Drive
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Local residents who don’t see the connection between density and the presence of shopping and entertainment choices as well as the viability of public transit aren’t likely to completely fade away; but both Frank and Holtzclaw admitted that even within the Sierra Club, not everyone understands how sprawl exacerbates climate change. Although global warming and energy use are the number one issue for the organization, some environmentalists are so focused on their own issues and projects that they don’t see the larger picture. “It’s not just building more hybrid cars but building more cities so people don’t have to drive as much,” Holtzclaw said, adding that people who live in multi-family housing share walls and a roof, so they use less energy for heating and cooling and tend to have smaller appliances. “There are lots of ways that the global warming effort benefits from building more compact cities.”
He is also excited about the social benefits of living in a diverse community. The night before we met, Holtzclaw watched the mid-term election results at the office with his colleagues, and perhaps inevitably our conversation sometimes touched on politics. He argued that when people have to drive everywhere, that hurts the social environment. “You know your neighbourhood from the windshield. You don’t know your neighbourhood from walking around and meeting your neighbours, chatting in the coffee shop or meeting them casually in the supermarket,” he said. “You don’t build up both the sense of community and the sense that people who look different really aren’t that different. And so you are gullible to the Bush-type fear appeals.” Decrying “our country’s arrogance” toward people of different religions and races, he suggested, “that attitude doesn’t carry too well in the city, where you’re meeting all these people” and if more people lived in cities, the spirit of this country could change “from one of fear and hate for people who are different.” Intolerance would become inclusiveness.
Maybe San Francisco wasn’t liberal because of its history of beatniks and hippies but because of its density. Indeed, if Holtzclaw was right, no one should be surprised that two of the country’s densest big cities—New York and San Francisco—are its most liberal. People who live closer together and are less dependent on the automobile develop a different attitude toward citizenship and activism. As he pointed out, “People take responsibility for their community if they feel a sense of community.”
SOMEDAY WE MAY all live in tolerant and diverse communities, but we’ll still want cars—if only so we can visit other tolerant and diverse cities. So, one way or another, we need to find a technological solution for a problem technology created in the first place. It’s like that sage show-ending toast in The Simpsons episode called “Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment,” in which Prohibition returns to Springfield, and Homer, who becomes a bootlegger known as the Beer Baron, declares, “Here’s to alcohol: the source of, and answer to, all of life’s problems.”
Someday we may be able to say the same thing about technology and be just as right, but so far no one has come up with any easy answers or even a surefire path to the future. Ethanol, biodiesel and hybrids are, let’s hope, transitional technologies. Plug-in hybrids, when they become available, will be an improvement, but our goal must be cars that don’t use fossil fuels or internal combustion engines.
Either battery-electric power or hydrogen offers carmakers the opportunity to completely rethink the design and manufacturing of vehicles. But even if the ideal technology suddenly emerges and everybody says, “Oh, boy, the next car I buy is going to be one of those kinds of cars,” it will take years to replace all the gas hogs. After all, I was driving across the continent in a fifteen-year-old set of wheels. Boehm had stated the obvious: “There’s no way you’re going to snap your fingers and wake up tomorrow morning and it’s going to be a hydrogen world or an electric vehicle world or whatever.”
We need to step up the research and development, and cross our fingers. But, at the same time, let’s not forget that we wouldn’t be so desperate for a technological fix if we didn’t drive so much— if more cities were like San Francisco and more people walked to work, to shop and to play.
17 The Pacific Coast Highway
Conflicted
I PARKED MY MAXIMA at the airport in San Francisco and rented a silver convertible Mustang for the drive to Los Angeles and back. My sidekick for the trip south was Mike Harper, who owns two Porsches and races one of them, and admits to being a devout car worshipper. But since he was going through a crisis of faith, it turned out that I was to be his confessor over the next few days.
