A soulful commute
Turning practical transport into ‘pleasing travel’
by Colleen O’Connor

For almost 20 years executive chef Cindy Pawlcyn navigated a daily four-hour roundtrip commute. She lives in Napa Valley, home of her famed Mustards Grill restaurant, and after working there she would drive off to work some more at Fog City Diner and her other San Francisco restaurants. But one rainy night, during the rush-hour commute, she got snagged by a grisly 23-car crash.

"It was like watching a pool game when they break the table and the balls go everywhere," says Pawlcyn, who sat aghast in her Volkswagen Beetle. "There were Jeeps upside down with wheels spinning, people upside down – it was nuts. I couldn’t even get my fingers unpeeled [from the wheel]."

A man rushed up from the car behind her. "He said, ‘Are you okay?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I think I’m gonna quit commuting, though.’ He said, ‘Good idea. I think I am, too.’"

Within six months, Pawlcyn had sold all her San Francisco restaurants. Ending her commute yielded an extra 20 hours of free time each week, which she devotes to tending her organic garden, helping her husband make apple cider in their small winery and cooking dinner twice a week at the home of her octogenarian neighbors, who aren’t getting around as easily as before.

"Now when I walk down the street people go, ‘Hi, Cindy!’ I was never around before. People knew who I was, but didn’t know me well enough to stop and talk. It’s so nice."

Increasing congestion – and costs

Like MTV and SUVs, commuting seems here to stay. It fragments our communities and takes its toll on our peace of mind. Between 1990 and 1996, incidents of highway violence increased 51 percent, according to the American Automobile Association’s Foundation for Traffic Safety. Gridlock and congestion trigger tempers and the problem is getting worse. According to the Association for Commuter Transportation, between 1982 and 1999 traffic delays increased by 235 percent.

Back in the 1960s, Thomas Merton uttered prophetic warning against this addiction to automobiles in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. "We waste our natural resources, as well as those of undeveloped countries, iron, oil, etc., in order to fill our cities and roads with a congestion of traffic that is in fact largely useless, and is a symptom of the meaningless and futile agitation of our own minds."

But he was a voice crying in the wilderness. By 1999 the cost of traffic jams totaled $78 billion, including the cost of 6.8 billion gallons of fuel wasted while sitting in traffic and 4.5 billion hours of lost time due to traffic delays. The average American now spends 443 hours a year in the car, the equivalent of 55 eight-hour work days, according to John Holtzclaw, Transportation Committee Chair of the Sierra Club in San Francisco. "People just don’t have an option," he says.

Historic conspiracy

There’s a reason for this. Early in the last century, public policy goals took second place to the needs of private business. Back then America had a vast network of public transportation, including an admirable system of electric trolley cars. In 1936, that system took a quantum leap forward when 100 modern streetcars hit the tracks – some herald this as the greatest advance ever made in the history of electric rail transportation.

But that same year, with an eye on its bottom line, General Motors formed National City Lines, a group of auto and oil companies such as Firestone Tires and Standard Oil of California. Together, they bought more than 100 electric-railway systems in 45 cities – including Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia and Baltimore – then ripped out the tracks and built new roads.

Later convicted of criminal conspiracy, General Motors was fined $5,000. Its corporate treasurer, who helped mastermind the plan, was fined a whopping sum of $1. But despite the conviction General Motors continued to buy electric-rail companies until 1955, when 88 percent of the nation’s electric streetcar network had been destroyed. In 1936, when General Motors formed the conspiracy, there were 40,000 streetcars in action. By 1965 there were only 5,000.

Today, bias against public transit continues in the form of hidden subsidies fueled by tax dollars. One of the largest is the public expense of building roads. A prime example is the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st century, passed in 1998, which set federal transportation spending for six years. Over $173 billion is allocated for highways, but public transportation projects received only $41 billion. The Transportation Equity Act is up for renewal next year, and activists are already working to win public transportation projects a fair share of the tax dollars.

But even if the impossible happened and public transportation won the entire lump sum, change would still be glacial. "We spent 50 years building ourselves into this situation, and it will take 50 years to completely reverse it," says Holtzclaw.

Bikes, jetpacks and sails

This means that every 16-year-old who receives a driver’s license this year will be fighting commuter traffic long past retirement age. For adults, it’s a life sentence. Many people – some saying they bordered on road rage – have downshifted to alternate means of transportation: trains, subways, carpools, bikes, ferries and scooters. Telecommuting is a popular option, and so is flextime – workdays staggered around rush-hour traffic.

