Ask a Car Critic

Dear Car Critic,

Why do so many modern cars, not just sports cars but sedans and even station wagons, have low-profile tires like you’d see on a racecar? I rode in my kid’s Honda Accord and the ride was so harsh! What’s the point?

Chuck M, San Diego, CA

Dear Chuck,

I can offer you a simple answer and a more complicated answer. The simple answer is: people think low-profile tires look cool. The more complicated answer is: in accordance with mimetic theory, people want to buy the products that would be used by the ideal human whom they admire and wish they could be. They can’t afford the Aston Martin DB10 that James Bond has, but at least they can at least have a car with similarly sporty tires.

Not satisfied with my own hunch on this, I asked a tire guy. (I was at his shop after blowing out my second low-profile tire in under three years.) He said the same thing: low-profile tires look cool and that’s more important to people than having a smooth, quiet ride and not having to worry about big potholes (like the one that destroyed my first low-profile tire).

All this being said, there is a safety benefit to these tires. Because they’re wider they have more contact with the road, which improves traction, and the shorter sidewall means they squirm less under hard cornering. Granted, these characteristics generally benefit a driver who’s going too fast to begin with, but they can help in an emergency situation. (For example, I was driving on an interstate highway when a UPS truck came right into my lane. My extremely sudden swerve into the next lane might not have gone so well with traditional tires.) One other safety benefit is that the larger wheel rim can support bigger brake discs, which (if your car has them) enable faster stopping.

Dear Car Critic,

What is it with drink holders? Can’t people drive across town without their fricking Big Gulp? Cars never used to have these … what changed?

Sandra S, Spokane, WA

Dear Sandra,

While I am appalled by America’s evident addiction to soft drinks, I do find drink holders totally appropriate for road trips. Coffee is a must for very long drives, and I wouldn’t want to hold it in my lap. It would also be hypocritical of me to badmouth drink holders, because I’ve had them on all my bicycles since 1978 (though of course we call those “water bottle cages”). But drink holders on shopping carts … that’s just silly.

Dear Car Critic,

It’s time for a new car and my husband wants an SUV. I’m concerned about the gas mileage and frankly the sheer size of these vehicles, but my husband keeps emphasizing the safety aspect. We have two kids so he may have me over a barrel there—but I thought I’d check with you. Thoughts?

Emily W, San Antonio, TX

Dear Emily,

Of course there are good reasons to buy an SUV (e.g., you ski every weekend, or you’re a tradesman in a snowy, mountainous place and need to haul your tools around, or you have a fragile male ego that needs to be coddled), but safety isn’t among them. It is an absolute myth that SUVs are safer.

I used to work in risk management, and we evaluated risk along two axes: severity and likelihood. It may be true that an SUV protects its passenger effectively in an accident, but it’s also true that SUVs are more accident-prone. The reasons are threefold: 1) higher rollover risk, 2) greater weight leading to slower stopping; 3) overconfidence on the part of the driver. There was an excellent article about this, by Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker twenty years ago; you can read the abstract here and the full article here. As Gladwell put it, “The benefits of being nimble—of being in an automobile that’s capable of staying out of trouble—are in many cases greater than the benefits of being big.” He cited data on deaths per million vehicles, as provided by a study conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in conjunction with the University of Michigan, showing that, at that time, SUV drivers had far higher rates of death than drivers of small and even compact cars.

That data being rather old, and Gladwell being perhaps less than 100% reliable, I have researched more modern statistics about car safety. My first stop, the ratings website managed by the National Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was not very helpful. I looked up the safety ratings for a variety of SUVs and they were all five-star, which might help explain why SUVs have a reputation for being safe. But then I started plugging in other vehicles at random, and they all got five stars as well. I tried my own car, my family members’ cars, my neighbors’ cars—everything was five stars. (It’s like the useless rating of all maple syrup in America: it’s all Grade A, whether it’s the tasty golden stuff that rises to the top or the murky brown stuff at the bottom.) Everyone gets a ribbon! What a joke. I think for the most part the NHTSA focuses on crash test dummy results, not the likelihood of an accident. The only difference I saw between the Ford Expedition and my car is that my car gets five stars across the board whereas the Expedition gets only three to four stars (depending on year) for rollover rating. (The only vehicle I could find with fewer than five stars was the four-star MINI Cooper, about which the NHTSA cautioned, “During the side impact test, the interior door panel struck the torso of the rear passenger dummy, causing a high lower spine acceleration.” To which I respond, who rides in the back of a MINI Cooper, besides your annoying baby brother who probably deserves a good spine acceleration?)

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an independent, nonprofit organization, is more helpful as it publishes modern data on deaths per million vehicles. It covers a decent variety (though alas, it’s not comprehensive). As of 2020, the Ford Fusion averaged 25 deaths per million and small cars in general averaged 54; the Ford Explorer had 22 deaths with midsize SUVs averaging 27. My first takeaway is that SUVs have gotten a lot safer in the last 20 years. That said, my second takeaway is that SUVs are not safer across the board. If you really want a safe vehicle, don’t assume SUVs are the way forward; simply peruse the IIHS website and find some individual vehicles with good numbers (and/or look up the car you already had your eye on). For example, the Subaru Outback shows just 6 deaths per million vehicles per year, while that Jeep Grand Cherokee you might assume would be safe has a whopping 103 deaths per million. (My own car, a basic station wagon, which I assumed would be safe because it’s a Volvo, isn’t listed on the site, but the 4WD version of it boasts just 5 deaths per million.) Suffice to say, limiting your new car selection to SUVs on the basis of safety doesn't make much sense.

Dear Car Critic,

It feels like from a cultural perspective, there was a golden era of motor vehicles that’s now behind us. It was mainly a guy thing … it was just so much fun to sit around and gab away about cars, happy as clams. Where did this go?

