The starkest factor impeding my quality of life in Milledgeville, Georgia is the aggressive dependence on car culture. This is my third time living in rural America, but both Ukiah (charming hippie mountain town) and Placerville (scary Libertarian mountain town) are in California. California, as we all know, is not the South.
My hometown of New Orleans (also, culturally, not the South) is rightly notorious for its torn up sidewalks and the meteor-crater potholes that make up a disconcerting (and ever-increasing) percentage of its roads, so I figured that nothing in Milledgeville’s dispiriting infrastructure could surprise me. But shit’s a lot worse here for walking: New Orleans, in all its below-sea-level glory, is flat. Milledgeville is not flat. It doesn’t have the hills of Seattle or San Francisco, but those hills are smooth. I didn’t mind the quad workout I got from living in either city.
I don’t get a quad workout from rural Georgia hills, just a steady feeling of foreboding. If my attention wanders on my near-daily walk to campus, a fall is imminent. I haven’t fallen, because I already know that I have to be super-careful when the sidewalk turns into this:
And that, dear readers, is where there are sidewalks. For the last part of my walk home, there simply aren’t. This is a friendly, helpful town where people often offer me rides, but more than once, I’ve had to decline because I couldn’t climb into the truck. My hamstrings are tight, yes, but I do my hip-raises, I assure you. I have lifted myself up into many a high-off-the-ground moving van. These trucks are too damn big. And even the artsy types drive them. People in Milledgeville think that’s what driving is, and they believe, furthermore, that everyone drives.
Unless you’re poor, of course. Milledgeville infrastructure is as anti-poverty as spikes on park benches to keep sleepers at bay. It occurs to me now that of the people who’ve offered me rides I can actually take, none of them were white. If you’re white and of any means to speak of, you drive and you drive a mountainous truck. They call that normal. They call that life. And they don’t even realize they’re calling it anything.
I never learned to drive for two reasons:
1.) Being born with cerebral palsy means I require hand controls to use in place of pedals. Those have to be custom-built, fitted not only to the body of the would-be driver, but to the car itself, necessitating not only expense, but a commitment to a particular vehicle that, by design, we wouldn’t make to our used Scion XB.
2.) When I had an opportunity to learn how to drive with hand controls, I was 16, and my inchoate executive functioning had me prioritizing all-night conversations with my first boyfriend over getting the amount of sleep I needed to drive. That part’s on me.
But my being a nondriver has never been a serious issue before now. As an undergraduate in Iowa City, I walked everywhere, and there was nowhere I couldn’t get to that I needed to go. I spent more cab money than was strictly ideal in my Austin days, but there were buses there too, and I made good use of them. After that, I lived in Chicago, where public transit made me feel limitless. (There were a couple of long commutes, but nowhere I couldn’t reach.) Ian and I got together in Chicago, then we moved to Seattle, where we didn’t own a car. Ditto Boston, where Ian got his MA: the Green line off the Boston T was laughably slow, but it got you there. Again, no point A without a point B, as long as you had patience. (Even with the necessity of planning for delays, the time to read, listen to music, or text a friend on the train is infinitely preferable to contending with Boston drivers.)
Things got tricky when we moved to California, where Ian needed to be to clear his teaching credential. While we figured out our next steps, we spent months-at-a-stretch in Sacramento and Berkeley. One can absolutely do Berkeley without a car, though not without ultrasecure wealth. Berkeley happened to be where I experienced the first of what became a series of untreated breakdowns (I’m all right now, I work out and see a therapist and I’m on Welbutrin!) and about the time I checked out of the mental institution for clinical depression is when Ian suggested he get a job teaching in the mountains and we go live in the woods.
So, we lived in the woods. And that’s why we needed a car.
After Ukiah, we determined that we were forever done with rural America. At the end of Ian’s contract in Salinas, CA, we wondered if we’d drawn our conclusions too hastily and decided that a different tiny town might be in order, so we tried Placerville. By the end of that venture, we knew for sure we’d been right, we were DONE WITH RURAL AMERICA FOREVER, and I applied to teaching credential programs in San Francisco and San Jose, choosing The City when I had options.
Three years later, when I decided to go for my MFA, I knew without a doubt that if I was offered an opportunity to get my degree from my dream school in New York, I would take it, and we would sell the car. At last, we would sell the car. Rural America? Never again.
But when the time came, I said no. They asked me, and I replied that I’d been offered full funding in Milledgeville, Georgia. “Oh please do not turn that down!” replied the earnest receptionist at Dream School Admissions office. So I didn’t. We were off. In our car.
