Drive (16 page)

Unfortunately, bad urban planning means that some people will have no choice but to drive no matter what the cost because the distances between home, work and shopping are so huge. To take advantage of cheap land, some schools are so far away from where families live that no kid can walk or cycle to class—the only way to get there is by bus or car.

And sitting sedentary behind a steering wheel is no way to go through life. Aside from packing on the pounds and inducing back and neck pain, some drivers suffer psychological damage. Cruising down an open highway may be a blast, but crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic sure isn't. A tense commute is, at best, dispiriting and exhausting; at worst, it can lead to road rage.

The term became popular in the 1990s after a spate of violent incidents, some involving guns, made the news. The trend coincided with an increase in aggressive driving—including following too closely, driving at excessive speeds, weaving through traffic, and running stoplights and signs—and a general drop in civility on the road. After being cut off in traffic or frustrated by a slowpoke, some drivers become incensed and seek revenge. It can start with swearing and bird-flipping, escalate to intimidating driving and end up in fisticuffs, assault with a weapon (such as a golf club or tire iron) or gunplay. Some road ragers have even used their automobile as a weapon.

The phenomenon may not get the media attention it once did, but it certainly hasn't gone away. One study suggested that up to sixteen million Americans experience what psychiatrists call “intermittent explosive disorder.” Not everyone agrees that the problem is medical, arguing instead that it's cultural, but there's little debate that as the traffic volumes increase and commute times grow longer, people become more impatient and less forgiving. Some experts speculate that drivers behave differently (read: more irrationally) in a car, which—especially if it's a big SUV—can create a sense of isolation and invincibility. The anonymity of riding in a living room on wheels, an extension of the anonymity of suburban life, can weaken common sense and self-discipline so much that even upstanding citizens with responsible jobs do things they'd never do in a grocery store lineup. “They aren't all Charlie Manson look-alikes,” Sgt. Cam Woolley, of the Ontario Provincial Police, told me. “They've timed their commute down to the last second, and if anybody goes too slow or doesn't drive the way they'd like, they go nuts.”

ON MONDAY,
when I fled Fenton for St. Louis, I was relieved rather than filled with rage. Back home, everyone was celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving, but I wouldn't be feasting on turkey and
fixings for several more weeks. Instead, I made a detour to the Whole Foods Market in Brentwood, a low-density inner suburb that includes several shopping malls with well-used parking lots filled with more Japanese cars than American ones. Then I drove to the Central West End. I'd found a cheap hotel there, but since it wasn't check-in time yet, I walked over to Forest Park, which is one of the largest urban parks in the United States and about five hundred acres larger than New York's Central Park.

The Central West End is a gentrified neighbourhood near St. Louis University, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine and Forest Park. I walked around some of the residential streets and saw plenty of lovely homes, particularly to the north, while lofts were going up to the south, closer to the hospital and the medical school. In the middle, restaurants and bars drew people out of their houses. Even on a Monday night, people were out and about, taking advantage of the restaurant patios. It all seemed good.

The Central West End's pleasures aside, St. Louis is a car city— and by that I mean one ruined by the car. At the turn of the last century, the Gateway to the West was the fourth-largest city in America, and by 1950 the population had grown to more than 850,000. Since then, as more and more residents headed for surrounding suburbs, the population has fallen below 350,000— about what it was in 1880. Unlike some American cities, St. Louis has not had much luck attracting many people back downtown again despite the presence of the big park, a healthy arts and cultural scene and Metrolink, the region's light rail system. A few neighbourhoods—notably the Central West End and Lafayette Square—are doing well, but residents are still clearing out of other areas, particularly North St. Louis, and the high crime rate hasn't helped. The region has also lost economic power, and though railway car manufacturing, some Boeing operations and Big Three plants are still up and running, it's not the major centre for transportation manufacturing it once was.

On Tuesday afternoon, I rode the Metrolink down to the Gateway Arch. The Central West End is about twelve miles from the arch, and as I looked out the window of the train, I saw a lot of industrial desolation. The Metrolink has the airport at one end and has stops by the domed stadium, the hockey arena and the baseball stadium, which are all close to downtown, the arch and the waterfront. And yet, it wasn't busy. Even returning to my hotel after four o'clock in the afternoon, I had no problem getting a seat. The trains heading to East St. Louis were a bit more crowded, but they were a claustrophobe's dream compared to the cattle cars on rapid transit at that time of day in more dynamic cities.

