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July 1

This year 2005 is half over. Early on in the year, back in the first few days of January, I started thinking that I should make an effort this year to not even ride in cars at all. I do not drive and so I am not even in cars all that much, but I would take that even further and refuse all offers for rides. But I was not sure that I was really going to take that challenge, not sure for real, until one week in, when I said so to a friend at a party.

The idea of writing about my carfree life this year every day came about one week later, and so I did not write about the first two weeks of the year. This diary starts mid-January. But I have kept writing every day since then even tho I did not exactly keep my goal.

I took a short ride in a car back in April, but beyond that, I have been carfree. I went three months before that ride, and now it has been nearly another three months. But I also knew, way back in January, when I decided I was going to do this car avoidance thing, that my father was planning a family reunion in Montana in July, and that there would be no way that I would be able to go without riding in cars for that week. I will have to ride in a car to do most everything that we will be doing. The town where we will be going, Red Lodge, has no bus service.

So I will have a week that will be pretty much the opposite of carfree, that will be pretty much the opposite of the life I have been living for most of my adulthood. I hardly ever ride in cars. Last year I tried to limit myself to accepting rides no more than once a month, and this next week will be a week of riding in cars pretty much daily in the land of my youth. I will be stained with the beast of car dependence, but then I will be back to my usual life here in Minneapolis where I can dodge cars a bit more easily.

The reasons I am trying to hard to withhold myself from the interior of automobiles are many. It all goes back to the reasons why I decided back in my early teens that I was never going to drive. But the two most immediate reasons are the war in Iraq, which really does seem more and more to have been waged as a war for oil, and because global warming. We mostly need oil to power cars, so we go to war for oil, and the burning of that oil warms the planet, and so we will be suffering the whole world for our car dependence.

So after today there will be a week where I will not be updating this journal daily, for I will not have a computer with me on the trip, and so I will bunch up my entries and type them up upon my return. I will be riding in a car as early as tomorrow afternoon, but I have one more day of purity, a day for walking and bus trips and maybe biking, or packing and preparing for the trip to Montana.

July 2

No time to write; have to catch an early flight.

July 3

I (dream) run thru backyards of houses with my trusty sidekick German Shepherd. The cars are chasing us down on the streets and alleys, so we have to run the fences, we have to go another way. Many back doors are left unlocked if not open, so we can cover some ground running the floors inside the houses. The houses are all empty, or else the people are not in them because they are in their cars and chasing after us.

Yesterday morning we took the bus to the train, then took the train to the airport, then waited a little and got on a plane with many other people. We shook up the sky a little and then we were inside it. We rubbed up with the clouds and then we came down in Denver. We waited a little while in Denver and then we got on another plane. The clouds shook the plane as it made its thunder rise into the sky. It was almost unbelievable that so many people could get so high all at once. Our plane flew north, and thru all the clouds. Then it shook thru the air and brought us down on the rimrocks of Billings, Montana.

After waiting a little while for our luggage, we walked out and a ride was waiting for us. His name was Ron and he is a friend of my father's. We got inside his van with our luggage and he took us the short drive to my father's home, then on the short drive down to downtown Billings.

There were so many more surface parking lots in Billings than I remember twenty years ago. So much of the center of the town has been pulled and stretched out or obliterated to put cars there. So many little houses where people once lived out their lives have gone away for the parking planes needed for the growing medical corridor just north of downtown.

Billings has new buses. We rode one back to dad's house after we spent a few hours having lunch and walking the streets of downtown Billings. Many of my old haunts were gone, but the library was the same and the nearby Art center was much expanded.

Last night I had my longest ride in a car for years really. We went sixty miles from Billings to Red Lodge, where my family is gathered in several different condos outside of town and near the rodeo grounds. I rode with my brother and his girlfriend S and K and I in my father's small SUV. We drove thru thick darkness. It is dark out here where there are no streetlights, and there were dark clouds in the sky raining to make it darker. The shadows of deer were at the side of the road, and D my brother had to set his brakes a couple times to watch out for them.

