(originally printed in Keyboard Magazine as part of the "Creative Options" column)
[From heaven to purgatory to hell . . . personal-transportation-wise. When I wrote this essay I lived in Marin, California, land of exceptional mass transit and a million bike paths. For a while after that, home was Boulder City, Nevada, in the desert outside Las Vegas, where life was a 50/50 compromise. If I wanted to go over the hill into the neon and quasi-civilization, I pretty much had to use a car. But around town, and for distance desert-biking, it was just me and my 15-speed Cannondale (you should have seen my calf muscles). Nowadays, though, I live in Los Angeles, and while there's a new bike in my future, one with a much sturdier frame and tires, for now I'm the legal guardian of a '91 Honda LX Accord which I have to sit in it waaaaaay too much, getting from place to place here in the great grey concrete ameba that is El Lay. Still and all, I haven't succumbed to wrapping it around me like a great big metal superego, as so many of my neighbors do. No vanity license plates. No customized personal decorations. No Tibetan prayer tires. And I did demonstrate my disdain for the whole car buying process by saying yes to the first (and only) car I looked at. But these are small victories. For a little while, I must confess, the engine boys have won. Cross-country on a unicycle is looking pretty good to me just now . . . .]
I have a problem with motors. Here in California, where young people are surgically attached to four wheels and an internal combustion engine at precisely 12:01am on their 16th birthday, this is rather like being a leper at a Mary Kay convention. I do my best to live with the condition, and to some extent the tax dollars of the state accommodate me and my fellow gasolinophobes (there are some very nice bicycle trails here in Contra Costa County), but my life and motorized society are basically a bad fit. Always have been. Land, sea, or air, if I am captain instead of passenger I prefer working with what's there to forcing my way through it: bicycles or beating feet over motorcycles and cars, sailboats over motorboats, gliders over powered planes.
There are lots of apparently different reasons for my feelings on this subject, but they all track back to frames of reference, scales of observation, and one undeniable fact: Speed (as in velocity) is a mind-altering drug.
This is true. Though it's a terrific turn-on, you just can't digest too much apparent speed. Move too fast through your life and everything turns to a content-free blur . . . unless, as in a jet plane, you withdraw to such height above the passing landscape that things seem to slow down and you can see again. There's your choice, in a simple equation. The faster you move, the more disconnected you become, in either one way or the other. It's inevitable. While there are obviously times when convenience outweighs this disassociation, a constant diet of rapid motion numbs the soul and, I think, dulls creativity.
I first noticed this possible cause and effect two years back, when the intersection of fate and bureaucracy temporarily made me an unmotorized citizen. Though the result was profound, the event itself was nothing all that serious: I went into downtown San Francisco for a meeting, driving the ancient cargo van that I'd bought to haul all my stuff to California the year before; said meeting took precisely five minutes longer than was legal for the parking space I'd (finally!) found; and by the time I made it back downstairs the Parking Authority, always watchful for sources of revenue, had taken my van off to City Garage bondage. I suppose they assumed that like most Californians I would mortgage family members, if need be, rather than be without wheels. Their mistake. The van had been more rust than steel back when I'd bought it, for about half the cost of renting a one-way truck from U-Haul. I would have been content if it had just gotten me to California and then disintegrated. After a year's additional hard use, however, the thing needed so much fixing I had already decided burial and replacement was more fiscally responsible than repair. If the City liked it so much, hey, they could keep it. (As to why I didn't have a better vehicle in the first place, please remember the second sentence in this essay. I will cheerfully spend vast sums of money on CDs, art supplies, books, musical instruments, restaurant meals, movies, massages, camping, and unexpected gifts for friends. But I'm cheap when it comes to cars.)
That night I took a bus home and contemplated the possibilities.
One thing that struck me was that we have it way too easy. Modern American culture worships convenience; Federal Express gets it there overnight, faxes get it there even faster, and Frequent Flyer Miles have become a kind of fourth world of exchangeable currency, after cash, checks, and credit. Every day in the health club I would see people sweating out hours and miles on the treadmill who would blanch at the thought of walking to their corner grocery store instead of driving to it. In the arts I saw people being crafty rather than craftsmanlike, falling prey to the push-button ethos rather than investing real time in their learning and their creative work. "Genius" is one of those things that is rarely apparent in the moment, but triumph over difficulties is a common theme in the lives of the men and women who have been tagged with that term. Perhaps when there are few or no difficulties there is little chance for real genius, just as oysters without grits of sand are also oysters without pearls? Maybe the ability to hop in, turn the key, step on the gas, and head anywhere at all without thinking tends to lead us precisely to . . . not thinking?
