“We should get a car,” said my son, looking out the window at the morning snow falling on the dark, lamp-lit street.
“Why?” I asked.
Rapidly realizing that his personal comfort and convenience was not a good enough reason, he replied, “It will be faster getting to the shops.
“Will it?” I asked.
Together we did a few mental calculations and concluded that taking account of getting the baby’s pram into and out of the car, it would save us about five minutes, not accounting for any time required to scrape ice off the windows or dig the car out of the snow, after which time it could easily take longer than walking. It would also be significantly more expensive than if we took the bus, given the high road tax and price of fuel, let alone the cost of buying a car in Greenland. Then there was the environmental cost and the fact that we would get less exercise. He looked dejected, realizing he was on the losing side of the argument.
Thinking about it, I realize that it’s been a long time since we’ve owned a car. In fact, I calculate that I have owned a car for only ten of the almost thirty years since I learned to drive. It wasn’t until I lived in Sydney in my late twenties that I bought my first car, together with my now husband. It was a second-hand beige Toyota station wagon in its dying days. Bits of it slowly fell off, or died, like the heating and the air-conditioning. And while heating might not seem so important in Sydney, my occasional visits to Canberra became very cold in the winter. On one such trip, I wore gloves, a woollen hat, and a jacket inside the car. When I arrived, I stopped at a store to pick up a bottle of wine for my brother. But having been alone in the freezing car for the previous three hours, I hadn’t realized the effect this had had on me. When I tried to sign the credit card receipt for my purchase, my fingers were so cold that my signature looked nothing like the one on the card. The man at the register frowned, to which I responded with laughter, trying to explain that my fingers weren’t working properly because they were cold. But apparently my lips weren’t working properly either and what came out of my frozen lips was incoherent babble. Suddenly, I realized how I looked to this man, standing there in gloves and a woollen hat with someone’s stolen credit card, obviously drunk and trying to buy more wine. I snatched up the bottle and dashed out of the store. The end for our car came in the middle of a busy intersection in central Sydney under a darkening evening sky filled with bats. Pulling into the junction, the clutch cable snapped and the car drifted to a halt. I exhaled a sigh that felt like it carried with it my will to live, as hundreds of cars poured around me in all directions.
Soon after that, we moved to Copenhagen, where there was no need for a car and we bicycled everywhere. But moving back to Australia some years later, I bought another terrible car. This time bits didn’t fall off so often, but it was a deathtrap – a cheap one that I could afford. This was also the time when I learned to love four wheel driving, which I needed to do for my geological field work. I loved climbing into those big Toyota trucks, driving off-road up sandy slopes so steep I couldn’t see the ground ahead, wheels crawling from one flat rock to the next through dry creek beds, the swoosh of brown water under the wheels as we passed though river crossings. After weeks driving around in those monster vehicles, my little Mazda felt so low to the ground that it seemed like driving a racing car. It was nothing like driving a racing car.
On the contrary, my husband’s next car was. He bought a fabulous (and much safer) convertible that we cruised around town in, bathing in the sunshine and warm breeze. My son started referring to my Mazda as ‘the slow car,’ which clearly it was, in relation to ‘the fast car.’ But when we moved to Greenland we had to give up both, being impractical to ship them over, despite my husbands protestations – imagining himself cruising the dark streets with the top down in the only convertible in Nuuk. My son, for years, also bitterly lamented its loss.
“I miss the fast car,” he would say, hunched over, trudging through the snow up the hill toward home.
These days, we have a baby car seat (for the times we take a taxi), and a boat, but no car and no intention of getting one. Sometimes, pushing a pram through the blowing snow or ocassionally having to wait for the next bus because there are already two prams on board, it would be nice, but I rarely miss it.
