Drive (19 page)

While popular car songs may not be as common today, anticar songs haven't taken their place on the average iPod. Protest music is a great tradition and musicians have been singing about the environment for decades—and in 1970's “Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni Mitchell did sing about paving paradise for the sake of a
parking lot—but I'm baffled that more songwriters don't think the downside of car culture is worth confronting.

IT'S NOT JUST
the obvious arts of literature, film and music that find inspiration in the automobile. Peter White is a curator who put together a show called “It Pays to Play—British Columbia in Postcards, 1950s to 1980s” that opened in Vancouver in 1997 and then travelled to several other Canadian cities. White was interested in how the car and the road helped to define how we viewed and even understood the landscape, and decided that postcards were a good way to look at that topic because they were designed for people who were travelling and wanted souvenirs—either for themselves or to mail to those stuck back home. “Postcards are related to leisure and there was far more leisure time, new leisure time,” he explained, adding that his parents drove to Los Angeles along Route 66 on their honeymoon in 1947. “People were far more mobile and they were using the car to take advantage of this leisure time.”

One postcard in the exhibit featured a woman and a Nash next to the world's tallest totem pole in Victoria, B.C.; another showed two women sitting in chairs beside their car as they enjoyed the view of a lake. “Cars were placed in postcards as basic props,” White explained, adding that motels also published postcards, usually with carefully chosen attractive cars parked in front. “The car was a central part of the experience.” But he also admitted that the problem with nostalgia, especially because we romanticize cars so much, is that the past suggested by these images never really existed.

In a few days, Chris and I would visit a Route 66 attraction that offers another idealized take on the car. Just west of Amarillo, Texas, we pulled over to the side of the road and walked two hundred yards into the middle of a field where ten old Cadillacs were half-buried—nose down, fins up—in the ground. In 1973, local helium tycoon Stanley Marsh 3 invited Chip Lord, Doug
Michels and Hudson Marquez, part of an art collective called Ant Farm, to come up with a proposal for an installation. If he liked the idea, he'd let the group use some of his ranchland. The Caddies stayed there from 1974 to 1997, when they moved two miles west because Amarillo's sprawl was getting too close for comfort. They remain surrounded by what seems like infinite stretches of flat pastureland in every direction except back to Amarillo. In a neat twist, the cars are arranged at the same angle as Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza. And they are, of course, heading west.

One of the best-known public art installations in the country—its fame aided and abetted by Springsteen's 1980 song “Cadillac Ranch”—it is, according to Lord, “a monument to the rise and fall of the tailfin.” The distinctive styling feature first appeared on the Cadillac V8 in 1948. Harley Earl, the GM designer credited with the innovation, had been inspired by the look of Second World War planes, notably the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. From Caddies, tailfins spread to other GM cars and those made by its competitors and reached their height of excess—the fins on the 1959 Cadillac were forty-two inches off the ground—and popularity in the late 1950s. By the mid-1960s, they had all but disappeared from the American automobile. Lord and his colleagues found the ten Cadillacs they wanted, plus a spare, for an average price of two hundred dollars per car, in just two weeks. Each of them is a different model—the oldest is a 1949 Club Coupe; the newest is a 1963 Sedan—and today they are covered in graffiti, a practice encouraged by Marsh and the artists.

To Michels, it is the “hood ornament of Route 66,” and Chris and I agreed it was one of the highlights of the old road. But we could see no antipathy—or even ambivalence—toward the automobile in the installation. If even the artists won't challenge it, our obsession with cars will never topple.

9
Route 66 (Part Two)

Oil, Booze and Automobiles

FROM CARTHAGE,
Chris and I pressed on through Carterville, Webb City and into Joplin. We'd entered the Tri-State Mining District, a region that was once the world leader in lead and zinc production. The base metals helped several towns in the area prosper for many decades starting in the early 1870s. But unlike many neighbouring towns, greater Joplin has continued to grow instead of shrivelling up. Now, with I-44 just to the south and a diverse economy, almost 170,000 people call the metropolitan area home. But like many other towns that have grown a lot in recent years, it reminded us of every other suburb we'd ever been in. Such places may have survived the interstate, but they had certainly lost their Route 66 charm—a few buildings, motel signs and other leftovers notwithstanding.