Meanwhile, visionaries are busy concocting possible solutions. Flying to work, without the hassle of airports, could create a Disneyesque commute. Aerospace engineer Michael Moshier recently conducted a test flight of his space-age invention: the Solo Trek Exo-Skeletor Flying Vehicle, a 325-pound machine that resembles a Buck Rogers jetpack (www.solotrek.com). Eight feet tall, it allows the driver to fly in standing position using two joysticks to control its direction. The Defense Department is paying him $5 million for a prototype to be delivered by 2003, envisioning that his invention will help soldiers quickly enter and exit tight spots. But Moshier, who lives in Silicon Valley, is intimately familiar with roads that are more like parking lots than freeways. So he thinks Solo Trek might be a smart solution, imagining commuters soaring through the air like a host of techno-angels at a breezy 80 miles an hour, getting 150 miles per tank of gas.

Anti-road activist Jan Lundgren, founder of the Sustainable Energy Alliance, also has visions. But his harken back to the golden age of shipping, when everything from citrus to silks was transported over the oceans: all powered by trade winds. Reducing this global scale down to the self-contained marine bio-region of Puget Sound, Lundgren has created the fledgling Sail Transport Network. This summer, his 35-foot sloop will transport musicians from one port to the next, where he hopes to attract the attention of other sailors to help re-establish sail transport as a sustainable alternative to trucks and motorized shipping.

"This is not about moving huge boxes of manufactured junk from one port to another," he says. "I’m talking about a whole new age of relying on local resources – about moving ideas, music, information and culture."

As a social statement, it’s both political and spiritual. "You’re close to the earth when you’re sailing," he says. "The water is alive, much more so than land. When you’re participating in a project with such earth-friendly values, you’re coming from a spiritual perspective, whether you call it that or not."

Soul of new commute?

But not everyone is gifted with such futuristic vision. Further, lots of commuters are land-locked. And many live in towns that lack mass-transit infrastructure. Then there’s a whole subset of commuters – moms with carfuls of kids – who find buses, bikes and scooters highly impractical for their tightly organized shuttling services.

People like this, unable to change their situation, have opted to change their minds. It’s as if they read these sentences from The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life by Thomas Moore, and created the soul of a new commute:

"If we imagine transportation as the process of getting from point A to point B, we are reducing it to absolute unadorned pragmatism whereas it can be an exciting sensual and emotional experience in itself," writes Moore. "Sometimes the difference between practical transport and pleasing travel depends on a simple decision to care for the soul."

Call it the spirituality of community, finding the sacred in the ordinary. Experts on commuter stress recommend that people make their cars into pleasant environments so that, if stuck, they’re at least serene: keeping things tidy with waste bags and drink holders. But road-worshippers take this much further. If our bodies are our temples, they reason, so are our cars. Rosaries, prayer beads and Buddhist icons dangle from rear-view mirrors. Jesus, Krishna, and the Virgin Mother grace dashboards. Pujas, Arabic prayers and the haunting beauty of Tibetan-bowl music waft from CD players. Bumper stickers are lectio divina, and ashtrays converted to altars brim with sacred rocks. Highways are holy places where random acts of kindness take to the road. Call it car karma.

"I’ve tried to adopt a rather benign attitude toward others in traffic," says Gary Haslop, the information and services technology manager at a Northern California supply company in Brisbane. "I might let someone back out of his driveway, or make a last-minute lane change. I may see the driver behind me drumming fingers on the wheel and then, lo and behold! He’s letting someone make the maneuver they need. It’s the kind of infectious spread we might all consider supporting."

There’s also toll-booth dharma, where drivers pay the toll of the stranger in the car behind them, lifting the spirits of both giver and receiver. Such road-worshippers are driving a new brand of spirituality, one that’s evident in the popularity of such books as Saint Benedict on the Freeway: A Rule of Life for the 21st Century by Corrine Ware, and My Monastery is a Minivan by Debbie Roy.

Traffic as spiritual discipline

It was Gregorian chant playing one afternoon on NPR that gave Roy, a self-proclaimed soccer mom, the idea of her car as sacred space. This idea really seized her imagination later, during a silent retreat at a monastery. Sitting in the chapel and absorbing the silence, gazing at the stained glass windows, she made a startling connection between commuting and the Benedictine hours of the day, where every moment is devoted to resting in the presence of God.

