End of the road

We love our cars. But what happens -- in an enviro-sensitive age -- when that love turns bad? Jacob Berkowitz finds his dream truck -- briefly -- and takes a trip through a fading world where cars were once king

Citizen Special

Saturday, July 14, 2007

BENTONVILLE, Arkansas

As I look at the two-tone cream and boxwood green 1970 Ford F-100 pickup truck -- my truck -- for the first time I think: It's beautiful. And this is the problem. I shouldn't like this truck, I shouldn't want it. In the era of climate change I can't justify having it. All my life I've driven compact, fuel-efficient vehicles. I turn-off the motor when waiting at rail crossings. My family scores 10-out-of-10 on the David Suzuki Foundation Climate Challenge. I'm usually excited about self-propelled vehicles: a carbon-fibre road bike, a Kevlar canoe with cherry gunnels.

But though the historic timing's off, as a 42-year-old husband, father, mortgage holder, school parent council member and keen backyard composter, my Y-chromosome is yearning for this petroleum-powered adult boy toy. A year ago I began searching the Internet for the truck I've long felt drawn to. Just a little investigative browsing at first, until I found a virtual mega-car lot of classic trucks on eBay. Then one day, with the click of a mouse -- to my wife's bewilderment -- the truck was mine.

That's how I found myself this past May in the northwest corner of Arkansas set to begin a road trip home to explore the question: What happens when our love of cars turns bad?

Sitting at my computer before I buy the truck and scrolling through eBay listings for dozens of antique F-100 trucks up for auction, I'm struck by the fact that these aren't your average car ads: 2001 Chevy Cavalier, 127K, snow tires, some rust. These aren't ads, they're odes. They're love poems. Some call it car porn. Sellers write of southern beauties that have never seen salt. One listing is about 1,000 words long with 25 photos, from the door hinges to the floor pan, so detailed I can sense the enameled metal, smell the axle grease. Sure sellers want to show their vehicles in the best light, especially to buyers who'll only see photos before bidding. But this is about more than putting the best tire forward. This is shared passion. These are dream cars and their steel frames, body curves and vinyl seats embody a range of feeling that no other objects do for North Americans -- especially men.

And in our current oil chill and debate about climate change, this is the 10,000 pound elephant in the room that no one (except Toronto-based bike activists with repressed car longings) wants to talk about -- we love our cars. Our cars aren't just ways to get around. They are personal extensions of ourselves -- as much spiritual and emotional as physical. Who needs a penile implant when you can sit with eight-cylinders roaring under the hood? Our cars are the journey. Life is a highway.

Craig, who's selling me the truck, meets me at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport and we drive to his house past endless road-killed armadillos -- their habitat extending north with the warming climate. He's parked the truck in his driveway just as he'd photographed it for the eBay ad. It's like seeing an online date for the first time. Yeah, there's a little more rust than he'd described, but as he says as I walk around "She's a sweet ve-hicle". The truck starts like a horse flaring its nostrils -- a burst that says I'm here. This is the real deal -- an "unmolested," as Craig calls it, 37-year-old truck: fly-away West Coast-style mirrors, double-I-beam suspension, the original 302 motor with only 67,000 miles on it.

The truck evokes my childhood; it's the truck I first saw on the roads when my family immigrated to the U.S. in 1967 and, like a duckling, I imprinted to what was paramount in my new world: truck. The F-100, the best-selling pick-up of all time, evokes a time of auto-innocence. It's a truck made in the era before oil crises and global warming and when the green movement was a thin offshoot of hippy love. It's a truck made before Ford needed to brag its vehicles were "Built Ford Tough". It is Ford tough. When I lift the heavy steel hood I double check that it's securely up, for fear of being decapitated.

Getting into the cab I realize I'm a little scared. Passion and curiosity have fuelled my journey to this point, and now I realize a tool kit and mechanical smarts beyond the ability to interview a mechanic might come in handy. It doesn't help that, as I pull out of his driveway, Craig waves and says I'll pray for you.

It could be prophetic.

The feel of the old truck is like nothing I've driven before. It dips and bobs like a powerful boxer out of his prime, but one who can still throw a solid knock-out punch.

It's dusk and I don't want to drive in the dark on the first night, so I find an EconoLodge in nearby Bentonville. Later that

In our current oil chill and debate about climate change, this is the 10,000 pound elephant in the room that no one (except Toronto-based bike activists with repressed car longings) wants to talk about -- we love our cars.


night, I look across the street from my room and see the open bay door of a garage -- light streaming out like in a sci-fi film -- and inside, several classic cars and trucks. I go over and meet Terry, a classic car mechanic whose just returned from Tennessee hauling a 1940 Ford sedan that's been lovingly restored to mint condition. We share a beer and talk about car love until midnight. Don't worry, he tells me. You're going to be scared as hell at first driving her. But by the time you're back in Canada, you'll be driving at 70 m.p.h. and not even thinking about it.

