Section 10: Vehicles and Driving
Being born and bred in California, of course I’ve been immersed in the car culture here. But although I’ve accepted cars, I was never INTO them, and during high school I became decidedly unenthused of them as my awareness of their environmental consequences grew. And through both high school and college I managed quite well without one.
But by 1976 I was out of school and employed, and the usefulness of an automobile became inarguable. Even then, I didn’t go out looking for one, but in that year my Mom upgraded the car she drove, and on April Fool’s Day she passed on to me (as an early birthday gift) her 1968 Dodge Cornet, upon which I bestowed the name Alycia (Fig. 7.10.1). When we first acquired this car it had one of those tall CB antennas – so tall it was bent forward and lashed down at the front of the car. Ned and I thought this was the coolest thing ever, but my Mom didn’t like it and had it removed – shucks. The car had power windows, a feature my Dad detested because it was “just one more thing that could go wrong”. And he was right: first the driver window’s control went out, and then some time later the one on the passenger side. Interestingly, when the mechanisms were replaced, they installed BOTH of them upside down, so one had to learn to press “down” when you wanted the window up, and vice versa. It was also the first car we had with air conditioning, but she never used it, since Los Gatos had such a clement climate. I didn’t use that feature either, until I drove out one weekend to visit my college friends John & Linda Hunter in Fresno. Well, that place certainly DID merit using the A/C, so I turned it on … but it didn’t cool anything down. So, I didn’t think any more or it until my return trip, when the car suddenly stopped running, just east of Los Banos. Turns out there had been no coolant in the A/C system, which ended up stalling the engine. Fortunately, it was less than a mile’s walk to a service station where they were able to fix it the next day. So I ended staying in a motel that night, but considered myself lucky because the next morning I was able to catch some Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons on the room’s TV.
The Dodge lasted me two years, when my parents surprised me with a brand new car for another early birthday present, a 1978 Honda Civic hatchback. Continuing my habit of naming my vehicles, I named this one Eliza Doolittle, in honor of Diana Rigg’s role in Pygmalion1. I even paid for personalized license plate, “Eliza D” (when I picked the plates up from the DMV, the clerk got a funny look on her face as she misread it and asked, “You wanted E-lizard?”). This was a fun car to own, and I can attest to Honda’s advertising campaign at the time (“We make it simple”), as I was able to teach myself how to do tune-ups and other relatively simple maintenance projects. In fact I got so good at it, I’d offer my services to several other friends who also had Hondas – it was fun for me, and they got free servicing. But then I got overconfident, and thought I could help out friends of mine with other makes of cars. Big mistake. When attempting to work on Robin Outzen’s 1973 Datsun 240 Z, I couldn’t do even the simplest job of removing the cover of the air filter, while Arlene Baxter’s Fiat defeated me when I couldn’t even figure out how to jack it up. So after that, I stuck with working on my Hondas … until they no longer used that “we make it simple” line, and now I rely on commercial mechanics. And in general I enjoyed driving her, although I did have problems during two ski trips (detailed in Appendix IX).
In any case, my trusty Civic was on the verge of needing a second ring job, so in 1993 I replaced it with another Civic. That lasted me to 2016, and I would have gotten a third one, except Honda was no longer making that model, so I got the closest thing possible: a Honda Fit. I find this an incredible car: short turning radius, decent gas mileage, good storage capability, and although up until then I was firmly in the camp of standard transmissions, I was pleasantly surprised by its incredible automatic transmission, that allowed for great acceleration, even when going up hills (which neither of my standard stick Civics could match).
But these four cars represent only a small percent of my transportation options.
I’ve owned five bikes in my life: starting as a kid in the early 1960’s when I had a one speed (unknown maker) – this was when one could buy a bike for under $50.00. My second was a three-speed (probably a Raleigh), which I rode until the end of 1970. But for Christmas that year, my folks gave me a Raleigh 10-speed Supercourse (which I named Davis) (as in Fig. 7.10.2). This was a fantastic upgrade (costing something like the astronomical price of $130), allowing me to go much further and faster. It was on the three speed and ten speed that I thoroughly explored Los Gatos, the Santa Cruz Mountains beyond it, and took a couple of longer rides to the north in the early 1970s2.
And with the Supercourse, I also began to enjoy the experience of bicycle maintenance – including replacing brake pads, pulling the gear cluster, taping the handlebars and such. For whatever reason, the only thing that was tough for me was truing the wheels, but generally I had fun just keeping the bike in order.
Regretfully, the Supercourse was damaged in a traffic accident in the early 1990s3. I replaced it with a Univega 12 speed, which lasted until the early 2000s. By then I was now using bikes strictly for in-town chores, and I replaced it with my present ride, a Giant 21 speed Cypress. It’s a bit of a clunker, but with a rear rack that supports a pair of panniers, well suited to the travails of riding along the surfaces of city streets.
As noted in Section 4, I’ve owned three divers (pilot slang for hang gliders … well, at least it used to be).
Following knee surgery in 2022, I realized I needed help in getting around (especially with my commute to San Francisco) I bought a GoTrax GXL V2 electric scooter (Fig. 7.10.3). It was a great training scooter: super stable and easy to ride. But you couldn’t get much faster than 10-15 MPH on flat ground, while I had to walk it up any sort of steep hill. However, the one I had must have been a lemon, because the charging apparatus failed twice, so the following year I replaced it with a Fluid Mosquito. This is a REALLY peppy puppy – it accelerates much quicker than the GoTrax, gets way above 15 MPH and can handle steep hills. But it is almost TOO peppy – definitely not a model for beginners. And I found taking a scooter in city traffic requires a certain amount of fearlessness – not only do you have to keep your head on a swivel to avoid collisions with other moving vehicles, unless you are lucky enough to come across a recently paved patch of road, one needs to be ready for pot holes and just a plain bumpy ride.
But for all my concerns about environmental damages, I find it unsettling that I have relied so much on solo car driving, even though (except for my summer jobs during college and a series of four jobs from 1980-85), I rarely relied on a car to commute to work. But I couldn’t have gone hang gliding without a car – either as a way to get to the training sites, nor to reach Fort Funston or the few inland sites I flew. And my job with TransBox had me driving all over the place as well – the shortest route (to Napa) was about a 100 mile round trip, while the longest (to Monterey) was about 300. And then in 2001, I began in earnest to sample the California fauna of parasitic Hymenoptera. This resulted in me racking up hundreds of miles every year for over a decade, as I sampled not only sites near home, but ranged throughout the state with trips to far-flung sites in San Benito and Riverside counties, along the Sierra Nevada, Stanislaus County, out to the coast from Santa Cruz up to Mendocino, as well as Plumas, Lassen, Shasta and Modoc counties. And now that I’m retired, my once/week gig with Red Cross (see next section) routes has me traveling not only throughout the “inner” Bay Area, but occasionally further afield to Modesto, Stockton, Sacramento, St. Helena, Ukiah, and Willits. So although I profess to spurn the automobile, I have in fact spent a fair portion of my life behind the wheel.
1 See section 8.
2 As detailed in Chapter 3, section 7.
3 In my cycling career, I had a couple of accidents, most of which led to minimal injuries. My worst injury was when I was cycling up Marin Avenue in Berkeley. It was hard work, so I was keeping my head down, and thus didn’t see the traffic island in front of me, and down I went. My lower face made contact with the concrete edge, and as a result my upper lip was permanently disfigured, and I lost a front tooth. Robert McOwen (who kindly brought me and my bike home in a station wagon) called it a “Close encounter of the curb kind”.