Except for some gambling riverboats, the banks of the Mississippi River offer nothing to attract people to them; indeed, the St. Louis waterfront makes the pathetic one in Toronto look good. Laclede's Landing, an old warehouse district with cobblestone streets that's now home to shops, bars and restaurants, is nearby. But on a Tuesday afternoon, it had all the vibrancy of a morgue. I got the impression that rather than living or working there, people popped in to party, especially before a game since Busch Stadium and the Edward Jones Dome are close by. The city is trying to revitalize its neighbourhoods, so there is hope, but without people living downtown, St. Louis lacks the energy a great city needs.

On my way back to my hotel, I got off at Union Station. Once an important railway terminal—after it opened in 1894 it was the largest and busiest passenger rail terminal in the world—and an impressive piece of architecture, it's now a shopping mall and entertainment complex, which surely says something about our current attitudes toward train travel, on the one hand, and shopping, on the other. But in the late afternoon on a Tuesday, the place was all but empty and I wondered how the retailers stayed in business. When I went outside and walked around the old station, I found that, as is so often the case with such malls, it had failed to generate any nearby development.

That didn't surprise me, but the light traffic at a time of day when most cities are chock full of cars did. It also dawned on me that in the two days since I'd escaped the suburbs, I'd seen hardly any taxicabs. Obviously, I hadn't expected St. Louis to be like Manhattan, where cabs seem to outnumber private cars (except when it's pouring rain, of course), but I had assumed that someone on a busy St. Louis street would have little problem flagging one. Taxis flourish in dense cities where there's effective public transit and plenty of pedestrians—places where people might walk partway and then hail a cab or take a taxi to their destination and walk back or, at night, take transit there and a cab home. One thing's for sure: car drivers don't flag taxis. So pedestrians go where there are taxis and taxis go where there are pedestrians. As I thought about this, I figured that I'd stumbled on a new way to measure the walkability and livability of an urban centre: simply count the number of cabs driving around looking for fares.

8
Route 66 (Part One)

Kicks, Flicks and Tailfins

AS SOON AS MY FRIENDS
heard about my road trip, they wanted to join me. I didn't invite them, they just said, “I'm coming.” Naturally, when it came down to it, work or family or a lack of cash intervened for some of them, but not for all. And so, just eight days into my adventure, I picked up Chris Goldie at the St. Louis airport. A self-described “history buff,” Chris wanted to drive Route 66 with me.

The highway, created in the 1920s, ran from Chicago to Los Angeles and quickly became not just the country's most famous road but also part of popular culture, inspiring hit songs, bestselling books and even, in the early 1960s, a popular television show called
Route 66
. The series featured two drifters driving a convertible Corvette around the country in search of “a place to put down roots,” though they had more luck finding adventure with different characters, ranging from a Nazi hunter to a dishonest beauty contest promoter to a heroin junkie (played by Robert Duvall). Shot on location, though only a few shows actually took place on
Route 66
, the show captured the restlessness and hunger for meaning many young Americans were feeling at the time. Chris and I are well past our youthful restlessness, but we were searching for meaning, or at least a better understanding of the history of America's love affair with the road and its influence on popular culture.

Despite decades of mythmaking, Route 66's kicks couldn't last forever. As soon as the interstates offered more efficient ways to travel across the country, most drivers forgot about the old road. Fortunately, many individuals and organizations remain dedicated
to promoting and preserving this part of American history, and 80 to 85 percent of Route 66 is still driveable. But it's a bit trickier than simply getting on the road and stepping on the gas pedal.

