The Daily: 14 May 2024

Last week I finally got my car’s oil changed. This is not quite the imperative that it is for a full gasoline engine, but it’s still necessary. I do have to use the gas engine now and again, and I assume the electric engine uses oil for… something, I’m sure, since full electric cars seem to need lubricant. Still, I don’t fear putting it off for more than the recommended six months between oil changes. However, this time it was long enough to make me nervous. The warning message displayed at start-up went from a polite yellow “change oil soon” to a rather shrill red “change oil now”.

This is not completely negligence on my part. I went to a quick lube place as soon as the polite message lit up, many weeks ago now. They ooh-ed and aah-ed over my plug-in hybrid Ford and got started on the oil change. Or tried to anyway… Turns out that there is a plate that covers the base of the engine to protect the electrical systems from things like Vermont, and the bolts that attach this plate were so corroded (by Vermont) that they would not come off. The quick lube guys refused to cut the bolts and told me to go to the dealership where surely they could handle such things.

The dealership does not do weekend service, so that was a problem. The first available service slot was three weeks out. So I booked that online and was glad that I had changed jobs to a commute that doesn’t use the gasoline engine at all. (And then COVID kept me housebound for a bit over a week of that time, but we are never grateful to COVID… on principle…) As it got close to the date and I hadn’t received a reminder, nor even a confirmation of the appointment time, I became a little worried. I couldn’t remember exactly what day I had chosen, for one thing, nor whether I had remembered to sign up for a shuttle ride to work after I dropped off the car.

So I called… and found out that there was no record of the appointment I’d made.

The kind person who took my call, listened to what I needed, and then told me he could work it into the schedule on the following Tuesday. I still forgot to ask for a shuttle… I am not good at these things…

Well, Tuesday came and I dropped off the car. My son dropped me off at work. I heard nothing from the dealership all day and finally, since they close at 5pm, called at about 4pm to see when I could pick up my car. Short answer was: not today. There was a complicated arrangement in which my son ferried me back to the dealership where my car was parked outside; I took the car home and then drove to work in the morning; the service shuttle people came and collected my car from my office parking lot for the necessary work; and then they delivered the car back to my office. Which was all well and good and went about as well as could be expected. The plate came off; the oil was changed; the bolts were replaced. Everything was…

Not great… They also did a full inspection of the car. Now, my car is old. Almost ten years old. That’s like 150 in car-years. And for the first five, Ex was driving it from our farm to his job on the other side of Massachusetts, five days a week. So it has some mileage on it, my little car. I expect maintenance costs each year. I’m ok with that. It’s much cheaper than a car payment even on a used vehicle. (And I simply can’t fathom how people buy new cars these days unless they have a trust fund to deplete). Anyway, I budget for annual car repairs. But this winter of driving on Vermont highways from September to April was… well, more than I budgeted for… The rear brakes are just shy of dangerous. The valve needs replacing. There were a few other things that have been corroded by road salt. And so the grand total is going to be over $2500. Which is goodbye to discretionary funds for the next many months…

After I got off the phone with the person charged with delivering this bit of bad news to an already disgruntled customer, I was rather close to tears. “Sticker shock” has taken on new meaning these days. It’s not just that everything costs more. It’s that it costs orders of magnitude more. When capitalism used to work, prices would increase slowly, unless there were extenuating circumstances like war or catastrophe. Used to be the case that if something cost X one year, it would cost X+1 the next year, or even 2X next year. But not 10X or 100X or X². And that is what it feels like in these days of crumbling capitalism. People complain vaguely about how expensive things are today, but I don’t know if they realize just what this means. If costs are going stratospheric for no obvious reason, certainly no increase in demand or quality, it means that the system that generates those costs is too costly. Supply is tightening, and transport and manufacturing costs are increasing. This is the principal sign of economic apocalypse… and it’s hardly on anyone’s radar.

Anyway, all this flashed through my mind along with regret for what I might have done with that money (mostly in the garden…). And for a briefly irrational moment I considered just trading in my car on one that doesn’t need so much annual work. Or going carless.