Mark A, Grand Junction, CO

Dear Mark,

I hear you, and your letter makes me think of the classic Tom Waits monologue “The Pontiac.” Now, I can’t say for sure that men everywhere have stopped talking about cars (which would be like proving a negative), but I’ve witnessed this shift myself. I would say that historically, and thinking back to my dad’s generation, a big part of what men talked about when they talked about cars was how to fix them, which I think has become less of a DIY thing over the years, with the rising complexity of modern vehicles. My own car doesn’t even have a dipstick and I had to look on YouTube to figure out how to get the digital dashboard to show me the oil level. The cultural change is similar, perhaps, to how men used to talk about navigation at great length, comparing various routes you could take between point A and point B, and how that’s now been made obsolete by GPS. And then you’ve got the younger generation that increasingly doesn’t even drive (for example, my own daughters haven’t bothered to get their licenses). On top of it all, we have endless new entertainment options that take up a lot of people’s attention. So those are a few theories for you, anyway.

Dear Car Critic,

How do you get little animals out of your engine area when they go there to escape the cold? Man I dunno but I think car mammals are funny.

Amanda A, Portland, OR

Dear  Amanda,

I don’t know how seriously to take this question, but I totally agree car mammals are funny. Case in point: a friend of mine finished grad school  and bought his first proper, non-beater, grownup car, a nice Audi sedan. Then he was called away to a postdoc in Sweden for a year, which consisted primarily of doing a lot of testing on lab rats, about which he felt kind of conflicted. Well, he came home to discover that a family of rats had taken up residence in his car and eaten all the upholstery and electrical wiring, costing him many thousands of dollars in repairs. He shrugged it off, chalking it up to karma.

Getting back to your question, it seems like if you could manage not to drive your car for a good while, especially during a cold snap, the animals would leave for warmer environments (though hopefully not the cabin of the car). Or, you could try sending in a very svelte, slinky cat.

Dear Car Critic,

Why are so many modern cars so ugly?

Bruce H, Brooklyn, NY

Dear Bruce,

I know, right? This bothers me a lot … I drive down the highway looking at all the cars around me, noting my reactions to each in turn: “Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, passable, ugly, kinda cool, ugly, ugly, ugly.” I suspect the problem is the endless need that the automotive industry has for novelty. As of 2020, the US automotive market size was almost $900 billion, meaning they’re able to get a whole lot of people to replace their perfectly good cars with newer ones. So, despite how expensive these things are, the industry treats them like fashion products—thus nobody is working really hard at creating timeless, classic designs. That’s my theory, anyway.

I did a little research for you, too. As described in this article, the car designer Frank Stephenson, who “reincarnated the MINI” and designed the (also cool looking) Ferrari F430, says “carmakers have this mindset that bold, shocking designs convey confidence in their brand and product” and “they assume that consumers will eventually catch up to their way of thinking.” Meanwhile, he complains, modern designers have “lost the appreciation for sketching on paper, and this contributes to the new, robotic, cold designs the industry is imposing on consumers.”

Of course, it’s also possible to complain that too many cars look too much alike, which kind of flies in the face of the “bold, shocking” claim. Maybe it’s both. Or may it’s just that, by and large, cars are lame.

Dear Car Critic,

Did Harry inherit more than William?

Wendy C, Granite Bay, CA

Dear Wendy,

I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong columnist. I know nothing about the royal family (and couldn’t care less).

Dear Car Critic,

What is a PZEV vehicle?

Robert M, Phoenix, AZ

Dear Robert,

It stands for “partial zero emissions vehicle,” which is linguistic blasphemy and a mathematical impossibility. On a less snotty note, this is the class of gas-powered motor vehicles that are the cleanest running.  As detailed here, PZEV vehicles have more sophisticated catalytic converters that turn nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide into less harmful gases, and fancy filters to keep unburned fuel vapors from escaping into the air. Now, if you’re trying to figure out of your own car is a PZEV, good luck with that. I went down that rabbit hole and was lucky to make it out alive (and no more informed than when I went in, alas).

Dear Car Critic,

I’m kind of torn when it comes to cars. On the one hand, I feel like I shouldn’t be swayed by “wow” features I’ll never use, like the cool little paddles alongside the steering wheel to shift gears. On the other hand, I want to own a car I will really love, even if it’s much fancier than I really need. Does that make me a hypocrite?

Lily A, Ashland, OR

Dear Lily,

I wouldn’t sweat the features that you don’t use. I mean, on the most fundamental level, most of us drive around with nobody in the rear passenger seats 90% of the time, but we wouldn’t want to switch to a two-seater. Meanwhile, most modern car tires (but not SUV tires!) could easily handle 100 mph safely even though almost nobody goes that fast (and none of us should). Most cars strike me as vastly over-engineered, but when we consider what’s at stake—literally life and death—perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. (Road traffic accidents, as documented by the CDC here, are a leading cause of death among people ages 1-54, second only to accidental poisoning, which includes overdoses.) I chose my car primarily because it’s safe, secondarily because it’s not ugly, and thirdly for its fuel economy, and although I adore the idea of its Geartronic shifting paddles, I never use mine, either. (I do wish my car were a stick shift.)

Hey Car Critic,

Why do you exist?

Ron M, Boston, MA

Dear Ron,

If I take your question literally, the answer is: because my parents wanted a girl, and my three older siblings all came out male. But I’m guessing that’s not what you’re asking. I’ll bet you’re chafing at the fact that, despite having no credible qualifications or education, I get to have my own column. That’s a harder question to answer, and you’d have to ask my publisher what he sees in me. My best guess is that it’s just because I’m dirt cheap. Meanwhile, though Ray Magliozzi’s “Car Talk” column is obviously far superior to mine, I have to say reading it sometimes makes me sad, as I think back to the radio show Ray no longer gets to do with his late brother Tom. Maybe people would rather read a hit-or-miss column from some rando who doesn’t even like cars.

A Car Critic is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a Car Critic,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Why Train Travel Is Better

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and subtle insinuations of mild sensuality.

Introduction

 Six years ago I blogged (here, here, and here) about my family’s trip on Amtrak from the Bay Area to Chicago.  Well, we’re at it again.  I’m typing away from the observation car as the train makes its way through the mountains east of Grand Junction, Colorado.  Our destination this time is Denver.

(As far as you know I posted this after the fact and/or we’re flying straight home from there so by the time you read this it will be too late to burglarize our home.  Or maybe not … maybe this is the beginning of a long vacation, in which case you’re welcome to try to steal our sentimentally valuable but commercially useless family heirlooms, though you’ll have to deal with our psychotic gun-nut house-sitter and his meth-fueled pit bull, who never knew his father.)

