Rambling Man

But now it’s done. Most of that section of I-690 west
near downtown is open for business again, and the road actually feels
smoother than it was. So we are left with the satisfying feeling that
it was really for good reasons and worthwhile, after all. And whatever
did we make such a fuss about, such as a closed lane or two, is nothing
to get torqued about.

They even finished part of the job early. The electric
sign said that the entrance to I-690 East was going to be closed until
July 3, and there I was, on July 2, pulling on to 690 without so much
as a single orange pylon in sight. So thank you to all the hard-working
men with the hand tools, and the guys in the trucks, and the
supervisors with the rolled-up plans under their arms, and the ones on
the radio or the cell phones, and thank you to the lady with the flag
who waved us through. It’s done. You slowed us down a bit, but now
we’re on our way.

{mospagebreak} 

I’ve actually been moving more slowly these days, and
appreciating how lovely our city and county really are. It’s not that
it hasn’t always been gorgeous and verdant in summer. Central New York
summers have always been this state’s best-kept secrets. I always
lament hearing Syracuse University students or graduates who move away
complaining about the weather here, because the academic year has
conspired to absent them just when things turn lovely and tranquil.
Maybe it’s because they’re gone? No, it’s just a fact: You can travel
the country and be hard pressed to find a prettier place to spend your
summer, unless that place happens to have salt water landing on sand at
regular intervals.

Honestly, though, I didn’t slow down my
driving because of any renewed reverence for nature. It was purely out
of self-preservation. The price of gas has forced me, like many of us,
to think about each and every gallon and how I spend it. Like you, I’ve
always known that those few minutes saved by pushing the pedal aren’t
really worth it, but at $2 a gallon I could fool myself and leave a few
minutes late, thinking I’d make it up by speeding. Instead I usually
ended up with coffee on my lap. At $3 a gallon I felt a bit foolish
driving a DVD back to Blockbuster, and started to make sure we combined
shopping trips and errands. At $4 plus, conserving gas has become a way
of life.

I drive more slowly, look ahead to see
if the light is red, try not to accelerate and brake if I don’t have
to. I take my wife’s little car and leave her the minivan when she will
be driving fewer miles than me. It took us a few years to figure out
that we both didn’t need vehicles large enough to hold all three kids,
their stuff, the very large dog and––oh, yeah, the two of us. But when
we finally did, I hung on to the minivan and she bought a small silver
Toyota Scion, which is not a hybrid and is not dangerous (two things we
always get asked).

The minivan remains a very practical vehicle. It’s just a
crime that it uses so much gas. I am always bothered when minivans and
SUVs get lumped together as gas guzzlers. There is a major difference.
The minivan is the car you need but you don’t want. The SUV is just the
opposite. It’s the car no one needs but everyone seems to want. Take
that back—there are a few people with driveways so steep or fields so
muddy that they actually need that four-wheel traction. Most of us know
in our heart of hearts that front-wheel drive will get us everywhere we
want to go. (Hummers are in a class all of their own—I haven’t read
enough Freud to even venture a guess.)

{mospagebreak} 

I was talking to a big, tough biker recently who defended
the right of Americans to own any size vehicle they want, be it a truck
or a boat, an SUV, a snowmobile or a jet ski. That, he argued, is what
freedom is all about. A common sentiment, but a completely foolish one,
without historical precedent. There was a time when people felt free to
defecate wherever they pleased—until someone discovered that such
behavior bred disease. Now public sanitation laws govern our behavior,
and we are all the better for it. Society controls reckless behaviors
when survival is at stake.

Freedom to accelerate a civilization’s race to
obsolescence isn’t freedom: It’s suicide. It’s like an adolescent
standing in the mall insisting that “I want it.” At some point the
adults have to speak up and drag the kid away and say “No.” That’s what
grown-ups do, but here’s the Catch-22: In a democracy, the kids get to
pick the grown-ups.

Why do you think politicians get such a buzz out of
telling us that we can have anything we want? How come commentators get
to say, day and night, that government can’t tell us what to do? And
nobody argues with them, they just keep calling up with more and more
examples.

Government tells us lots of things we have to do. Just
read the little eight-point type in the police blotter in the daily
paper and you will find a whole list of things that the government,
with lights flashing and sirens wailing, tells us we can’t do. Just
recently we learned that the government can even tell us that we can’t
give away iguanas as prizes at firemen’s field days. Oh, the horror of
it all!

Most of these things are considered reasonable limits on
our freedom, and we accept them. In sober moments most of us are
grateful for restrictions, for example, on the volume of our neighbor’s
music-making devices.

{mospagebreak} 

So it shouldn’t shock anyone that some day in the
not-too-distant future we might have to make the right to drive gas
guzzlers, like the right to own handguns in a city, relative rather
than absolute.

What’s that you say? 

They did? 

5-4? 

Really? 

Uh-oh.