By the time we reached the Missouri–Kansas state line, we'd noticed that the sky and the horizons had grown bigger. We stopped at a gas station with original pumps and asked a man dressed in blue jeans, a jean jacket, cowboy boots and a baseball cap how to get to Galena. He seemed to us the picture of the archetypal God-fearing, patriotic, rural Republican from Middle America—except that his pickup was a Toyota Tacoma. He pointed straight ahead, grinned and said, in a friendly way, “If you can't find it, there's something wrong with you.”

Turned out there was nothing wrong with us, but the economy of Galena, Kansas, didn't look too healthy. After the discovery of lead in 1877, the town boomed, and by 1904, more than thirty mining companies operated here. Eventually, the town had 15,000 residents and plenty of places for miners to spend their
money on alcohol and women. Route 66 made the economy even stronger for a while, but after a decrease in mining activity that began in the 1930s and the closing of all the mines in the 1970s, Galena now has a population of just over 3,200. We kept going, past Riverton, and stopped for lunch in Baxter Springs, which bills itself as “the first cowtown in Kansas” because it was the end of the Shawnee Trail, an early cattle-herding route. It's another place crushed by the closing of the area's mines. Then, because Route 66 just grazes the southwest corner of Kansas, doing a thirteen-mile right angle, we crossed into Oklahoma. After Quapaw, we drove through Commerce, another one-time mining town and the hometown of Yankee great Mickey Mantle. On we went into Miami (pronounced My-am-uh rather than My-am-ee), with its Spanish Revival–style Coleman Theatre. Originally a 1,600-seat vaudeville stage and movie house that opened in 1929, it has never gone out of business and the local community is in the process of restoring it.

South of Miami, we took a dirt road to the Sidewalk Highway, which actually predates Route 66. Faced with a choice between paving two lanes for half the route and paving one lane the whole length, the county chose the latter. Today, the little-used road remains a single eight-foot-wide strip, so that when we met a pickup coming the other way, I kept one wheel on the paved section and one on the gravel shoulder. When that ended, we continued on Route 66 to Narcissa and into Afton, where I stopped to aim my camera at the delightfully dilapidated sign in front of the ruins of the Rest Haven Motel. We kept on through towns, villages, hamlets and named crossroads until we reached Tulsa.

We were hitting our Route 66 stride, and Toronto seemed a long way away. So far on my trip, I'd seen lovely countryside but also sprawling suburbs and towns such as Joplin that might as well have been suburbs. What struck me the most, though, were all the small towns left to die by the interstate and the downtowns the car had killed.

HEADING INTO TULSA,
we plugged the address of a downtown hotel into the GPS. Nestled among the forests and rolling hills between the Great Plains and the Ozark Mountains, and split by the Arkansas River, the city boasts 140 parks and was the selfproclaimed Oil Capital of the World in the early part of the last century. But when we got there, it looked desolate. Not dangerous, just dead. We saw plenty of beautiful art deco buildings and no human activity, even though it wasn't quite six o'clock on a Thursday evening. Wondering if a neutron bomb had gone off, we spent the next half hour driving around in search of a hotel that might be close to something resembling a lively neighbourhood. At one red light, ours was the only car at the intersection.

America first struck oil in western Pennsylvania in 1859, shortly after the invention of the kerosene lamp had created a huge demand for the fuel. Discoveries in Ohio, West Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma and California followed. Initially, gasoline was just a kerosene by-product with little value, though it was sold as a treatment for lice, and once Thomas Edison developed effective electric lighting in the 1880s, oil was no longer so valuable. Suddenly, the country—which produced the majority of the world's supply—had an abundance of a natural resource and no overwhelming way to deplete it.

