Babe in the Headlights Goes Electric

For more than a decade, I have driven old Jags. When I say old, I’m talking last millennium. You know, when you say low mileage and what you actually mean is under a hundred thousand. The Jaguar XJ8s from the late 1990s are sleek, feline cars, classy, with relatively robust engines, and built like tanks. I mostly bought mine from my mechanics. Every time one of my cars was on the verge of clapping out, they seemed be selling one of their loaners. They were well maintained, and with ridiculously low resale value I could buy them cash down. Cheap to insure. They mostly started in the morning. And they guzzled fossil fuels like there was no tomorrow. 

Several events this Spring conspired to bring my Old Jag Era to a close. First, I totalled Jag #5. It was a random rainy day skid event, but when you only have Liability and you mash your front bumper and hood on a freeway onramp wall, your sleek feline vehicle is not worth repairing. Maybe not firing on all cylinders after the crash, I panicked and bought a replacement that Sunday from a private party in Sacramento. Not everyone is as honest as my mechanics.

So May rolls around and once again I have no car, yet my job entirely depends upon one. The citrus fruit Jag #6 was nonoperational outside my house, after I put $1100 into a new alternator, only to have the fuel pump fail as I drove it away from the shop. For the second time in a month, I was donating a car. This was humiliating, not to say weird. I had to go with a different nonprofit for the second donation. Who is this lady? Why does she keep giving us old Jaguars? Does she need help?

I have always said I wanted to drive my values and buy an electric car, and I’ve never been able to afford one. This Spring things reached a tipping point and I fell over into the bucket of folks who can make payments on used EVs with no money down. I looked at hybrids, and plug-in hybrids, but decided that if I was going to divest from the fossil fuel industry, I was going to leave gas stations firmly in my past. Two-thirds of California’s electricity comes from clean energy. We do the best we can. 

I’m not one of those people for whom it is thrilling to research new technology. I am one of those people who just want someone to tell them what is best to buy. And maybe come to the dealership with me to help me buy it. So I did my homework the best I could, but I may have glazed over a little at some of the details. Plus, in my defense, it’s hard to get good data out there from people who have been driving EVs for a while. Mostly it’s Tesla folks saying it’s great, you’ll never look back! You get over range anxiety really quickly! Uh-huh. Teslas now have a 200-mile range. Sweet, if you make $200k a year.

The first thing that overwhelmed me in my tentative internet research sessions was how many EVs there are out there now. Over 50 models. Oh please, could someone just tell me what to buy?

Every dealership website has these intrusive fake helper people, usually called Amber or Nikki, with whom you have a “chat” and they answer your questions (all except “please tell me what car I should buy?”) and make appointments for you to test drive specific vehicles. Then you talk to the dealers, and they have no idea who Amber or Nikki is, but they’re mad because she’s been giving out false information. Based on the fake helpers’ possibly false information, I decided that the Nissan Leaf and Volkswagen eGolf might be within my range.

So early one Saturday in mid May, I’m driving up to Santa Rosa to test drive cars. I’m white-knuckling it up the 101. I’ve never bought a car from a dealer. My mind was filled with the image of a hapless female being circled by sharks. Yet I was too proud to ask any of my male friends to come with me. I’ve got this! I’m raising a teen, how hard can it be to buy a vehicle from a used car salesman?

Salesman #1 was classic. I’m sure he was just trying to feed his family, but when the affordable 2015 Leaf didn’t work for me he went straight to a completely unaffordable 2018 model, such a great deal, leased car just returned...blah blah blah. Salesman #2 was bright, enthusiastic, and seemed honest. The awful truth is that you reach a point in your life where you are trying to buy a car from a kid who is young enough to be your son. I liked the eGolf. My possible son promised me earnestly it was a good fit for me. 

