One advantage of not having a car

Our son still laments the loss of dad’s ‘fast car’ that we had to leave behind in Australia when we moved to Greenland. He loved cruising around in the back of that convertible, basking in the warm southern sun, blond hair blowing in the breeze. But moving to Greenland meant leaving it behind. It’s one of the number of things he has not quite forgiven us for. For the past five years we haven’t had a car – a boat, yes, but a car, no. Sometimes, when the wind is blasting tiny ice crystals into your eyeballs as you wait for the bus in the freezing cold, having a car seems quite appealing. But when one considers that our typical commute time is about fifteen minutes, with less than five minutes walk to the bus stop, and that the buses are remarkably reliable and punctual, arguments for having a car seem a little self indulgent.

There are also days like yesterday, which – perhaps counter-intuitively – make me slightly smug that I don’t own a car. Yesterday was one of those epic snowstorms that hit once a year or so. It was already snowing when I got out of bed. By eleven in the morning, the snow was so heavy that it was difficult to see across the street. Billowing drifts grew almost visibly as I watched. And then all the buses were cancelled. I tried to get a taxi home, but none would drive along the long, windy stretch of road out to where I live, where storms blowing in from the sea fill the air with a penetrating whiteness and snow drifts pour across the road.

The afternoon pressed on with no sign of the snow abating and predictions that it would continue well into the evening. So when a friend offered us a lift home, we took it. At first, it seemed ok. Fuzzy street lights peered out of the heavy white air and we followed the red tail lights ahead closely. But we quickly lost sight of any cars in the sea of whiteness, inching along in the tracks on the slightly more grey than white road in the headlights that penetrated just a few metres ahead, and hugging the side of the road where we could still make out a least one streetlight ahead in the near distance. Then suddenly, the streetlights were gone and the road was invisible. We were enveloped  in blowing snow. Nothing distinguished the roadsides. They could have been walls of snow, or precipitous drops. It was impossible to tell. The streetlights had vanished in the whiteout, so we couldn’t see whether we were even still on the road, let alone going in the right direction. So we stopped and scraped away the ice building up on the windscreen as filmy white powder poured in through the open car door. All we could see were the lights of a car stopped behind us, also waiting for some indication of what to do next. Then, the headlights of a truck appeared driving towards us through the snow, and we pushed quickly ahead towards it along what was apparently still the road, stopping immediately afterward to wait for the next sign of where the road might be. On one such push ahead, we ground to a halt when we spotted the flashing hazard lights of a stopped vehicle ahead, which we could only see when we were perhaps two metres away. In this way – stopping and starting – we slowly inched through the swirling mass of whiteness that was the invisible route home, every now and then passing a car at the wrong angle on the side of the road, some with lights blinking, some abandoned and being rapidly buried.

This morning, after the storm had passed, the carnage was more evident. More than a metre of snow had fallen in parts of the city. Cars were half buried in mounds of snow by the roadsides. Even cars not caught out on the road in the storm were now trapped in their parking places, some barely visible in the drifts.

On such mornings, I don’t envy car owners and almost gleefully walk the few minutes to the bus stop.