Drive (38 page)

He traded in that one for an orange 1974 Firebird Limited and regretted it almost immediately, so he replaced it with another 1976 Firebird, but it just wasn't the same as his first. Since then, he's owned a string of Monte Carlos, Ford and Chevy trucks and SUVs and the odd Maverick. He can count on one hand the ones that weren't American: the FJ40, an Isuzu Trooper, two Porsche 911s and his current ride, a Nissan Xterra, which he is delighted with. His wife, Diana, drives a Chrysler Town and Country minivan—a tough thing for a Porsche lover to accept, he admitted. “It killed me to get a minivan.”

Another car enthusiast who married into the Correa family is Mike Murray, a thin, heavily tattooed UPS driver with a shaved head. Although it soon became clear that he really wanted to show us his car, he didn't want to come out and say so; instead he waited until his brother-in-law forced the issue. Murray took us out front to see his white 1964 Buick Riviera, which he'd lovingly restored and customized, including redoing the interior in red leather, installing both air and helium tanks for the hydraulic suspension and shaving the door handles, a modification that involves
removing the factory handles and then using a remote door popper to get in (though Murray admitted the cheap remote he'd bought no longer worked and he had to stick his hand in through the car's triangular side window). As he demonstrated the various heights and configurations possible with the suspension system, opened the hood to show off the V8 engine and let everyone hear its loud primitive rumble, his eyes lit up with childlike pride. Correa, who once owned the car, looked on wistfully. He probably regretted his decision to sell it given the way Murray had restored it, but he entertained us with the story of how, many years ago, he'd driven the car into a telephone pole, giving it a large, perfectly semicircular dent in the dead centre of the front.

Though it gets just seven miles per gallon, Murray uses the Riviera as his daily driver. “It's the only car I want,” he told me. His wife, on the other hand, drives a Honda Civic. “I love my country and I'd love to buy American,” he said a little sadly, “but I had to buy the best car for my wife.”

By now, this was a familiar refrain. The Big Three can wrap themselves in the flag, but for all the patriotism across the land these days, more and more people are buying their cars with their heads instead of their hearts. And given how expensive cars are, one bad experience can really stick in a car owner's head. Other countries' carmakers also issue recalls and produce the odd lemon, but when Americans have problems with an American car, they take it personally, as I really started to understand Saturday morning as Spencer, dressed in jeans, a green golf shirt and a green ball cap, cooked up a breakfast of eggs and sausages.

“My ideal car for a long, long time was a Jeep Grand Cherokee,” he told me. In fact, he sold his 1984 Porsche Carrera so he could afford a fully loaded metallic-blue 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee. “It was the car I wanted for so long and I spent a lot of money on it thinking one of the kids would take it to college. But it didn't treat me right back,” he said, sounding like nothing so much as a spurned lover. “That car was in the shop every six
months.” Three or four years later, he finally cried uncle. His breaking point came one day when he was playing softball with his brothers-in-law: his wife called to say one of the windows wouldn't go up and it was starting to rain. “I couldn't go out for a beer with the guys because I had to go home and deal with that. Here we had this American car, desired and loved for so long, and we had nothing but problems.” Even more proof, as if any were needed, that nothing should ever come between a man and a beer with his buddies. Not even a car.

MIKE HOGGED THE WHEEL
all the way to Los Angeles. The way he figured it, I'd have plenty of time with the Mustang after he flew home. Spencer's brothers-in-law had spent a good deal of effort trying to convince us to skip LA because of the traffic, and go all the way to San Diego. That sounded like fun, but I actually wanted to experience LA's traffic.

We left San Jose and headed for State Route 1, commonly known as Highway 1 or just the Pacific Coast Highway. After stopping in Monterrey for a bowl of clam chowder, we travelled leisurely along Seventeen-Mile Drive, the famous scenic route along the coastline through Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach. Well worth the nine-dollar entry fee. And then we were really off. Just south of Carmel, we passed a yellow road sign promising, “Hills and Curves Next 63 Miles.”

Mike turned to me and said, “That's the sign every driver wants to see.”

