Herewith is my attempt to summarize the vision for a documentary of the so-called Last Road Trip. You know, where I take my innocent wife and daughter on a Southwest airlines flight from Connecticut to San Diego to pick up the 1983 diesel Mercedes I bought through Ebay so we can drive it back home, fueling it with only, say, biodiesel and vegetable oil. Is any of this coming back to you? I cracked the car up on December 31, 2008 and decided its replacement needed to reflect my concern, no, abject fear of the future, given the realities of climate change and peak oil. But still be grounded in the belief that we need two cars to function.
So I thought about really expensive hybrids and not-yet-commercially available electric cars (except for Chinese-made go-karts), and decided an old Mercedes – at a fraction of the cost – that runs on vegetable oil would be a good stop gap. Enter the creative inspiration to buy it in San Diego, where the cars have no rust, and the idea for The Last Road Trip was born.
But wait, it doesn’t stop there because this seems like a great idea for a documentary. Doesn’t it? Even though I’ve never made a documentary before, why not? You can get these great digital cameras – on Ebay, and, well, if Ken Burns can do it, why can’t I?
So waking today at 5 am with a lot of things going through my mind, like ‘are you freakin’ crazy?’, and stuff like that, I decided I needed to try to write a synopsis of this documentary idea so I could communicate, clearly, to people what this is all about. I know, good luck. You can find the synopsis on the Documentary page of this blog.
In order to find my way back to this blog, of which this is only the second entry, I googled The Last Road Trip. Guess what. A lot of other people have had similar ideas. The first entry in the search results was this blog from a writer in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. He was, well, so sarcastic about my idea. How did he know about my idea anyway?
The really scary thing, if you read the blog, is that it gave me even more ideas for the documentary. Will there really be empty roads due to lay offs? Will I find abandoned, half-built neighborhoods? Empty strips malls with seas of shimmering black-topped parking lots? We’ll see. Here’s a quote I can’t resist:
“Imagine the sights: All those bizarre new ghost towns, huge, tract-home megadevelopments with no one around to mow the perfect 13-foot squares of sod; tumbleweeds rolling like lost macho dreams across all those shuttered Hummer dealerships; bigwig bankers out in the street, begging for alms, $4,000 Armani suit in tatters. Or at least, a bit smudged. Honey, get the camera.”
Then there are the folks in Missouri that are abandoning a car in Delaware (this is a unique idea and I’m not sure how they came up with. Probably, because the car they are abandoning is a Ford Explorer, they felt it was important to get it out of their home state, and several states away. Its probably a kooties thing. I always thought Ford Explorers had kooties and this has since been confirmed on 60 Minutes and in several other news stories. I, personally, have stuck with European cars for the last decade or so with some success. Now of course, it doesn’t really matter because without gas they are all worthless. But I am getting a bit off track).
I really like the tone of the blog from the people in Missouri. They seem genuinely concerned about what is happening in the world and are doing something about it. Their blog is really about the decision to become a one-car family, something we haven’t been able to do yet – which is why we are picking up the Mercedes in San Diego.
Did I mention the car only cost $3,500? So that seems at least consistent with the overall trend of the demise of our happy motoring. Why invest $20k or $30k in a car that will soon be obsolete? Do I need to include the cost of airfare, hotels and food for the trip in my calculations? We are getting some additional benefit out of it. Plus, I really think the documentary could offer a valuable message. I do. Really.
Conversely, there is another link from my search of ‘last road trip’ that turns up a website I am less able to relate to. The Last Great Road Trip is about some guys that customize their Toyota FJs and drive all over creation, literally. They don’t even use roads much of the time. I just had to post the following quote because it mentions the ’scared trees’. Anyone that has followed my study of Eco-Psychology will understand why this phrase jumps out at me, as I attempt to understand and experience a more spiritual, mythical relationship with the world because of a deep understanding that it is only by renewing our sensual connections with nature and the cosmos that we will be able to navigate the changes bearing down on us. But this, too, is a digression. Here’s the quote:
“Paul lead us up and down the hills through the forests as we settled into driver mode. When you take your rig off road you accept a certain amount of risk and each scared tree we passed reminds us of the carnage that 4×4 trails can extract on anyone’s rig who is not focused on the job at hand.”
I love that part about ‘carnage that trails extract on anyone’s rig’ Amen brotha! And settling in to driver mode. I am going to need to know more about this given the upcoming 3,000 miles. Of course there’s the carnage on the landscape that we ought to be addressing, but it’s our landscape, humans that is, right? So we can do what we want with it. [Note to self: Maybe the author meant 'scarred' trees instead of 'scared' trees. The scars would be reminders of the 'carnage' done to the rigs. Acknowledging scared trees is perhaps granting a level of empathy with nature that may not really be there - yet. While I was fascinated by the idea of a scared tree, scarred probably makes more sense. It might make sense, too, that these FJ drivers aren't the best spellers. But, ahem, living in a glass house, I wouldn't want to throw stones.]
This, of course, is not the message I wish to promote. But it is important to get a robust picture of the cultural mindset we are dealing with. In defense of the expedition-oriented website, the quote above was written on January 20, 2009. (It’s February 2 for God’s sake). So I’m sure between then and now, the authors of the blog have probably started to get a better sense of the larger trends out there.
As the writers of all of these blogs know, however, there is still time for one last road trip and that is, ostensibly, what this blog is about.
