The Freeway Is Nobody’s Home
19 Reflections on Commuting by Tim Brookes
1. The first curious thing about commuting is that it’s in some ways the exact opposite of travel. When we travel we do so with our eyes and ears open, asking questions, going out of our way to meet people, reading up on history and geology and architecture, constantly alive to new perspectives and possibilities. When we commute, anything that happens is a nuisance, an enragement, a good reason to whip out the .38 in the glove box. The best we can hope for is a double-negative: that nothing happens, an experience without experience. In fact, the perfect medium for efficient commuting would be for everyone to have his or her personal culvert, a concrete tube leading from home to office or factory, free of distractions, stop lights and gridlock. We would have arrived: humans as sewage.
The second curious thing about commuting is how much we take it for granted. We don’t even notice the first curious thing.
2. The Industrial Revolution, which changed the ancient pattern of subsistence agriculture and cottage industry, created commuting. It did so by inviting (or in many cases forcing) people to work, for the first time, outside their homes or their feudal estates. It also created the means for moving far more rapidly than ever before, and it forced the worker to work to the schedule of his employer’s machinery: for the first time people obeyed not the natural rhythms of sunrise and sunset but machine time. It changed the development of communities, which had existed before roughly within earshot of the church bell but now needed to exist within earshot of the factory whistle.
By replacing cottage industry with heavy industry it displaced all but a few agricultural workers, and once canning and packaging and large-scale agribusiness created the need for vast tracts of arable land rather than smallholdings, the agricultural workers went too, either to the canneries and packing plants or to seek work in the strange new cities. Home was separated from work and from food. Time became someone’s else’s property.
We are all displaced people: displaced from the land, from our ancestors, from our history. Commuting gave birth to a kind of blindness to everything around us, not only because we were moving in such a hurry, but because we had no good reason to care about it: it had nothing to do with us. A librarian from Williston told me that on I-89 she drives like a maniac, but as soon as she gets into her village she slows down to 30 and to hell with the traffic building up behind her. That’s where I live, she said. The freeway is nobody’s home.
3. The commuter becomes the commute, and vice versa. Look at the symptoms of commuting. Blankness. Lethargy. Lack of affect. No sense of discovery or risk, no recollection that we are in this by choice. No joy, only obligation. Now step back and look around, at the scene of the commute. Exactly the same symptoms. Asphalt. Concrete. Road signs. Chain franchises owned by out-of-state corporations. The spiritual architecture of Wal-Mart. Commuting results in both the denaturing of the landscape and the death of the soul. And then the two proceed to reinforce the other.
4. I love the valley I live in, but I can’t call it a community. Strung out along the road and set back from it, we have no common ground apart from the road itself—no common playground or park, no library, no opportunity for chance meetings and chat. I’m a fairly gregarious person, but I’ve been in only four of the houses along my road. And the people? One is a teacher, one is a doctor, one a forester, one works at the community college, one is a realtor. Most of them I don’t know at all. We wave at each other’s cars in passing. The nearest people I’d call friends, as opposed to friendly, are a fifteen-minute drive away. I have to commute to them.
5. The road that leads to Paradise also destroys it. By moving out to paradise and then driving back and forth, we turn the road into the focus, the artery; instead of linking farms it becomes self-important, the houses starting to come to the road instead of the road coming to the houses. At the head of the valley there’s a wonderful old rural lane called Rollin’ Irish Road—narrow, twisting, dipping and rising, passing between farmhouse and barn in the old-fashioned way. In talking about it, people use the word that means they see that it is perfectly engineered in keeping with the ecology of its setting: they call it “beautiful,” and back that intuition up by paying it the highest compliment—they run a half-marathon along it. My own road throws off driveways like the stiff, dead branches of Scotch pines, the houses now lying farther and farther back from the road, beyond waving-and-chatting distance, even out of sight. A house this side, then that side, identical plots of land running away perpendicular to the road–the landscape has the flattened and geometrical quality of a map.
6. Here’s a garter snake, white belly up, flattened into a treble clef. I’ve seen at least dozen dead garter snakes along my commute, not to mention worms, mice, butterflies, the tiny frogs called “peepers,” chipmunks, rabbits, cats, groundhogs, birds beyond identification and insects beyond number. Once I saw a driver hit a young moose down on the interstate. The usual casualty list quoted for American roads is roughly 50,000 killed and half a million injured each year, but that is the human casualty list. By one estimate Americans kill a million mammals a day on roads. This is the inevitable consequence of commuting, the cost of doing business.
7. The rural end of my commute is almost trash-free. As soon as the roads start to combine, though, I find beer bottle tops, then a cigarette butt, a cigarillo mouthpiece, a Marlboro packet, an empty paper coffee cup, matchbook, another empty paper coffee cup, a packet of Winstons–a litter of stimulants, an index of our driving addictions, another hidden cost of commuting. In any city, look on the road or in the gutter by any traffic light, and you’ll see a pile of butts, the debris of impatience.
