Susie Bright's Journal

Susie's Maiden Voyage in a ZipCar

"I'm as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken—"

Well, I'm not quite that drunk, because I have just stepped out from behind the wheel of my maiden voyage in a ZipCar.

The whole experience was so exhilarating, I'm already scheming for my next Zip-Date: I want a gleaming convertible in San Francisco, and I will not be deterred!

ZipCar is a "car-sharing" operation where you sign up for a membership and gain access to a fleet of autos parked all around your town—  or any town they operate in, for that matter.

Within minutes, days, or weeks notice, you reserve your date with whatever vehicle you choose, be it Tacoma Truck, Prius, or MiniCooper.

You show up at one of the Zippy parking spots with your magic membership card, and wave it like a wand in front of the windshield. It opens up and you drive away!

The car is new. You don't pay for gas, insurance, or anything to do with the car's upkeep. The parking spot is always waiting for you. There is no maddening car rental counter to suffer through; it's all DIY. You save beaucoup bucks by not operating your own vehicle, and obviously, your "carbon footprint" becomes much more dainty.

Okay, that's the Greenish explanation. But I am here to tell you of the psychological effect!

It all started when a certain unlicensed, uninsured someone, who shall remain nameless, totaled our old Toyota van in the driveway.

The Previa wasn't put into "Park" at the conclusion of its illegal journey— and so it drifted down the driveway, headless, until it was stopped by our gnarled orange tree rather than careening out into traffic. The door was badly bashed, and the cost of even minimal repairs exceeded the value of the car. We had to let her go.

Now here's the thing. Our home has a massive solar array— I could light up a small planet. If I had an electric car, I would just plug in the bastard and we would never pay for a drop of fuel again.

But those type of cars aren't going to be commercially available, at a price I can afford, for another year or two. I've never read the "Auto" section the news before in my life, but now I drop anything for updates on the Chevy Volt, the plugin Prius, or the VW Diesel-Hybrid. "Yoo Hoo, Mr. Auto Mogul, I am READY for you!"

We have one other car we share in our household. Much to our relief, relying on one pony has worked out pretty well. We all started biking more— a lot more. I can now pedal up the big hill to my house and daydream instead of crying and gasping for air. I lost weight. The plummet in our gas bill... well, you can imagine... was astounding. It was fun to drop the insurance and say adieu to all the crap of a second car.

How very noble and wholesome.

But every once in a while, we hit a snag. One of us has to go out of town for a few days, and it's tough to  leave the other one car-less. I live in a semi-rural town with abysmal public transportation. What else is new in America? There is no such thing, in my village, as hailing a cab. To get to a train to San Francisco, I have to take a bus that runs on what's politely called a "limited schedule." The 40-minute trip to the San Jose train station can take three hours.

Then I read in the local paper that ZipCar has an outpost in our town, thanks to a collaboration with the UC Santa Cruz. In fact, one of the things that sold me on the deal, is that if I reserve a local ZipCar, I can park in any of the 'A'-Lot spaces on campus, which is such a rare thrill that I feel like reserving a few Zip hours to park all over school and sneer at the meter maids who bankrupted me at this same campus when I was an undergrad.

You can reserve ZipCar dates over the phone, but the geeky thrills are on their Web site, or your mobile browser. You feel like you're shopping for shoes at Zappos. You tell it what time and day you want to begin your trip, and it shows how many, and which kind, of cars are available, with a map of locations. I checked a whole bunch of times, from "right this minute" to weeks in advance, and there was always a few choices close by. Always.

They charge you by the hour, which is an novel way to look at driving costs. Zip publishes numerous cost comparisons— as this is their main selling point— and you always come out ahead, way ahead, by sharing rather than shouldering the burden of single-owner maintenance.

Plus, no matter how many times the ZipCar flacks re-do their cost-savings examples, the price of gas goes up another dime by the time they post to their site. No wonder they're signing up new members like there's no tomorrow.

For my first reservation, I picked out the car by color— Tango Red!— and got all dressed up to go meet my beau.

It was a brand new car. A Honda Element. With roof racks. I'm going to put my canoe on it next time.

Do you know how often I drive new cars? Never. I called up some friends in the Valley who didn't know what I was babbling about. "Do you want me to pick you up in my NEW TANGO RED and go for a joy ride?" 

