It ended like this:
Our daughter Sadie is in her last year of elementary school. The public middle school she would attend next year in our neighborhood has a fairly dismal reputation. I kept trying to put a happy face on it. “Oh, it can’t be as bad as they say,” I’d remark hopefully.
However, the more I talked to people, the more it seemed it was as bad as they say.
“You can’t go by there without seeing a police car in the parking lot,” one parent would say.
“I’ve seen straight A students here at Nava come back completely crushed by the social situation at Devargas,” teachers would say.
So my daughter was convinced she did not want to go there.
All of our options, at least in the public school system, rested on lotteries. There’s another middle school, not too far away from us, that is practically on the bike path. They’re even building an underpass for the trail to route it under a six lane road at one of the worst intersections in Santa Fe. For a carfree family, it wouldn’t be too bad. But when I bike that way on my way to work, often I see little middle school kids climbing up out of the arroyo reeking of pot. While we, as parents, would all like to forget the things we did in middle and high school, still, my past all accounted for, that does not seem like such a good sign — middle schoolers getting stoned before school.
And Sadie didn’t make it in the first round of the transfer lottery, though her number is low enough that she might eventually make it in there. However, her teachers aren’t too hot on that school either. At one point it was pretty good, they said, but so many people have jumped ship from the school in our district to that one that it’s having its own problems now.
The other options are charter schools, and they are both difficult — not impossible mind you but difficult — and unpleasant to reach by bicycle. One, Monte del Sol, is near a bike path, but this particular path becomes a skating rink in sections during a snowy winter. The Academy for Technology and the Classics is about eight miles out a two lane road with three roundabouts with a forty mile an hour speed limit people treat as sixty. At one time, this two lane road just went out to the Community College, but now subdivisions are sprouting out there like mushrooms.
I rode out there several times by myself and once with my daughter, trying to imagine what it would be like if she was in after school activities and we had to head home in the dark and snow and ice. True, she can take a school bus out for the regular school day, but she wouldn’t be able to do anything extra.
I mentioned to my wife that maybe, with the possibility that Sadie would be going to ATC, we might have to consider buying a car.
That got her to thinking about it. For seven winters, she has been setting off before dawn, in sub-zero temperatures, to bike up to work. The first two or three winters were empowering. “LOOK what I can do! We don’t have to have a car to get around.”
But year after year of the cold, snow, and wind can wear down your spirit. Taking the bus, alternatively, takes much longer because the bus from our house arrives at the connection point five minutes after the bus for work leaves, and it is a forty-five minute wait for the next one. Forty-five minutes to hang around in the dark, snow, and wind. Lately, she has been calling a co-worker for a ride up to work when it is snowing.
So when I mentioned that we might think about getting a car, she did not object.
Then, somewhat tangentially related, my mother went into hospice care in the early part of February. (That’s a long story that doesn’t really belong in this blog, but basically, she began having real trouble the end of last summer, had to have an operation for cancer they found while investigating something else, and she never really recovered). I flew out to spend some time with her, and while I was gone, Laura rented a car. Having a car at her disposal during that time cemented her feeling that it might be time to buy one. In the meantime, my mother died while I was with her. I am glad that I had flown out and could be by her side.
I took almost all the money from my share of my mother’s estate and used it to cut our mortgage principal in half. We’re in spitting distance, as they say, of getting it paid off and being completely debt-free, though it still looks like a lot of time.
I also put away a six-month emergency fund, but I took some money out of it, and we bought a 2003 Subaru.
In the meantime, my daughter did make it in to the Academy for Technology and the Classics. Since we had just bought a car, we all four drove out there and attended the lottery. She is number 22 out of the 65 people they are admitting to the seventh grade.
For me, it is really about having the possibility to do a little more with our children. Sadie tried to be a cheerleader one year, and we were so irritated by having to go out in the dark, cold and snow to get her to games, we came to a mutual agreement that there would be no more cheerleading. My son has been trying to be a boy scout, and I keep saying, “no, I don’t think we’ll go on that camping trip; it’s too far to bike.” (Though I have other problems with the Boy Scouts as an organization that I won’t go into here). It will be nice knowing that I have the possibility to take him up into the mountains for a hike if he’s driving me nuts, or I can take my family on backpacking trips without having to ask a friend to give us a ride. I believe they have learned a lot from growing up without a car. They know, as few children do, that a car is not a necessary part of life in America. There’s just things, you know, that it would be nice to do with a car. I doubt we will use it carelessly; I’m still not excited about having it, but it will be nice for getting us all out together when we might not have gone anywhere because of weather, distance, or time. (It takes me, for example, four hours to bike up to the ski basin. There’s just not time to go hike up Santa Fe Baldy after that).
I don’t see any reason to be apologetic. We did what we set out to do and proved that you do not need to have a car to raise kids in Santa Fe. We still ride our bikes most of the time. I most often default to my single speed. The simpler, the better. It has less chain to lubricate, fewer parts to replace in the drive train, and I like my cork grips from Rivendell. My Rivendell itself has been flummoxing me with the brakes. I had some cheap brake pads on it for a while that were stripping bits of metal off the rim. I bought some good pads from Rivendell, but they still make a sandpapery sound that I don’t like. It annoys me. For that reason alone, I think, I ride the old single speed everywhere. Its brakes are quiet and have a good feel.
I’ll probably just leave this as the last post to this blog. We’re now carlite rather than carfree. I am left wondering what to write about.
But as Emerson says in “Self Reliance”:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Maybe I’ll buy a Vespa and start wearing bow ties. I’d like to learn Italian, and there’s always the dusty rough draft of my novel to get back to. I might start writing a little bit in my other blog, Flowing Mountain, but I think that’s it for this one. Let it stand as a testimony to living a carfree life with children. Good luck to everyone out there who gives it their all.
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