Having tackled the overall train travel experience in my previous posts, today I’m going to give you the top 10 reasons why train travel is the best way to go. 

Reason #1:  Train travel is novel

Train travel is novel.  Flying has become as routine as taking a bus, more so actually, as has driving, and both activities get old pretty quickly (unless you’re driving on a cool highway like US 50).  And on the train if you get tired of your coach seat or sleeper car berth, you can mosey on up to the observation deck, or down to the lounge, and at mealtime you get to sit in the dining car (and actually, the Amtrak food is pretty darn good).  At bedtime if you’re in a sleeper you fold down one bed from above and turn the seats into another bed, which is really fun for kids (I think this gave my younger daughter goose bumps the first time).

The train stops from time to time, in places more rustic and less bland than the convenience stores along an interstate.  You can step off the train for a little fresh air.

Reason #2:  Flashers

Also, if you take the California Zephyr route you’ll cruise along the Truckee and Colorado rivers, where there are lots of rafters, and your chances of being mooned or flashed are very high.  It’s a long-standing tradition, apparently, for young men to moon the train, or young women to pull up their shirts or bikini tops for the benefit of Amtrak sightseers.  When my brother took his kids on this train back in ’05 they were flashed by rafters, as was my wife in ’06 (while my head was, alas, turned the wrong way).  And while I was sitting here peering into my laptop just now, a rafter flashed the passengers to my right.  I’m so bummed to have missed that.  Serves me right for writing this instead of just gazing out the window and watching life go by.  I hope you’re happy.

Reason #3:  Better for the planet

Wikipedia reckons that “a train seems to be on average 20 times more efficient than automobile for transportation of passengers, if we consider energy spent per passenger-km.”  They base this on an assumption of the car getting 39 mpg, which is far better than most cars get, especially with a bunch of luggage and/or bikes fastened to the roof rack.  In contrast, Wikipedia estimates that a passenger train gets 468 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.

I’m not sure how Wikipedia gets their “20 times more efficient” figure because they don’t show their work.  My Volvo gets about 28 mpg on the highway, so with 4 passengers that’s 28*4 = 112 passenger-miles per gallon, which—compared to the train’s 468 passenger-miles/gallon—makes the train look only 4.2 times as efficient as a fully-loaded automobile.  I’m not going to ponder this disparity at length, because I’m more interested in comparing a train to a plane.

Wikipedia estimates that an Airbus 380 (the dumpy plane most of us tend to fly) gets 78 passenger-miles per gallon.  That means the train is 6 times more efficient (per passenger) than the plane. On top of that, the plane is polluting up in the atmosphere where the emissions do the most damage.  The so-called “climatic forcing” effect of jet aircraft means that although “per passenger a typical economy-class New York to Los Angeles round trip produces about 715 kg (1,574 lb) of CO2,” this is “equivalent to 1,917 kg (4,230 lb) of CO2.”  That is, the fact of the aircraft emissions being high in the atmosphere increases the environmental damage by a factor of 2.7.  So the train is actually about 16 times less bad for the environment than a plane.  In other words, for the environmental cost of one family vacation involving air travel, we could take 16 train trips of equal length.

If these numbers start to make your head swim or your eyes glaze over, here’s a more interesting way to express the efficiency of trains:  in 2007 a man dragged a 7-coach train weighing almost 300 tons along its track for more than 9 feet, using his teeth.  This is possible because the steel-on-steel interface between the train wheels and the track incurs so little friction.  (You think that guy could lift even a small single-engine aircraft off the ground with his teeth?)

A final environmental consideration:  the benefit of your choice doesn’t end with your train trip.  Amtrak pays freight train companies for the use of their tracks, so by supporting Amtrak you’re also supporting the railroad freight industry, which is far greener than long haul trucking.

Reason #4:  Can be cheaper

If you can tolerate coach class—where the seats are way bigger than an airplane’s, by the way, with far more legroom—Amtrak can be very inexpensive.  I’m sharing a table in this observation car with an lady who is traveling from Winnemucca, NV to some town just outside Chicago for under $280, round-trip.  The gal across the aisle is going from the Bay Area to Denver and the total tab, one-way, is $222 … which covers herself and her two kids.  (Full disclosure:  this was her original cost, but a couple days before her trip, Amtrak ran a special on the sleeper car so she upgraded for “not much money.”)

The sleeper car is generally a lot more expensive than coach, but I sprung for the sleeper car because this is our big vacation for the year.  It was worth paying extra just to be able to tell my kids, “We’re livin’ large as possible, posse unstoppable, style topical, vividly optical.”  I can’t make this boast with air travel because first class there is way too much money to even consider, and the seats are still smaller than even the coach seats on Amtrak.  (Each seat in the sleeper cabin is wide enough for two.)

Reason #5:  None of the airline bullshit!

I hate flying.  Going through the security check, and having to take off my shoes (even though the one guy who tried to smuggle explosives in his shoe got caught), and having to drink up or forfeit my water, and let some guy pat me down so closely I expect him to ask for my phone number afterward, and then having to take my bag over to some table where somebody runs a little cloth swab all over it to check for explosives—as if!—and then, once I’m finally on the plane, being deprived of legroom, food, even peanuts, and invariably being seated right above the wing with the jet engine shrieking in my ear, and having the baggage policy get ever stingier practically every time I fly, and being asked to pay—get this—$150 each way to bring my 17-pound bicycle on the plane … it’s all just such bullshit I can’t even describe it without the “-shit” part.  I tried to use “BS” but it just wasn’t enough.

On Amtrak, there is no security check.  None.  I mean, what are you going to do, hijack the train and make them take you to the Flagstaff, AZ station instead of Denver?  The Amtrak process is so simple:  you make your reservation, print out your single sheet of paper which serves as the boarding pass for your whole family, show up at the station 45 minutes in advance (no check-in required), and bring practically as many bags as you want, for free, and take them right to the train where you’ll have access to them the whole trip and never have to wait for them to come off the carousel.

