the van of destiny (pt. 2)

I drove back from Huffle’s in my new used van more numb than excited. I was satisfied with the price; unbeknownst to Mr Huffle, I had stopped at an AAA office on the way back from the mechanic to crosscheck the price with their notary. Her estimate of the van’s model, mileage, features and service record came in at some three thousand dollars above the sticker. So I felt good. Of course, good is just what Ol’ Bill intended to make me to feel upon leaving his lot, so that’s partly a testament to his abilities as a salesman. But I also felt good about our bargaining, In the United States, price haggling is a dying art; I had to go to China and Africa to learn the basics. At the end of the day, I’m acquiring a fairly ideal vehicle for about $3.500 below its estimated value, so I feel I have little to be ashamed of.

And what a magnificent vehicle it is! I had at last moved out of Harrisburg, waving goodbye to Mrs. Rodriguez and the hedgehogs and Allison Hill to stay with my parents in Hershey while I made my preparations. This process – outfitting the van, buying supplies, making plans – was more than a little daunting. There’s little precedent for my project. While the roadtrip is of course a time-honored American tradition, there are few Americans who move into a cargo van and roadtrip non-stop for a whole year. There are, however, plenty of Americans out on the road. Driving back and forth between home and Kmart to get supplies, I peer curiously down into windows, wondering who these people are and where they are going.

What, I reflect, could be more American than the car? Every morning, this country steps into its 207.8 million passenger vehicles and drives to work, to drop the kids off for school, to have a good time, whatever. We zip along a thin black streak, each of us enclosed within our little air-conditioned bubble of designer metal. In our cars, we buy ourselves complete individualism in motion; the comfort of choosing our own seat position, music, and atmosphere, each passively reveling in the luxury of not having to interact with anyone else except through turn signals. We are at liberty to drive just as fast we want within a law that we break and that the state expects us to break. We cruise high over the speed limit, jockeying for position, and then slow down when we see the cop, and just enough of us get busted to fill the local police department’s monthly quota.

We all in some part define others and ourselves by our cars, making public statements about our own identity and priorities, and regarding those of others. We pick our cars carefully, weighing what we want and what we can afford, choosing our identity from a palette of options supplied by Toyata. I’m in a Hummer, don’t fuck with me. I’m a socially and environmentally conscious citizen, observe my Hybrid. We cannot see each other except in a brief, moving flash obscured by windshield, but we can easily recognize and understand the declarations of our vehicles.

The real status distinctions made by cars, however, are much more unconscious, threads worked so widely and deeply into the fabric of lives that we see them every day and do not recognize them. We build our society around cars. A fifth of America’s gross domestic product is reliant on the auto industry. 2.3 million Americans are employed by either General Motors, Chrysler or Ford. One out of every six American workers makes a living in an auto-related industry. Our biggest corporations are Auto and Oil companies, and the latter largely decides our country’s foreign policy.

In this car-ruled society, those who cannot drive lose. We shovel our old into nursing homes, set safely away from the violence of the highway and from participation in communities, spending the golden years playing bingo and begging for a visit from the grandchildren. Similarly, Americans under 16 are reduced to total dependency, relying on their parents to ferry them to soccer practice and piano lessons and the mall, hamstringing their own developing independence and self-reliance – until, of course, they get a car of their own.
Besides the young and the old, many are kept from participation in the modern car society by – you guessed it – money. As the example of Harrisburg shows, we give choice jobs to those who can already drive to work, sequestering those too poor into ghettos hedged by rail or highway and accessible only by bridge. These people may even be able to afford buying a vehicle, but to drive one each day is wildly expensive, some 9,000 to 11,000 dollars each year in internal and external costs like insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, and depreciation. Meanwhile, We concentrate our products in huge department stores on the edge of town, accompanied by massive parking lots and connected by separate highway exits, accessible only by car, leaving those who cannot reach them to fend for themselves with inner city groceries and minimarts on streets sometimes too dangerous to walk by night. Having limiting road access to those wealthy enough to afford riding those roads, we then spend all our government revenue on expansion and upkeep of this gated resource, tacitly subsidizing the driver. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that 1.2 to 1.6 trillion is spent annually on passenger ground transportation, numbers far “greater than our total national expenditure on either education or health.” Everyone pays equally for these resources, though only some can use them. In any ratio of utility, a poor single mother riding home on a bus pays far more than the governor to surface the road he rides on his BMW. A welfare state indeed, but who is subsidizing whom?

