Carlessness
One year without a vehicle.
Summer without a car is worse than winter. Much worse. When people ask me what it’s like to not have a car, the answer is always: the only consistently terrible part is the summer.
People find it surprising. I guess they always imagine, as I did, that winter would be the tougher season in a city where December through March often feel icy and endless. But it’s the heat of the summer, the raw, humid, damp-at-your-desk-until-lunchtime heat that is most unbearable. I hope I don’t have to live the rest of my life in a perpetual Indiana winter, but if I never own a car again, I’ll take Januarys over Julys.
A little over a year ago, I got rid of my car, and have since relied on buses, a bike, and a boyfriend to get me where I need to go. It is easy to think of it now as a social experiment, but the decision to go car-free was most strongly motivated by the terror of being upside-down in a loan that felt like it would never end. There were other factors, too—I wanted to save the planet and invest in really knowing my neighbors and prove to the people who know me that I could do something more than tweet.
I did all of those things, to some small extent. I built up a little savings and became familiar with my neighborhood in new ways. I memorized bus schedules and learned how to fix a flat bike tire. I reduced my carbon footprint and, in the process, I found that carlessness provides the perfect excuse for the fact that I’ve always looked kind of sweaty and disheveled.
In the last year, I walked holes into a couple pairs of shoes and tested the limits of my boyfriend’s generosity. I had the opportunity to be a little preachy, writing a series of essays and giving a talk about the experience. I rode my bike across town in interview clothes and got a great new job. I explained the worst and weirdest parts of my alternative lifestyle to my new coworkers : it’s the summers, man. It’s the summers.
Being a kid in the Reagan era meant that pop culture was full of lessons about safety. I remember bad kids offering Punky Brewster drugs in her treehouse, and Red Ribbon Week at my school, where we received a family discount at places like bowling alleys and Ponderosa if I pledged to remain drug-free. I remember watching on loop the made-for-TV movie about Ryan White’s death from complications related to AIDS, and the car trip to my dentist’s office in the small Indiana town where Ryan White died.
I remember sitting in the back of our woody mini-van and passing the cemetery where he is buried, my mother trying to explain to me why his headstone was often overturned. I was seven years old.
A few years later, when I was in a community theater production, a teenage boy from the theater died of complications related to HIV. His name was Ryan too, and he was tall, and thin, and everyone knew that he dreamed of being on Broadway. After he died, the theater mounted a special production of his favorite play: The Pied Piper of Hamelin. There was a framed photo of him in the lobby, oversized, his hair carefully frosted and spiked.
I was scared of Ryan’s death, of the death and life of both of the Ryans, even as I watched one of them happen over and over again on VHS. I was scared of the way that I felt when I looked at that picture of Ryan in the lobby, because I found him handsome, and I wanted the same life he had wanted. I was scared because of what they both meant for my own safety.
It’s hard to say what made me think of that second Ryan. I hadn’t thought about him in years, then he shows up the second I sit down to write about getting rid of my car.
His death was a landmark moment for me, and now there are so many details about him I forget. I am frustrated because I cannot remember his face, or his last name, or how I felt when I watched that silly play in his honor. I cannot remember the dreams I used to have about what it would have been like to be his friend, my dreams about what it felt like to be that tall and thin and talented.
There are certain things it is impossible to remember not knowing. There are things you cannot imagine ever forgetting. Then, I guess, there are the Ryans. And what I’ve learned in my life is this: sometimes you promise to remember, and you won’t. Some days you wake up knowing your sole purpose is to notice the world, and acknowledge it, but then you get busy and forget.
The thing about carlessness is that it changes time. Days dilate and constrict. If you’re not early, the bus will blow right by you. Biking always takes 15 minutes longer than it should. Hours are sometimes too lonely, or too full of strangers. Things go slowly or too fast. I’m sure that happens in cars too, I just don’t remember it.
A few months ago I had the opportunity to speak about going car-free in a city that loves cars. In the intro, I referred to myself as an accidental car-free advocate. But I was wrong. I don’t advocate that people get rid of their cars.
I advocate that people remember. That they notice. I hope to encourage people to slow down enough that they can dutifully catalog the things that make them feel alive, afraid, crazy, present, selfish, sane, safe, whether they do it from inside a car or out.
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