And you know what?  If you’re not that organized, and you get a late start riding bikes to the station with your teenage daughter, and if Google Maps totally screws you by leading you not to the station but to a barren place across the tracks and more importantly across a giant fence from the station, so you have to spend an extra ten minutes racing around on surface streets, you can literally roll up with your bike less than 15 minutes before the train leaves.  At least, my daughter and I did, and incurred only a very mild, brief tongue-lashing at the ticket counter, where I paid $10 each to take our bikes on the train.  And the bikes, un-boxed (because Amtrak had run out of boxes), didn’t have to go through some system of conveyor belts like at an airport, which present some danger to the bikes, which danger the airlines—being dicks about this, like everything—accept no liability for.  I put the bikes on a luggage cart, and the conductor said they’d just be leaned on a wall and lashed down.  Simple.

Reason #6:  Less stressful than driving

Driving is a leading cause of accidental death.  Even if you’re the best driver ever, you’re sharing the road with drunks, and irresponsible young men who think driving fast is a game, and drivers who just plain suck.  And you have no control over the weather, which can turn your road trip into a nightmare.

With a train, you’re responsible for  getting yourself to the station and that’s about it.  Then you can read, sleep, look out the window, play a board game, blog, or take advantage of the seventh reason why trains are better.

Reason #7:  Friendly fellow passengers

It is technically possible to have a good conversation on an airplane with a fellow passenger, but highly unlikely.  First of all, your only opportunity is with the person in the next seat, vs. wandering around a train with the opportunity to chat up anybody who seems friendly.  Second, most air travelers are too angry, too tense, and/or (if they’re on business) too preoccupied to want to chat.  In my experience, everybody in the Amtrak observation car is there to soak up the view and relax.  I’ve conversed with several friendly passengers today.

Conversely, if you don’t feel like chatting, you don’t have to be rude to the person in the (assigned airline) seat next to you who keeps asking what you’re reading instead of letting you read.  On a train, you can just return to your seat, or into your sleeper car where you can close the curtain and/or door.

Now, if you’re sharing an automobile with your favorite people, of course you can chat with them, but only to a point.  If you’re the one driving, you shouldn’t get too caught up in the conversation or you’ll become that “distracted driver” that is such a menace to society.  (Once, at the end of a 6-hour drive, I missed the exit to my mom’s town because I was so caught up in reciting the poem “Kill My Landlord.”)  If you’re not driving, you need to take care to not distract the driver too much.  And you can’t have a good conversation with your kids because they’re too busy fighting in the backseat, and dispensing toilet paper out the window to make comets, and fussing, and squirming, and asking, “Are we there yet?”  On the train you can split them up, banish them to their sleeping room, or tell them to go pester the conductor about the ETA.

Reason #8:  Better scenery

The view from the tiny plastic airplane window is okay during takeoff and landing, but once you’re at cruising altitude you’re usually too far up to see much.  Occasionally the pilot will get on the PA and say, “Those of you on the right side of the aircraft can see the Grand Canyon down there … looks a little like a cracked lip.”  Often there’s cloud cover below the plane so you can’t see anything at all.

The view from an automobile is better, but you still don’t see as much.  Train tracks sometimes go through places that don’t have roads.  I’ve been looking out at the Colorado River and the gorge it winds through, and it’s pretty impressive.  The tracks go through less developed areas so the landscape is often especially impressive.

Right now the train is threading its way between Routt National Forest and Arapaho National Forest, near the towns of Kremmling, Heeny, and Sheephorn.  Have you heard of these places?  Of course not, and that’s the point.  (“I used to live in Kremmling,” a friendly fellow passenger just piped up, having perhaps read that over my shoulder.  “One saloon and one cabin.”)

Even familiar scenery can be completely changed by the unique vantage point of the train.  I’ve seen the Carquinez Bridge hundreds of times, but never from below, as I did yesterday.

There are even volunteer docents on some stretches, who will give you history about an area (such as the gold country or the gorge we’re going through now).  They don’t just drone on either; they’re pretty funny.  “Look at that white thing way up on the bank there—that’s a Suburban,” one just said.  “That’s a teenager’s driving lesson.”

You also get to see cooler animals via the train.  On this trip my family has seen antelope; prairie dogs; some strange animal we’re calling a desert badger; a jackrabbit; mule deer; and even a T-Rex scarfing baby Ewoks like they were croutons.  (I made that last bit up to see if you’re still awake.)  Some animals seem curious about the train whereas no living creature has any interest in cars (except certain humans).

On top of all this, you’re not going that fast on the train, so you get a better look at everything.  (And you still get where you’re going sooner than a car because the train doesn’t stop for the night.)

Reason #9:  Don’t have to look at people

There comes a time during a conventional voyage when you get so bored, you may be unable to resist looking at other people.  How often have you been on a 6-hour flight and you get so stir-crazy you decide to head over to the lavatory, even though you know there’ll be a line, and you stand there looking out over all the other bored, irritated people, packed in like cattle, and you just hate them all?  Or you’re so bored during a drive that you start to look at every driver you pass, and in every single case they’re looking back at you, and you’re both thinking, “What are you lookin’ it?!” and it’s just kind of creepy?

I guess if the answer to those (albeit rhetorical) questions is “No,” then you’re a better person than I am, and you can have your boring interstate highways and jam-packed airplanes.  For me, boredom just isn’t a problem on a train, and there’s so much to look at, and everybody looks better to me because, like them, I’m so much more cheerful.

Reason #10:  No deep vein thrombosis or perforated eardrums

Okay, I’ll concede that deep vein thrombosis isn’t exactly an epidemic.  It’s the rare person who, due to being too cramped and still for too long, suffers a blood clot that moves through his/her system and causes a pulmonary embolism.  But it can happen.  What if you got one and died on a plane or in your car?  Wouldn’t that be a rotten way to go?  (“He died as he lived … stuck in coach” or “He didn’t die alone … his car veered over several lanes and took out a school bus.”)

Meanwhile, train travel is easier on your ears.  The pressure changes on a train are very gradual.  As you cross the Continental Divide, you might notice the foil on a single-serving coffee creamer start to bulge, but you won’t feel much in your ears.  This train is at over 7,000 feet elevation right now and I’ve barely felt a thing.  Airplanes are different.  Cabin pressure is at cruising altitude is equivalent to 5,000 feet of elevation, and can decrease to zero in a matter of minutes when you land.  Once, I had a minor cold resulting in a clogged Eustachian tube, so when the plane descended I suffered a perforated eardrum.  This was absolutely excruciating and turned my ear into a geyser of blood and pus for several days, and required several follow-up visits with a doctor.