Author Jane Holtz Kay notes “70% of all state and local law enforcement activities are expended on traffic management issues.” Another man was shot several weeks ago on the exact same intersection at which Jonas Strunk died. The police, presumably paged by a gunshot sensor, arrived quickly, stringing off his little balloon-and-flower makeshift memorial with crime scene tape. The investigation continues, but so will the violence. Simply slowing the volume of shootings– leaving aside any inquiry into their root causes – would require a much heavier round-the-clock police presence. Currently, the police are too busy managing traffic into and out of the suburbs to be able to do more than zip in and put up tape. This suburban traffic, however, generates revenue for a poor city; revenue that will subsequently be spent on building more parking garages in downtown Harrisburg to attract more drivers.

This is a municipal cycle of generating revenue and then spending it to generate more, all within a system that only privileges a certain class of people. This vortex is replicated on the personal level, and the poor are not the only victims. The car does not quite translate into the rich man’s gun, but cars kill as many kids in the suburbs as guns do in the city. The cost of car ownership is high even for those who can afford it. Ivan Illich, writing in Energy and Equity some 30 years ago, reports “the typical American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car…. He sits in it while it goes and while it is idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes, and traffic tickets. He spends four out of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.” If anything, Illich’s estimates are conservative, since they do not take into account time “consumed by other activities dictated by transport; time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages: time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer meetings to improve the quality of the next buy.”

The vast freedom the automobile appears to offer is misleading. We are free to define ourselves in any form car companies decide for us. The powerful speed of the automobile offers to dramatically increase our efficiency and leisure time. However, we will spend 8 billion hours each year stuck in traffic, costing us between 43 and 168 billion dollars of lost productivity. We are free to come and go at high speeds whenever we want, although our days will mainly be structured by work time spent financing our cars. As Illich, points out “the model American puts in 16,000 hours to get 7500 miles; less than 5 miles an hour.” We drive to work and then work to drive.

Given all this, the Manchester Guardian determined “the private car is an environmental, fiscal and social disaster which would not pass any value-for-money test.” The total impact of the car from production to disposal, “is a state subsidy equivalent to giving each car user a free pass for the whole year for all public transport, a new bike every five years and 15,000 kilometers of first-class rail travel.” Nevertheless, the car is not going anywhere. We are, as I mentioned, a society built on cars, and to substantively address the problem would be to substantively change the very structure of our society. Our economy and our nation is reliant on the automobile, but as the above article suggests, they are also probably dying under its weight. One half of the oil and one third of the automobiles sold in the United States are imported. We spend 50 billion dollars combating the health effects of air pollution, and lose 176.5 billion to motor vehicle fatalities. Equally devastatingly, we destroy our environment for the car. We funnel our creativity and productivity into paying for the car. We sequester the poor to riding on the bus in Allison Hill. We put the northernmost point of Confederate progress during the Civil War under pavement. We cannot resist the car. From Steinbeck to Kerouac, from On the Road Again to Road Runner, from Lost Highway to Highway One Revisited, from the journals of Louis and Clark to Thelma and Loise, our culture is steeped in travel, in roads, and in cars. The roadtrip – that most American adventure that entered me into this inquiry – is most often a journey to “find oneself,” that other American project. Either that, or to “find America.” And what, after all, am I doing this year?

I think of that strange moment when Ol’ Bill softened just after agreeing to sell me the van. That nostalgic, almost fatherly look. Maybe he knew what he was doing. He clearly knew, in his excitement, his vociferous involvement, and most of all, that last, bittersweet softness, that he was officiating over one of the great rituals of our contemporary society. The moment when a young man gets his first car. The debate over the cost, as if it was something that could be tabulated on a sticker. The transfer of the check, and then of the keys, from the salesman to the new driver; the two shake hands, and the father is left at the desk, looking on silently, inscrutably. I think he knew, on some level, that he was handing me the keys to America, or rather the keys to find America, a nation scored by highways too wide to ever cross, filled with riders like me, driving into a long sunset from a Western to find a proud, desperate frontier country. They rode over it by the thousands on half a ton of metal each, mile by burning mile.


Materials on America's car culture is from:

Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

Kay, Jane Holtz. Asphalt Nation. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1997.

and the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics at:
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/

THE VAN OF DESTINY (pt. 1)

September arrives abruptly, knocking me free from these thoughts. Acorns fall with crashing reports like military salutes around my parents’ house in the wooded hills between Hershey and Hummelstown. Somehow, they jolt me from my complacency even more than the very real gunshots that slew Jonas Strunk. Before I know it, Arthur has left for Japan, vowing to teach a class of elementary English students the wonders of Sir Mixalot, and Julian has departed for Azerbaijan without a word, but after leaving a South Allison Hill Civic Association t-shirt neatly folded on my bed. I curse myself; I had meant to take him for a trip in the van before he left. Instead, I’m still looking for a van, wearing his tshirt.