I watched the darkness go by so glad that I did not have to drive this thing, that I did not have to watch our for deer, that I did not have to concentrate so hard on where we were going so we would not lose the road, so we would not get lost.

July 4

We are just outside of the small town of Red Lodge, probably a twenty minute walk from the core of town, but it is probably not a walking distance, for the two lane road that goes into town has no sidewalk or shoulder, and the car traffic goes fast on the road. So we always have to drive into town, and I rode to town and back twice yesterday in a car.

The town has narrow streets and sidewalks. The streets are an asphalt trail laid down the middle. The green grassy shoulders between the street and the sidewalk is where people park. There are no gutters or curbs, except for on the main street in town.

The main street of town, Broadway, is several blocks long and very walkable, and there were great crowds walking back and forth for the noon parade yesterday, for the pre-rodeo festivities. The small storefront buildings hold a variety of stores, mostly stores serving the tourist trade, candy and beads and souvenirs. There is no Walmart just outside of town. The shopping street, Broadway, is it. Many people drive the sixty miles to Billings or Cody to get the things they cannot get in town.

The railroad tracks were pulled out years ago. There is no other way to get here but in a car. Cars are it. I do not even know if there is a bus depot in Red Lodge, but there must be somewhere. There are most likely van shuttles if not entire buses to get tourists and skiers here.

It is built into the life of people here to drive an hour or so for various trips. As the price of gas goes up and up, it will make life here much harder. But at least tourism has kept a lively walkable center that could still work, that could achieve some sustainability too as shops could change to serve local needs.

The old coal mining town is still much in place. Many small houses with yards and gardens. Smaller houses for the immigrant miners and some larger ones in the Hi Bug section for foremen and shop owners. It could be an ideal place, but for the car reliance. And all the new development in town is up on the ridge above town, where we are staying. There are no sidewalks here, no easy walking trail that I have found to connect us to town. It would be so easy, but it is not even thought of, not even imagined or wanted with all the cars and their trips on the brains of the town.

July 5

It is possible to get around here by walking. Yesterday we walked into town for breakfast and the parade and then walked back up to the condos where we are staying. Then we walked from the condo to the rodeo. Much of our walk to the rodeo took us across the big rodeo parking lot on the range.

These were not bad walks at all, tho parts of each were on a highway with narrow shoulders. Our condo is actually fairly close to the rodeo grounds, and the grounds are just slightly up a short hill from the center of town. But when driving is the only way to actually get somewhere, everyone from town drives their car the five minute trip from town up to the rodeo grounds. Then they spend fifteen minutes negotiating the parking lot on the grass plain to get in or out of it, to get a spot somewhere on the tall grass or to wait to get out of the one driveway.

We were the only ones I saw walking along the road. Something tells me that walkers outside the center of town are somewhat rare here. On our way from town up the hill to the rodeo we were offered a ride. When we said we were fine walking, the car backed up quite a way before driving on the next few hundred feet to the rodeo grounds. They must have passed us and turned around to offer us the ride. They must have felt really sorry for us, but I was feeling a little sorry for them.

Leaving the rodeo we walked thru a great parking sea of vehicles parked on the grass and barely moving. People were stuck inside their cars and big trucks and waiting their turn to get out the one road out of the one entrance. We walked past them all and kept on walking. It was K and I and actually a long line of others from our family. We made a nice long line of walkers along the side of the highway. Our long line of walking people slowed down the cars when they got close to us.

It can be done. We did an experiment on the town, we brought back the past for a while. For years ago many people probably did walk from town to the fair or the rodeo rather than firing all their cars up into a traffic jam on the one narrow highway to get there in really about the same time, if you include the time spent on parking. A lot of people did come from further distances, but they would have walked down the hill right to the train depot, which still would have had active trains.

Another thing that struck me about the rodeo was seeing cowboys who were just a little larger than I recall seeing in previous years. There were more chunky cowboys, which was probably more a reflection of the culture at large than anything else. Waistbands and guts are getting wider on cowboys just as they are getting wider on everyone else.