I bought my car on a Thursday night, driving north in the rain with my daughter after work to pick it up. I was in my friend’s Mazda, the fifth in a stressful patchwork of loaners I had driven over a period of weeks. I had reached the stage of depletion with the car-buying process where I just wanted to sign. Anywhere. Whatever. My possible son the dealer handed me over to a ‘finance specialist’ for the paperwork. They made me sit in the dealership waiting room with a terrible cup of coffee while they did stuff. What stuff? Steph Curry was on the giant TV, chewing his mouth guard in a close game with the Trail Blazers. He was maybe a little more stressed than me. But only a little. And he gets paid a bit more than I do.

In the Finance Room, my finance specialist was even younger than my son the dealer. He was also beautiful and very dapper in a dark suit with a vermilion shirt. I began signing papers. This is the clause that says if your car is damaged by a falling piano, you are only liable if it’s a Tuesday. Sign here, initial down here...I signed. I initialled. I tried to make informed decisions about the unnerving number of special deals, extra warranties, and monthly add-ons. At one point in the proceedings, vermilion shirt asked me what I did for a living. Not like he cared, just because things were terribly quiet in the room as I signed away my financial future. I’m a hospice nurse, I said. Oh, he said, staring at his computer screen with his beautiful fixed smile. That’s nice.

After all the paperwork, they led me dazed and confused to my car and gave me the keys. I shook hands with my son the dealer. I really wanted to thank him for making the whole ordeal less stressful than it could have been. But when I tried to do so, I mixed my metaphors. Instead of telling him I had felt like a deer in the headlights or a babe in the woods, I said I had felt like a babe in the headlights. They all smiled pityingly at me. Then they disappeared. I sat in my incredibly clean car and I wondered how to turn it on. No ignition!

I decided to start by pairing my iPhone with the Bluetooth. That way I could drive my new electric vehicle off the lot to soundtrack. Old Jags don’t have Bluetooth, they have cassette players. Pairing proved easy. Driving the car off the lot, not so much. I poked the Start button, with my key close by like they had said, and pressed the accelerator. Nothing happened. Seriously? I can’t get off the lot? I am NOT going back in there! I pressed a few more buttons randomly. Finally, I took the giant manual out of the glove compartment. Furtively searched the index for Starting the Car. It wasn’t there.

How to turn my electric car on was only the first of a very long list of things I should have been born knowing. And yet strangely, I was not. I have had to figure them out by a process of swearing inwardly and wondering aloud why the planet had to get mixed up in this climate change mess to begin with. Ok, maybe not so inward with the swearing. 

To start an eGolf, you have to press the brake. I thought about that as a metaphor. Putting an end to thirteen years of beautiful Jags and their insatiable thirst for fossil fuels, I hit the brake, pressed Start, and went into Drive. The car moved soundlessly off the lot to the tune of Louis Berry’s Restless, then down 101 in the Spring rain and into my brave new electric life.

Riding Fool Snacks on Bugs

Like any life-threatening activity, when you road bike fast downhill you pay really really close attention to what you are doing. Wednesday I was riding home from the Alpine Dam, a ride that I know like the back of my hand. The last stretch from the top of Azalea Hill to my door is a non-stop fast-paced downhill stretch that takes half an hour to ascend and nine minutes to come down. If you don’t attend to every millisecond of the descent, you could be toast. I love toast, but I don’t much want to resemble it.

A downhill when you are familiar with the road involves knowing exactly how much you need to brake at the start of each curve in order to safely make it through the bend without losing control and without crossing the median on a blind corner. On most bends, if I brake for one to two seconds, I have curbed my speed enough to ride freely into the curve and feel I can come out of it alive. Sometimes I let it go a little, see if I can take the curve with no braking. Yeah. No. Braking is generally a good thing. Coming out of it alive is never a given.

Wednesday was a warm Spring night, the first of the merry month of May and when I set out, I was trying to ride away from a tough week. This generally works, which is why we fools put on the spandex and clip in with the silly shoes and pedal up vertical slopes. But as I rode up the mountain I felt slower than usual. The mountain was also a lot longer and steeper than usual. This is typically a sign that I am going to have to ride harder to leave my day behind. Either that or CalTrans has actually employed some guys to make our local hill higher and more steeply graded. This happens. I have seen them out there, with their traffic cones.