I quickly discarded the first option. As I said, car maintenance, even at this magnitude, is far less than a car payment. And there is no guarantee that the replacement wouldn’t need just as much work, maybe more in a few years — at which point I would be paying for maintenance and a car payment. Stupid…

However, I thought hard on the car-free option.

I used to think that this was only an option if one lived where there was public transportation, not something that Vermont excels at… But the more I considered ditching the car, the more I realized that the best place to be carless is actually in a small town, or even a rural place, given neighbors within a few square miles. (So maybe not Wyoming, but the Midwest, yes.) This turns conventional wisdom on its head. But think about it…

In a rural setting, you can easily arrange your life so that most days you don’t need to drive anywhere. Your work is at home. You can produce food and probably many other daily needs. You have entertainment and exercise all right outside your back door. Most days, there’s no need for a car. For those irregular needs that can’t be produced at home, you and your neighbors can pool together to share a small truck. Or you could go old school and get a cart and horse… though I think it’s probably easier to maintain the truck. And out in a rural place, you probably know a half dozen people who can fix the truck and keep it running long past its normal lifespan. (Maybe one or two who can fix the horse, though there’s no extending that one.) You might even luck into one of those crazy hippy-tinker neighbors who can turn a gasoline engine into a veg oil engine and run your shared truck on recycled fryer oil… though driving a veg-car does make for mad cravings for chips.

In any case, going carless in the country sounds not so bad now… certainly easier than in the suburbs. Maybe even easier than in the city… because not every public transportation system is as comprehensive as the NY Metro. Most have a ring-and-spokes plan, where train and bus lines will run from the city center outwards but rarely around the ring. To get from one neighborhood to an adjacent neighborhood, you often have to ride all the way downtown and then back out again.

Anyway, I started thinking differently about my own situation. I don’t live out in the boonies, but I do live in a small town in a state that is almost nothing but boonies. So I have that crazy hippy-tinker neighbor. On at least two sides of my house. I could also probably find a vet for a horse if I decided to convert my garage back to the carriage house that it used to be. I don’t work at home, but I do work close to home. I can also produce much of my food. But I can do better than the boonies. I can walk to a really good grocery store, the drugstore, the hardware store, the movie theatre, the opera house, many restaurants, many clothing stores, a couple hobby shops, a few florists, a pet store, my bank, my insurance agent, the cable company, the library, the Unitarian church, a convention center, and just about anything else I could need. (Though we could use a better bookstore… also a record store, but that might be just me…) Also my usual mechanic (not the dealer, nor the weekend quick lube people) is literally at the bottom of the hill that I live on. If my car refuses to go, I could just give it a shove.

But I could go carless…

I’m still considering that option. I can’t quite convince my arthritic knees that they want to pedal up the Very Large Hill to my office. And I’m frankly terrified of the way people in large trucks drive. The speed limit on the only road from my house to the office building where I work is 50mph. I regularly drive 55. But even at that speed, enormous land yachts and compensation mobiles will pass me as though I was doing 25, leaving my little car quaking in the wake. And my “little car” weights 2500 pounds (yes, I looked that up once… to see how much more the hybrid engine weighs than a conventional engine). So I can imagine the terrors of pedaling up a 10% grade at maybe 10mph, maybe, and having these two-ton momentum monsters blow by. I’d have to shower the panic sweat off at work… and maybe keep a change of underwear in my backpack. And then there’s winter… Or really any precipitation, but especially road-salt slush. All that corrosion that ruined the undercarriage of my car… would be on my skin. And in my eyes. And maybe up my nose. And all over my clothes… and bike gears.

So anyway, I’m considering it. I will probably “road test” the bike commute many times before I make any sort of decision. But, being me, I think I probably will decide not to decide. Keep the car and keep it running, but use it as sparingly as I can. I do still need some affordable way to get to Brooklyn to see Son#2 now and again. And Amtrak is not affordable. (The train also takes over nine hours, compared to the five or six it takes to drive there.)

For now, I will be fixing the car. But I can definitely see a road to a carless future now. And I feel pretty good about that.

Because, in this economic climate, all those momentum monsters will eventually run out of gas…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024