While my driver manoeuvred the Mustang along the winding road, I soaked up the stunning scenery: cliffs down to the rocky shore to my right, cliffs up to the blue sky on my left. By the time we got to Morro Bay, it was well past dark. The tourist town is sometimes known as the Gibraltar of the Pacific because Morro Rock, the last of the Nine Sisters, a series of volcanic plugs running up the coast from San Luis Obispo, sits in the middle of the harbour. Once a valuable navigational aid for mariners, the
576-foot-high rock is now a sanctuary for peregrine falcons and other birds. When we were there, most of the tourists seemed to be couples, so after dinner we walked inland a few blocks and found a bar filled with locals and Cal Poly students, an entertaining band and a shuffleboard table. We stayed late.

The next morning, not too early, we kept going south until we reached Santa Barbara. We gaped at the money, the attractive people and the expensive cars and then stopped for lunch. When Mike asked our exotically gorgeous young waitress why people came to Santa Barbara, she seemed surprised by the question and said, “Because it's so beautiful.”

As we returned to the Pacific Coast Highway and headed south to Los Angeles, Mike admitted that thinking about cars takes up an embarrassing amount of his time. “I love what they do. I love how some of them sound. How they look. The freedom that goes with them,” he explained, adding that he's rarely more relaxed than when he's driving. “I'm happy sitting here in a convertible, which is the ultimate driving experience in terms of the open air, the sun in your face.” He doesn't need or want to listen to the radio, preferring to find deliverance in the sound of an old car's exhaust as he revels in the power and the handling. “I enjoy the feeling of being in control of something and going where I want to go. I just hope we will always have two-lane highways because that's where the fun is.”

Watching Murray start his Riviera the night before had taken Mike back to when he was a kid and getting a car going wasn't a certainty and often took some finesse. The introduction of fuel injection solved the problem, but Mike missed the drama of the carburetor era. What he didn't miss were the emissions. As Murray brought the car to life, Mike stood behind it to enjoy the deep bass of the classic big block engine, but also to see the two exhaust pipes. Sure enough, smoke shot out of them.

A few months after our road trip, he sold the Boxster and bought his dream car: a Porsche 993. By the end of 2007, he'd also
sold the 911—he would never be able to tell his fellow racers this, but he just couldn't justify the environmental cost of racing it. That didn't make it any easier to sell a car he thought he'd never give up, though, and Mike confessed: “I moped about it for weeks.”

18
Los Angeles

Suburbs in Search of a City

I'D HEARD A LOT
about the car culture in Los Angeles long before I arrived. “You are your car,” was a typical warning. “In LA, you're centred in your car,” Montreal art curator Peter White told me. “You live in your car and you get out here and there. Your car is where you are and other places have a secondary role. There's this inversion that takes place.”

It didn't take me long to see how that could happen. I was staying in the Hollywood Hills with Amy Spach, a friend since we went to McGill University together. She showed up in a Camaro for second year, even though downtown Montreal is not a place anyone, especially a student, needs a car. But it wasn't like that where she grew up—car-conquered suburban New Jersey. (In third year, she took me home for American Thanksgiving: I'd never seen a drive-in bank before, and found the thought of one completely preposterous.) Amy obtained her driver's licence on her seventeenth birthday, the first day she was eligible to do so. All her friends drove; in fact, I was the first person she ever knew who didn't. But later, while living in Manhattan and London, she went nine years without wheels. “I fantasize about that time,” she admitted. That's because she moved to LA in 1989.

Today, she must drive ten to twelve minutes down a steep and winding canyon road just to get to the nearest store. She can't get a pizza delivered. And she has to drop her son off at the car pool because none of the other parents wants to drive up to get him. Much to her son's embarrassment, she gets around in a 2002 Nissan Altima. While functional, the car is far from glamorous in a city where everyone else seems to be driving Porsche Cayenne
SUVs, Jaguars and other luxury cars. It's also old: most people she knows rarely keep a car longer than two years. “I am in the minority in LA because I don't love my car,” she said, adding that she resists the peer pressure to take her ride to the car wash every few days. Though she works from home, she spends at least an hour a day in her car and it's far from uncommon for her to be behind the wheel for four hours. “Initially, the car was my liberation,” declared the one-time Jersey girl, “but now it feels like my entrapment.”