I deliberately sought out a truck in the heart of car country, the land of NASCAR and Route 66, American's iconic early highway, the Mother Road. What I didn't know is that Bentonville is literally the hub of the modern road economy. It's home to the world headquarters of Wal-Mart, the business that has transformed commerce with its warehouses-on-wheels business model. Formally known for its sprawling chicken barns, Bentonville is home to Sam Walton's original five-and-dime store (now a museum), that grew like a chick on steroids and has morphed into the world's largest corporation.

To baptize my road trip, I drive to the Wal-Mart world headquarters for a photo-op. Standing beside my Ford, a friendly Wal-Mart PR staffer taking my picture, it dawns on me how closely the two great America brands are intertwined. Henry Ford -- more than any of the early auto inventor/industrialist -- has made us who we are today -- car creatures. "Ford" is more than a brand name, the name resonates as a way of being. His design of the Model-T, "the car that put the world on wheels" paved the way for the personal car. Wal-Mart's success is a direct descendant of Ford's -- mass consumption tied to the car and transforming the landscape of retailing. The car made possible Wal-Mart's retail superstore model and the superstores make ever more necessary the car.

Leaving Bentonville and soon Arkansas, I drive north up Interstate 44, a four-lane swath of asphalt that bisects Missouri from southwest to northeast and tune into a Christian radio station. The host is interviewing Christopher Horner, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism). When I later find the book, its back flap asserts that Mr. Horner, an attorney and senior fellow at the Washington-based conservative think-tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute, "reveals the full anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-human agenda of today's environmentalists, dubbing them 'green on the outside, red to the core'."

Them's fighting words, the words of America on the ropes, and Mr. Horner's radio audience is right there with him. In fact, Mr. Horner tells a caller, the global warming crusade isn't just anti-American, it's un-Christian -- it's humans thinking we're big enough to accomplish what only the Creator can, alter the globe's climate. For the first time, I understand George W. Bush's appeal, in these blue states in the mid- and southern U.S., the Bible Belt, NASCAR country, the land that Chevy Truck ads that call it the Heartland of America. Folks don't want to change -- and here they have the chutzpah to say it out loud. In this land where vehicles rust ever so slowly and a man and a socket wrench are one, the past is the present. America's glory days are tied to the car. And here cars, the Christian God, the military, baseball and NASCAR are intimately linked in a cultural weave so tight the individual strands are barely visible. To challenge the car is un-Christian, un-American and un-sportsmanlike. It's hitting below the belt.

Just how different today's Wal-Mart world is to that of the Model-T becomes apparent later that day as, for the first time, I roll onto historic Route 66 in mid-Missouri. Dubbed the Main Street of America, Route 66 stretches about 4,000 kilometres from Chicago to Los Angeles. Opened in 1926, it was one of the first U.S. federal highways. And, although it was decommissioned in 1985, it lives on as the mythic road of freedom and joy. This summer, like every one before, what's left of the Mother Road will carry tens of thousands of tourists looking to get their kicks on Route 66. What's striking is just how small it is. It's bucolic -- a two-lane stretch of pavement no wider than a concession road near my home in rural Lanark County. This was America's Main Street?

Seeing Route 66's asphalt self is a form of time-travel -- back to the days before the 24/7 virtual economy, nuclear power, and the possibility of a weekend flight to Paris to celebrate a 10th wedding anniversary. This was the scale cars used to be before there were enough to change not just the shape of our lives, but our planet's climate.

But my journey back through time hits a snag almost before it can begin. With a bang, and a puff of grey smoke, my truck journey rolls to a dead stop on a Saturday afternoon on I-44. Safely on the margin, I sit in the cab in disbelief, after only 386 kilometres, as 18-wheelers careen by -- the wind from each one causing the truck to rock like a ship at sea. I survey my surroundings for somewhere from which to call a tow truck -- huge roadside billboards advertising food and rooms loom in the distance, yet feel as far away as the moon. From higher on the embankment I see buildings back beyond the far side of the highway. I scoot across the four-lane interstate, focused on avoiding an armadillo's fate, wiggle under barbed-wire, cross a field, and arrive at an auto wreckers, hoping that this isn't my truck's fate. The tow truck I call hauls my pickup and me to the Ford dealership in nearby downtown Rolla, Missouri.

Rolla's town leaders pitch it as the "middle of everywhere", within 100 miles of the lower 48's geographical bull's-eye -- Kansas City, Missouri. I'd wanted to come to middle-America and here I am. The location adds to what I'm already feeling: my truck meditation has become car-ma -- keep my eyes open and things will come to me.