Jason Slaughter, a Canadian urbanist who relocated to the Netherlands in order to raise a family in a non-car-centric city, discusses related matters in his infinitely informative and wryly funny youtube channel, Not Just Bikes. He often returns to the fact that American policy-makers consciously chose to turn our once-pedestrian country into a sprawl that required cars, massively restructuring cities so that they were designed for automobiles instead of people. Urban history in America is a series of decisions based on the belief that if you don’t drive, you don’t matter. The fact that this deliberately-chosen “value” has been internalized on masse as “the way things are” or “just America” is more infuriating than I know how to summarize.
When I worked as a tutor in my short-lived Berkeley days, a high school student told me that he couldn’t wait to get his license because driving meant freedom. I asked if he felt free when he was stuck in traffic. “Oh wow, that’s a good point,” he said. Then, as though recounting past frustrations in his head, he added, with a groan, “stuck in traffic.”
What kind of mindfuckery does it take to associate traffic jams, car insurance, collisions, repair costs, gas prices, and noise pollution with freedom?
It couldn’t be done without our imaginations. I happen to love a vintage car, and, like any red-blooded American, some of my hottest proto-sexual experiences were car-based. Looking out at the Pacific while cruising down Highway 1 makes me feel alive, of course it does. And I’ve known enough born-and-raised Southern Californians to understand why some of my favorite people would feel their hearts torn out if “offered” the “opportunity” to live without a car. How do I convince them that they’ve been conditioned by a megacapitalistic large-scale plan to keep us dependent on an industry that’s destroying the environment and, as commutes get longer and gas prices get higher, mental health en masse?
If there’s one thing it’s nearly impossible to do, it’s detach from positive associations in order to see the reality of the destructive consequences we’ve turned away from. Fossil fuel dependence and its unshakable relationship to climate change pales in the face of Greased Lightenin’. And yes, there were moments during our week-long summer drive from San Francisco to Milledgeville that, in the middle of true uninterrupted nowhere, I noticed just how fast Ian was going with a jolt that certainly felt primal.
But it isn’t! Nothing about driving is primal. And nothing about America’s relationship to driving or its seeming need for cars happened organically. Racist policy-makers made a lot of decisions — creating the initially all-white suburbs that compelled middle-class people to flee cities — then bulldozed and rebuilt America to such a collassal degree that our history was readily forgotten. (A few sources: Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, Robert M. Fulgelson’s Bourgeois Nightmares, Daniel Knowles’ Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do about It).
I’ve heard more than one person say that a car’s major advantage is a private meltdown space on wheels: when the stressors in their life become too much to bear, they can drive to a remote space, roll up their windows, and scream. I can’t help but wonder if a life entirely without the chronic stress of traffic and all its ensuing noise might alleviate the need to break down privately at any moment. If that sounds reductive, I implore you to watch this:
One of the San Francisco-specific silver linings of the pandemic was the pedestrianization of certain areas that, theretofore, had been designed for cars. The need for people to spend as much time as possible outdoors and six feet apart was met with relative ease, disabusing all prior narratives that making an American city more pedestrian-friendly is impossible.
Still, many of San Francisco’s elderly stuck to an especially grating point: they wanted more cars in Golden Gate Park for the alleged benefit of people with disabilities! This still boggles my mind. I never had the dubious privilege of arguing with these people, but I saw their “case” on bulletin boards in parks, and read it in Voters’ Manuals arguing against pro-pedestrian legislation. Their conclusion, which is assumed to apply to me: People with disabilities have to drive or be driven.
Cerebral palsy is not the only disability that inhibits a person’s ability to drive. Epilepsy and autism can render driving either extremely dangerous, or so full-body stressful as to not be worth the disproportionate trouble. As far as walking moderate or long-distances, I struggle to see how an electric mobility aid is somehow less conducive to a disabled person’s freedom and autonomy than a car. I can only conclude that the loudest voices on this matter come from, again, a series of enforced history and associations. Their whole lives have revolved around cars, and, at their advanced ages, they’ve never questioned why.
Investigating our positive associations means questioning our feelings, which it’s never fun to do. A lot of people accept that questioning negative associations is useful, but in America, we’re loathe to question positive ones. If something feels like freedom, then it is freedom. If we were trapped, we’d feel trapped. But history tells us just how easy it is to convince ourselves we’re free within specifically-designed confines, meant to create dependence. If we call that dependence liberation, we are, by definition, not free.
Here’s to freedom in 2024, by which I mean asking tough questions. Welcome to my new subscribers! As always, I appreciate your minds and eyeballs, and encourage discussion from every angle.