I got into the driver's seat and cackled at the full gas tank. There is even a gas credit card in the sun-visor, in case I go hog wild. I can fill up the tank at any service station on Zipcar's tab.

It was a little unfamiliar to check the mirrors and set the seat before I got underway. I'm so sheltered I've never even driven a Honda before. The most shocking aspect, truthfully, is that I couldn't trash the car and leave all my snot rags and coffee cups behind me. Cleaning out the vehicle before I tucked it back into its stable was the most mindful I've ever been in the auto-care department.

Yes, there are rules, lots of little Golden Auxiliaries. You cannot invite your big hairy mutt to share the front seat. You can't stay out late without telling anyone and screw the next driver out of their reservation. You can't smoke hash. I realize that any of these limitations could be the last straw!

But I am still in the Euphoria Stage. I love to look at the fleets in dozens of other cities, and imagine showing up in London, or Vancouver, and reserving my mount.

I walked home from my Zippy Parking Spot at the end of my three-hour tour. I live a few blocks away, a five minute walk, and I wondered if that aspect would exasperate me. But the walk home was actually delightful, part of the whole dating atmosphere. We stopped for chocolate cake at the Nickelodeon. The smell of jasmine and ginger flowers along Lincoln St. were especially fragrant.

I said, "I feel so smug, I think I might explode." I kicked a eucalyptus nut in my path and watched it bounce up ahead of me like a skipping stone. Ha! Life is good!

  Zipcar did not pay me to write this; although they should, after this tongue bath! But believe me, as I continue my grand car-sharing experiment, I will tell ALL, including any disillusionments or shocks. I'm sure you have a million questions, as I did, and their web site anticipates all of them, so go check it out. As a new member, they encourage me to hand out $25 driving credits to my friends, so please enjoy!

Big Sur Burn

The Central Coast is burning down— and no, I'm not kidding. The Santa Cruz Mountains, and the Ventana Wilderness, my community, have been ablaze with fires for the past few weeks. Big Sur has been on the edge of destruction since the weekend, and if you can read a satellite map, be prepared for a shock.

The air is orange and choking gray with smoke, the heat like an iron. In my neighborhood, 20 miles from from the nearest burn, there've been swarms of winged insects crowding the windows and doorways. You can drive past smoldering ruins and still-flaming burns down Highway 1. The lightning strikes over last Saturday ignited over 800 fires across the state of California, and most of them aren't reported in any daily newspaper.

Some of the local fires are arson; like the one in Bonny Doon. Another, the Trabing Fire, has been determined to be a car exhaust-pipe accident that closed down the entire interstate. Then we have the epidemic ignitions by lightning strikes, that get called  "acts of God"  because no one can digest an act of ecology. We wouldn't blink at this point if frogs started falling out of the sky.

You might've heard a bit about our "town" fire— but even more frightening, at this moment, is the destruction of  Big Sur, where many of my friends live, who've now been made homeless.

Many of you have visited the coastal oasis of Big Sur, the inspiration of Henry Miller, Jaime de Angulo, Edward Weston, Robinson Jeffers, Richard Brautigan, Esalen, Hunter Thompson— the muse-place of more 1960s inspirations than one can count.

Modern photography, psychotherapy as we know it, the Beat culture and all its literary influence, icons of California architecture-- this is where it was inspired. Big Sur has drawn mavericks and DIYers of every portal, including our beloved Bob Nash, who died just a month ago. I find myself sick with relief that Bob didn't see this; it's unbearable.

I can't tell you how this is going to end. Local residents and Forest Service people are going at it with their bare hands, bulldozing everything in sight to defend their homes. Everyone is primed to evacuate, if they haven't been already; all are displaced. Here's a tip from one veteran of previous fires:

If you know anyone who may be in the line of the fire, get your livestock trailers and trucks there right now.

Do not call them and ask if they need help, because by the time they need help it will be too late.

Even if they don't have pets and livestock, a livestock, horse, or utility trailer can haul just about anything.

If you are in the line of the fire and have not prepared for it, you may be too late— however, if you have cleared all the underbrush out 100 feet from your buildings, start working on the next 200 feet.

Close all windows and doors and seal up all vents into your house.

Fill all bath tubs, buckets, etc. with water.

Take down all window dressings.

If you stay, which I did and saved my house, be prepared to take shelter and let the fire burn over the top of you, then come out and put the fire out if you can.

We had folks we didn't even know stop and take all of our livestock. People can be really nice in times like this.

