"Driving in Southern California" Soti Triantafyllou.

 

From Los Angeles: Driving in Southern California, by Soti Triantafyllou. Patakis Publishers. Athens, 2024. Translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.

What do I mean by "people like me"? I don't know. Perhaps those who were born around 1957 and grew up dancing to rock'n'roll and driving cars up and down and all over. And who, although they tried to understand ontology, threw themselves passionately into road-ology.

 ~

I have an irrepressible inclination to flight; wanderlust; like the ramblers of the 17th and 18th centuries, but on wheels. The ephemerality of changing locations gives me a feeling of exquisite freedom; anonymity; limbo; I never had a goal or a destination. Perhaps it had to do with the manifestation of a primal instinct, of the nomadic hunter-gatherer — I have no idea. Later, little by little, I began to become aware about the emission of carbon dioxide and about my monstrous imprint on the planet: was I, I wondered, taking a greater toll on the environment than other people did?

My prolonged stay in the American heartland contributed to this realisation: even though I was forever complaining about American wastefulness, the fact that I overused enormous SUVs for short trips and minor errands made me feel guilty. Besides, on the American roads, the traffic is by now so dense that it is no longer a question of the "open road"; so, what's the point? To find the freedom and emotional release of speed I'd have to get away from the northern hemisphere.

Many people in the West today feel that a war has been declared against private vehicles — and this despite the fact that the economies of a number of countries depend, at least in part, on the automotive industry. Some, mainly Americans, marshal their libertarian spirit and accuse "big government" and bureaucracy for the multitude of regulations and prohibitions that make driving slow, boring and excessively costly. In their eyes it appears to be yet another conspiracy: mainstream politics makes private vehicles "impossible" in order to force everyone to get packed onto busses. But the war on cars doesn't play out this way: mainly, it's the cities that lead in measures restricting the use of private vehicles as an answer to traffic congestion and pollution. There are indeed taxes, restrictions and prohibitions, speed limits and strict parking rules: the vision of the 21st century city is car-free. That said, for the time being, it’s limited to Europe and is very slowly disseminating to the rest of the world: the car-free trend did not arise in America, where most trends are born.  

Although I agree that car-free cities are a natural consequence of the situation on this planet, I am admittedly heartsore that road trips now seem to be a thing of the past. I concede that the mythical road trip can end up in a big bottleneck or that the magic might be lost when you’re forced to drive at 80 kilometres an hour; nevertheless, there is something in me, something that makes me spring from my desk chair and alight again and again behind a wheel. The roar of the engine, the sound of the tires, even the sound of the wipers affirm for me that I’ve landed in the right place; in a moving system that I control – even if, as Mario Andretti said, when you maintain complete control it means that you’re not going fast enough.

Here's another AL post on Europeans and road trips. And photographer Jarrod McCabe's winter Massachusetts-to-Montana trip in a 1971 F-250. AL driving Banff to Big Bend in a 1951 Chevrolet grainer. Evan Ryan's desert road trip. And--Banff to Texas again–"what does a cowboy have for breakfast?"