We’ve lived for almost a year now without a car. We’ve talked about living without a car when we go “home,” or wherever we end up. In California, it’s not impossible, but in the summer, it could be really brutal, as there’s quite a distance sometimes between bus stops. And, then there’s the driving culture in which so many take part — it creates some real take-it-for-granted behavior in terms of giving directions and respecting how much time it takes to get between point A. and point Z (we’ve even seen that here in Scotland). I read this story with a sense of awe at the sheer stubbornness displayed.
The Invisible Man
I can’t explain this, so you’ll just have to believe me: last month my brother and sister-in-law asked my wife and me to adopt one of their cats. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much to you. Maybe you think it happens all the time — somebody decides they have too many cats and somebody else absorbs the surplus. But there was one little anomaly in this situation. We live in Ravenswood, and they live in a small town an hour’s drive from Seattle.
Why didn’t they look for a respectable, cat-needy household in their own neighborhood — even in their own time zone? That’s what I can’t explain. It was just one of those things: as Johnny Carson once said, “If you buy the premise, you’ll buy the bit.” They thought it made sense to ship a cat two thousand miles, and I ended up in a live-action version of a Magritte painting. Life works out that way sometimes — my life in particular.
Anyway, on a weekday morning in March, my brother dropped the cat off at the United terminal in Seattle. The cat was traveling by a direct flight, to eliminate the chance of a missed connection; and, at the advice of more than one vet, she wasn’t tranquilized — doped cats, we learned, sometimes forget to curl up when they’re cold, not a good thing when they may spend hours in unheated baggage areas. Around noon I called United in Chicago to find out where I was supposed to pick up the cat.
This is where we came to a problem. I don’t drive. By that I don’t mean what most people mean: “I have a car, but I try not to use it.” Neither my wife nor I have ever had a car nor even a driver’s license. It’s the way we do our bit for the ecosystem. We sometimes try to make it sound like a big sacrifice, but the truth is that in Chicago, being without a car can be a blessing. After all, we lived in Lakeview for 15 years, and we didn’t spend a single second of that time looking for a parking space.
But when you’re dependent on the RTA to get everywhere, a slight ambiguity in directions can turn into a major logistical hassle. That’s what happened this time. The guy at the airline was vague about where I had to go.
He didn’t think he was being vague; he simply took for granted that I would be driving. I’ve learned over the years that the noncarless don’t bother cultivating precision about distances. Offhandedly, he dispensed the information that the cat wouldn’t be at the terminal, but would be taken to the freight office, and I should show up there an hour and a half after the plane landed. Then he started to hang up.
“Where’s the freight office?” I asked loudly.
“Just follow the signs,” he said.
Read the rest of the story here. By Lee Sandlin