When the fire passes do not be surprised if it comes back and down the mountain at you again.

The wind will dictate all.

These areas are difficult to talk about in terms of fire defense, because the wilderness demands its own burn ecology to renew from time to time, and this locale has been way overdue— for decades. In the meantime, families have dug in; it's rural living and residents are maniacal about fire safety.

There's an extra edge to the smoke, that goes beyond the inevitable natural crises: Our country has, for some time, been unable to provide the infrastructure to deal with disasters.

I'm not just talking about for the hermit who's off the grid. Everyone in California is mindful of the terrible floods in the Mid-West, and that leads to the all-too-obvious reminders of Katrina. A bridge collapses in Minnesota, and everyone knows that bridge should have been repaired or replaced ages ago. I'm sure all of you could tell me about something in your area that is a public hazard, overdue for repair, a "disaster waiting to happen," and yet nothing happens 'cause there's "no money."

Meanwhile, we see the latest gas prices, and read about the exploding number of multi-millionaires— who still can't fucking pass through the eye of any needle— and you just want to explode.

Of course the government can't arrive at your side, like Superman, to scoop you up when the clouds of locusts arrive. But we know that many of the crises we're having today are because the roads ain't fixed, they laid off the rescue workers, the repairs went unfunded.

We have no tax base in our state to cope with our problems, and it's not because California isn't still golden with profits. The corporate taxes are so low here, it's beyond reckless. We have the worst-funded schools in the nation— dead last. Our parks are closing, the streets are buckling, there's three cops in town to work the night shift, and the firemen haven't had an hour off in a month. They need ten times the numbers they have to  cope with these fires.

People I know who work in public safety whisper to me about how shocked the public would be, if they only knew how undefended we really are. Well, it's pretty obvious, now. Anyone who wants to start a fire or rob a bank, just drop on by; our whole community is walking around with its pants down.

The individual acts of heroism in the past weeks, are, of course, inspiring. My friends in the thick of the smoke are relentless. They'll  be marked by this forever.

I lost everything in 1979 when my home burned down— all my diaries from when I was a girl, my family letters, all the books and photographs. The stench was with me for years— and I found that this weekend's events sent me sobbing back under a blanket, like a child.

I have a quote scrawled on an old Greyhound bus map from my burn year: "Suffering is the Fire that Burns Away Desire."  It reminds me that that the pain and burn are not only a metaphor, but sometimes one and the same. When you lose it all in a fire, you lose a lot of hope. You are afraid to hold onto anything, or want for something, because you never want to hurt like this again.

Photo Credit: View from Nepenthe webcam, Sunday night, and Partington Ridge on a clear day. Toby and Linda,  I LOVE YOU!

Support the Big Sur Volunteer Fire Brigade!

Beep, Beep! — A Little Food For Weekend Thought

La Frontera means the border, or the frontier, in Spanish. In our neighborhood, The "Club Frontera" used to be a bar with sawdust on the floor that catered to Mexican men. It was on lower Main Street in Watsonville, the heart of central-coastal California.

The Santa Cruz County line is a block away from Club Frontera at the Pajaro River. Monterey County is on the other side of the bridge. The river also divides Watsonville from its poorer sister, the unincorporated community of Pajaro.

The Club Frontera was closed down a couple of years ago, after years of notoriety. The Watsonville Police Department Headquarters is located on the far side of the club's parking lot, about a hundred yards away from the front door.

You can picture Captain Renault, from Casablanca, making the final raid: “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here, and prostitution, and heroin, and cocaine, and arms sales, and the fencing of stolen property!”

This story is by my friend Andy Griffin, the organic farmer whose brilliant newsletter about food, farming, ecology, and politics, is called the The Ladybug Letter.

 

On the other side of Club Frontera from the police station is El Pollero restaurant, a former drive-thru hamburger joint that now serves spit-roasted chicken. In Spanish El Pollero means “the chicken herder.” In street slang, a “pollero” is an ironic term for a smuggler who brings undocumented workers, or “pollo,” across the border— making the name of our chicken shack on lower Main a fowl-smelling pun.

Anyone walking down Main Street, seeing a Pollero next to a Frontera can hardly have any illusions about where our most important border is. It isn’t the dry riverbed that defines the county line. The real frontera lies eight hours to the south, and it divides our community everywhere we go.