If LA's car-obsessed excess were a vehicle, it would be a Hummer. The in-your-face monster appeals to some people but, as the numerous anti-Hummer websites attest, is despised by others. And few sights are as ridiculous as an extremely thin woman driving one of these massive machines.

My non-driving wife, Carmen Merrifield, is a Hummer-hater; in fact, she believes that it's the duty of every right-thinking citizen who sees one to give the driver the finger. So I accepted General Motors's offer to let me test-drive one for a couple of days with wry amusement. As it turned out, Carmen was flying into LA to meet me on the same day I was to pick it up. My mischievous plan was to pick up the beast, then surprise her with it at the airport. But it wasn't going to be ready in time. So we went together to pick it up in Torrance and then headed to the coast. Luxurious and fully loaded—with leather seats, XM satellite radio, built-in GPS—the H3 is smaller than its predecessors, but it didn't take long to get a reaction from someone other than my wife. At Redondo Beach, while we waited at a stoplight, a driver in a Toyota Prius sneered at me and my Hummer as he made a left turn in front of us. That scene said it all: a hybrid built by a Japanese company versus a behemoth built by Detroit. Both have their fans, of course, but one seems like the future and the other reeks of the past.

LOS ANGELES ONCE APPEARED
to be the future of the American city. From 1920 to 1940, with the movie business and the aviation industry
booming, two million people moved here, tripling the area's population. Since many of people arrived by car, it was no surprise that they wanted to stay in their vehicles. The endless summers also helped make Southern California a perfect incubator for a lifestyle built around the automobile.

Because most Eastern cities started with a dense core and then expanded in a radial pattern, especially after the arrival of the automobile, most people blame the suburbs on the car. But there were railway and streetcar suburbs long before the car arrived. “The automobile didn't create suburbs,” argued the Chrysler Museum's Barry Dressel. “Suburbs were a preoccupation all during the nineteenth century. But what the automobile did was allow people to gratify that urge by dispersing the population farther out.” Even if it's true that the suburbs helped create the car rather than the other way around, the old streetcar suburbs had the benefit of being denser than the new ones. And once the car led to housing developments farther and farther away, the easiest way to move people around was to build highways.

In the East, that meant destroying downtowns, but most of LA's significant growth came after the car, so it developed differently. If Henry Ford wasn't thinking about LA when he said, “We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city,” he should have been. Certainly writer and renowned wag Dorothy Parker was when she quipped, “Los Angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.”

All those suburbs have given LA an unenviable reputation for sprawl, and the smog that inevitably goes with it. And yet, the Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana urban area, which has a population of close to twelve million, has a density of more than seven thousand people per square mile—denser, in other words, than the New York area. “Turns out LA is not really the paradigm of sprawl,” said the Sierra Club's Tim Frank. “You have to go to someplace like Atlanta to find that.” There, developers are still building plenty of houses on one- and two-acre
lots out on the periphery of the city. LA doesn't have that option because it has mountains and the Pacific Ocean constraining it, which has tended to mean smaller lots and more in-fill development.

And yet LA doesn't always benefit from its density. “LA is a conundrum,” mused James van Hemert of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute. “People say they don't want to be like LA because it's sprawled, but in fact the average population density in the LA metro area is almost twice Denver's. But it's still very auto dependent, so you have high density with cars.” That's because cramming people into an area won't make a difference to the amount they drive unless there are workplaces as well as shops, restaurants and other places worth walking to nearby. The ideal urban form isn't just dense; it encourages a mix of homes, retail outlets and offices.

IF LOW-DENSITY SPRAWL
begets congestion, auto-dependent high density begets even more congestion. No one likes being stuck in traffic, but the thing about people who complain about it is that they are the traffic. Except for a couple of days in the H3, I was driving a convertible and I was there for only a week anyway, so I didn't complain too much, but I was shocked by how few miles I travelled for all the time I spent in the car. One evening, it took me ninety minutes to drive from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills—a distance of just twelve miles. There I was stuck on Santa Monica Boulevard, late enough in the day that I could no longer bask in the mid-November sun, and unable to move even though the light was green. We were in gridlock.