(Editor’s note: Completely reckless use of linguistic devices ahead.)
Quietly, like a new years eve celebration that goes to bed at 9:30, we celebrated our one year anniversary of being car free.
There was less fuss to going car free than I would have anticipated - the lease was up, so I put the bike in the back, went to the dealership, gave them their car back, and rode home. That was pretty much it. Not a lot of planning. A little gearing up in terms of a good rain jacket and gloves. We did go big on the fenders now that we didn’t have car or gas payments.
A couple of days into it, we were still pretty pleased with ourselves to the point where even the steady spring drizzle didn’t seem to dampen our moods. When you need to go somewhere, and you can only go by bike, then you go by bike. The simplicity was oddly comforting. When we didn’t ride, we found ourselves walking around the city noticing things we hadn’t really noticed before.
The first hitch came when we dearly wanted to cash in a coupon from the Portland Nursery across town. How were we going to haul plants and mulch? That is when we discovered the beauty of the Zipcar. Like 823-BUMP, Zipcar filled the hole in our transportation options in no time. We took those big trips to the store, and ran luxuriously quick errands on dark rainy nights. We went to the coast when we wanted to. We got a puppy - who we now haul around in a Burley.
We admit that we have it lucky: we are close to a lot of services and there aren’t kids to schlep around. And while we miss hitting the trails as much as we used to, we now have a closer relationship to our travels. Like living on a farm, we know where our transportation food comes from.
I saw an interesting comment the other day, about the cognitive disconnect that people feel when they start to really understand the impact of cars. But I don’t feel any smugness in being car free, nor do I feel like I have escaped the disconnect. We use cars, and might have to buy one someday. But I can say that going car free was easier than I thought. Kind of like taking off the training wheels.
