There used to be a lot of roads like the one above around here, but they are getting pretty scarce.  In fact, the road you’re looking at is not very long and it connects two paved roads.  It’s kind of a short cut with one good size farm and a couple of houses in the middle of it.  I was looking over the survey description of our property recently and I noticed that the road in front of us was a dirt road when the survey was done in 1979.  It’s was paved sometime since then.  

    Paved roads are pretty nice for riding bicycles and I have read that the first roads to be paved in the United States were around Chicago and that it was the American Wheelmen who petitioned to have them paved so they would be more suitable for bicycle riding.  I think it is safe to say that since then, we’ve been paving roads for other kinds of vehicles: SUVs and pick-ups most recently.  I heard on the news while I was washing the dinner dishes that SUVs, pick-up trucks, and mini vans made up 53% of the vehicles sold in the US last year.  I can’t for the life of me figure out why more than half of us think we need trucks.  I’ve needed a truck so infrequently that I’ve always borrowed or rented one when I did.  What I saved in gas money could have rented a lot more trucks than I ever thought of needing and I didn’t have to drive one every day in the mean time.

    The other day, President Bush was talking about this and that and he said he would veto an energy bill that congress might send to him because it would cut some of the tax breaks that the oil companies get.  Instead of giving the tax breaks to the oil companies, the new legislation would give the breaks to companies that are working on renewable sources of energy.  Mr. Bush said we can’t do that now because the oil companies need to be out finding more oil.  How come we think all the oil belongs to our generation?  How come we think all the minerals do too, and the most spectacular building sites, and all the best trees?  What about the people who will come along behind us?  Aren’t they entitled to anything other than our debts?

    Getting back to paving, we belong to a rural electric cooperative and they send us a magazine every month.  It’s a pretty good magazine.  They aren’t trying to drum up customers for their electricity.  Rather, they would like all of us to figure out ways to use less of it because being a cooperative, the electric “company” is ours.  Anyway, last month they had an article about pavement.  In it they asserted that 10% of the United States is paved or covered by buildings.  Now I’ve crisscrossed the US and I find that number hard to swallow, but I do see that too much of it is paved.  We were in Greensboro last week.  What a mess of big, crowded streets and parking lots.  And today, we had to go into Asheboro to get a bottle of acetylene.  We stopped in at the hospital to see a friend of ours and when we came out, I was impressed by the preponderance of motor vehicles.  They are obviously the chief benefactors of the design of the downtown area.  I wonder how it got to be this way.

    Sometimes you see pictures of life in India and you notice  that the sacred cows seem a little out of place in urban areas.  I don’t know the whole story about those cows, but I do understand that while some people starve, the cows are taken care of.  In our culture, it seems that we do an awful lot for our automobiles.  I often think of garages as shrines were we keep our deities, the motor vehicles.  And it is clear that in the design for our cities and towns it is the motor vehicle we are most interested in accommodating.  

    Riding through tiny little towns, I’ll come to an intersection where a little used road crosses a sometimes used road and there will be a stop light -- it’s probably a big deal for a town of 150 to have a stop light.  The light will be set to trip when a car or truck stops over its trigger.  Bicycles seldom trip these lights and there is no accommodation made for pedestrians at all.  It’s as if no one ever considered that a person might want to walk across the street to the hardware store after having a cup of coffee at the cafe, but everyone thought they’d better get a light put in so that a car can get through the intersection without having to wait too long for a break in traffic.  How did motor vehicles acquire a higher status than people?  I suspect it has something to do with the economy and the consumption that fuels it.    

    I recently heard a discussion about nuclear power on the radio.  The host of the conversation explained that by 2050 there will be 500 million Americans and that we are going to need a lot more electricity.  The panel of discussers set about explaining that even though waste is a concern, nuclear power is what we need.  Then one of the panelists objected and opined that by conservation and efficiency, 500 million future Americans might well need less electricity than 300 million of us do today.   There was the briefest pause in the conversation and then it went on about nuclear power as if the one panelist had not spoken at all.

    Conservation is not a popular idea in our culture.  Heck, we’re facing a recession and the way out of that is to borrow money and spend it on more stuff like SUVs and big houses and roads, parking lots, and bridges.  I hear some of the presidential candidates talk about greenhouse gases.  It’s all lip service.  Just look at the size of the houses we build or the size of the vehicles we drive or the amount of ground we pave.  No one is really concerned about green house gases.  It’s even considered green to support the idea of putting more land under cultivation so that we can make gas out of food.  What did that mean French lady say about her starving subjects a long time ago, “Let them eat cake?”  Not today, flour is going to be too expensive to waste on cake soon.  We’ll want it for gas.

    Well, I was encouraged to hear that the president isn’t aware that gas is headed toward $4 a gallon.  Maybe it will sneak up on all of us and before we know it, it will become too dear to waste.  Then we can put our paved roads to the use that the American Wheelmen envisioned for them: for riding bicycles on.  And maybe we’ll be able to keep some of the few dirt roads that are left.  They’ll be a kind of cheap nostalgia.