Internal combustion engines, which several people were working to refine at the time, provided a possible solution to this dilemma. But it took the automobile makers—who put the engines in their horseless carriages and found them more effective than battery power—to ensure that we would one day be addicted to the environmentally ruinous, geopolitically fraught black gold.

At the end of the Second World War, the United States was the source of three-quarters of the world's crude—far more than its citizens could consume. By the early 1970s, the country had to import about a third of its oil, but few people worried about where their gas would come from or how much it would cost. That changed in 1973. First, Americans faced brownouts and rising
prices; then, in October, the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, along with non-members Egypt and Syria, announced an oil embargo to punish the Western countries that were supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Some gas stations ran out of fuel while long lineups at others led to frayed tempers and even violence. The government reduced highway speed limits to fifty-five miles per hour and instituted a rationing system that allowed owners of cars with odd-numbered licences to buy gas on odd-numbered dates and those with even-numbered ones to buy on even-numbered dates.

The country went through a second oil shock in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution. With oil prices quadrupling in the early part of the decade and then doubling again at the end, the 1970s were marred by high inflation and low growth, or as we called it back then, “stagflation.” But by the mid-1980s, the price of a barrel of crude had plummeted. And despite a mild six-month increase during the first Gulf War, the cost of gas fell even farther in the 1990s and didn't rise sharply until 2004.

The experience of the 1970s could have been an opportunity for Americans to adjust to smaller, more efficient automobiles. With the introduction of Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations, better known as CAFE, the average American car started to go farther on a gallon of gas. But the rules had many loopholes, and much of the improvement took place at the expense of safety as manufacturers made vehicles lighter to reduce fuel consumption. This would have been a great time to get good at producing appealing small vehicles, but domestic automakers just couldn't pull it off. Indeed, when Car Talk, the popular National Public Radio show, held a Worst Car of the Millennium contest, four of the top five were small American models from the 1970s: the Chevrolet Vega, the Ford Pinto, the AMC Gremlin and the Chevy Chevette. Only Yugoslavia's laughable Yugo was worse. While most foreign automakers, notably the Japanese, had success with their small offerings, the Detroit automakers couldn't wait
for the return of cheap oil. When it did, they concentrated on increasing the horsepower of their engines instead of worrying about fuel efficiency. That was fine with many Americans who would eventually make the SUV the It ride—and under CAFE, SUVs were light trucks that had to meet less rigorous fuel efficiency and emissions standards than passenger cars. Not that today's fuel regulations are that severe anyway: just 27.5 miles per gallon. (They've been stuck there since 1984, though I suppose that's better than the 15 miles per gallon we were at in 1975.) For light trucks, an average of just 22.2 miles per gallon is good enough. New standards will require a fleet-wide average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, but while the improvement is welcome, it does seem too little, too late.

Along with heaps of burning disco records, gas station lineups are just another weird image of 1970s nostalgia, but we'd be foolish to think we could never see them again. America now has only 3 percent of the world's known petroleum reserves and, in 2006, the country produced more than 8.3 million barrels a day— and consumed 20.6 million. Though oil now has many uses, from home heating oil to plastics manufacturing, cars are the thirstiest customers: “The typical North American driver consumes his or her body weight in crude oil each week, and the automobile engines sold this year alone will have more total horsepower than all the world's electrical power plants combined,” according to Richard Heinberg, author of the 2003 book
The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies
. “Globally, cars outweigh humans 4 to 1 and consume about the same ratio more energy each day in the form of fuel than people do food.”

By the time he had to give his February 2006 State of the Union address, even President George W. Bush, the former oilman, was admitting, “America is addicted to oil.” But when it came to policies, not much changed. The Bush administration wouldn't even make a serious effort to encourage conservation, let alone try more drastic measures such as higher gasoline taxes. Instead, it
eyed reserves in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with bad intent, even though the amount of oil there would put only a small dent in the amount the country has to import, while drilling would be done at an unconscionable cost to a fragile ecosystem.