They played the old John Wayne "Ragged Old Flag" song as a kind of preamble to the national anthem before rodeo got started, just as they did the last time I saw this rodeo almost twenty years ago. It is an interesting tradition, and that song and the huge flag carried by a dozen guardsmen and the cheers for our country are just as strange to me as they were back then.

It seems to me that we have replaced citizenship with patriotism. Citizenship is when you make government the work of the people. Patriotism is when you make government into religion.

July 6

I was back in the car yesterday after a day without riding in one. I rode with the whole group. We were an armada of five cars going down to Cody, Wyoming to visit the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and then a quick visit in the evening to Powell, Wyoming, where I lived from the age of six to twelve.

We were in Powell for just a short time, and much of that time in a restaurant downtown on Bent Street. Powell had a three block long downtown street of buildings that in my memory were towering, but now I could see were mainly one story narrow storefronts. There were a couple buildings that were two stories tall. These were the tallest of the downtown buildings. One of them was the movie theater, then called the Teton, now called the Valli. "Herbie Goes Wild" and "War of the Worlds" were playing there.

My memories of Powell are of walking and biking everywhere. I never lived there at an age where anybody of my age would be a driver, so all my friends and classmates were nondrivers, as was I. It was and still is a small town. Most of the houses look like they are from the thirties or forties, with later houses still built on the same size small lots as the earlier houses are.

The town was small enough that you could quickly cover it on bike or foot. I wanted to walk thru it last night and experience every house and sidewalk for clues to my past, for memories of those days, but we drove thru, and in driving we saw next to nothing, just quick impressions, little scraps of pictures and memories, bits of lightning as we passed the buildings and the places fast.

One thing I did notice in my quick flashes of looking was that the big grassy field next to the community college, the big field like a park where we used to play and fly kites, was now mostly a surface parking lot.

In between Cody and Powell, the two lane road was being replaced by a five lane highway. We drove thru the dust and gravel of the construction of that thing, so much overkill I think to link a town of 5,000 people to one of 9,000.

In between the towns of Cody and Powell, in the open spaces, we would see the openness by car. We could also see Heart Mountain, the strange lone peak that hits me so in the heart every time I see it. It was the icon in the sky in Powell, the picture we would always draw in school. I did not have to see it on foot to feel its power, I could cement my eyes on it as we drove around it and it changed its aspect to our miles.

The town whipped by, its small and its walking spaces, just one quick blink after another, but in the car the mountain held its own, keeping us in its sight as we kept it in ours.

July 7

I think that it is I just good engineering to build redundancies into a system. If one thing fails, another thing can take over. In my transportation life at home, I have a whole set of redundancies. If I cannot or do not want to walk, I bike. If I cannot or do not want to bike, I take transit. If transit does not work, I call a cab. If I cannot get a cab, I might ask for a ride, but not very often.

In much of the West, like around here in Red Lodge, there is no redundancy. There is complete dependence on the car. Walking is an option, but it not practiced much. Walking once was the only option. But that was more than a century ago. Here, people's lives revolve in a sphere of hundreds of miles. Driving sixty miles to the next big town is a fact of life, so walking takes you nowhere quickly. It is rarely used even in trips around this town. There is no redundancy, the car is everything.

The value of walking is not one of transportation, but of mere recreation. People hike for fitness, but not to get anywhere. Walking is a trifle, not anything of serious consequence.

If there is an attack on the car, if the car and the truck go down in gas price glory, if the car and the truck prove themselves to be worthless, there is no other option. The railroad tracks that used to take people from one town to another have long been ripped from the earth, the railroad depot in Red Lodge is now an art gallery.

These places will have a very difficult time functioning as places in coming years as gas supplies continue to get all used up. This town was once a coal mining town, but once the coal was dug out it died a tiny death before tourism based on the car and the Beartooth Highway to Yellowstone took over. What will take over when we run out of cars. What will be the reason for this place at all then.

Yesterday we walked back down to town, and walked along the highway. There were sidewalks on the road on the south end of town, altho it was hard to cross the highway, it was easy to make that walk. Some places have sidewalks, some places are completely without them. Once the car stops working, all streets and highways will be sidewalks.