As a preteen growing up in Kitchener, Ontario, Mike fell for his dad’s exotic automobiles, including a BMW Bavaria, a couple of Jaguars and an old Morgan. “I couldn’t drive them but I certainly enjoyed driving in them,” he told me. “And I got to wash them. So from an early age I literally had hands-on experience with cars. I got close to them and noticed the curves and the artfulness of special cars and started looking forward to the day when I could start driving them.” When he was a teenager, his family had six sets of wheels and only three drivers, so Mike did much of his driving in a Fiat Spyder. At twenty-one, he bought his first car, which he is embarrassed to admit was a two-tone Pinto wagon. He then bought his own Fiat Spyder, nicknamed “Fix it Again, Tony”—and his mechanic really was named Tony. He sold it after the hassle and expense of keeping it on the road became too much for him.
In 1994, he bought a Porsche 911 and started racing, reasoning that it would be a shame to have a car like that and not take it on the track and really learn how to drive it. He joined the local Porsche club, started out at the lapping days and then progressed up the various levels. “Half of it is the racing,” he explained, “and the other half is the race culture and the people.”
Though he owns three other vehicles—a 2000 Porsche Boxster S, a Saab and a pickup truck he uses at his place in the country— he has a special attachment to his 911, which has been through many iterations, from street car to track car, back to street car and finally to a full race car. Someday, he’ll probably convert it to a street car again. “I’ve never had a car that I had a deeper relationship with,” he said. “It’s doubtful that I will ever sell that car.” But he was having second thoughts about his Boxster, which he liked but considered a bit of a poser car—the kind of car driven by men who aren’t car guys but have lots of dough. This wasn’t the first time Mike had let peer pressure sway his opinion of a car. He liked his Mazda Miata, except that it was the source of too much ridicule from his friends, who considered it a “chick car.” Finally, after one guy asked him if he had pink racing gloves to go with it, he decided to sell.
Since he lives in central Toronto, close to the subway, and enjoys riding his bike, he doesn’t need to get behind a wheel every day, but still racks up twenty thousand kilometres a year on his four vehicles. “I wish we could have cars that we could live with and enjoy,” he said. “Cars have made life so much better for so many people, but they’ve now put the world into a tough position so we have to change our attitudes about them. We have to change our behaviour because doing more of the same is going to end in disaster.”
He’s so conflicted that, lately, he wonders if his cars will be the last he’ll ever own. “Most days I torture myself thinking about what my next car is going to be, but then sanity creeps in,” Mike confided, adding that the ones he already owned had as many kilometres left in them as he was likely to drive the rest of his life. “One part of me says, live with what you’ve got and be happy with what you’ve got,” he said. “So instead of thinking of what my next car will be, I start thinking, will I ever have another car? Should I ever have another car?”
Before we hit the Pacific Coast Highway, we were going to San Jose to stay with people I didn’t know. Bruce Spencer and I are both on an internet mailing list devoted to our favourite hockey team, the Boston Bruins. We’d never met or even really emailed each other privately, but when he heard about my road trip, he insisted I visit him.
San Jose was a s
mall farming city with fewer than 100,000 people in 1950, and the area was known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Today, the city is the booming high-tech centre of Silicon Valley with a population of more than 950,000, which makes it bigger than San Francisco. Early growth policies that encouraged sprawl through the annexation of surrounding land gave way to ones that promoted intensification and managed growth. That’s meant that the density of the city itself has improved, but the sprawl has continued outside San Jose’s borders and, as Spencer warned me, the road and transit infrastructure hasn’t kept pace, exacerbating the traffic congestion in the area, something Mike and I experienced first-hand when we arrived in town late Friday afternoon.
