The Planet Burns and Still I Drive

It starts with the sky. The winter sun is just beginning to emerge as I open my car door. In shadow I sneak through the waking city, gliding between the buildings, greeting my fellow journeymen with a blink of orange or flash of white. I turn into my lane, pour into the traffic. We flow beneath the sky.

This morning looks promising: pale yellow fading upwards into blue, wisps of icy clouds. As we file out, a multitude in two neat lines, the show begins. A glimpse at a roundabout, then the countryside opens up before me, gently rolling hills. Over the farmland, the sky refracts through watercolour mists, with shafts of sunlight so crisp you can taste them. The sky is a Turner painting and the trees are shadow-puppets, the ground a crystal frost. I am witness to a glory.

Not a day goes by that I don’t want to stop and stare, to pull over and take a photograph. I wish to imprint this image forever on my brain, for tomorrow it is gone and another takes its place.

Rarely do I feel more connected to the Earth than in my car under that vast ephemeral sky.

What am I doing?

It wasn’t meant to be this way. Growing up I was a bike kid. I had the privilege of fenland, flat as a pancake until you get to Lincolnshire. I am a cyclist’s daughter, raised in a crossbar seat and tag-along until I could pedal for myself.

As a teenager, I worked in a call centre in my hometown. The commute to that first job was eight miles on a bike, and I’d spend the first mile home rolling smugly past the gridlock. I wasn’t like the sedentary, gas-belching masses: my vehicle had the carbon emissions of two exhaling lungs and only cost me money when I needed a new tyre. This was freedom, and all without a car.

In our society, the car is a tool of adulthood.

I didn’t have a desire to drive, but I did have ambition, and that forced me to learn. In our society, the car is a tool of adulthood, of independence. A car (in good traffic) can get you to places on time, sweat-free, with your hair done. No longer the child calling to be picked up from the station: with a car you can offer the lifts. Sure, I’ll take you to the airport! It’s an intoxicating and empowering ability.

I was not a quick study: it took me three years to get the hang of it. Each lesson would reduce me to a panicking mess. There were too many controls, too much speed, and instructors love to notice the one thing you mess up. It’s a perfectionist’s nightmare.

On the day I had been vegan for 7 years, a squirrel ran across the road in my driving lesson and got stuck between the lanes of traffic. It flailed on the centreline, unsure of the escape route. When the light changed, I turned onto a road covered in house sparrows, a hedgerow-full, communing on the tarmac. I came to a sudden stop and they took flight, but I was still sobbing as my instructor told me to steer to the side. I didn’t see whether the squirrel made it.

Roads divide the countryside, segregating nature into neat pockets at the edges of human life, but there isn’t enough for them in these enclosures: they have to venture out. Every time I see roadkill I feel sick: badgers, hedgehogs and deer, the kind of animals that strike you with awe when you get to see them alive. Some bodies I know like landmarks, passing them day after day, as they blacken and decompose by the side of the road. The buzzards circle overhead, making peace with their generation’s reality, trading the large prey populations of a wild habitat for the unholy offerings of the roadside.

Before I could drive, I was a videographer in the wedding industry. It is a beautiful job, to be a witness to love, but in practical terms, it can strand you in the middle of nowhere, with people you don’t know, half of whom are drunk. Weddings end in the dark: sunset is a photo-op that heralds the party hour. I was equally scared of a taxi driver knowing I was there, a woman alone in the night, and of being trapped at a reception as the revelry devolved.

Once I had my licence though this changed, and quickly. I was, to my own great surprise, a confident driver. Within a week I’d stretched my trips further and further: one hour to Lincoln for a fair, two to Stratford for a November wedding, amber light scattering through rust-coloured trees. The world opened before me.

These days I commute and my route isn’t safe: 21 miles along a scruffy A-road, with slip roads so short there’s barely time to indicate. My car is not a safe vehicle for the world I love: it burns diesel fuel, £50 worth a week towards an oil company and my cognitive dissonance. But despite both of these things, I can’t help but feel safer in my car than anywhere else. Like all the women I know, I lock the doors immediately upon getting in, but after that a sense of peace falls over me, knowing that I can drive away from anything. My car is a sanctuary in which I can sing full volume and scream and cry, with not a murmur to the neighbours. It’s my Room of One’s Own, my getaway car.

All of this is at odds with the pollution generated by my car: as each year becomes the hottest on record, I know that the gases fuelling my journeys are making everywhere I go less safe, less liveable. It gnaws at me – how can I square this circle? Could I get an electric car? Charging points are limited; my rented house doesn’t have a garage. The women around me whisper that they wouldn’t go further than a hybrid, and the fear of being stranded knots again in my chest.

I read about ideas for putting charging points in lampposts, revisit the sci-fi possibilities of solar power and electrified strips in the road, like the world is one huge set of dodgems. I think about the enclosed wildlife – a word that seems to embody every piece of human delusion, every way that we’ve separated ourselves from the truth that we are animals reliant on the earth.

I wonder if the world can sustain my way of life.

I don’t want to lose hope in the few solutions we have, but as I drive along and another storm, worsened by the changing climate, threatens to blow my car off course, I wonder if the world can sustain my way of life, my commute to this job. I start to work from home when I can – a small step. Even if I can afford the plan of buying a house and an electric car, most people can’t do this.

My other option is public transport, but the trains don’t run on time. When I started filming weddings, a train strike stranded me on the other side of the country for four days in a row. I sat panicking at a roadside inn, hoping no one knew a young woman was taking an extended stay. I barricaded the door, but the anxiety threatened to collapse my chest.

Now when I try to commute by train, they are running late by 7am. There is a driver shortage, a carriage shortage and we are short changed. It is now cheaper to drive to the centre of town than it is to take the tram. Another of our public services being run for profit, the solution to low margins has been increased fares and a crackdown – conductors whose agenda is not to sell tickets but to collect fines, to remove riff-raff. It is a hostile environment.

One day waiting on the platform, the tram pulls up and the inspectors remove a woman. Not content with ejecting her, they move onto her appearance. Her top still has a label attached – did she steal that too? The woman flips them off and begins to walk down the tracks, continuing her journey on her own, at a slower, more dangerous pace.

On my commute home, the night fades in. The traffic blinks before me – we all have our reasons for the journey. Over the long unlit roads, the stars emerge. I name them. I turn on the radio and am filled with bliss.

I want all of this forever. Freedom and safety and beauty and joy. Vast expanses of habitat under the vast expanse of sky, places to explore and grow. The future I dream of will not be built on one thing alone, not on the promises of technology or on individual efforts, though both have their place. It requires reimagination of who we are and our roles in nature, redistribution of the land to consider all living things. Some time spent in hard consideration of the dreams our transport grants us – competence, security and freedom – and the extent to which these can be sustained in a collapsing climate. I want us to build a liveable world: affordable infrastructure and rewilded greenery, women in getaway cars and kestrels in flight.

When summer comes, I’ll roll down the windows and listen to the charts. I will sing at the top of my lungs, and the music will whip away on a fast moving wind. The sun will greet me, bright and furious, and something will burn in the heat.

MAIN IMAGE:

Richard Misrach

Flooded Marina (gas pumps), Northshore, Salton Sea, 1983

From Issue 20: ABYSS, in collaboration with the Extraction Project

For over 40 years, Richard Misrach has photographed the dynamic landscape of the American West through an environmentally aware and politically astute lens. His visually seductive, large-scale colour vistas powerfully document the devastating ecological effects of human intervention, industrial development, nuclear testing and petrochemical pollution on the natural world.