Coming from a long line of historical romantics, I sometimes can’t help but fantasize about living in a world without the internal combustion engine and without, therefore, the automobile. I like to imagine how Washington’s roads would look. There would be no asphalt, no speed-limit signs, and no parked cars cluttering the margins. The air would be emptier of sound without the roar and blat of traffic.
For these modern elements, I like to substitute the pleasant jangle of a harness, the creak of carriage wheels, and the whinny of live horsepower. Think how pretty the architecture downtown would be, how broad and tranquil the avenues! No trucks or minivans or cars; just wide swathes of green grass, brown dirt, and handsome white marble.
It’s a shamelessly edited fantasy, of course. I leave out the manure, and the flies, and in my daydreams it is never beastly hot or pouring with cold rain. I leave out the impossibility of ever popping out to the supermarket to buy delicacies for dinner at the last minute and the amount of homegrown boiled cabbage that would probably ensue. I gloss over more substantial things I’d miss, such as being able to visit my relatives in New England (not to mention to ski there), and the ability to get to a hospital at the double-quick if I need to.
There is a good reason that American culture became an automotive culture; cars do bring self-directed freedom of mobility.
Still, it’s hard to relish the wretched things when you’re sealed into one on a beautiful sunny day, nowhere near any grand architecture, and the mobility that you’re achieving is roughly the speed of a walker — that is, the speed not of a person walking, but of a person walking with a walker. That’s how desperately slow it can be, as my fellow sufferers will testify. 95, 395, 495 and 66 are, on a bad day, the real numbers of the beast.
Those traffic-clogged times are when the reverie comes on strongest. Gazing out at the remorseless blacktop I imagine the cars vaporizing (without injuring anyone) and their occupants blinking in the sunshine and slowly waking to the natural landscape around them. The landscape is natural because the highways have also disappeared, of course (see swathes, green).
Because I am a historical romantic and get to imagine things as I would like them, something else happens. At the moment our cars vanish, we are all miraculously reclad in 17th century attire.
Suddenly I am no longer dressed for the gym in sneakers and yoga pants but am nipped into a handsome velvet riding habit. Those teenage girls on the side of the road, sloping along in tube tops and flip-flops? Presto: Now they’re swishing in pretty calico. And that fellow with the stained singlet and backward baseball cap? He’s looking down in surprise at a smart pair of breeches.
It’s almost summer and I’m stuck in traffic. But I can dream, can’t I?
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@ washingtonexaminer.com.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
