Liz and I must bid a tearful goodbye to the red Honda Civic, which has given us so many great memories, from the road trip to Yellowstone to the time I side-swiped our garage on Second Avenue in Wausau. It carried me and much of my stuff to Poughkeepsie in October 2005. It carried our canoe everywhere we went canoeing. For a few weeks it carried me 45 minutes to the train station each day, back when we lived in Glastonbury and I had to commute to work from there to Manhattan. And it carried us to Bayfield many times, including, if I'm not mistaken, the weekend I proposed to Liz.
Purchased in October 2003 for about $5,000 from Sixth Street Motors in Wausau with just under 130,000 miles on it, we sold the car this morning at 195,000 miles for $1,800 to a nice older guy named Lee, who was buying it for his sister. He's picking it up this afternoon while we're gone, better for us lest we embarrass ourselves with an uncomfortable outpouring of emotion.
Is it odd to get misty over something as ordinary as a car? But we are Americans, dammit, and sentimental attachment to our vehicles is in our blood. I feel like a cowboy without a horse now that I am without my own car for the first time since college, though we still have Liz's car for the time being.
Completely unrelated final note: After our Cabin Weekend 2008, spent among the vast countryside of northern Minnesota and its lakes and farms, I found myself humming one of my favorite Talking Heads songs, "(Nothing But) Flowers," a kind of ironic fantasy of progress played in reverse, with urban real estate sacrificed for farmland and parkland. The song doesn't promote a "return to Eden" message so much as a contrary perspective on the "evolution" of modern society, that one day we might find ourselves nostalgic for skyscrapers and interstate highways and Honda Civics.
"There was a factory, now there are mountains and rivers.
We caught a rattlesnake, now we got something for dinner.
There was a shopping mall, now it's all covered with flowers.
If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower. ...
"Once there were parking lots, now it's a peaceful oasis.
This was a Pizza Hut, now it's all covered with daisies.
I miss the honky tonks, Diary Queens and 7-Elevens.
And as things fell apart nobody paid much attention."
Showing posts with label Transportation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transportation. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Junk Yard Turtle Wax
Anyone wanna buy a 1998 Honda Civic? Pushing 200,000 but in good shape. Sad to say goodbye to my individual transport module after nearly five years, but since I've become a practicing believer in public transportation and pedal transportation, it makes less and less sense to keep the Honda.
The only legitimate reason to keep it is as a backup for Liz's car, and for spare parts, since she has the same year and model Honda. And that doesn't quite justify the $100 car tax bill (Connecticut is weird) and several hundreds spent on car insurance.
So yesterday I bought a new battery (the old one died) and stopped by the local junkyard to salvage a small passenger door panel that somehow had disappeared one night into New Haven thin air. Then I picked up some Turtle Wax for $6 at Target and spent my evening washing and polishing the body into an impressive shine.
I figure I can get about $2,000 for the thing. Enough to cover my train tickets for a few months.
The only legitimate reason to keep it is as a backup for Liz's car, and for spare parts, since she has the same year and model Honda. And that doesn't quite justify the $100 car tax bill (Connecticut is weird) and several hundreds spent on car insurance.
So yesterday I bought a new battery (the old one died) and stopped by the local junkyard to salvage a small passenger door panel that somehow had disappeared one night into New Haven thin air. Then I picked up some Turtle Wax for $6 at Target and spent my evening washing and polishing the body into an impressive shine.
I figure I can get about $2,000 for the thing. Enough to cover my train tickets for a few months.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Getting From Point A to Point B
All travel looks backward. Technological advances build on what came before, and often the modes of transportation that seem revolutionary today claim their novelty by redefining earlier modes — quicker, safer, easier on the psyche or the seat of your pants, but based on concepts developed over generations.
Generations on the move. The settler pushing over the plains with his family, horse and carriage, now the U-Haul with trailer hitch. Current-fueled raft, ocean steamliner, speedboat, personal watercraft, kayak, canoe. The physics behind today's jumbo jets, the same physics behind the Wright Brothers first flight, though the size and comforts of air travel may have improved a bit. A train is a train, and riding the train into work every day I can imagine how passengers on those first transcontinental rails must have felt, hurtling across the countryside, speed at their window, the chug of car hitched to car in tandem, lungs once filling with burning coal smoke, now filling with chemical exhaust of unknown origin.