Because it was the end of the week and we were out-of-town guests, Spencer invited his in-laws over for a barbecue. As Al Correa, the oldest in the clan, told me more than once, when the family gets together, they’re a party all by themselves. And all of the men are car guys. Originally from Massachusetts, Spencer moved west in the mid-1980s and was soon struck by the richness of California’s car culture and how people take greater pride in their vehicles than Easterners. The CPA, who owns a tax preparation company, has owned more than two dozen cars (and half a dozen motorcycles) over the years. He bought his first set of wheels, a late 1960s model Toyota FJ40, when he was fifteen and then counted down the days until he turned sixteen and could drive it. His next ride was a 1973 Pinto. Though the Pinto sold well, the Ford subcompact gained considerable notoriety after several fuel tanks exploded in rear-end collisions. Undeterred by that reputation, Spencer moved on to a 1979 Pinto wagon, complete with faux-wood exterior. That was good for hauling his music gear around, but by his senior year of high school he needed something with a bit more style. So he bought a silver 1976 Pontiac Firebird, the first car he really fell in love with. It was also the first car he learned to work on, partly out of necessity, partly out of desire. “I spent weekends pulling that thing apart for no reason, other than to jam it back together late Sunday so I could drive it to school,” he remembered. “You know that commercial where the guy pulls his car apart to clean a piston with a toothbrush? Well, that was me. And you know how later on that week he reaches in his pocket and pulls out an extra piece of the car that didn’t make it back in? Yep, that was me, too. I’m proud of the maintenance I was able to do, but I also screwed up a few things pretty bad.”
He traded in that one for an orange 1974 Firebird Limited and regretted it almost immediately, so he replaced it with another 1976 Firebird, but it just wasn’t the same as his first. Since then, he’s owned a string of Monte Carlos, Ford and Chevy trucks and SUVs and the odd Maverick. He can count on one hand the ones that weren’t American: the FJ40, an Isuzu Trooper, two Porsche 911s and his current ride, a Nissan Xterra, which he is delighted with. His wife, Diana, drives a Chrysler Town and Country minivan—a tough thing for a Porsche lover to accept, he admitted. “It killed me to get a minivan.”
Another car enthusiast who married into the Correa family is Mike Murray, a thin, heavily tattooed UPS driver with a shaved head. Although it soon became clear that he really wanted to show us his car, he didn’t want to come out and say so; instead he waited until his brother-in-law forced the issue. Murray took us out front to see his white 1964 Buick Riviera, which he’d lovingly restored and customized, including redoing the interior in red leather, installing both air and helium tanks for the hydraulic suspension and shaving the door handles, a modification that involves removing the factory handles and then using a remote door popper to get in (though Murray admitted the cheap remote he’d bought no longer worked and he had to stick his hand in through the car’s triangular side window). As he demonstrated the various heights and configurations possible with the suspension system, opened the hood to show off the V8 engine and let everyone hear its loud primitive rumble, his eyes lit up with childlike pride. Correa, who once owned the car, looked on wistfully. He probably regretted his decision to sell it given the way Murray had restored it, but he entertained us with the story of how, many years ago, he’d driven the car into a telephone pole, giving it a large, perfectly semicircular dent in the dead centre of the front.
Though it gets just seven miles per gallon, Murray uses the Riviera as his daily driver. “It’s the only car I want,” he told me. His wife, on the other hand, drives a Honda Civic. “I love my country and I’d love to buy American,” he said a little sadly, “but I had to buy the best car for my wife.”
By now, this was a familiar refrain. The Big Three can wrap themselves in the flag, but for all the patriotism across the land these days, more and more people are buying their cars with their heads instead of their hearts. And given how expensive cars are, one bad experience can really stick in a car owner’s head. Other countries’ carmakers also issue recalls and produce the odd lemon, but when Americans have problems with an American car, they take it personally, as I really started to understand Saturday morning as Spencer, dressed in jeans, a green golf shirt and a green ball cap, cooked up a breakfast of eggs and sausages.