8. Here’s a bracket fungus on this old maple, a sign that the tree’s resistance is weakened by some disease, allowing the fungus to get a foothold. Simply being next to the road is enough to sicken it: as this is a commuter road, it gets a lot of salt runoff in winter, until recently it used to get asbestos and lead. A Caltrans official said, “We’re wearing out millions of tires, brakes and clutches every year. Where do you think all of that stuff goes? It goes into the first ten feet of the side of the [road].”
9. As soon as we need to get to work on time, we lose our intuitive sense of what a “natural” rate of activity is. Instead of a steady passage through time, there seems to be a new set of rules, an entity called speed. Yet speed has its costs. Two thousand years ago the Emperor Hadrian, writing about traffic congestion in Rome, observed “This luxury of speed destroys its own aim; a pedestrian makes more headway than a hundred conveyances jammed end to end along the twists and turns of the Sacred Way.”
In two thousand years we still haven’t learned something about speed itself—that instead of being a mathematical abstraction, solely a measurement of velocity, it is something that we buy, something that consumes huge amounts of space and energy, and that leaves a kind of vapor trail of consequences—environmental, emotional, economic, spiritual.
Speed is our approximation of the divine, our primeval wish to be able to say the word, and be there. The difference between a divine act and a technological one, though, is that the divine act diminishes nothing else. When one commuter makes the slightest touch on the gas pedal, it diminishes the entire world.
10. We treat our car as an extension of ourselves, a safe place in which we are more free to be ourselves than anywhere else. I’ve seen drivers conducting vigorously to the radio or lipsynching, I’ve seen two guys getting dressed, and countless drivers smoking, picking their teeth or noses, chewing gum and tossing the wrapper on the floor. The car is the safe space, sometimes the confessional.
When I’m driving, I feel so much at home in this space that my mind fills it; it becomes the limit of my experience of my self. As such, I treat it like I treat my mind, tossing the things I don’t want to think about into the trunk, the back seat, onto the floor, suffering periodic spasms of rigor or conscience, trying to set things straight. It’s so much an extension of ourselves that fat people, research shows, think their cars are wider than they actually are. By the time we’ve been in the car for four or five minutes, we barely realize it’s there. The car has become a second skin.
As humans, we’re all prone to a dualism between limitless mind and limited body, but driving takes this to an extreme. Driving is so easy (what other active sport do we do sitting down?) that we barely notice it; we glide everywhere like metal bubbles filled with thought. No wonder that we resent the cop, and the digital display speed sign. These are a reality check from the world too dull for dreams. No wonder we hate heavy traffic and scream vile obscenities at the idiot who cuts us off: they are bumptious interruptions from the dull sublunary world. No wonder that people who have never vanpooled hate the idea, seeing it as a potential infringement on these precious moments of psychic freedom. No wonder, too, that people tend to regard cars as far safer than they actually are, and themselves as far safer drivers than they are: we barely notice that the shell in which we travel is deadly. No wonder we’re surprised at the consequences of our actions: “What, me, officer?” In this state, the world is a figment, a projection. As with television, it’s the passivity that makes us vulnerable: we scarcely care what we see, as long as it doesn’t disturb our solipsistic dreaming.
11. By the age of three, my daughter Maddy was spending about 400 hours a year in her car seat. At her age, I spent none, as we didn’t have a car: I walked or rode in my stroller; we went on longer trips by bus or subway. Over the next few years she’ll need to be ferried across town, or from town to town, for soccer, dance classes and miscellaneous extras, and as a teenager her dependence on a car will become almost overwhelming. When I was eleven I walked to and from school, two miles each way. From the age of fourteen I went to school by train, and it was wonderful. I got in shape by running the mile or so to the station each morning whenever I didn’t get up quickly enough. Best of all, the train was always packed, so we were pressed up against the girls from the private school next door to ours, and I can’t tell you the number of times I deliberately missed my train in order to watch Jackie Thompson on the opposite platform.
12. The German word Verkehr means both “traffic” and “sexual intercourse,” but it’s a strange, sick kind of sex, born of frustrating and longing, born of staring at strangers behind glass as if in a peepshow. Anecdotal histories suggest that commuting breeds desperate, angry sexual acts such as mooning, flashing, and leering, but the only actual relationships to develop have been between drivers and gas station attendants, or drivers and toll booth operators, when two people could actually talk to each other, were forced to wind down the window or get out of the car.
13. The rise and fall of the hills, the meandering of Alder Brook, the bark patterns on the trees and the angle at which the birch trunks diverge–these have an intuitive geometry that is deeper and far subtler than Euclidean geometry. We recognize these forms but have no names for them. Earlier ages used the word harmonious; they appeal not to logic but to something closer to music.
