He who rides a Wildcat...
Anderson, Chris
REPORT FROM THE HIGHWAY HE WHO RIDES A WILDCAT... LIFE IS JERRYBUILT: ENJOY IT It's hard to be taken seriously as an environmentalist when you drive a '69 Buick Wildcat. My wife's...
...Cars have shrunk and hurried up the world, brought all the city people to the forest...
...Being forced to drive the Buick on the alternate and rainy days has been another lesson in how I participate in my culture whether I want to or not...
...I have to give in more and more...
...I'm making do with it as long as I can, since we live out in the country now and can't afford another second car...
...It's a dream without plot, just the feeling of exultation, of some deep pleasure in what I know is the infallibility and wonder of the engine beneath the hood, as if all the claims of the car commercials were actually true, as if the car really is magic, can change your life—power without cost...
...The hump between the ruts was grassy and full of dandelions...
...I keep thinking of the millions of cars and trucks on the roads today, the millions sold each year, the important percentage of the gross national product devoted to the making and selling of cars, the countless cubic tons of asphalt...
...I had no sense of the cost of that power, or of the disparity between that technological achievement and the war in Vietnam, the poverty at home...
...It's a grown-up car, a Leave-It-to-Beaver-Hi-honey-I'm-home car...
...When you accelerate you can actually see the needle of the fuel gauge go down...
...There's a little justification for pride in making do and delaying the gratification of a sleeker, more efficient engine...
...It's not the wars these people remember when you ask them about the most important changes in their lives, it's the car...
...I love the riding on the good days, get all the expected benefits: the glow of endorphins, the frameless views of fields and trees...
...Interior smells—of the alder smoke that clung to the carpet and walls of their house—set off memory, as smells always do...
...They smiled when I told them we bought the house because it reminded us of theirs, because we wanted to live something of the life they Commonweal 8 May 1992: 7 had lived, but they were too spent to do any more...
...It's a dark, Republican blue with black vinyl top and interior, low-slung, limousine-long, faintly sinister...
...It's a matter of personal economy, too, of course...
...All these levels...
...The odometer reads only 99,357 miles...
...It's somehow representative of the balancing we've all had to do coming of age in the world of Nintendo and MTV that the moonshot foreshadowed and made possible...
...It's fifteen miles round trip, and hilly, just about the upper limit for me, sometimes past it...
...Fuzzy dice help me brazen out disapproving stares at stoplights...
...I love its cabin-cruiser glide, its liquid turns, the weight and buoyancy of the thing...
...But not much...
...It's a square, futuristic car in the dream, straight and simple as a line drawing, and what I experience as I drive it or sit next to my father driving it (it varies) is the simple exhilaration of speed, of the things flying past...
...I keep thinking of this as we approach the end of the century...
...Perhaps right on the edge of one age and the beginning of another...
...The Buick is an example of how complex and patchwork and jerrybuilt life is...
...Choking on exhaust and catalytic converter fumes in the bike lanes, listening for the doppler effect of the next car, and the next, fighting occasional truck turbulence, I can nurse my hatred of the automobile...
...All these paradoxical associations...
...The roads are cracked and full of weeds, the yards growing wild...
...Nana is stooped over, taking medicine for her heart...
...CHRIS ANDERSON Chris Anderson teaches English at Oregon State University...
...In the science fiction stories some cataclysm or economic collapse has emptied the suburbs...
...People like me...
...My kids love riding in the Buick, playing with the power windows...
...How you have to enjoy the ironies and messiness...
...My wife's grandfather gave it to us for free, which is the first reason I could hardly say no, even though it's got a 450 V8 as big as a refrigerator and gets about six miles to a gallon, on level ground...
...It's tricky...
...Things seem pleasantly pastoral to me...
...I am planting seedlings, cutting trail, wheelbarrowing silt from the drained ponds, hauling skyline over muddy hills, yarding alder for firewood, running a chain saw until my knuckles drag and my crotch burns...
...I keep wondering whether there's any place of human habitation in the world now out of earshot of the hurrying, elbowing, invasive, Chinese-water-torture whine and roar of arterial traffic, the incessant downshifting and revving up, the constant mental tailgating...
...I used to be so smug when we lived in town and I could walk everywhere, looking down on the commuters and the two-car families...
...I keep thinking of the endless chain of single drivers listening to Madonna and sucking up Big Gulps driving from mall to mall in search of the latest K-Mart Blue Light Special...
...The endless chain, each face blank...
...It's connected with time, with history...
...I have a recurring dream, even now, of a huge white Ford Fairlane flying down a desert road...
...There's another odd resonance, too, a private though similar irony, since the Buick always reminds me of the tree farm where my wife's grandparents lived for thirty years, harvesting and replanting the hemlock, living off the land...
...Grandfather is dead of bone cancer now...
...Between the bike and the Buick, I get about twenty miles a gallon...
...The last time they came to the new house they were too tired to appreciate my own line of tall trees, my own little acre and a half of forest...
...Driving home I sometimes feel for a moment the way I imagine my father felt when he drove home in his Chevys or Dodges, confident behind the wheel, mature in power...
...We are living now, my generation, at the moment of transition...
...I'm self-sufficient again, under my own power, and not dependent on Gulf oil or polluting the air...
...How we are always taking losses...
...The ironic fact is that to move out and away from the malls and the Muzak I've had to commit myself to the highway...
...Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon the year the Buick was made, an event I remember with absolute clarity...
...Oldtimers out where I live now remember when you could stop in the middle of Highland Drive and pick strawberries...
...I am digging postholes...
...I can maintain a little self-respect because I bike on alternate 6: 8 May 1992 Commonweal days, whenever the weather is decent and my legs are holding out...
...Maybe one day when we are gone and the next age has begun they'll be bending over on Highland Drive picking strawberries or having a picnic in the grass, and all around them will be the sound of the wind in the trees...
...I can't hold myself apart anymore...
...For me the moon-shot involved imagination, not technology...
...When the radioactive dust settles and people start back into their routines again, they look up from planting corn or drawing water and all they hear is the wind in the trees...
...I can recover some of my former smugness...
...And looking at their own children they'll suddenly think of riding in their father's Buick long ago and of another, more frantic time when the world was mostly asphalt and shopping malls and always in the air was the sound of acceleration, the shifting of gears...
...How you have to compromise and trade off...
...I am stretching barbed wire...
...I've not had to drive before in any place we've lived—can measure out my life by the different walks I've taken on the way to work, the neighborhoods I've memorized over the years, house by house, corner by corner...
...Maybe the change will come slowly or without upheaval, but I'm sure that in any event it will come and that it will be profound...
...8: 8 May 1992 Commonweal...
...It used to be a luxury car—power steering, brakes, windows, seats, aerial—but it's dinged up in the back now because grandfather couldn't see very well in reverse, and the front hood, broad as a ship's prow, is rusting out from the rain...
...There was a full moon that week and I remember feeling nothing but joy in the fact of us being there, a joy mixed up I'm sure with the joy of being fourteen and surrounded by trees, paddling canoes, and diving off docks and cooking over a fire every night...
...It's tricky, too, because secretly I love driving the Buick...
...I am hiking the logged off hills, beautiful now in leaning alder, corridors of white trunks and shimmering leaves veiling the huge, old growth stumps, extending off in the distance toward the ITTRayoneer land that has spread and spread until it entirely surrounds this tiny three hundred acres...
...Walking instead of driving has always been a point of honor with me, until now...
...I was at scout camp then, gathered with the others around a black and white television hooked up to the outlet in the commissary, watching the stiff and ghostly figures from under the ponderosa...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 9
