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Preparing to say farewell to the gas-guzzlers

JOHN DEMONT jdemont@herald.ca @Ch_coalblackhrt John Demont is a columnist for The Chronicle Herald.

Though I cannot remember my Netflix password without writing it on my hand, my recall of old movie scenes remains impeccable.

And so, Tuesday, I went looking online for clips from Mad Max 2: the Road Warrior, in which Mel Gibson travelled a parched postapocalyptic landscape in the quest for something to keep his held-together-by-ducttape-and-chicken-wire-jalopy going.

At the movie’s start the narrator, in sonorous tones, explains how it all went wrong:

“When the world was powered by the black fuel and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel – gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They’d built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped… Cities exploded – a whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.”

Thus far, I have managed to restrain my cannibalistic urges. Yet who can deny the way that the inexorable rise in fuel prices is turning our gasoline-centred world upside down.

In time, of course, the price of electric vehicles will drop, the public transit grid will stretch far and wide, and venturing into a bicycle lane will no longer depend upon the whims of the gods; that, for a variety of reasons, will be a good day for every one of us.

But that day is not here yet, and a $2 litre of gas is making even urban folks think twice about getting behind the wheel. It is also causing huge hardship in rural areas where the soaring cost of commuting to work, school, the doctor’s office, the hockey rink, and the grocery store, challenges the economic underpinnings of living in the countryside.

NOT A CAR GUY

Now I have owned precisely seven cars in my life, none of them new. My longest road trip has been between Ottawa and Cape Breton. I have never once had a job that required me to drive to work. I seldom get up, look out the window and say, “you know what I really want to do today is go put a few hundred clicks on the ole odometer.”

All of which means I have never been a real “car guy.” I do, though, concede that the gas-fuelled automobile has been as much a factor in my life as it has in yours.

Thus, when the age of the gas-guzzler ends, a day which has surely been hastened by Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, a chapter closes for me that began crawling around seat-beltless in the back of a tail-finned car, filled with smoke from mom’s Belvedere filter tips, as our dad arrowed the car to the Fairview A & W, or towards the Canso Causeway on summer vacation.

My first paycheque — delivering this newspaper, which I did at an earlier age, got you cold, hard cash — came from a service station, near the corner of Quinpool and Robie, now just a hole in the ground.

I was a bad hire, even though I liked the blue coveralls which I rightly or wrongly recall sported a white badge with “John” embroidered in cursive.

ON THE ROAD

The first time I tried to check someone’s oil was the first time I had ever peered under the hood of a car. At the end of shift, my cash barely balanced. Between cars I sat down beside the pumps, ensuring that my first real summer job was also the first job from which I was fired.

I was nearly old enough to vote the first time I got behind the wheel, although whether it was in an empty shopping centre parking lot under my dad’s tutelage, or in a car bearing the Queen Elizabeth High-sponsored Driver’s Ed logo, I really cannot say.

As you have guessed, I did not grow up in the country where a set of wheels opened the bigger world. Yet I did have a few city-bound friends with access to the family ride, and even a couple who drove cabs, so throughout high school I had all the traditional auto-related experiences: drive-in movies and late-night forays to artery-hardening fast-food joints; a few road-trips as epic as Odysseus’; the occasional lifethreatening adventure.

A lot of time, I recall, was just spent driving around aimlessly, stereo or eighttrack blaring Stevie Wonder, hammering 4/4 time on the dashboard.

Eventually, I grew up, married, and had kids. There was company, then, on the mundane trips required by day-to-day life, but also on the wide-open road, when we made for the Rocky Mountains, Drumheller Badlands, and Gatineau Hills, as we circled the Cabot Trail, while we circumvented Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula, and squeezed down Welsh roadways and sputtering along Scottish trunk roads.

A car, however it is fuelled, gets a person from A to B. Through the windshield you see the world unfold in real time. Behind the wheel, in the passenger’s seat or sitting in the back, the journey becomes as meaningful and memorable as the destination.

That, my friends, is how I remember it before you had to dip into the RSPS to fill up the gas tank.

No one was in a particular hurry. You could go wherever your inclination took you, back in the innocent pre-two-buck-a-litre days.

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2022-05-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

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