My Bittersweet Love of Automobiles

From an early age, travel by automobile has been one of my surest delights. Flying down a road, scenery blurring as it whips past like film speeding through a broken projector. Loud music in surround sound--four or more speakers!--synching up with this sensation of epic, unnatural movement. And to have my hands on the steering wheel? My feet on the pedals? Oh, it's beautiful. While other girls (and men, women and boys) may fantasize about horses, I dream almost exclusively of being at the sheltered helm of metal steeds. Few pleasures can match a road trip or long commute.

More than clothing, more than food, more than craft supplies or books, gasoline is frequently my largest financial indulgence--bordering on a vice or guilty pleasure.

But the guilt! I'm not without a geological education. It was one of the subjects I overindulged in, in college. Environmental geology. Even after my interest officially wandered into neuroscience and psychology, the possible AND certain consequences of environmental ne'er-do-welling weighed heavily on my mind. Does the bioaccumulation of PCBs and other industrial contaminants--passed from mother to child in utero--contribute to our higher rates of autism? Cancer?

This brings me back to the "guilt" part of guilty pleasure. I burn more gasoline than necessary.

It seems like whatever industry exhales or discards has a tendency to turn around to bite us medically, if often in ways too complicated and indirect to get the general public excited about.

Some products, some substances have only obscure, unclear consequences. Not so with my beloved gasoline.

The combustion that soothes my character degrades my lungs, spoils the natural sunscreen in the sky (no small concern for a ginger!), requires environmentally AND politically sketchy geological extraction, may encourage war, certainly fouls up the delicate and increasingly unstable systems responsible for the sort of weather our species requires, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, our climate now acts like an alcoholic parent! Spoiling us and beating us--sometimes to death--with terrifying unpredictably.

But still, I return to the subject of my car. My modest little vehicle. My metallic pet. The charming metal box that hurls me from work to home, from home to friends' houses, and always to see my family.

The internet and telephone can help me see and talk with people too far to walk to and too obscurely located to bus or train to. But in-person visits are still much preferable to the telecommute, and time spent at the helm of a car is such a pleasure in itself, that I still fail to join my gasoline-free friends in their medically and morally superior lifestyle.

Woe is me, the sinner who does not bike to work. (Yet.) I dream of guilt free cars, of limitless, safe propulsion. No toxic batteries or airborne, particulate exhaust.

My fantasy is that the wretched and finite nature of fossil gasoline will not take the beauty of the automobile down with it.