I’ve spent the latter part of the summer researching cars, looking up prices, occasionally visiting a dealer to check out a vehicle. This one’s in Maryland, and I can’t find a mechanic to crosscheck it. This one’s closer, but they won’t let me take it to a mechanic. This one gets lousy gas mileage. This one’s too small.

At last, I find a handful that seem to fit. One is at a dealer in Palmyra, and two are at William Huffle’s Used Cars in Mechanicsburg. At the latter, a well-groomed, slightly pudgy young man named Eric shuttles me around the inventory, answering questions and opening doors. He’s polite, collected but not suave, and encouraging but not pushy. He generally disproves all the bad rap on car salesmen. One of the vehicles I’m looking at is a 2004 Chevrolet G1500 Express cargo van. I decide it makes more sense than a similar Ford I’m eyeing, and ask to drive it to a mechanic in Hershey to get it checked out. Eric agrees, and hands me the keys.

It’s something of a shock after the little Toyata Prius I arrived in. Cargo vans, I think, have crossed the invisible divide that separates cars from 18-wheelers. The thing is enormous. At first, it’s like I’m steering a boat down the middle of 322. I can imagine the rudder shifting with the steering wheel, watery asphalt grinding away in a rough charcoal wake. When I go up hills, the engine sounds like a jet intake, and when it gathers momentum, I have the vague sensation of riding an asteroid on an Earth-skimming near miss. In my old cars – the current Prius and a much-beloved old 1991 Honda Civic hatchback – the headlights of minivans and SUVs blasted bothersomely through my rear window. Now, I look down with perverse satisfaction at the drivers of these once towering behemoths as they lean anxiously forward in their now-absurd little buggies. SUVs, I hear, don’t do very well in crashes. Just before I give myself a mental smack on the hand, I imagine my craft cruising serenely, sublimely through a twisted pond of Hummer metal.

The company that previously owned the van installed a system of shelves and grates in the cargo bay. Many of them would serve me well – I was planning on installing something similar anyway – but in their current empty superfluousness, they’re nothing but noise pollution. When I hit a bump or break, the vibrations travel through the whole vehicle ending in the metal-frame shelves, which then shake, rattle and roll, making a truly ungodly racket. Strauss’s Alpine Symphony includes scoring for a Thunder Machine. This usually takes the form of a large, thin metal sheet that some sturdy young percussionist draws out and shakes like hell to cut through a 123-piece orchestra. If he could have heard it, Strauss may have preferred to simply use a Chevrolet.

But on some level, I like the din. I felt real disappointment in many aspects of the Prius, which displays gas mileage on a little onboard computer screen, runs silent as a ghost but repeatedly emits a small, civil beep to remind you when you’re backing up and chirps wildly at you when you don’t buckle your seatbelt. Compare this rather aggravatingly civil personality to the van, which roars and rattles but somehow stays in one piece and chugs gasoline like a frat boy sloppily chugging Beast in a keg stand. It’s like leaving your elementary school librarian to go out and play in the parking lot with a Hell’s Angel.

And as it happens, the gas mileage isn’t actually so bad (for a van). Its large frame is built on a 1/2-ton chassis – as opposed to the one-ton chasses supporting vans designed to haul huge amounts of cargo – so it achieves the same level of efficiency as a smaller vehicle. This is important to me, both because I have trouble ethically justifying an automobile that guzzles more gas than necessary, and because gas will be my biggest regular expense on the trip, pretty much replacing rent and utilities evenly.

My mechanic gives it the go, more or less, and I drive back to Huffle’s with my father, who knows less about cars than I do, but comes along for support. I’ve settled into the feel of it, the lower pickup and greater momentum, the larger turning axis and the rear-well drive. It’s really surprisingly maneuverable. There’s a light whistle in through one of the windows. “So, are you going to take me across the country so I can listen to all the sounds out there?” I silently ask the steering wheel. I hit a bump. “GragragrakukukukukakakakakakaCHUNKgaDUNKabrrrRUNKKKUKNKNKKkkk!” the van replies. Yes. This is it: the Van of Destiny.

Back at Huffle’s, Eric abruptly disappears once it becomes clear that I’m buying. Out of nowhere pops a stout grey leprechaun. He’s short but compact and dense; one would imagine that if he curled up tight, he’d do well as a bowling ball. His gray hair is flattened desperately under a snugly fitting baseball cap, and wild gray moustaches stick out every which way like tumbleweed. Glittering, squinty blue eyes twinkle out from his behind thick glasses. “Hi!” he shouts gruffly, gripping the syllable in his stomach before launching it out like the bolt of a trebuchet. “I’m Bill,” He thrusts forward his hand. I take it; he shakes firmly, someone spastically, and then hollers “siddown!,” thumbing the chair in front of his desk. “Now lemme tell you something about cars, son….” The cavalry has arrived.

