the Walnut Diary

A car provides a space where you are effectively autonomous. This power is the result of mobility and anonymity. For the teenager its initial appeal is sudden control over vast distances. The process of conquering the previously inaccessible develops the taste for freedom in the forms of speed and unsupervised time with others, the chance to cut loose.

For my generation the car was the trysting place of young love. Woe betide the swain whose mechanical skills weren’t up to the task of reviving the battery of his car in the gravel pit at the end of a country road with the local clergyman’s daughter in the front seat beside him.

A car is its own economy. It provides mobility, the product, in return for considerable effort to pay its costs. This usually involves using that mobility to go to a variety of places of employment at regular hours, so the car imposes a discipline on the individual which we generally accept as normal in Western society.

Leaving the farm for life at university comes as a wrenching change to the young auto enthusiast. All of the sudden in a high-density environment, a car is a real nuisance and his newly acquired repair skills are in low demand. Parking on campus is prohibitively expensive. Cars are the fashion statements of well-to-do fathers and there is no correlation whatever between the price of the car in front of the residence and the level of satisfaction of the kid in the room above.

Walking provides amazing mobility in the microcosm of a university campus, but a bicycle is even better, if less anonymous. Kamikaze rushes across campus to the lunch room fill the need for speed, and the frequent short stair descents on the route provide adventure. Winter riding enhances these thrills, especially when a blast through a snowbank encounters a fire hydrant.

A car is a much warmer vehicle in winter than a bicycle. It is also much less likely to lose traction on an angled railway crossing under slush, or to spin out on glare ice and slide into a curb.

One’s first new car is a shining, wonderful thing, a sensual delight of smells, sounds, and G-forces. It comes with worry. The owner signs away his freedom in a contract promising to pay a significant amount, each month, for the foreseeable future. The new job imposes even more regularity to the driver’s life, this one with a 35 year contract.

Over the duration of this contract marriage and dogs, houses and kids happen, the trappings of a happy, successful life.

All to pay for that first new car.