Pamela Windo

It seems to me a blog is in between writing an entry in a personal diary and publishing a piece for the public. I haven’t written a blog for a while, but today I’m in the mood. Thoughts are like birds flying by… difficult to catch.  Here’s something that caught my eye:
”… traveling alone is the last great test of who you are in a world where everyone aches to be the same.” I read this in an article by Andrew O’Hagan in the New York Times last week, and as I’ve done most of my traveling, since I was 16, alone, it struck me as interesting.

I came to live in Santa Fe alone, and for the past year and a half have explored the city alone, walking wherever my feet led me. For day-to-day trips downtown, or to the grocery store, I take the bus; in this case, the aptly named Santa Fe Trails.

Having been intentionally car-less for the past few years—since my Honda Civic was stolen from our parking lot in the dead of night and I didn’t have the stomach to go through choosing another one—I decided to continue doing without a car for the foreseeable future.

What’s happened is, instead of longing to be a car owner again, for many reasons, I have come to hate cars.  When you are a pedestrian, trying to cross a street with lines of cars in every direction, their drivers all raring to accelerate the instant the light turns green, you have to be ultra alert or you will be run over, or at least have plenty of scary near misses.  There is such a thing as pedestrian rage, though it can’t compete with the noisier horn-honking road rage.  The drivers, in their heavy metal containers, seem to forget that they, like you, are made of mere flesh and bone. 

I now see cars as metal monsters; huge SUVs with young people driving and texting or gluing cell phones to their ears on their way to being killed or killing someone else; men who morph into army commandos in tank-like Humvees; the list goes on.

And yet, when I mention to people I don’t own a car, it seems to blow their fuse. A look of bewilderment crosses their face as they try to compute my statement. They either ask: “But how do you get around?” or I can tell that that’s the question they are trying to formulate.  Occasionally, someone responds with a resounding: “Good for you!” or “Oh, I really envy you not having a car!”  These people know that with parking problems, gas prices, daunting maintenance costs, insurance, etc., a car is a bug-bear.

Quite by chance, I met the director of the Santa Fe Trails bus company at a tourist convention I had stumbled into. He seemed almost as dumbfounded as the other disbelievers when I confessed to using his buses. I told him all the good points: how polite, friendly and patient the drivers are. How each driver plays his own selection of music—from rock to classical—and each has his own favorite topics for chatting.  Once, the sole passenger on a bus, I told the driver I wanted to catch another bus. He looked at his watch and turned off his route to get me there on time.  They are kind to the homeless passengers who frequent the #2 route on their way to and from a shelter. One driver got off the bus the other day when he noticed one of the regulars slumped on a bus shelter bench. He nudged the man, asked if he was alright, and if he wanted to get on the bus. He did. On the other hand, the drivers will not take rudeness of any kind, and are expert in getting the more obstreperous (or drunk) passengers off the bus without escalating the drama.  There is no such thing as bus rage.

I can tell, without them saying so, that many of the people who’ve expressed surprise at my carless-ness wouldn’t be seen dead on a bus.  But the director asked me for the bad points too. Well, yes, the #2 is the busiest route and is often 5-10 minutes late, which in cold weather is not fun. But I couldn’t really think of any other bad points.

For me, the bottom line is, the thought of going from the four walls of my house straight into a metal container every day, and often many times a day, rather than being out in the fresh air, and saying hello to passers-by, fills me with a sense of claustrophobia. I am not so manic however that, if a friend invites me to drive somewhere, I will not go. It’s all a matter of a personal life choice: I walk, catch the bus, bicycle, call a cab if it’s late at night, or rent a car to go traveling somewhere. These seem to me more than enough options to get around.  But I don’t do all this just to be different……