D5

by Tim Moerman
For The Times & Transcript

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Last Friday I walked down Main Street, along with thousands of others out to enjoy the sunshine and ogle the dazzling array of classic cars at the Atlantic Nationals.

For all the merriment, to me it feels like the sunset of the automobile era -- the last couple of hurrahs before peak oil and climate change put the kibosh to this peculiar obsession of ours. And I'm not sure how I feel about that.

When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up (if that is the word) to be the Dukes of Hazzard, tear-assing around the countryside in a souped-up hotrod. I remember being very upset that by the time I was old enough to drive, the gasoline would be all gone.

My timing was off, but that day is coming, as surely as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. The fossil fuels we guzzled at pennies a litre are running out. We will soon face a whack of problems as a result. How to get our mini-vans to the mall may be the least of them.

Perhaps to the surprise to those who have read my occasional screeds in these pages, I don't actually hate cars. If I hate anything, it is what cars have done to our world. Or more properly, what we have done to our world, and to ourselves, in their name.

The Atlantic Nationals take place on Moncton's Main Street, a handful of lively, beautiful urban blocks of the type that were once commonplace across North America.

But as automobiles became part of the daily routine of anyone with a pulse and a paycheque, our Main Streets withered and died. Stores closed down and relocated to suburban malls surrounded by acres of asphalt. Highways spread across the countryside, devouring farmland and popping out suburban tract houses. Our cities are going bankrupt maintaining this enormous expanse of infrastructure.

As a non-driver, I am painfully aware of how cars have spread everything out far beyond human scale. I can't buy groceries or a pair of shoes without having to trudge across a vast wasteland of free parking. (A representative of a certain national drugstore chain, in an unguarded moment, confirmed what I always suspected: retail chains don't care about pedestrians because a pedestrian can only buy, and carry home, so much stuff. Someone with her own vehicle is likely to spend a lot more money. This explains a lot.)

To those who can't drive -- children, the very old, the poor, people with epilepsy or narcolepsy or any number of otherwise minor handicaps -- much of the world is inaccessible.

Cars took over our lives and sometimes took our lives themselves. Accidents kill tens of thousands of people each year. My cousin Marc died in a car crash when he was 23, months before his daughter was born. My uncle Larry died, the day after he graduated from university, of a blood clot resulting from an accident two years earlier.

Those are just my relatives.

Eddie Cochran was a rockabilly guitarist of searing, blistering talent. As I write this I'm listening to his version of Blue Suede Shoes, which for my money beats both Elvis' and Carl Perkins' versions with one hand tied behind its back.

Cochran died in a car crash in 1960, aged 21.

Those who don't die suddenly in crashes, bleed out their lives an hour or two at a time, sitting in traffic jams.

The CO2 emissions from our car dependency are changing the global climate to a degree not seen in millions of years. Whether this will mean the end of the human race, or merely the end of our civilization, remains to be seen.

So, the world that cars made and the consequences of living in a world built around them -- yeah, that I can do without.

The sooner these things stop governing our every decision, the better.

But do I hate cars per se? No.

Humans evolved as cursory hunters, chasing prey for hours and hours over the grasslands of Africa. The love of speed and mobility must be in our genes. Give an australopithecine the keys to a '49 Merc and he would know there's not an antelope on Earth that could escape him.

I would be a fool and a hypocrite to deny an instinct honed by millions of years of evolution. Resist it, yes, recognize that it is no longer useful, sure, but deny it? Absurd.

Will I miss cars? I don't know. I will miss the world that made them possible -- the vast wealth that allowed almost anyone to command a machine with more power, speed and stamina than any horse.

When I walk down Main Street, eyeing these classic machines, lovingly restored and polished and proudly set out to be admired, something in my throat tightens.

The world that built these cars was a world where anything seemed possible, where people walked on the moon, where the future lay all ahead of us the way it only does when you're young and stupid and beautiful.

Yes, I will miss these cars. But not the way I miss being sixteen. I will miss them as I miss the dinosaurs: magnificent behemoths, too big and voracious to live, the stuff of legends long after their time has passed.

n Tim Moerman is an urban planner and a resident of Moncton.