Truck-less in Rolla, I'm forced to go to ground -- to walk through one micropolitan area in the heart of America. Route 66 used to bring America right through the heart of this town. Now I-44 by-passes Rolla pulling the town to its edges. Like so many towns, Rolla's life now orbits around the highways that intersect it with the fast food joints lining these transportation arteries.

In this environment you're a freak of nature without a car. I walk into downtown Rolla on a Sunday mid-afternoon in search of coffee. After five minutes I get an eerie feeling. It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers -- I'm the only person on the sidewalks. I walk for more than an hour, right through downtown Rolla, pop. 15,000, and cross paths with exactly five people -- a student on the University of Missouri at Rolla campus and three teenagers dressed in black. Pine Street, the main street of historic Rolla, is barren. Drivers look at me like I've wandered out of the psychiatric ward. Passing a golf course, I see two overweight golfers in a buggy. It's the other thing a Canadian in middle-America is struck by -- here, being overweight isn't about some extra Molson Muscle around the waist -- the term that comes to mind is morbidly obese. Sure there are super-sized food portions and TV-channel changing as the key form of exercise; but looking in on a nation of overweight people wedded to big cars, you can't help but make the connection between the spread of middle-America's suburbs and their stomachs.

That night, I stop for a beer at Joe and Linda's Tater Patch. I'd searched for anything but fast-food and spotted a hand-made sign pointing down a side-street: Bikers Welcome. Outside the tavern are a couple of heavily customized three-wheel motorcycles, all arcing handle-bars and shiny exhaust piping. Inside are a collection of souls somewhere between drowning and sharing their sorrows. Every so often Joe, the bartender, yells "Taxi's here!" and all heads turn slightly to watch another patron's uncertain, tilted journey to the door.

I sit beside Carl, a carnie, who, as I arrive, is given the bag from the bottle of Crown Royal he's finished. Carl is prognosticating in a Tom Wait-ish drawl. He talks about a girlfriend, tits and ass, his brother (a university professor and crack addict), his sister (a Buddhist monk in Taos, New Mexico), his estrangement from his sons -- "In the '80s I wasn't the nicest guy," he says. He puts it down to post-traumatic stress syndrome after his time in the military.

More than a storyteller, Carl is the DJ for my journey. In a bar of hard-living faces, he leans over the digital, online juke-box and chooses from a virtual universe of possible songs. You got a fast car. I want a ticket to anywhere. Maybe we make a deal. Maybe together we can get somewhere. Tracy Chapman's Fast Car, a song about a woman whose hopes of vinyl-seat escape from her drunken father and small-town life, turn into the plus-ca change tale of a drunken, jobless husband burning their cash in the car that was to be her ride to something better. Joe yells "Taxi's here" and, somehow, Carl makes the exit.

On Monday morning it doesn't sound good. Actually, the only sound I recall is the motor's single deep clunk as the Ford dealership mechanic turns the key in the pickup's ignition. Gone is the motor flaring like a bronco's snort. When the mechanic pronounces that the problem's not the timing chain, all hope of a quick pit stop and end-of-day return to the on-ramp is lost.

Probably a broken rod, Bentonville's Terry advises me when I call him. She probably needs a new engine. I'd driven the truck for less than 24 hours, had it for not much more than 48 and now it's a metal shell. But for all the disappointment of a road trip on the rails, mostly I feel a deep gratitude for the people I've met, something that's hard to convey to my wife by phone when I call to tell her my $4,500 truck is toast. (The deeper disappointment comes weeks later, after restless nights, when I decide to sell the truck to a friend of Terry's.)



 Getting into our cars is the antithesis of thinking about climate change. It's where we lose ourselves The big picture feels way too big -- and anyway, I'm just one little, inconsequential part, we each tell ourselves in our car cocoon.

With no way to rent a car and continue my road meditation back to Canada, I decide to fly home from St. Louis. I learn that it's a city that more than any other has been hollowed-out by cars, roads and suburbs. In its pre-Second World War heyday, St. Louis was the largest city on Route 66 between Chicago and L.A. However, the post-war boom in suburbs decimated the city core, turning it into the Big Empty. Between 1950 and 2006, St. Louis lost more than half its population, and at a rate faster than any other U.S. city. All this while the surrounding suburbs ballooned. Today, St. Louis residents face one of the longest commutes to work of any American metropolis. The shuttle driver who takes me to the airport tells me he used to commute 100 miles one-way from his home in Rolla to a paint factory job in suburban St. Louis, a commute he says he'd never do with today's gas prices.

That evening, I walk through St. Louis' historic central west-end neighbourhood, past magnificent turn-of-the-century homes and find myself at the Left Bank Bookshop, the city's sole independent bookseller. There's an author reading tonight. Following my car-ma instinct, I decide to stay. Marcus Eriksen, author of My River Home: A Journey from the Gulf War to the Gulf of Mexico, is a former U.S. marine turned environmental activist.