July 8

I (dream) am on a scavenger hunt thru the suburban neighborhood. Among the items that I must bring back are a house. The tall man with the cowboy hat leads me to the paved trail down the valley into town, where certainly one of the many houses is loose enough that I might rip it up and carry it back to the picnic table, where the game is to end.

I have been in Red Lodge enough days for it to enter my dreams, and today we are leaving. But this area has always been in my dreams. My dreams of losing breath and rising up into the great mountain valley of flowers and beauty and my heart falls down and my feet cannot touch the ground at the majesty of the streams and the thin waterfalls. The trees and the flowers and the little ditch of road barely hanging on the side before falling waters fall it all down to the valley, and the rocks and the boulders make a water of their own.

This place, or the valley we will enter today, is always in my thoughts. I moved away from the mountains almost twenty years ago, but the mountains are still inside me, all their points and roundness, all their tiny trees holding on like shaving whiskers, all the curves and lines that look like faces when you are so far away. The far away is so clear and evident if it is so tall, if it takes such an adventure to get absolutely thru it.

July 9

This morning I am in Cooke City, Montana. It is a small mining town near the Northeast entrance to Yellowstone Park. Last night we walked the small streets of this town. The main highway thru is the only paved road. A block up from that, up the hillside of a mountain still showing bare trees from the 1988 Yellowstone fires, are the houses that just barely escaped the fire. We walked up Broadway street, a one lane dirt road with only a few buildings, some majestic log mansions, and some trailer houses with peaked roofs tacked on top of them to slide off the heavy winter snows.

Yesterday our big family group left the condos and Red Lodge and said goodbye. K and I rode along with my sister and brother in law and niece on the backway to the Beartooth Pass. The pass, which actually takes you up and over a mountain, is closed part of the way. The treacherous switchbacks of the 1936 highway were washed down the mountain side in spring rains, so we came up the back way. The pass itself is nearly 11,000 feet above sea level. We got out of the car to walk around over 9,000 feet up. We were above the tree level and the ground was carpeted with tiny ferns and small buttercup flowers. Other flowers and lichen made the ground tender and colorful.

The trees were all a few hundred feet below us, so we walked in a world nearly naked above the level of the rocks. It was very windy up there, with only clouds above us close, and there were no birds or other animals visible, tho K did see a grizzly footprint. A couple butterflies flew past us, or were blown past us, up the mountain and over the other side. Butterflies were everywhere in one section of the road, shooting in the front of the car and only some of them making it back from the asphalt and to the flowers on the other side of the highway.

July 10

Thru Yellowstone we drove. Only in 1915, after many years of fighting, were cars first allowed into the great first national park. Now cars number in the thousands on the roads that tangle between the mountains and valleys and geysers.

I have so many early memories of walking the boardwalks that cross the features, the geyser plains and hot springs. We took walks yesterday across the Norris Geyser Plane and Mammoth Terraces. The world is so burning and glowing and blazing inside. Just under the crust is enough heat to make water jump and steam rise in great billows. The heat and the action move around from year to year, sometimes brewing activity and color and sometimes running dry.

The roads make these mountain places so accessible so people can see them and so people can desecrate them. Minute Geyser died when people threw rocks into it years ago. On Friday we stepped, tho lightly, on fragile Alpine plants. We killed some of them for sure, and other people walk on them and pull them out and trample them, and more will be coming when the road is widened with a shoulder, when the roads are made easier so everyone can cross the mountain and trample on its tender crown.

Between the town of Cody and Powell, small town in Wyoming, we drove on gravel lanes made for the construction job going on this summer. They are making a two lane flat road into a five lane highway. They are tearing up more of the badlands around these places to make it easier for cars.

There are still great open spaces here. There are still trails you can only cross by hiking or on horses. There are ribbons of gravel road, some up mountain and some low on the valleys, and the black asphalt cover that seals off all the water.