But let’s change the channel from yesterday’s news and watch cartoons. Every Saturday morning at our house, Wile E. Coyote tries Acme-brand booby traps, Acme-brand dynamite, and Acme-brand H-bombs to sabotage the Roadrunner. And— Beep, beep!— every Saturday morning the Roadrunner escapes, leaving Wile E. to play the fool.

Wile E. is a Hollywood coyote. Real coyotes— the feral canines with dirty gray fur, bright yellow eyes, sharp teeth and street credibility— have to get their birds, or they won’t survive. Their range extends across mountains and deserts, from Chiapas to the Yukon.

There are human coyotes at home on the same range, so named for their cunning, their scavenging instincts, and their capacity to adapt to a harsh environment. In colonial Mexico, the Castilian grammar of the conquistadores imposed itself on the indigenous Nahuatl noun, coyotl, and a New World bastard-verb was born. The regular “ar” ending to coyotear, means to behave like a coyote. Yo coyoteo, tu coyoteas, el coyotea, etc. Such slinking behavior in a man is met with a mixture of disdain and admiration in Mexico. Coyotes are not heroes, but they are survivors.

Wile E.’s canine cousins have adapted to suburbia. They sip cool water at dawn from swimming pools on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Coyotes eat the cat food that’s been left out for Muffy, and they’ll eat Muffy, too, if they catch her, before they slip into the brush to sleep the daylight away. Suburban pet owners, who build spacious homes oblivious to their surrounding habitat, get outraged at this eruption of wilderness when coyotes stalk prey inside the city limits. But “crossing the line” is an abstraction to a coyote.

For the coyote’s human namesake, “going over the line” is a job. El coyote is the person who gets illegal immigrants under, over, or around the border. Pollero is a synonym for coyote. We all know how much a coyote enjoys a chicken dinner!  Right now the price a coyote charges is about $2000 for a one-way trip from Otay Mesa or Mexicali to San Jose— more for women with infants or children.

Coyotes come in all shapes. Some coyotes are diversified businessmen who smuggle drugs across the border along with their human cargoes. “You want some coke with your chicken?”

Some coyotes are milder in spirit and guide their customers across the desert the way a hen guides her chicks. I knew a coyote once, a marimacha, or Mexicana dyke, named "Little Pistols," or María Pistolitas. Her husband was serving a life sentence on the Mexican prison island Islas Marias, for growing opium poppies. Maria worked to support her family as a lay midwife and curandera when she wasn’t smuggling immigrants. María was a sweetheart in a brassy, wise-woman sort of way, always ready to prescribe herbs and massages.

During George Bush Senior’s administration, the U.S. Mexico border was so porous that the price a coyote could charge a chicken fell precipitously. Business got so bad that one coyote I knew, Tío Raul, had to quit the life. He got a job pushing a broom around the Wrigley’s Gum factory in Santa Cruz. Tio Raúl had house payments, car payments, a wife, and two expensive teenaged daughters to maintain.

Luckily, for all the hard-pressed coyotes, President Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton. President Clinton threw a bone to his critics on the right and started “Operation Gatekeeper,” which promised renewed Federal attention to the border situation.

“Gatekeeper” placed almost all active INS officers on the international frontier. By moving I.N.S agents to the deserts, well away from any employers who felt harassed by onerous federal regulations, Clinton honored the needs of the business lobby, while managing to look tough for the press and the public. Bill Clinton is a man who knows how to conjugate the verb coyotear. Tyson Chicken, one of the biggest poultry producers in the world, is based in Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, and was one of his biggest political supporters. Bush Jr. knows the Tyson folks too.

Due to enhanced border enforcement, the cost of trespassing into the United States went up dramatically for the pollo. Darwinian logic meant that the marginal coyotes— the dumb, the unconnected, the unlucky— were hunted down by agents in lime-green four-wheel drive Broncos, and culled from the desert.

Smart coyotes were back in business. Borders move around, but there’s always a line to cross. What about Bush’s  new fence? It was always dead on arrival; the real coyotes would've found ways to build that fence with undocumented laborers.

The way I see it, year after year we see the same cartoon landscape scrolling in the background— while in the foreground a bald eagle tries to solve social problems with Acme-brand dynamite. The varmint gets away in every episode.  Beep, beep!—my "*". I can hear a coyote licking his chops right now, as he relishes another chicken dinner.

(c) by Andy Griffin, The Ladybug Letter. Photo of "Prima," Andy's new baby.