Or maybe I really am a customer out of Detroit's worst nightmares, and all of the above is just rationalization. "Kick the tires? No thanks, I'd rather kick the habit." In any case, by the time I had walked home from the bus stop my decision was clear. For a while, at least, the only motors in my life would be those belonging to friends or mass transit.
The experiment lasted slightly over a year before the intersection of fate and business required me to rejoin the ranks of the Automobile-Endowed. (Still haven't bought a new car, though; I rent 'em when needed. Better tax deduction.) Along the way during those months I observed many things and reached several speculative conclusions, among them:
When you compress time, you compress viewpoint. Being inside a moving car limits the information you can take in. Furthermore, what little bandwidth there is mostly goes to the primal distraction of survival. The faster you go then the more danger you are in, and the more danger you are in then the more your attention is given over to the other hurtling metal cans in your vicinity and not to the world you are zipping through. This pretty much goes the same for passengers as for drivers, unless the driver is really good and the passenger totally trusting. As MPH rises you can't afford to look away from dead-ahead for very long, so you start staring straight down the road, glancing briefly into the mirrors, and letting your peripheral vision catch the rest. It all works, but it's a mind- and time-killer. It blunts thought more than it greases it. The first thing I noticed, not driving, was how much more time I had to think, reflect, and dream.
People don't know their own neighbors and neighborhoods. Or, perhaps, they have redefined "neighborhood" as "everything within 30 feet of where I can drive or park my car," turning their lives into a center-less tangle of spaghetti. Walking, I noticed shops in my neighborhood that carried items I had previously driven miles, out of habit, to buy. Walking, I learned more about the people on my block in a single week than I had learned in the previous six months; and they, in turn, learned more about me. That sense of connection would have been rich even without all the fascinating additional information it afforded.
There is an incredible amount to see. And not just big stuff, either. On foot or while bicycling it is the little things that leap into your eyes, details too small to be taken in at greater speeds: The brightly painted wood and metal of a children's playground never noticed in a hundred drive-bys; the bra lying on the ground in the middle of the sidewalk (and what's the story behind that?); the house with a backyard full of semi-private sculptures. These details are of vast importance. They are what make here different from there in this seemingly homogenized society of ours. They are what makes being anywhere at all worthwhile.
You can't know a place until you've walked it. Even bicycles are too fast for a real connection. That requires the swing of legs driven by a beating heart and the steady planting of feet, one after another, with lots of pauses to stare. It's no wonder that sole and soul are pronounced identically; you have to put both into a place to truly make it yours. Art is the same way. You can't rush through either making it or experiencing it, not and do it justice. A painting exists in the time it takes to paint it, a composition in the time it takes to compose.
Walking is dancing. It's just dancing very steadily. And it's great for writing songs. Far more than a boring 4/4, walking has in it the seeds of every time signature known to mankind, plus a few that sneak in from alien dimensions. It also has this singular advantage over a car -- any time you want you can close your eyes, stand still, and let the world come to you. Try it: You might be amazed how many ideas are just waiting for you to stop moving so they can catch up and grab hold.
Involvement is easy. It's distraction that takes work, and plenty of it. On foot or on two man-powered wheels or staring out the window of a city bus, undistracted, it's virtually impossible not to become involved with everything and everyone that you see, hear, and feel.
Last, perhaps best of all my lessons, was this . . . Taking anything for granted is wrong.
Such a simple thought, and bedrock in our culture before Henry Ford's invention led us astray. The more you hurry, the more you take for granted, and we are damn good at being hurriers. Doesn't have to be that way, though. You can drive a little slower and see a little more. You can eat a little slower and really taste what you eat. You can spend time polishing one great song instead of cranking out a hundred so-so symphonies.
It all comes down, in the end, to quality vs. quantity. If I have miles to go before I sleep, then I intend to milk each mile to the max. Anyone who wants to join in with me is welcome. As for the rest, I promise to smile and wave as you zoom by.