A Contemporary Dilemma: Idling Cars

At the outset, allow me to note that I’m about the only Jarecke male given to hopeless causes to which I become furiously attached and behave irrationally about. I put it down to the MFA in creative writing and the genes of great-uncle Mont, who was the black sheep of the family. He DRANK.

My father, his brothers, my cousins, and my brother were or are all rational scientists. My cousin John has a Ph.D. in physics, his father worked on the Manhattan Project, my father taught chemistry and math before moving into educational testing, and my brother is a certified rocket scientist. The most recent project I asked him about turned out to be building a filter to go on the camera on a satellite that was supposed to take pictures of stars; his gizmo was supposed to filter out the light from surrounding stars so they would know how bright the subject star was. Or, he could have been putting me on.

None of them, I’m sure, would have gotten so worked up about people idling their cars. I’m the Lewis Black of idling engines.

The first time that I confronted an engine running, some guy was sitting in an enormous, really expensive-looking car (I don’t know what kind; see post of January 17) in the T&C grocery parking lot. (T&C is the luxurious grocery, Safeway proletarian with ambition. I was only at T&C for one item I couldn’t find at Safeway.) His engine rumbling away, my anger wasn’t so environmental but a class thing: who are you to be sitting smugly in a big goddamn vehicle, your engine running, while your wife, I’m sure, as you delegate all of those sorts of errands to her, is spending way too much on whatever in the store?

I walked over to the passenger side and, though I can’t remember the exact words, I asked him if he had to leave the engine on seeing how global warming was a real threat. He stared at me for a few too-long seconds, then turned it off. I thanked him and went into the store to buy my over-priced trifle.

Then, probably just because I had become sensitive to it, I noticed more and more people lounging in idling cars. What completely exasperated me was the day I parked at our Safeway-dominated shopping center and saw an enormous truck idling and parked diagonally across a handicapped zone.

How many laws of man and nature can you break in any one moment? I went into the store and picked up a couple of items, exited, and there the truck was, still idling, still illegally parked. I could make out someone in the passenger seat, but no: these are the sort of people who maintain an arsenal in the “glove compartment”. I left.

But that was it. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

I was walking back from that self-same Safeway at about the time the high school let out. Every day, an enormous number of vehicles are parked around the school, parents waiting to pick up their children. I began to pass two mommies both of whose vehicles were idling. The kids weren’t due out for five minutes. I stopped to speak to both mommies, one of whom simply smirked and the other of whom laughed at me. I’m afraid that your narrator lost his shit at their nonchalance and ended up yelling at both of them, not noticing, of course, that an officer of the law was parked across the street.

He left his own vehicle and strode over, asking, “What’s going on?”

I told him what the environmental delinquents were up to; he said, well, it wasn’t illegal. I responded stupidly that it should be. He said write my congressman. I said I had (and I really had.) He said, “See, the problem is that when you yell at people, they get scared, and then they call me.”

The conversation ended; my failure to respond to him with the fact that neither of those jaded mommies looked anything like scared of me frustrates me. I’m not quick on my feet. However, I don’t suppose you win any arguments with cops. I walked on.

Next: Some guy in a white Lexus SUV (see? I do know some brands. The Lexus has the osteoporotic “L”, right?) was idling his car in the Safeway parking lot. His window was up, and I beckoned for him to lower it, and he did. I asked him politely that in the world of global warming, could he possibly turn his car off? He said, “I appreciate your perspective, but I’m running the AC now.” Then rolled his window up. It was 66 degrees! What I should have said to him was, Yes, run your AC now, and that kid I see in the back seat will be boiling beyond what any AC can do for the future adult—or hell, adolescent.

That’s when the lone Jarecke male with an irrational, blinding attitude had had enough. I wrote a letter to our weekly local paper and asked people to shut down their cars, pleading with them to help with global warming. I reported on my incident with the gentleman in the Lexus SUV.

I received some return fire. The sharpshooter is, I’m awfully certain, a financial advisor at a firm of shaky repute, and his picture on his website is the very picture of Republican white privilege. He replied saying essentially that idling produced de minimis pollution, and anyway I should mind my manners and my own business.

Once I calmed down—OK, got my heart to quit pounding—I fired off a response that cited a documentary film about a lawyer in New York City who did what I did but for five years; the documentary noted that SIX BILLION gallons of gasoline are wasted in America alone each year this way.

Then I essentially said, my manners? What about the people who sit idling in the parking lots and ferry lines, sickening the air? What about their manners? And it’s not my business? The earth’s health is everyone’s business. He didn’t respond, having clearly realized that he’d lost that one.

Then, weirdly, I lost all hope and incentive, having been convinced by my own letter: As I had pointed out, if presumably enlightened people on Bainbridge are idling their cars, what are people in Oklahoma doing? My irritant had asked what I had against the good people of Oklahoma; I had responded that they keep reelecting Jim Inhofe, a Senator so deep in the pocket of the oil industry that he’s suffocating, a climate denier so extreme he makes Trump look green.

Then the U.N. reports came out that concluded that we’re essentially fucked. We have to turn it around right NOW, or my daughter Kate and her friends will have an unlivable world. It profoundly depresses and embarrasses me. Wasn’t the Woodstock generation supposed to fix everything that the Greatest Generation fucked up, like winning World War II and designing and implementing a political and economic model that made peace in the Atlantic a constant? So why have I taken up space on earth?

After those reports, I changed lanes again (OK, it's a cliche, but see what I did there?) to become distressingly obsessed. I decided that there was nothing to lose, and I absolutely had the cultural upper hand here. I was going to confront people.

At least I’ve learned from Nancy, who, as rational as she is, has joined my crusade: don’t be confrontational, but be polite, respectful, and ask them if they’d consider blah blahh. Lately, I went up to a woman who was listening to her radio and I apologized for bothering her and asked if, considering global warming, she’d consider turning her car off? She gave me a blazing smile, apologized, and turned it off. I nearly asked her if she was seeing anyone.

Then, the last, scariest test: some big white vehicle was parked in a no-parking zone at Safeway, idling away. I walked over to it, but the windows were heavily tinted, so I had no idea if anyone was even inside. Still I motioned for the driver to turn down the window. He did, and he was enormous, arms like my legs, and he had one of those moustache-goatee combinations that say, I am one evil sumbitch, and you don’t want anything to do with me. I smiled, probably noticeably quivering, and apologized several times for bothering him. I then asked if, in light of global warming, would he mind turning off his car? He stared at me. He didn’t glare; that would have required him to acknowledge that I had annoyed him, and, I get it, he doesn’t want to go that far. And then he reached over and turned it all off.

Is there hope after all? Probably not, but I’m going to defy social niceties and the Jarecke calm to keep at it.

Uncle Mont, at left, with the pinky ring. A harbinger of the demon rum.