Bill, the human foghorn. Bill, the Used Car Philosopher. Good old Bill, your best friend when buying a used car. Bill goes on for about five minutes about the glories of used cars before he gets it that I’m not considering getting a new one. There’s a fresh Prius outside; I guess he figured I was thinking on a classier level. I explain that I received a grant to buy the van, and so am working in a very strict price range, and ask if the price negotiable. “Is the price negotiable!” he shouts, abruptly leaning back in his chair, hands over his head. He drawls the words with weary familiarity. Then, suddenly, he’s leaning forward again, hands on the desk before him. “Now that’s a good question. Is the price negotiable. Now, you see, at this establishment, we don’t have a whole lot of window dressing. You see this office? Now, I could get myself my own room, get Eric over there a nice little cubicle, get leather chairs for us to relax in, but I don’t. Why? Because that would make your van more expensive. Now, here at Huffle’s, I need to be competitive. That highway out there is nothing but used car lots, and I need to be competitive. So I don’t put in a whole lot of this and that, so that the price on that sticker there can be as low as it can be.” I apologize and tell him that the price on the sticker is out of my range, and ask if he could lower it. “You ever bought a house, son? How old are you?” I’m twenty-two. “See, you don’t understand. I built this house. Now I’ve got to choose between selling these vans for a certain price and keeping this house. You see where I’m coming from? I’ve got a house to maintain. That’s where I’m coming from.” The age question riled me a little. I say that I understand where’s he’s coming from, but since I’m working on a budget for all my expenses next year, I have to choose between his van price and eating. That’s where I’m coming from. “Now you looked at a lot of other cars,” he draws leadingly. I nod. He changes tactics again. “Okay, well you’re not going to get a better deal in the midstate. Why don’t we try and make something work, here. Why don’t you go ahead and tell me a price that you think you’d be able to pay, and I’ll tell you if it stacks up with where I’m coming from.” I quote him a price, knocking a thousand dollars off the sticker. He blinks at me, then leans back again and shakes his head. “Now, you see, what you’re telling me, the question you’re giving me here is, do I want to do business with you, or do I want to make money? You know, do I want to make a profit? Now don’t get me wrong here, I’d love to give you this deal, but that’s just out of my range of consideration. Now I know you’ve got your own concerns, but I don’t think, see, that I can make that number square with my concerns.” I ask him to make a counter-offer. “You see, if I give you this van for your number, you can just drive off. But then when you want another car, you might come back here, and you know what? Ol’ Bill will be plain gone. See, I got to be competitive. And if I’m giving away vans like that – if I’m not thinking about my business, well I’m just gonna disappear and you won’t be able to come back to Ol’ Bill for a new used car.” I ask him to make a counteroffer. “Now lemme ask you a question here,” he says instead, leaning forward more, peering out at me over his glasses, squinting further, little slits of eyes twinking. “Lemme ask you a question, real straight-forward, yes or no. Okay?” Okay. “Real straight-forward.” Okay. “Is there any way I’m going to sell you that van for the number on the sticker?” No. He leans back with expression of a parental disappointment. “Fellowship for what?” he drawls. Music, I reply. “What kind of music?” but then, just as I’m trying to think how to answer, he blurts out a number almost under his breath, adding 800 dollars to my offer. “That’s only two hundred dollars away from the sticker price,” I reply, “so it’s still out of my range. But I tell you what, I understand where you’re coming from, so I’ll meet you in the middle.” I give him a number 500 off. He squints at me. “Excuse me a moment,” he says, launching out of his chair and going to a back room, talking and laughing loudly at another employee, leaving me to sit quietly at an empty desk with my father, who looks at me inscrutably. Eventually Bill returns. “Excuse me,” he says again. He has papers in his hand. “Now look at this,” thrusting them at me, “these are complete records for everything that’s happened to this car since it got bought. Everything. Now, this car has been serviced religiously every three thousand miles since day one. Now, you’re not going to find a record like that on a car like this anywhere in the midstate. So what do you say to this number right here?” He says, pointing with his pen to his last offer. No, I’ll meet you halfway. He leans back again, giving me that same disappointed look. “What kind of music?” he asks again. I’ll send you a CD if you give me the car. Suddenly he’s shouting again. “Eric! Eric, whaddya think? Should we sell him this car? I think he got a fellowship from his dad. He’s gonna send us a CD.” Eric looks uncomfortable, and mumbles something. Bill doesn’t listen. “Fine!” He barks. “It’s a deal,” he is suddenly soft, fatherly. “It has been a true pleasure doing business with you.” The hard twinkle promptly returns. “Now you can clear up the details with Eric, like whether you’ll be paying in one check or multiple installments?” And just as suddenly as he appeared, he’s gone.