Without the car in California

It seems much more urgent to drive a car when you are in San Francisco than in New York City. Nonetheless the good public transportation system in the city, when you talk with locals about a trip outside the city they can’t imagine it without a car. At least the most of them. Yet it was indeed possible, and despite that several times we considered to rent the car we managed without it. Probably that way was even more adventure. So we get to know the bunch of Californian buses and ferries. Sure, we were also walking a lot. And it was because of this walking that we discovered an impressive popularity of the old and bizarre cars keeping among the habitants of San Francisco…

Because the lack of our own driving experience I allow myself to quote here a fragment from Milosz’s book to show you the style of a guy who caused some of our adventures there, and to present you the portrait of America which I found accurate:

"If the goal is not sufficiently distinguished from what surrounds it, the pursuit of that goal is valid only as a decision arrived at, map in hand, but since no changes can be expected, the trip becomes no more than persistent montion, which at the same time makes it unclear whether we are moving or are immobile witnesses of a moving space dotted whit identical gas stations, roadside restaurants, and motels. The cities: the band of freeway takes us over their symmetrical rectangles, or else they are simply obstacles, for they force us to slow down and stop at their traffic lights. The trip takes place inside the car, the only ultimate contact is with the car, and the trip is measured by the speedometer's needle and the numbers crawling past on the odometer; everything outside flashes by, appears and disappears, silvery, unreal, a screen. Perhaps the passangers on long-disstance express train and planes are also severed from reality in the same manner, but their passivity was accepted in advance and written into the contract, the ticket. The owner of an automobile is actively passive, with a constant desire for activity, for an activity other than holding a wheel, but he is continually being cast into passivity again.

In the deserts of southern California and Arizona, the very thought of stopping for anything but gas or food seems absurd - why bother when you can see everything you need to out the window? There is nothing out there beside stunted, prickly vegeration. Though the coniferous forests in the Sierras is attractive, with its greenery and shade, it too, after a few steps, kills any desire for a walk amid its scree-covered tracts, rocks, inaccessible thickets. But our active passivity is also felt in relation to people. We pass them, busy with their daily work, immersed in their houses and little towns. We converse with them when we stop - in stores, restaurants, motels - but differently from the way people did when they traveled by camel, horse, or stagecoach. They do not bring us into their tents, they don't set out feasts in honor of their guests, who are precious because they are rare. The banal ritual of greetings and goodbyes, so smooth that we pass each other like pebbles roundes by a stream, puts a distance between us and them, and so their eyes, mouths, movements are all the more disturbing to us. They are enigmatically self-enclosed, and haunt our minds as if we were from another planet, staring at humans" - C. Milosz Visions from San Francisco Bay 1969

L