Having decided to start at the Chain of Rocks Bridge, which isn't far from Lambert International Airport, I keyed it into the GPS and off we went. Built in 1929 as a private toll bridge, it took Route 66 travellers across the Mississippi River between Illinois and Missouri. The trussed steel girders on concrete make it appear assembled from a giant Meccano set, but the really notable feature is the curious twenty-two-degree bend in the middle that was a compromise between the limits of the geology and the demands of river navigation. Closed to automobile traffic since 1968, it would have been demolished in 1975 except that a collapse of the price of scrap steel meant that it was cheaper to let the bridge stand. Today, the rusting mile-long structure is open to pedestrians and cyclists and, on special occasions, to car clubs.

After walking across the bridge to the Illinois side and then back again, we drove through St. Louis, remarking on the light traffic and laughing as we followed a dancing lowrider. Particularly popular in Latino communities, lowriders are cars and trucks with suspension systems modified so they ride low to the ground. Some owners—who often add flashy paint jobs and graphics, custom interiors and powerful audio systems—install hydraulics, allowing them to adjust the suspension at will and even raise and lower different corners of the vehicle as they drive. While cars from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s are favourites, the lowriding scene, which involves a lot of cruising the main drag after dark, wasn't around during the heyday of Route 66. So seeing the big white Cadillac in front of us bouncing up and down, sometimes one wheel at a time, in a gleeful ballet was a reminder that car culture is alive and well—and mutating.

EVEN THOUGH CHRIS
had brought along a couple of guidebooks for the old road, it soon dawned on us that this might be more of a
challenge than we had imagined. We stopped at a gas station and bought a map—and then promptly hit a dead end. Right in front of us was a large concrete barrier overgrown with bushes. We turned around and drove back to the information centre at Route 66 State Park near Eureka. The volunteer staffer working the place, and presumably repeating the same spiel innumerable times a day, wore a name tag that said read “Jerry.” He was already busy talking to another struggling road tripper, a man who spoke with a Southern drawl and wore cowboy boots and a weather-beaten trucker's cap. Outside, his wife—a gargoyle with a peroxide-blond beehive hairdo, ruby-red lipstick and so much makeup she must have used a trowel—hauled on a cancer stick as she sat in a Ford F-350 pickup with a crew cab and Alabama plates. Although she looked terminally bored, I assumed she was secretly delighted to have a husband who would actually ask for directions.

Our wives were back home, and the GPS couldn't help us, so we were two men with no choice but to seek guidance. We left the centre with another map and some directions. But it was already mid-afternoon and we weren't even thirty miles west of downtown St. Louis. At this rate, we would never get to Albuquerque. Undaunted, we took off with renewed purpose and followed the road through a series of sleepy towns with names such as Pacific and Bourbon and Cuba, but after accidentally finding ourselves on the interstate again, we decided to stay with the rest of the world and take the superhighway into Springfield. Although it was a minor defeat, the sun was dropping on the horizon, so we soon wouldn't be able to see much anyway. Besides, it was only the first day and we were confident we could redeem ourselves on the second. Arriving later than we had hoped, we checked in to a hotel surrounded by parking lots. Inside, we discovered a five-storey atrium featuring a ten-foot sculpture by Dale Chihuly, the renowned American glassmaker known for his vibrant colours and abstract designs—we were definitely no longer on Route 66.

Tonyea, the front-desk clerk, told us about the nightmarish road trip she took with her family when she was a teenager. The plan had been to drive to Alaska, across Canada and then home, but she bailed out on her parents halfway through and vowed never to go on any trip like that again. Her story reminded me why I'd never want to be a teenager again, but failed to dent my enthusiasm for our expedition.

Springfield considers itself “the birthplace of Route 66” because that's where Cyrus Avery, the road's biggest proponent, settled a dispute over what number would designate the road; although he and his supporters originally wanted 60, they finally agreed to 66. With a population of just over 150,000, the Queen City of the Ozarks is the third-largest city in Missouri, and while the density is a meagre two thousand or so people per square mile, the downtown, which was a short walk from our hotel, had lots of bars and restaurants and a lively feel to it. We enjoyed an excellent meal with a rather unnecessary, though much enjoyed, second bottle of wine and then found a fun place full of college students enjoying a good bar band. And I was thrilled to be in a town with the same name as the one Homer Simpson lives in. But a cool name and a few good blocks of downtown can't make up for all the sprawl and woeful urban planning—or lack thereof—that goes into creating too many cities just like Springfield.