Just past the Deer Valley golf course, I saw a mama deer with her little bambi snacking on the lush grass and forget-me-nots in the ditch. Baby bambi looked to be just a few days old, he was still tottering a bit. Maybe I was the first bicyclist he had ever seen. I called out to him not to be afraid of us, we mean him no harm. It’s those morons in the King Cabs you need to worry about, bambino. He gave me a quick nod. I hoped my lesson had sunk in.

On the downhill past where the road has caved in because nobody’s paying attention to national infrastructure, I started to feel seriously good. The ride high was kicking in. I knew this because I started swallowing bugs. When I am on a ride, I generally have a silly grin on my face and this freely allows small insects to fly into my mouth. Believe me, this is worse for them than for me. They were probably planning on dinner with the family, with the intention of having dinner, not being dinner. Me, I get a tiny nugget of protein. With wings! And legs!

When I got to the dam, I was feeling that old I did it feeling that really floats my boat. The sun was about to set over the mountain and a duck was doing a spectacularly low fly-by over the lake, so streamlined and graceful I couldn’t understand how he wasn’t skidding into the water. Then he sort of sank into it with choreographed grace and I wondered if the maneuver released endorphins in his brain like my ride did for me or if it was all just ho-hum for him, another day skimming over a lake in paradise.

I parked my bike by the metal sluice gates and I noticed once again how they inexplicably have large KEEP OUT signs carved into them. I mean, who really wants to enter a dam’s sluice gate area? Or is it a general statement about the lake and its gloriously pristine environment? About America? Am I reading too much news?? I took a selfie beside the sign, and a picture of Mathilda casually leaning up against the gates. No, I don’t think we will keep out, I hoped my selfie expression said. I think we will keep riding right across your dam with its unfriendly signs and I think we will keep soaking up the free natural beauty of this mountain lake.

But the sign also got me thinking about the southern US border, because despite having ridden all the way there after work I wasn’t quite unplugged enough. I thought about being an immigrant myself, a blow-in from Ireland with a lottery visa in 1991. It was relatively easy for me. I was white, educated, and Bush Sr. was president. I literally won my green card in the lottery instigated by Senator Brian J. Donnelly in an attempt to legalize the tens of thousands of highly educated yet illegal Irish workers who flooded in from the “sick man of Europe” in the 1980s and boosted the California economy in Silicon Valley.

I did not have to walk across a desert with little food or water. I paid money, a lot for me at the time, but coyotes were not involved. My point of entry was Boston’s Logan airport. An immigration official looked at my paperwork, and although my heart hammered as hard as any immigrant hopeful, he waved me through. 

Twenty-eight years later, I am reminded every day how lucky I am. I work with caregivers from Haiti who yearn to return to their home country; with nurses who were physicians back in the Philippines; with refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Chiapas. I left terrible economic insecurity in Ireland, with an undergraduate degree not worth the paper it was printed on in terms of available jobs, but it was nothing to what these people fled.

So I got back on my bike on the dam and I headed up the mountain to that nine-minute downhill . There is a bend in the road right near the summit where you can look back down over the snaking uphill road you have toiled along, all the way to the distant puzzle piece of lake far below. It never ceases to amaze me that I have ridden that far uphill. I’d like to capture that feeling in a little bottle and take it with me to work every day so I could open it now and then and get a burst of it.

Failing that, I put the bike in its highest gear for the descent and I let loose with my carefully timed braking schedule. One second, curve, two seconds, curve, long free downhill, one second, curve...Dramatic descents usually provoke some quietly manic laughter in this riding fool, so I definitely got a little bug protein action. Hors d’oeuvres! And on my way down, I passed a CalTrans guy putting the cones back in his truck after a long day making hills steeper.