I feel guilty from so many days of riding in cars, but tonight we will fly back home and I will be back to my usual place. I have had some rich experiences, and they will continue to decompose into my dreams and memories for years to come. We saw birds soaring, and a bear, and a coyote right beside our car. We saw these things for the car could bring us closer. We crossed a few hundred miles in a couple of days, over mountains and meadows and rivers thanks to a car and driving.

July 14

We did not leave Billings on Sunday night. After our ride to the airport we found out that our plane was delayed and we would not make our connection in Denver so we chose to spend Sunday night in Billings at my dad's house and fly out early Monday morning.

Earlier that day we had ridden along on the ride from Livingston, Montana to Billings. One last long car ride, a couple more hours in the back seat with our twenty-one month old niece. On the way we stopped at a protected Prairie Dog town and watched the Prairie Dogs watch us. They looked out for enemies and made their warning sounds, but after a while they thought little enough about us to gather at the edge of one hole to eat some roots and plants.

Sunday evening, after our plane did not come, we got a ride in my dad's big truck up to the rimrocks, the cliffs above Billings and its streets and cars and buildings. From up there we saw a huge storm move in. Sinister clouds swept up the sky and lightning bolts leaned from cloud to mountain. Up on the rims there was a bike and walking trail and there were people walking and biking it. That was an amenity that would have been unthinkable in Billings long ago when I lived there.

Sunday afternoon we walked a stretch of Billings to go to the Pickle Barrel restaurant for one last big family gathering outdoor sandwich dinner. My brother and his girlfriend and K and I walked that landscape that does not get walked often, and I saw little details that I passed by many times before, tho twenty years ago. Many of those details were faint in my memory, but many other things I am sure that I never noticed. Now I notice plants more after ten years or so of gardening. I see trees in ways I could never see them when I was a teenager and just passing them by. My brain has changed the entire nature of my vision, and I do not see like I saw when I was 17. Now I am 42, and see with all those years compressed up in my brain, or forgotten but lingering somehow, and the seeing that I see has all that weight, the pounds of years and the bags of all the thousands of days and things I read or heard or witnessed in my day to day daze.

There was one more car drive on Sunday night with an old friend J who showed us the latest far flung sprawl development of Billings. Here were cheap asphalt streets with no storm sewers built in. After the storm that crept over town and washed and thundered it there was a network of temporary ponds around the expensive cardboard houses. I imagined the wide roads that would have to be built someday to serve this far flung place with cars, or the undervalue of these gigantic fortresses when we all just throw in the car towel and give up on places so far and so flung.

July 15

Monday morning we got a last ride, from my father and my father's car, up the hill that he lives just under and he dropped us off at the Billings airport. We got our boarding passes and sat around in the small airport for a short time and then we flew back home to Minneapolis.

In Minneapolis we took the hike to the underground train station with our suitcases on us as backpacks. My eyes turned misty as I thought about my great family once again scattered across the country. Planes and cars had brought us together. Our distances are too great for feet and bikes to do the same in just a week.

We had to wait a while for our bus downtown, and when we got off the bus we had to walk three blocks with our heavy back packs in a heavy heat. But then we were back home at our house without a driveway, at our house without a garage, without a car, without a full tank of gasoline, or any tank of gasoline at all.

Now it is Friday after a busy week at work. I rode my bike to work all those days, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and I will ride it there again today. My bike legs were not twisty - I made it back on two wheels quite easily. My first bike ride on Monday was down to the post off ice to pick up our collected mail for the past week.

It is so easy now to be back in the rhythms of our normal life here, our life without a car. It was so easy in Montana to fall into the rhythms of daily riding in a car, tho there was a whole day when I did not ride. Now I feel all the cars from the outside, and they seem threatening, and they seem hot and bothered at their coming demise. Last week, cars were what brought my family together in this cut off spread out unfair world. Airplanes strode across the greatest vastest distances, and they burned up the fuel to jump the sky. Cars crossed the great, but not quite so great spaces, and they really burned up almost as much fuel per person per mile as the jets did.

Now I am happy to be back at my neighborhood with transit, with nice biking streets, with sidewalks, and I am beginning to think of my next trip.

July 16

Sloppy Books

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