The book is Mr. Eriksen's account of his tour-of-duty in Kuwait and Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and on his return home his soul-searching raft-trip down the Mississippi River -- a modern day Twainian journey from the river's headwaters to the Gulf; down the great river to find himself and his place in his country.

With a square jaw, piercing black eyes and a solid, compact build, Mr. Eriksen is everything Uncle Sam would want for a poster boy marine -- except that he's now a member of Veterans for Peace. He joined the marines at 18, pumped to carry on the tradition of fighting for freedom that he saw among the vets in his small town Louisiana neighbourhood. He was ready for anything -- to kill, be killed. But what he wasn't expecting was the Highway of Death.

In March 1991 with the end of the ground war, Mr. Eriksen's marine platoon was based on "Hill 99", a three-foot rise in the desert of southern Iraq. It's from here that he and his equally bored platoon mates ventured out in time-off military tourism, looking for whatever adventure and souvenirs they could find. On the six-lane highway leading north to Basra, they came across the charred remains of a convoy of about 500 vehicles. There were a few military trucks full of weapons, but mostly buses, taxis, motorcycles, passenger cars -- anything on wheels the retreating Iraqi army could use to flee. As Mr. Eriksen writes, "In order to stop the Iraqi army from having contact with the swift U.S. army, which had already penetrated into southern Iraq, the U.S. air force obliterated them. "Any homeward bound euphoria in the minds of their youngest soldiers quickly evaporated as hell descended." All of the young marines jokes about how this was going to be a turkey shoot also evaporated on seeing the thousands of charred bodies remaining from the real thing.

But it wasn't the carnage alone that ultimately transformed Mr. Eriksen. It was the reason for it. He went to defend America's values and realized on returning that he was sent to kill for its primary interest: oil.

On the bookstore wall, Mr. Eriksen projects a quote from James Baker, George Bush senior's secretary of state during the Gulf War.

"Let me go back to oil for a minute, 'cause to a lot of people that's a dirty word and I'm not sure that it ought to be to a country like ours that uses so much of it and depends so much on it for energy," he said during a National Public Radio interview in October 2006 following the release of his memoir. "I've been in four administrations ... and (in) every one of those administrations we had a written policy that we would go to war to defend secure access to the energy reserves of the Persian Gulf. So when you formulate and implement foreign policy for the United States, you have to look at principles and values, yeah, but you also have to look at national interests."

I step out of the bookstore into the warm evening and walk down the sidewalk past cafes spilling carefree banter. On the narrow street, a yellow Ford Mustang roars past and jolts me to thinking of the film Road Warrior. The film depicts a dystopian Australia in which, following a long war over oil, those remaining (including Mad Max, played by Mel Gibson) live in a police-state defined by savage fighting for the remaining drops of gasoline.

That future is now, I think.

We're already stealing and fighting for oil -- and it's just barely above a dollar a litre. At a Missouri gas station the day before, I'd seen a home-made sign asking patrons to pay before pumping. With spiking prices, the owner said, drivers had begun fleeing before paying and a single pickup's full tank represented a day's profit lost. The chaos, murder, and lawlessness televised live from Baghdad makes Road Warrior seem not only prophetic, but tame.

It's not the truck journey I was expecting -- the feel-good Route 66 road trip. It's what we all want when we get into our cars -- to escape, to feel the freedom and power of quick zero-to-60 acceleration with the simple pressure of a right foot. Getting into our cars is the antithesis of thinking about climate change. It's where we lose ourselves The big picture feels way too big -- and anyway, I'm just one little, inconsequential part, we each tell ourselves in our car cocoon.

At home I realize I didn't need to go to middle America to explore what happens when our love of cars turns bad -- it's just that the contrast opened my eyes to what's already around me.

We're America's gas tank. The massive development of the Alberta oil sands is fuelled by the North American need for oil. Canada is America's biggest supplier of oil -- not to mention natural gas, uranium and electricity. We're the dealers. And what do we do with our money? We buy their cars -- and the dreams and delusions that come with them. In May, Canadians bought more vehicles than in any other month in our country's history. And where'd we get the money to buy our wheels? According to economic analysts, it's the booming oil patch that's boosting auto sales.

For all the buzz about the Smart car, hydrogen and hybrids, when it comes to what we drive we're still hooked on the past, driving down Route 66 in our minds eye, living a car ad fantasy even as the heat-alert days soar and talk drifts steadily to adaptation, rather than prevention, of climate change.

And it turns out that in May I was far from alone in my passion for a truck. A newspaper article on the record vehicle sales concluded: Despite high gas prices and a new federal levy on gas-guzzlers such as large sport utility vehicles, sales of trucks rose 15 per cent, outpacing passenger car sales.

Jacob Berkowitz is a writer and author in Almonte.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007