One of the great pleasures of my life these days is the freedom to get out of the house and go for a walk, pretty much at will. I find walking to be a deeply pleasurable activity. The physical activity is healthy, of course, but the mental lift the walk provides is real, as is the space to think in an unfettered manner.
I am walking in a suburban area, which is a mixed blessing. There is beauty in the area where I walk, but there are also roads, and I have made an unsettling discovery about roads while on my walks. There are motor vehicles on roads.
Okay, so this may sound a little obvious. But what is new in this discovery is how violent motor vehicles are. I am a veteran driver of motor vehicles, and as such, I take their benefits for granted: they are self-contained, pleasurably air-controlled environments, and they get to places quickly. What I now observe from outside of the vehicles is that they are also very, very loud, unnaturally faster than other things in the environments through which they travel, much larger than the people they contain, and very inhuman in their behavior and appearance. From the point of view of the pedestrian, they don’t seem to belong in some of the places they travel. When walking down a quiet street, watching the birds and squirrels, and enjoying the suburban flora, an approaching car sounds like an attacking Smaug, the fearsome dragon in The Hobbit. The scale of the car’s roaring sound and speeding presence is so far removed from the sound and appearance of the neighborhood, that it shocked me the first few times it happened.
The sound of a motor vehicle from the outside is different than I thought it was. As a driver, I knew the sound as the not-unpleasant hum of the engine. As a pedestrian, I hear the sound of the engine as a roar, the sum of the many rapid little explosions that make an internal combustion work. And the sound of the motor is only part of the sound. The other unexpected sound was that of the tires on the road. The friction that causes the car to move forward on the road creates a harsh, vitally present white noise that sounds as if it is ripping the fabric of the tapestry of the gardens of the suburban neighborhood. It is a sound that doesn’t belong to what you see as a pedestrian.
I am not a Luddite. I will not be writing letters to the editor, or blog posts, demanding the elimination of motor vehicles. I still drive, and will continue to do so. But I also think I will increase how much I walk, and I will try to find walking places where there are no motor vehicles. And I will also think about how much I am driving, and where, and whether or not it is necessary. I would rather not be a violent part of my environment if I don’t need to be. And that may be my new perspective: driving is a violent activity, and one should be violent only when violence is necessary.
