by Chet Raymo
"Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in," writes poet Wendell Berry. The automobile is the perfect machine for obscuring places, especially an automobile with a cellular phone. "Honey, I'm just leaving the parking lot, I'll be home in an hour." "Honey, I'm on the expressway, home in twenty minutes." "Honey, I'm in the driveway." One place like every other. And if it's not, we'll make it so.
The natural contours of a landscape mean nothing to an 80-ton Caterpillar bulldozer. A stand of trees, an outcrop of granite, or a purling stream can be erased in a trice. Scrape it flat. Start from scratch. Most of all, make lots of room for cars. Pump asphalt up out of the ground and spread it on the surface. We are agreed that our ideal planet is as round and smooth as a bowling ball, asphalt black, painted with white lines.
Which is not to say that we can leave natural places alone. We no longer have that privilege. Maybe we never had that privilege. When the first human crafted a chopping tool from stone, the wilderness was finished. When the first human struck a fire with flint, untrammeled nature was in retreat. The entire surface of the planet is inevitably going to be a human artifact. Wendell Berry, that champion of cherished places, is a farmer as well as a poet. He knows that a dairy cow and an ear of corn are artifacts. A farm is an artifact. The question is not whether we will live in artificial places, but whether we will know and love the place in which we live.
"If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently." says a character in Anne Michael's novel, Fugitive Pieces; "If you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another." And that's what place is all about: learning to love. No one should love an automobile. No one should love an expressway. No one should love acres of asphalt marked with white lines. The automobile is the antithesis of love, because it is the antithesis of place.
The place we learn to love can be a windowsill in a New York highrise, a patch of woods on Walden Pond, or a thousand acres of the high Sierras. Alaskan nature writer Richard Nelson says: "What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart, not whether it's flat or rugged, rich or austere, wet or arid, gentle or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame. Every place, like every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way in which its bounty is received."
Civic planners have a responsibility to insure that our parks, greenways and open spaces remain bountiful. One thinks back to that grand era of public spaces designed and executed by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his contemporaries. His was the generation who gave us our national parks, national forests, and great city parks. His was the generation who knew that we can't survive without roots in nature. His was the last generation who could imagine a landscape without an automobile.
New York's Central and Prospect Parks, Boston's Emerald Necklace, Chicago's Jackson Park and Montreal's Mount Royal Park are just a few of Olmsted's many splendid urban creations, feeding our need to connect to the natural world. He reshaped the landscape, to be sure, but in a way that lets organic nature shine through. Part of the requirement for the design competition for Central Park was provision for cross-town traffic; after all, the park was to extend fifty-one blocks up the center of Manhattan Island. Olmsted solved the problem by sinking transverse roads in deep-walled trenches, thereby preserving the north-south visual integrity of the park, a strategy that minimizes the influence of vehicular traffic even to this day. Imagine what our cities and suburbs might be if those presently in charge of the planning and execution of public and private spaces were guided by Olmstedian principles.
Instead, we have created landscapes that cater to cars, not people, even to the point of sacrificing the esthetic integrity of some of our forbears' most precious gifts, such as Charles Eliot's system of metropolitan parks and parkways around Boston, and Connecticut's Merritt Parkway. As early as the 1920s, the writing was on the wall. On September 29, 1923, Charles Eliot's friend and coworker Sylvester Baxter wrote in the Boston Evening Transcript: "The parkways and boulevards...intended to be strictly subordinate...have become the primary factor in the scheme of the park system." The service of motor traffic had become the main consideration of the park administration, he complained.
If aliens from outer space visited this planet they would quickly decide that the ruling beings have four wheels; certainly, the two-legged creatures seem eager to sacrifice to the automobile their time, fortune, and quality of life. Add a lane, pave it over, build a strip mall. If there is a shred of natural beauty left, erase it. All hail to the automobile! The automobile rules.
The automobile is here to stay, of course, and properly so, but we are not required to love it, or sacrifice everything to it. Every acre of asphalt is one less natural place to love. A house with a three-car garage is unlikely to become a home. The number of miles on the odometer is a pretty good measure of how far we have gone from where we belong. If we had been wiser, we would have created a culture that emphasized place rather than mobility, nature rather than asphalt, public rather than personal transport. We chose not to and we are poorer for it.
Chet Raymo
Photos by Jason Houston
This article originally appeared on OrionOnline.org, the website of Orion and Orion Afield magazines.