Bonus Reason:  Hand-to-hand combat

If you try to give somebody a real beat-down in the aisle of a passenger jet, you’ll probably get arrested when you land.  And an automobile is just too confined a space for a good fistfight—your elbows keep hitting things.  The sleeping cabin of a train, however, is private and spacious.  I could hear my daughters going at it from across the aisle.  They don’t pack a good punch, those girls, so neither was injured, but I think they had a good, satisfying tussle.

This was confirmed when I interviewed my daughters for this post.  Among the reasons my older daughter gave for preferring train travel was “Can finally fight it out with your sister once and for all.”  She even admitted that she was fantasizing a bit about being James Bond, who never boarded a train without having one final battle with this or that nemesis.  (And for the record, upon reading over my shoulder just now, she has assured me that she was pulling her punches and actually could have done serious damage.  Maybe on the way home?)

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Fiction - Before the Fall

Introduction

The assignment this week for the fiction writing class I’m taking was to start telling my life story in summary. (“Summary” here means the part of the story that gives the reader background about the characters, situation, etc. versus immersing the reader in a pivotal scene.) My classmates and I were told to do summary for awhile and then stop and move into a scene.

We were told this exercise could be autobiographical. Because I’m trying to learn to write fiction, I didn’t stick to the truth, nor to the facts, with this exercise. You should consider it purely fictional. (The resemblance of characters to actual people isn’t pure coincidence, I must confess.)

Before the Fall

I was late to my own birth, hitting the scene two weeks after my due date. The backdrop of my childhood was Boulder, Colorado. The seventies.

To outward appearances my family was a very close, happy one. Outward appearances were my dad’s specialty. For so many years my three brothers and I had no idea how miserable our parents’ marriage was. For Christmas one year my dad bought my mom this really posh stuffed bear called a Gund, which got him a lot of good press from his relatives. We all assumed that my mom loved the Gund, but learned later that she actually hated it for making her self-absorbed husband look caring and sensitive. If my brothers and I had only known, we could have offered to coat that bear in model airplane cement and torch it for her.

Mom was begrudgingly complicit in this illusion of a happy marriage. For example, she would let Dad kiss her hello when he got home from work. It was, I later realized, a grotesque parody of a kiss: a reluctant reaching outward of the two pairs of lips, as tentative as a young kid’s hand timidly reaching out to poke a sea urchin in a tide pool. A micro-kiss, with an absolute minimum of actual lip contact, lasting just long enough to make a little smacking sound. (See? Your parents are in love. They still kiss.)

My brothers and I fought a lot, but beneath it we respected one another. We kind of had to because we were all social outcasts. None of us got along with our classmates. Occasionally I’d encounter an older kid who knew one of my brothers and would say, “Ewww, you’re an Anderson?!” It was a stigma, but also a strange honor in some way—sort of an us-vs.-them deal.

The oldest brothers, Seth and Ryan, twins, were almost four years older than I, with Mick right in the middle. Mick and I hung out quite a bit but the others usually ignored us. The main thing that bonded the four us together was the shirking of household chores. I remember one day in particular when we killed a whole afternoon at this. Ryan was supposed to mow the lawn while the rest of us dug weeds. The lawn was half weeds and half dead. Our neighbors, the Gales, had this lush, perfect, Technicolor green lawn and the boundary between our properties was sharply delineated, like their grass was a different species, in its robust prime, while ours was disheveled and elderly and sick.

Ryan mowed one strip across the lawn, turned the lawnmower around, started back, and then ran over the cord, stopping the machine dead. (We must have been the only family in America with an electric lawnmower.) It would be weeks before Dad got around to replacing the extension cord, so Ryan was off the hook. He wheeled the dead mower back to the garage, strolled back out, and flopped on the lawn. I picked halfheartedly at a weed. We were paid three cents a weed to pull them, but the roots had to be intact. On a hot day like this, it just wasn’t worth it. I glanced over at Seth. He was lying on his back, pretending to drive a car. I watched his left foot expertly working the clutch as he went through the gears. He steered with his left hand and by the looks of it he was on a twisty mountain road. It would be two years before he was old enough to drive, but he appeared ready.

Mick was on his feet, looking across the lawn to the neighbor’s car. Mr. Gale’s son Craig was seventeen and had the coolest car—a late sixties Mustang Mach 1. It was not in good shape—if you looked closely you saw layers of flaking paint, dimpled like an orange peel, from amateur paint jobs, grey beneath orange beneath blue, and inside the upholstery was peeling like a banana—but the car had good bones. We all dreamed of getting a ride in it one day, but it wasn’t running. It just sat.

We all gave Mick our complete attention because we knew what he was thinking. He suddenly sprinted toward the car and just before he reached it he screamed, “Look out, George!” and made a terribly realistic sound effect of screeching brakes. Then next second the car had knocked him off his feet and he sprawled over the hood, bouncing twice before tumbling to the ground. Of course the car hadn’t really moved, but the illusion was uncanny: our eyes told us this kid had just been hit by a car. We ran around to the other side of the car to look at Mick sprawled on the asphalt. He was in bad shape: convulsions racked his broken body.

“Yeah, that was a good one, but I think you need to tone down the convulsions—they’re a little overdone,” Seth said. Mick got to his feet. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “But how was the rest of it?” He’d been practicing his stunt all summer and was still perfecting it. We made our way back to the lawn. I took my weed digger and winged it at the grass, hoping to impale the ground so the handle would stick up. I was Pepe, Steinbeck’s young hero, throwing a switchblade at a post for practice. I picked the digger back up and was about to try again when Mick took another run at the Mustang. This time, as he landed on the hood, the car horn came on, and stayed on. FRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA…. Gave us the willies.

After a few brutal minutes of vainly hoping the horn would shut off, we went and knocked on the Gales’ door. Mr. Gale answered. He was wearing a white tank top and looked like he’d just woken up. He tried to be grumpy about the car horn but couldn’t help laughing. We all must have looked stricken. He went over to the car, opened the driver’s side door, popped the hood, then came around to the front and disconnected the battery. The horn stopped. Mr. Gale asked what made it turn on and Seth and Ryan immediately ratted Mick out. That was the end of his being hit by the Mustang.

