Confessions of a Car Guy

I have a little, very used silver Mazda Miata that I picked up for a couple of bucks a few years ago to be used as a project car.  Eventually, I intend to push for an extreme form of recycling, taking this rust eaten 120,000 plus mile former daily driver into an interesting little go kart.  But in the meantime, the car satisfies me greatly by breaking down a lot.

You see, I come from a line of tinkerers and engineers, and I love to take things apart and put them together again.  Often they work better after I do.  Just as often I appear to break them a little more, but learn important things along the way. 

Fixing a car is an acquired but rewarding experience.  As one works upon a car, one becomes intimately familiar with a series of systems that come together under a sleek aluminum or steel sheath to become this aerodynamic object that we use every day to convey ourselves around this earth.  The immediacy of identify the problem, fix the problem is one that brings joy to anyone who works with interpersonal, political, and fuzzy problems on a day to day basis.

And there’s the experience of driving itself.  As we drive, this bundle of simple machines and electronic pathways transcends itself and provides us with the ethereal perception of gliding across this earth.  This transcendence increases if one can trace every sensation, sound, and smell to the machine that one just had his or her hands in a few moments before.

And that, unfortunately, is a problem.  For this perception, this automotive mythology, has been accepted for too long without us understanding the true costs of a car- based society.  Even those of us who are not true gearheads regard the car as a magical transporter that (usually) moves us with little effort from our point of origin to our point of immediate need.  We fail to recognize just how wasteful this device is, how these shiny metal boxes doom us to sit in traffic and curse our neighbors around us as we all try to get to the same place at once.  We also fail to notice how inefficiently we use the air, space, and energy we have been privileged to live with for this short period of time. 

For now, I will go outside and change the oil on my little silver go kart and try to keep the ravages of salt and melting snow from dissolving it where it sits.  But, I will also resolve to continue to find ways to not use it very much.

Chris Steele is a husband and a father of 2 children in the Newton Public School system.  He is also an economic and community development consultant as well as an activist and volunteer.  You can contact him at steelch@yahoo.com