Loving not Driving

I haven’t owned a car since 2003, and it's a tremendous relief. I no longer receive parking tickets or speeding tickets, don't have to control the temptation to drive like a lunatic. (I was a road rager if there ever was one.) Each month, I need not concern myself with car payments, insurance payments or maintenance payments.

Having moved to Brazil, the dreaded task of removing snow and ice from a car windshield is not only in my past, but it is inconceivable to those in my present.

The alternatives to driving have become much more attractive to me. Having moved to within a five minute walk of the ocean, I no longer need to spend ten dollars of gas and two hours of driving to reach the Jersey Shore. I just walk.

Because the nearest shopping mall is eight hours away, the ritual of endeavoring to earn more and more money to drive to the mall and invent new ways to spend it is much deemphasized. No more shopping mall parking lots for me! Less is more.

In Brazil, there are buses that reliably take passengers to most anywhere we might want to go, no matter how remote. So, when I want to go to a beach further up the coast, I just wait at a bus stop on this beach for a bus to that other beach. Unlike in the United States, the buses in urban areas here typically run twenty-four hours per day, which makes them a viable alternative, even for nocturnal people who like, sometimes, to party all night.

And party they do at the clubs along the coast here, where over a thousand people can be found girating to Pagode and Axé music, watching a choreographed dance show on stage, on any give day or night. And all without cars, for the most part.

Sometimes, I imagine what Brazil would be like if it had a car culture. Here, there are quaint little country roads that run along the Atlantic coast, where one can always descend from the bus and drink chilled coconut water from the coconut, with the waves lapping at one's feet along a sandy beach. But in the United States, the coastline is dominated by four-lane highways, with concrete bridges and honking horns passing twenty yards above oily and polluted streams and estuaries, a filthy open garbage dump nearly the length of a nation. A relatively small population creates a quarter of the world's pollution.

Without the intense car culture, many Brazilians live at the ocean, catching fish in streams and estuaries just by casting in a hand-net and pulling it back full of lunch. (One morning on the beach at sunrise, I saw an Indian walk to the water, cast a net and immediately haul it in, with two large blue fish inside, with the vast simplicity of a Frenchman walking home with a loaf of bread under his arm.)

I travel often by bus here. I enter and pay my fare and look for a seat, all the while glancing into the eyes of up to seventy other passengers and wondering about their lives. I remark to myself how much faster our tropical paradise would be degraded if all of these seventy Brazilians went to the beach in 35 cars, with 35 motors, 280 internal combustion cylinders and 70 dual exhaust pipes, instead of all traveling in one bus with one engine.

Communal travel is so obvious a solution to global warming that Americans will never be willing to adopt it. Instead, we turn America into a large and winding three-dimensional parking lot, where we spend hours and hours just a few feet from thousands of people with whom we will never communicate, except to flip them the bird.

For many where I live now, the morning commute is by bicycle, along the same beaches at which we swim on weekends, and all without warming the planet or filling the sky with eight cylinder sport-utility smog. A city not dependent on cars is dramatically different from one that is car-dependent.

I’m a computer junkie and I admit it. Within a ten minute walk from my house, there are a dozen Internet cafes and six computer stores, all accessible without driving a car or even taking a bus. If most people drove cars here, entrepreneurs would surely build stores fifteen minutes away by car (two days on foot), and we would warm the planet driving to that which could just as easily have been built next door to us. Cars are expensive, and many of us are much richer as a result of our relative poverty.

I was made for Brazil’s culture. Even before I moved here, I loved to walk miles at a time, exploring my environs on foot for that new soul-food restaurant, park or enormous shade tree that I never would have noticed had I driven by at 60 miles per hour. When I dated, I led my women friends on long walks up and down the Charles River, from Boston to Cambridge and back again. Only the strong survived.

And now, in Brazil, when I reflect on my peak moments of the last year, the best of all came during a five-hour nature walk, led by Arí, an Indian guide and friend, among cliffs overlooking the Atlantic ocean, with ten miles of pristine beaches visible to the north and south, and vistas of Africa imaginable to the east, across an immenseness of bright blue ocean.

Arí is blessed to live on the ocean and make his living guiding tourists along one of the most beautiful seascapes imaginable.

On foot in the tropics, precisely because there are so few cars and shopping malls, one can look up at the clouds and see dragons and elephants among them, drifting into millions of bright nighttime stars, instead of smoke stacks and telephone wires. I’m glad I don’t own a car and I'm glad I don’t need one.

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