That was one of a great many useless, idle, indolent days we brothers spent that summer. The best part was that we had no idea that our basically happy family was about to be ruined. Had we known, we’d have tried to make the best of our time together, which just would have felt strained. We really didn’t know what we were about to lose until we lost it.

The end began in my mom’s car, a Volkswagen Dasher, coming back from swim practice. Ryan was riding shotgun—seating was by birth order and he was twenty minutes older than Seth—and I was in the back middle seat because I was smallest. Mom said, trying to sound casual, “What would you boys think if I told you I was thinking of divorcing your father?” A chorus: “No, Mom, don’t do it!” But it wasn’t a real inquiry—her mind was already made up.

A week before Labor Day my mom bought a condo and moved into it. Condos back then seemed a sudden, novel phenomenon and vaguely subversive, only in part because the first time I came across the term, it was on a giant “CONDOMINIUMS FOR SALE” banner that college kids had folded over itself so it read “CONDOMS FOR SALE.” Our parents, who both worked full time and had historically not paid a huge amount of attention to us kids, each began a campaign to win us over and turn us against the other parent. The ultimate prize? Custody.

So it was that on one of the last evenings of summer, Dad took Seth and Ryan to the new James Bond movie while Mom took Mick and me to Baskin-Robbins. Today’s jaded kids might not think such outings would be a big deal, but to us it was an amazing show of largesse. It was a hot day and Baskin-Robbins was completely mobbed. The line snaked out the door and across the strip mall all the way to La Paz Fine Mexican Dining. Customers sprawled across the lawn out front. When my mom realized how long we’d be waiting, she went off to go shopping. “Just meet me out front here,” she said.

Everybody gets ice cream. Out front were little kids wearing t-shirts with big iron-ons (“Star Wars,” etc.) and there were older guys who were shirtless and bronzed. Many of them had on those super-short running shorts with the piping down the side. Boys had taken off their shoes and tube socks, girls had kicked off their sandals. A teenage guy said to his girl, “God … my arms are so damn tan.” Inside, I tried to take a number from the little pink dispenser and pulled out two feet of spooled paper tickets. Mick helped me stuff it all back in there.

We didn’t mind the wait because soon enough, after the ice cream outing, after a few more days of purgatory, a few more bribes, we’d be expected to tell our parents which one we’d decided to live with. We hadn’t heard of joint custody and our parents evidently never considered it. Instead they went for the King Solomon approach, splitting the family right down the middle, with the kids working out who would go where. It was a no-win scenario and we sought to forestall it as long as possible.

Baskin-Robbins had never before seemed like such a grim place. Suddenly I was down on everything. Their “Thirty-One-Derful Flavors!” slogan struck me as really dippy. The flavor name “Here Comes the Fudge” was annoying because though I somehow knew it was a play on “Here Comes the Judge,” this cultural reference was just another that had passed me by. That French Vanilla “costs a bit more, but it’s worth it!” seemed a cynical marketing gimmick. The staff seemed bored, and then irritated at how many taste spoons I asked for. Was it my fault nothing tasted good enough?

A radio was playing and the guy next to me at the counter, a young adult, was lip-synching to the music: “I guess it’s just the woman in you that brings out the man in me.” Like that’s a good thing. As the guy reached for his ice cream cone, I noticed his bracelet. It was engraved: “DAMN I’M GOOD.” Is that how it works? You just declare how great you are? Is that why my family was collapsing—because we got tired of holding each other back with our humble, cozy complacence? Was dead-weight Dad the only obstacle to Mom becoming damn good, or getting a man who was?

Mick and I left with our cones and then they were gone in minutes and we had nothing to do but stand among the throngs outside and wait for Mom. Once she got going on errands there was no stopping her. When she finally arrived, we heard her car before we even saw it. Its engine made a distinctive rattling sound because it was a diesel. (Of course we had the only diesel station wagon in America.) Mom was driving through the parking lot at like one mile per hour because there were so many people everywhere.

And all at once, Mick saw his opening. It must have been a thrilling moment of insight, like when Watson and Crick first deduced the double helix. It was a moment of mental brilliance, and yet Mick acted on pure instinct. He raced through the crowd, bounded down off the curb, and let out a perfect brakescreech. Then—BAM!—he was bouncing over the hood of Mom’s car, which made a great noise as it caved in and then sprang back into shape. He’d left out the “Lookout, George!”—he’d finally realized, just in time for his big moment, that it was the least realistic part of the stunt. He also skipped the convulsions—when I raced around the front of the car to look at him, he was deathly still, lying on the road in a fetal position. As many times as I’d seen this stunt, I couldn’t be completely sure he hadn’t been hit. If the action had stopped here, half a dozen witnesses would have said, “I saw the whole thing! That crazy bitch must’ve been going thirty miles an hour!”

But it didn’t stop there. As people crowded around the accident scene trying to figure out what to do, Mom suddenly opened her door and jumped out. She was furious. “Get up!” she screamed. “Get up off the ground, you brat!” More amazing still, Mick rose from the dead, jumped to his feet, and the two of us got in the car. As Mom drove, cursing, from the scene, Mick and I were laughing so hard it didn’t even make any noise. We couldn’t get enough air and tears were streaming down our cheeks. It was the pinnacle of the summer and of our childhood. Our last hurrah.

From there, things unraveled predictably enough. Mick and I moved into the condo until he and Mom couldn’t stand each other anymore, and then he drifted away and began living in a total dive with a bunch of deadbeat teens, filling his days with weed and the like. I got hooked on something far worse: TV. It started out socially, watching David Letterman with friends, but it got worse over the years to the point that I ended up taping shows like “Simon and Simon” and “Remington Steele” and watching them during the day, when other kids my age were in class. I missed my brothers terribly.

