Just like a true nature’s child
Cars are not always the best option for getting your motor running, writes David Slack.
Ido not wholly hate cars. I have standoffs with drivers on pedestrian crossings, and sometimes I put their license plates on Twitter, and I ride a bike, a bus, a train, a ferry whenever I can, but I do not wholly hate cars.
The miracle is that any child of my era could ever come around to liking them after all that puking. We remember the misery in the back seat, winding from Mangaweka to Taihape, a trip of approximately 13 days, with your head out the window gulping the breeze.
But then you become a teenager and discover that anything with wheels and an engine is your friend because you’re out the door and into the world and there are other young people and alcohol and you bet you want your licence.
I don’t wholly hate cars and I have warm memories. Years ago my brother and I had a magnificent summer holiday riding motorbikes from one end of the the North Island to the other.
This holiday I drove across the Desert Road twice and that is still one cool trip. Tell me you don’t have a favourite album you’ve played going through that moonscape. Sharon O’Neill made the best music for it ever, even though the Falcon ends up on its roof.
But this afternoon is a drivinghome afternoon for many people and I want to ask you gently: how’s that going to feel? Are you looking forward to the crawl?
I wrote last month in this column that I thought e-bikes would change the world, and a friend’s mother clipped it out and put it in her wallet to show everyone because she agrees so ardently, and I loved that.
So I talked about it again this week on the radio and someone texted: ‘‘what are these e-bugs you’re talking about?’’ So my diction needs work and perhaps I should elaborate.
Last summer, I saw my friend Mike outside the supermarket with his electric bike which he had just been raving about on Facebook. This is what e-bike owners do. They enthuse, they rave, they post Facebook photos of themselves enjoying a glass of wine at some cafe way up East Coast Bays after the shortest and easiest of rides.
This is what you discover with these things: the hills are made flat and distance is no longer any big deal.
Why? Because there’s an electric motor that does some of – or even all – the work for you. Look at you zipping up that hill – only the fastest lycra dudes are still getting past you! And look at you comfortable in your office clothes, no perspiration, no exertion, just bliss! Look at those poor sad saps filling up at the Mobil station. You get yours from a power socket.
‘‘Give it a try,’’ Mike said, so I got At the end of these holidays there may come a moment when you hitch yourself to the clock alarm again and find yourself too soon sitting in soul-sapping traffic. on. I only had to do half a circuit of the New World carpark to get it. It’s genius.
We love our cars. They take us wherever we want, right now. What kind of idiot would want to deny us that right? How about because you could be just rolling along in the fresh air and none of us would be getting killed and we could save a vast amount of money?
I don’t wholly hate cars and I am not an abolitionist. I’m not trying to prise anyone’s cold dead hands from any steering wheel.
There are plenty of scenarios, still, where the car works best.
But dragging your carcass to work on the motorway is not the same magnificent feeling as leaning your motorbike into the corner on the Napier-Taupo road with the warm summer sun rising up off the road.
I would never put you out of your ute and take your livelihood off you, and I know you can’t put your extension ladder and your nailgun on an e-bike, although you know what: there’s a builder in Devonport who’s rigged up a trailer for his bicycle.
Whatever. At the end of these holidays there may come a moment when you hitch yourself to the clock alarm again and find yourself too soon sitting in soulsapping traffic. If you can see yourself at that moment finding it hard to convince yourself that it doesn’t get any better than this, maybe it might be a good idea to clip this out and slip it in your wallet.