Commuted

LISTEN. It's the autumnal equinox, the beginning of fall (and spring down under). The pool's too cool, the oatmeal suddenly appeals. “It is the summer’s great last heat, / It is the fall’s first chill: they meet.” Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (WA)

It'll soon be time to drive and peep at leaves, for those who do that sort of thing and who aren't conscientious about the recreational burning of fossil fuels in a warming world. Seeing the USA in your Chevrolet (or Corolla) isn't the responsible thing now, if you're concerned to set a good example and be the change we need. But I can't help it, Dinah's jingle makes me nostalgic. 

Dinah's ditty, though, is from decades ago, from the days when gas was cheap and our parents thought it would never run out. My late dad loved to drive, the longer and further the better. He was a veterinarian, but his true ambition growing up on the farm was to be a long-haul trucker and see the country. I don't think he ever got over that.

We didn't quite get around to discussing the last section of our reading in Environmental Ethics yesterday, "Moving Around" in Hope Jahren's Story of More. She gets off some good lines. "If I have a single bias as the author of this book, it is that I hate cars... Because I hate cars more than the Devil hates Jesus, it does not make me happy to tell you that the world currently contains close to one billion passenger vehicles."  

I don't feel quite so hostile to them myself, though my attitude took a big shift in that direction one chill night late in February 2018 when the I-24 commute I'd so long taken for granted nearly killed me. Well, not the commute per se, but a FedEx tractor trailer and a small passenger vehicle it swerved into my lane to miss. 

It's true that more people die in cars than are murdered and commit suicide combined, each year. It's almost certainly true that autonomous vehicles will ameliorate that. But it's truer still that we'd be smart to ditch cars for public transport. 20% of us drive 45 minutes or more to work and home each way, each day (typically closer to an hour for me, 42 miles, Nashville to Murfreesboro). Polls consistently reveal that to be one of our greatest aggravations and sources of stress. Losing my daily commute during the pandemic, I confess, and "biking to work" (to Zoom)--like Henry walks to work--has been its silver lining. 

Today, though, I'm looking forward to doing that commute so I can have lunch with my daughter and then Zoom from her balcony. Jahren complains that "most of what our cars do is take us away from the people we love, so that we can do the things that we have to do in order to buy more gas to put into our cars." Not today. Today my driving sentence is commuted. Today it'll be a pleasure.