They said it couldn’t be done.
“You can’t be careless in Colorado,” they said.
“You can’t have kids and no car,” they said.
“You can’t be a travel editor without a car,” they said.
They were wrong.
[media-credit name="Jim Carr" align="alignright" width="264"]
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It’s now three months shy of four years since I watched the minivan drive off, that gas-guzzling money pit. It was a Chrysler Town & Country, a soccer mom’s dream and just the kind of mysteriously assembled heap of metal and electricity that puts dollar signs in mechanic’s eyes.
Truth be told, though, as much as “the Purple Wonder” – it was a weird dark bluish shade that in certain lights looked like a gigantic grape – sucked away thousands of my hard-earned dollars over its the six years with us, it traveled to some amazing places.
A friend and I lived in it for nearly two weeks as we did the Grand Circle tour of the Grand Canyon and Zion and Capitol Reef, trading out all of the rear seats for two mountain bikes, two sleeping bags, a pile of T-shirts and a blender for margaritas.
It saw pretty much every nook and cranny of Colorado, from numerous escapades down the Arkansas River in Cotopaxi to the annual Tour of the Valley in Grand Junction to tracking dinosaur prints in La Junta. It took me to Vegas, to Cheyenne and Yellowstone, to Taos and Santa Fe, to Salt Lake City.
[/media-credit]Denver is easy to navigate as a pedestrian and offers several areas that are closed off to cars, such as this part of Fillmore Plaza in Cherry Creek.
It also got me and my daughters to six Western states for countless car-camping excursions, and it hauled them safely to school and back when we lived in East Denver and they chose to go downtown to Morey Middle School.
But after I survived a bout with cancer in 2006, my girls and I, now 16 and 14, talked about how we wanted to live going forward. They decided they didn’t want to go to the high school that was only two blocks away and instead chose East High School, which was so popular that it required either moving to its neighborhood or a lottery to get in.
We all also had a strong pull toward more urban living. We wanted to be in the thick of the downtown lifestyle, walking to the theater and stores, taking the bus anywhere farther away, and getting rid of the car. We wanted to go vegetarian and organic as much as possible. We saw a change in our driving habits as tied in with our eating habits and our living arrangement. It did seem to be connected: more exercise, smaller carbon footprint, better food in our bodies that came from more local sources and had been produced using fewer resources.
But first we had to contend with the nattering nabobs of negativism. While many people seemed to think it was an “interesting” choice, most immediately reacted by telling us there was no way we could do it.
Coloradans don’t kid around about their cars. Several people actually became combative, acting as though I might suggest they give up theirs, too.
It’s true that having kids seemed to be the biggest hurdle – all I could think about were the daily and monotonous treks to and from school, the constant runs to the store, the after-school activities. I am lucky in some ways – my daughters don’t play soccer, which to me seems to be the biggest life-sucker of all the sports.
But once I found a house to move to only 17 blocks from East High, the kid component eased quite a bit. At the time, they were both still attending Morey, only four blocks from the house, and I began envisioning a place where my daughters’ friends could come after school, a Cleaver-esque existence where I would wear an apron and serve warm cookies as I dispensed sage advice that cleared up nightmarish middle school existences with a chuckle and possibly some theme music.
And in fact, that’s exactly what happened – minus the apron, the cookies and any teen ever looking to me for advice. But sometimes other parents who worked far away and couldn’t always get to the school for pick-up would weirdly trust that I wouldn’t let their kids drink or listen to the devil’s music (OK, maybe I did allow some playing of The Shins and possibly Interpol, but we didn’t listen to any lyrics).
It had the added benefit of my getting to know my daughters’ friends, and there have been many more – including some truly unexpected — benefits.
Has it always been easy? No way. But so far we’ve made it work, to the point that I dream of one day looking back from the end of a long life to the realization that I didn’t own a car again after 2007.
Next time: Part II – The nuts and bolts of carelessness
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