In the car, half of this information just doesn’t get to us, and the rest we don’t even regard as information because we’re looking out for information defined in narrow, human terms. Driving, we’re offered simple choices: left, right, straight. Nothing to do with relationships, or dynamic processes that will change as we enter them, the soft geometry of life. Here the geometry is hard and Euclidean, square, rectangular, circular, octagonal, presented to us in human shapes: words, numbers, arrows. The Just Do It of information. This is most obvious on the Interstate, where all information is presented as certainty: 35 miles to Montpelier, 26 to Waterbury; bridges freeze before the road, and the weigh station is closed.
14. I weigh 200 pounds. As soon as I start on my commute, my weight increases tenfold. Much of the massive excavation and many of the vast, ugly structures necessary for commuting are needed solely because of that increase in weight. Bicyclists could commute on astroturf. And if I walked or cycled to work, I would weigh less. The epidemic of obesity in the U.S. is caused not by doughnuts but by driving.
15. By the same token, when walking, I take up maybe six square feet of space. Add the necessary area around me, and I need maybe 25 square feet, less in Manhattan. As soon as I get into my car on its landing at the head of my driveway, I expand like a triggered airbag, taking up 100 square feet. And once I’m on the road, given the space I need on both sides and behind, plus the necessary stopping distance ahead, I take up at least 1,000 square feet. No wonder we have traffic jams: we simply run out of room. No wonder we have traffic jams: we simply run out of room. A bus, by the way, may be much bigger than a car but it uses space–and fuel–far more efficiently.
One more thought. Nowhere is space pollution more apparent than in parking lots. Most states require businesses to built parking lots that in fact will usually be less than half full. We all pay for that great grey acreage.
16. If the people currently stuck in traffic were walking down the sidewalk instead, they’d be not only less crowded but more graceful. Nodding, calling out greetings, smiling, scowling, excusing ourselves if we jostled someone–a social group, in a way that traffic is not. Driving makes us social quadriplegics, almost invisible in our glass-in high-tech wheelchairs, heavy on our feet, communicating only in clumsy and limited gestures–flashing lights, horns, the middle finger stuck out through the window. The car was never designed as a vehicle of communication, and it stultifies and brutalizes us, gives us a brash and aggressive body-language (a body-shop language, in effect). A man coming out of the bagel shop stops abruptly, steps back a little, holds the door open with a slight bow for an elderly lady. Try doing that in a car! Crunch. And at once the waving of fists, the calling of names, and cars backing up to the horizon.
17. When my sister’s family was finishing up their first visit to North America, I asked them for their impressions of Vermont. They thought for a while and all agreed that it was much flatter than they had expected. Flat? Vermont? Just as well they didn’t try Nebraska, I thought, baffled. Yet it makes sense: they are used to living in small houses, some of them built before cars, on roads that tiptoe up and down hillsides, respecting the natural rise and fall of land. Much of America has grown up since the bulldozer, which has made possible the creation of vast quantities of flatness. Beacon Hill in Boston, Russian Hill in San Francisco: their names stick out because they’re so unusual. Every housing development with its wide roads and parking spaces, every mall, every large-scale retail development or new office complex creates another plateau of flatness.
The French verb ecraser means both to flatten and to shut up. In being flattened, the landscape is silenced; it loses its ability to sing of its past, even of its present. Everything we know, we learn from what is exposed, broken open, dug up. The rise and fall of hills illustrates the footfall of glaciers, the collision of continents, the sudden outburts of volcanoes.
18. When we’re commuting, as much as half of everything we see is gray. The color gray exists in America to a degree that would have been unimaginable a century ago, and it takes its toll: commuting tends toward an echoing, reflecting tautology of spirit, a gray mood in gray surroundings, until the combination has the critical mass to become a Grey Hole, where no light can escape but the wavelengths that fall within the spectrum between the beige of concrete and the charcoal of asphalt, all filtered through the subliminal prism of exhaust and particles of rubber. The Seasonal Affective Disorder specialists who study the effects of light wavelength on our mood and health should study the effects of this narrow-spectrum light experience, bereft of cool greens and calming blues.
19. If we think of commuting as a necessary evil, it by definition can’t be good, so we don’t ever stop to imagine what “good” might look like. We stick with “not bad,” which means “not as bad as I’ve known it,” or “not as bad as New York,” where I once spent an hour and a half trying to cross Manhattan on Canal Street, or “not as bad as Los Angeles,” where I commuted from San Diego with a TV producer who had to get up at up at 4:15 a.m. to beat the rush hour, which around LA lasts from before 6 until after 10, running at 85 m.p.h. on the open stretches, watching out for the cops, smoking up to ten cigarettes on the drive. If we can get to work and find ourselves unable to remember anything of the past ten or twenty minutes, who knows what is right or wrong any more?
Commuting is a double-negative, an experience without experience. So much so that we don’t even notice how much we take it for granted…. Wait a second. Isn’t this where we started? I guess we must have arrived.
The earliest version of this essay was published in the San Diego Reader.
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