The variety of America is evident in its travel. Mark Twain, in "Roughing It," traveled from Missouri to Nevada, first on riverboat, then by stagecoach — no Pacific railroad yet, Twain informs us. No less adventure more than a century later when Steve Martin and John Candy found their way home on a mix of planes, trains and automobiles.
On my recent trip to visit Kyle and Keith in St. Paul, Minn., Liz gave me a ride by car to the train station, and I caught a Metro-North train down to Harlem and the M60 bus from Harlem to La Guardia, where I caught a nonstop Northwest flight to MSP, and there another car was waiting, with Kyle and Keith inside. The trip home run in reverse. I get home, find my car has been towed for some emergency road work. (Why is such nonsense even possible this day and age, why such an assault on efficiency and mobility?)
And it intrigues me that Keith, Kyle and I have three distinct ways of getting to work. I spend nearly two hours on a train. Kyle spends maybe 45 minutes in a car. Keith pedals a few minutes on his bicycle — the "way of the future," as 19th century Paul Newman famously said in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" before stealing Katherine Ross, Robert Redford's girl, for a ride on the handlebars. Cue the Burt Bacharach.
I, too, dabble in the bicycle commute, at least as far as the train station. Someday, perhaps, we will all commute by bicycle. Viva la revolution, as Keith would say. All forms regress as they progress. Trains, once a dying form, are making a comeback. Planes are falling out of style with their rising ticket prices and increasing fees. As cities rise and small towns decline, the transportation mix will evolve rapidly. But no wheels need be reinvented. With everything close at hand, the best way to get from Point A to Point B might just be a short walk.
Generations on the move. The settler pushing over the plains with his family, horse and carriage, now the U-Haul with trailer hitch. Current-fueled raft, ocean steamliner, speedboat, personal watercraft, kayak, canoe. The physics behind today's jumbo jets, the same physics behind the Wright Brothers first flight, though the size and comforts of air travel may have improved a bit. A train is a train, and riding the train into work every day I can imagine how passengers on those first transcontinental rails must have felt, hurtling across the countryside, speed at their window, the chug of car hitched to car in tandem, lungs once filling with burning coal smoke, now filling with chemical exhaust of unknown origin.
The variety of America is evident in its travel. Mark Twain, in "Roughing It," traveled from Missouri to Nevada, first on riverboat, then by stagecoach — no Pacific railroad yet, Twain informs us. No less adventure more than a century later when Steve Martin and John Candy found their way home on a mix of planes, trains and automobiles.
On my recent trip to visit Kyle and Keith in St. Paul, Minn., Liz gave me a ride by car to the train station, and I caught a Metro-North train down to Harlem and the M60 bus from Harlem to La Guardia, where I caught a nonstop Northwest flight to MSP, and there another car was waiting, with Kyle and Keith inside. The trip home run in reverse. I get home, find my car has been towed for some emergency road work. (Why is such nonsense even possible this day and age, why such an assault on efficiency and mobility?)
And it intrigues me that Keith, Kyle and I have three distinct ways of getting to work. I spend nearly two hours on a train. Kyle spends maybe 45 minutes in a car. Keith pedals a few minutes on his bicycle — the "way of the future," as 19th century Paul Newman famously said in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" before stealing Katherine Ross, Robert Redford's girl, for a ride on the handlebars. Cue the Burt Bacharach.
I, too, dabble in the bicycle commute, at least as far as the train station. Someday, perhaps, we will all commute by bicycle. Viva la revolution, as Keith would say. All forms regress as they progress. Trains, once a dying form, are making a comeback. Planes are falling out of style with their rising ticket prices and increasing fees. As cities rise and small towns decline, the transportation mix will evolve rapidly. But no wheels need be reinvented. With everything close at hand, the best way to get from Point A to Point B might just be a short walk.
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