trying to be car-free

As returning back to Ontario has reminded me of my general dislike of driving, a dislike that is furthered by my desire to be as environmentally friendly as I can be, the following from Craig Wilson struck me. although i'd like to switch walking for biking, it feels a lot like he's talking about me - or at least the me i'd like to be to the North Americans in my life...

"I walk to work.

When I tell people this, a few are jealous, but most look at me as if I'm some sort of throwback to another era. I suppose some even think there’s something un-American about it.

Still, I walk to work. And I walk home. Thirty minutes each way. This summer marks my fifteenth year as a car-free American. . . .

“Don’t you hate walking across the bridge in the winter?” they’ll ask. I do not. I’m from upstate New York. Winter in Washington, as anyone from upstate New York will tell you, is a joke. Unfortunately, no one who lives here is laughing. It’s a town where people carry umbrellas when it snows. Need I say more?

This time of year is another story. July and August. My shirt sticks to my back before I walk a block. The tar sticks to my shoes. I hate the smell of it all. . . .

And this time of year, I see tourists, maps in hands, their feet sore from a day of sight-seeing, trying to fend off their tired and unhappy children.

Sometimes, if they look pathetically lost or confused, I’ll stop and ask if I can help. It’s my one-man crusade to dispel the myth that all urban dwellers are mass murderers. This startles them, of course. Some clutch their children closer when I approach.

But after I’ve told them how to get to the Lincoln Memorial, or where the Kennedys lived before they went to the White House, or where there’s a good place to eat with the kids, they begin to relax.

But I never tell them I’m walking home from work, from another state no less, and that I don’t own a car.

No need to scare them further.”

excerpt from "Walking to Work" Craig Wilson, It's the Little Things (New York: Random House, 2002), 108-110.

i figure my desire to live car-free is fairly crazy. one can do it in Amsterdam, and maybe in a big city in Canada, but not so much in small town North America (like my parents’ place in the country). but I’m crazy enough to try – although I need to get a decent bike over here and find a car-sharing place for it to become a life reality. but i hope i can - and i hope that living car-free and other environmentally friendly desires will come up here again, since i'm discovering more and more that this is something that really matters to me.