Over the decades, my brothers and I eventually made good. After passing the GED, Mick took fifteen years putting himself through college, took a degree in electrical engineering, and although he’s not rich yet, he was just granted the patent for mRFIDs, microscopic radio chips that fit not just in your wallet but on your earrings or car keys. (So long as your personal effects are within a quarter mile of your smartphone, you’ll never lose them again.) Ryan has created the ingeniously compact encryption algorithm that can run on a chip that small. Seth now lives in the Netherlands where he’s a soap opera star. I’ve got a lucrative real estate job that I could do in my sleep, and usually do, as I bide by time: when Mick is a billionaire, I’ll write his authorized biography, or maybe his unauthorized biography. Maybe both. Whatever else we Andersons accomplish and enjoy, though, I doubt I’ll ever recapture that pure joy of carelessly pissing away a perfect summer day on a half-dead lawn in Boulder.

dana albert blog

Train Trip - Part Two

NOTE: this post is rated PG-13 for an instance of mild strong language.

Introduction

If you feel you need an introduction, perhaps you haven’t read my previous post, “Train Trip – Part 1.” Or perhaps you don’t need this introduction at all, and yet here it is, like that weird snub-nosed hair dryer provided in a hotel room, or those gross individually-wrapped toothpaste-flavored candies in the glass bowl at an otherwise great restaurant. (This introduction exists for the sake of form; I try for a certain consistency with these posts, having not yet read enough Donald Barthelme to develop better habits.) Suffice to say I’m in a huge rush, writing a bit here in the observation lounge before the rest of the family wakes up. Thus, there may not be any structure to this post, and it may run a bit long. The Times regrets—no, wait, the Times breathes a huge sigh of relief—that it isn’t paying me by the word, nor, in fact, at all.

Train architecture

I’m in the observation lounge, looking out the huge window at, uh, Kansas I think. It’s easy to get disoriented when you wake up on a train that’s been cruising along at 70 mph all night. To my left is the bar. So far on this trip there has been no activity at the bar: no drinks served, no bartender, no booze inventory. Just a little sink and the kind of faucet where you push the glass against a half-ring, and two small fridges built into the cabinetry. I picture a time, back when Americans drank cocktails, when this bar would have been the nerve center of the entire observation car: guys with narrow neckties and short haircuts drinking highballs. You can still get beer on the train, but it’s downstairs in the cheerless little snack bar among the Doritos and refrigerated box sandwiches. (Of course, this car is gorgeous, and has no need for a two-drink minimum.)

I’ve often filled our water bottles here at this abandoned bar, reaching over its low partition, feeling vaguely subversive. If anybody gives me a hard time about this it’ll be the Scoutmaster to my right, who is presiding over six or eight Boy Scouts on this train. The other day this Scoutmaster scowled at me hard for no apparent reason, though I’ve decided the scowl might just be his natural expression. He doesn’t look happy at all, though perhaps I wouldn’t be either if I had to wear a full Boy Scout uniform in public throughout my vacation.

Anyhow, yesterday evening I saw somebody manning the bar for the first time, but it was a college-age girl, standing behind the partition working on her laptop PC. I couldn’t figure out why she chose that area, having to stand and risking the wrath of the Scoutmaster, when there were seats available. (She wasn’t serving drinks, needless to say.) This morning the mystery is solved: she was there for the electrical outlet. This train, though it looks a lot like the one we took east toward Chicago, is evidently a bit older and doesn’t have electrical jacks running along the walls. The other one had plenty of them (each labeled “120 Volts” since probably half the passengers on these trains are foreigners). The only electrical outlet in the whole car is that one at the bar. I’ve got my laptop cord snaked through there and hope to have my battery back to 100% before the Scoutmaster notices.

Situation room

Downstairs from the observation lounge is the snack bar and a restroom that mainly serves the coach passengers. This restroom is certainly harder-used than the ones in the sleeper cars. We only use it when the kids need a restroom during our meal, as it’s quicker to get here via the observation lounge than to go back through the sleeper cars. During one meal I stood outside the restroom, chaperoning Alexa, when another passenger (ball cap, sleeveless t-shirt, slack jaw, paunch) went right by me toward it. It didn’t occur to him that I was in line. I guess he thought I just preferred standing over sitting, and preferred restroom-perfumed air to fresh. I said, “Hey, dumbass, you think I’m just standing here for my health?”

No, of course I didn’t really say that. I said, “There’s someone in there.” He replied, “Both of ‘em?” and continued down the short dead-end hallway. There is of course only one restroom there. I replied, “Oh, I didn’t know there was a second one.” When the guy discovered there was only one restroom, he said, “Oh, my goodness, right you are! I’ll line up behind you like any reasonable person.” No, of course he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything: he just tried the latch on the one restroom, where Alexa was. I guess he figured I was lying about the restroom being occupied, or was somehow mistaken, or perhaps he thought that tiny door would miraculously open out into a giant multi-stall men’s room. Alexa called out, “Excuse me, I’m in here.” The guy came back out past me, mouth-breathing, his brain unable (through overexertion or sheer paralysis) to contrive a facial expression. This is the beauty of a train: aren’t you glad this idiot isn’t on the highway instead, buzzing along at 80 in his Ford Expedition, changing lanes without checking his blind spot?

Off the train

Last Thursday we got off the train in Chicago. It had been a great three days but the kids were starting to become unstable, in the way that a nuclear reactor sometimes does. Their roughhousing was becoming more violent and unstructured, approaching that of two little boys (which of course I have no stomach for). My attempts to calm my daughters down were failing. I put a stack of pillows between them; these became weapons. I felt my authority slipping away: the kids would desist for only moments before gradually going at each other again. If Joan Didion had been trapped in our little sleeping car, she’d have said, “The center cannot hold, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

The train was only about four hours late, which wasn’t bad at all over such a long distance, with a freight train derailment along the line. (Amtrak pays the freight companies to use their tracks.) Our checked bag, however, took another forty-five minutes to reach us. It’s hard to know, in a train station you’ve never set foot in, that you’re in the right place, that there isn’t an evil twin baggage claim area that actually has your stuff. There were no announcements of any kind concerning any of this, and when I asked somebody in an Amtrak uniform what was up, he said, “Oh, it’s on the way. They had to wake up baggage.”