“My ideal car for a long, long time was a Jeep Grand Cherokee,” he told me. In fact, he sold his 1984 Porsche Carrera so he could afford a fully loaded metallic-blue 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee. “It was the car I wanted for so long and I spent a lot of money on it thinking one of the kids would take it to college. But it didn’t treat me right back,” he said, sounding like nothing so much as a spurned lover. “That car was in the shop every six months.” Three or four years later, he finally cried uncle. His breaking point came one day when he was playing softball with his brothers-in-law: his wife called to say one of the windows wouldn’t go up and it was starting to rain. “I couldn’t go out for a beer with the guys because I had to go home and deal with that. Here we had this American car, desired and loved for so long, and we had nothing but problems.” Even more proof, as if any were needed, that nothing should ever come between a man and a beer with his buddies. Not even a car.
MIKE HOGGED THE WHEEL all the way to Los Angeles. The way he figured it, I’d have plenty of time with the Mustang after he flew home. Spencer’s brothers-in-law had spent a good deal of effort trying to convince us to skip LA because of the traffic, and go all the way to San Diego. That sounded like fun, but I actually wanted to experience LA’s traffic.
We left San Jose and headed for State Route 1, commonly known as Highway 1 or just the Pacific Coast Highway. After stopping in Monterrey for a bowl of clam chowder, we travelled leisurely along Seventeen-Mile Drive, the famous scenic route along the coastline through Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach. Well worth the nine-dollar entry fee. And then we were really off. Just south of Carmel, we passed a yellow road sign promising, “Hills and Curves Next 63 Miles.”
Mike turned to me and said, “That’s the sign every driver wants to see.”
While my driver manoeuvred the Mustang along the winding road, I soaked up the stunning scenery: cliffs down to the rocky shore to my right, cliffs up to the blue sky on my left. By the time we got to Morro Bay, it was well past dark. The tourist town is sometimes known as the Gibraltar of the Pacific because Morro Rock, the last of the Nine Sisters, a series of volcanic plugs running up the coast from San Luis Obispo, sits in the middle of the harbour. Once a valuable navigational aid for mariners, the 576-foot-high rock is now a sanctuary for peregrine falcons and other birds. When we were there, most of the tourists seemed to be couples, so after dinner we walked inland a few blocks and found a bar filled with locals and Cal Poly students, an entertaining band and a shuffleboard table. We stayed late.
The next morning, not too early, we kept going south until we reached Santa Barbara. We gaped at the money, the attractive people and the expensive cars and then stopped for lunch. When Mike asked our exotically gorgeous young waitress why people came to Santa Barbara, she seemed surprised by the question and said, “Because it’s so beautiful.”
As we returned to the Pacific Coast Highway and headed south to Los Angeles, Mike admitted that thinking
about cars takes up an embarrassing amount of his time. “I love what they do. I love how some of them sound. How they look. The freedom that goes with them,” he explained, adding that he’s rarely more relaxed than when he’s driving. “I’m happy sitting here in a convertible, which is the ultimate driving experience in terms of the open air, the sun in your face.” He doesn’t need or want to listen to the radio, preferring to find deliverance in the sound of an old car’s exhaust as he revels in the power and the handling. “I enjoy the feeling of being in control of something and going where I want to go. I just hope we will always have two-lane highways because that’s where the fun is.”
Watching Murray start his Riviera the night before had taken Mike back to when he was a kid and getting a car going wasn’t a certainty and often took some finesse. The introduction of fuel injection solved the problem, but Mike missed the drama of the carburetor era. What he didn’t miss were the emissions. As Murray brought the car to life, Mike stood behind it to enjoy the deep bass of the classic big block engine, but also to see the two exhaust pipes. Sure enough, smoke shot out of them.
A few months after our road trip, he sold the Boxster and bought his dream car: a Porsche 993. By the end of 2007, he’d also sold the 911—he would never be able to tell his fellow racers this, but he just couldn’t justify the environmental cost of racing it. That didn’t make it any easier to sell a car he thought he’d never give up, though, and Mike confessed: “I moped about it for weeks.”