We spent the night in Chicago (our hotel, which we’d paid for in advance, was overbooked and they sent us down to a “sister property” and refunded our money!) and we spent the next morning recombobulating ourselves. Then we had lunch at an Italian place called Volare. Glorious! Look at this pappardelle alla Bolognese I had:

As I cropped the photo just now, this big black woman passing behind me must have looked over my shoulder because she said, “Mm-mmm-mmh.” And she’s right.

It was hot and sunny and humid in Chicago. We found a little pocket park with a fountain. The kids were instructed not to get wet. They got drenched. Erin said, “I can’t believe they got wet!” I replied, “I can’t believe you can’t believe they got wet!”

There’s a big park in Chicago next to the naval pier, and a nice stretch of beach. The kids wrestled on the grass for at least an hour. Instead of running all over Chicago (in the heat and humidity) and trying to tick off items on a metaphorical tourist’s checklist, we just spent the afternoon at this park relaxing.

Unreasonably close to the departure of our next train—which would take us a short distance up to Michigan to visit some friends—we suddenly became ambitious and headed to the John Hancock building. It’s not as tall as the Tower Formerly Known As Sears but has the best view in the city, according to our waiter at Volare. To be precise, he recommended the view from the women’s bathroom in the 96th floor lounge. The elevator made all our ears pop. Here’s the view Erin and the girls got to see:

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There is no window at all in the men’s room of the 96th floor lounge.

It was a bit tight making our train to Michigan. I have a vivid memory of my kids sprinting down the platform ahead of Erin and me, the train seething and groaning next to us.

Michigan was excellent. Among other attractions, there is a gorgeous beach near New Buffalo:

After a lovely few days with our friends we headed back to Chicago, where we locked up our luggage in the baggage claim room at the station. This took twenty-five minutes because it involved a fingerprint reader that wasn’t working. The attendant got it basically working and I managed to cram our carry-on bags in the locker. On the way to checking our last bag I realized I’d locked up our tickets with the carry-ons. I went back, released our baggage, checked out the locker again—only it assigned me a different one so I had to move everything—and then when we checked that last bag we finally learned the location of the mythic passenger lounge where they’ll hold your bags for free. (I’ll be making a voodoo doll of the person at the information desk who played dumb about this lounge and directed us to the lockers.) By now we’d wasted not only $12 but too much time to go up in the Tower Formerly Known As Sears. Here’s an exterior shot, anyway:

We still had time to head over to Giordano’s for real Chicago-style pizza. (Doubtless a local would contest the “real” label, since Giordano’s is a chain, but so is Uno, and we have no guide, so what could we do?) Regardless, it was tasty:

(Note, in that photo, how assiduously Lindsay is wiping salad dressing off her plate so as not to taint her pristine pizza.) In case you’re wondering how this ‘za compares to other offerings, it’s quite similar to Zachary’s in Berkeley, whereas Uno (the original one) is more similar to Little Star in San Francisco. Uno and Little Star are single-crust pies with a cornmeal crust. Giordano’s and Zach’s are double-crust pizzas. Overall, I found Giordano slightly inferior to Zach’s: the sauce isn’t as bright or zesty. (Uno outside of Chicago, meanwhile, is greasy in a Pizza Hut way, though I still like it a lot.)

We have many dozens of itchy souvenirs from Michigan: during movie night, outdoors near the swimming pool, we were absolutely feasted upon by mosquitoes, despite taking every precaution. We’d worn socks, shoes, long pants, long-sleeved shorts, bug spray that smelled like Thai food, and even these Lawrence of Arabia hats, provided by our hosts, that covered our necks—but all to no avail. I slaughtered a good many mosquitoes, but clearly not enough. My entire back is a night sky of welts—you could make out any number of constellations. At least the bites are small (perhaps due to the allergy shots I get?) compared to that of our host, whose back was a raised topographical map of mountainous welts. Erin got it really bad, too, on her legs: evidently those insect bastards could bite right through her pants. Alexa has one on her face and another on her neck, poor kid. Next time it’s jeans and a denim jacket, kitchen gloves, and rubber waders.

Scenery

During dinner the other night, we crossed over the Mississippi River. It was all but unmistakable given its vast size, but since the waitress was right there we asked her if it was indeed the Mississippi. She glanced out the window as if she’d never seen the river before, and said she really didn’t know. As she turned to head to the kitchen area, I said to Erin and the kids, “I did hear one guy say that this was the largest body of water west or east of the Mississippi.” The waitress turned back and said, “Is that right?” (This is what we in the amateur comedy industry refer to as “collateral damage.”)

Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa offer multiple—no, countless—no, almost continuous—opportunities to look at cornfields flying by.

If a Martian landed on this train and looked out the window for a few days, he would probably conclude that corn is the main thing we humans eat. And yet all these cornfields aren’t abounding with the sweet corn that humans can eat; it’s all for cattle. So the question is, where is all this cattle? In feed lots, of course, and though rolling by a feed lot or two would be educational for the kids, I’m just as glad they’re not on display here.

We also pass by fields of soy, though I somehow missed my opportunity to photograph them. At least the kids got to see them. In their bedroom at home is a U.S. map showing (via cartoonish drawings) the main industries and exports of each state. Northern California has a picture of a semiconductor, which my kids easily recognized. Around Iowa in the map is a little bag labeled “soy.” Soybeans are among our country’s largest exports but nobody knows what the plants look like. For the record, they’re darker green and lower than cornstalks, and leafier. Not as characteristic as the cornstalks—or is it just that they’re not as ubiquitous here?

This isn’t to say the scenery is boring. The rows of manicured crops create nice optical effects if you blur then focus your eyes. The abundance is kind of soothing. Meanwhile, I get to watch freight trains, which pass by regularly. The sheer range of vintages and styles of these trains never ceases to fascinate me. Watching them at stations is the best way: when they come by, you can feel the vibration in your feet and the wind coming off of them. They are serious industrial beasts. Best of all, when I'm traveling by train I don’t have to look at automobiles. In general, I hate cars. If you asked me to rate each car we saw as we drove along an American highway, I’d say, “Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, passable, ugly, ugly, hideous, ugly, ugly, okay, ugly, ugly, passable.” And there are too many lousy drivers on the road to give me complete peace on road trips. The train is really the better way to go.

Check back soon for Train Trip Part 3 – Dining Car Ewok Meatloaf Special!

dana albert blog