"In the monastery, I meditate. In my minivan, I meditate," she writes. "Repetitive schedules are found in both the monastery and the minivan: 8 a.m. chapel, 8 a.m. car pool; 3 p.m. chapel, 3 p.m. car pool; 6 p.m. chapel; 6 p.m. car pool."

From Buddhists to Christians, road worshippers see traffic as the new spiritual discipline. Impatience, even anger, become tools for developing virtues like humility.

In his book Living the Mindful Life, Charles Tart, professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, writes that he was discussing the nature of evil one day with a group of religious scholars. The next day, driving in the fast lane on the freeway, he struck a deep insight.

"I noticed that a man was trying to pass me, but I was blocking the fast lane and there was too much traffic in the other lanes for him to go around me on the right. Well, I felt I was going fast enough and it was just too bad if he would have to wait a minute to get around me. Suddenly, I realized that, for all my claimed aversion, I was indulging in evil. I was enjoying another’s suffering and feeling powerful and satisfied with what I was doing and feeling."

Many of the experts’ strategies for commuter-stress management are actually spiritual principles in disguise. For example, one manual advises: "Remind yourself that becoming upset over situations beyond your control is unproductive." In Eastern religions, this is called detachment. In Western religions it’s considered acceptance or surrender. Either way, its a priority for Richard Hasselbach, a former priest who now works as executive assistant and legal counsel for the president of the Borough of Manhattan Community College. His four-hour roundtrip commute is a daily education.

"One of the things I’ve learned is not to fight with the inevitable," he says. "If traffic is hopelessly tied up I have no choices. There’s no point in sitting on the horn."

Still, he admits that he’s not perfect. The biggest challenge usually comes when he’s finally off the freeway and more than halfway home. "I find myself sometimes frustrated by the slowpoke in front of me, driving five miles below speed limit," he says. "This aggravates me almost more than traffic. In those moments I sometimes sit on the horn, but in better moments I catch myself feeling this truly irrational anger."

He then uses this emotion as a tool for self-reflection. "What I’m encountering with that irrational anger is a piece of my own darkness that I don’t usually look at. Since it tipped its hand, I want to get to know it. So is my need to be on the fast track? To always be out in front? If so, how healthy is this? And being in front of what? It becomes a source of meditation, really."

But for Mary Wilkin, who works at a small hospital 50 miles from her home in northwest Ohio, driving and the spiritual don’t mix. "I prefer to practice meditation and breath prayer alone in the early morning with a single candle burning. That doesn’t translate well to the automobile."

Even the car radio jams her nerves. "Talk radio could tempt me to drive into a ditch and end it all," she quips.

Then she discovered books on tape. "Not self-improvement tapes, not inspirational tapes, but murder mysteries, science fiction, even a few Oprah book club titles. I found that for two hours a day I could enjoy a simple story. It gave me a reason to get in the car every morning at 7 a.m. and again at 4:30 p.m. I looked forward to seeing what happened next."

Susan Hodder, director of a strategic marketing company in Boston, prefers a combination of mindfulness and gratitude. She could focus on the negative aspects of commuting. After all, her daily commute from the Boston suburbs to her downtown office has been massively complicated by construction of the Big Dig – the largest, most complex and technologically challenging highway project ever attempted in American history. Its goal is to dramatically reduce traffic snarls in one of America’s most congested major cities, but its construction has tripled weekday commutes.

"Rather than dwell on the hassles of urban commuting, I decided that I would focus on how lucky I am to be in such a world-class city," she says. "I changed my route to work to follow along a winding thoroughfare that follows the banks of the Charles River past Harvard and MIT. Now, as I sit in traffic, I watch the scullers pulling past me, and the geese diving for their breakfast, and I marvel at the range of local architecture as the beautiful Boston skyline unfurls before me. If the Big Dig ended tomorrow, I wouldn’t change back to my old route."

Even mass transit doesn’t guarantee peace of mind. Meg Carter doesn’t own a car, so she uses public transportation to travel from her home in Oakland to her job at a San Francisco bank. According to the recent census, San Francisco has the nation’s third worst commute – trailing only New York City and Chicago.

"It can be stressful," she says. "It’s a long trip and I have to be at the office at a certain time. There are always several transfers involved, which increases the potential for delay."

Many of the bus drivers won’t stop to pick up passengers unless they’re dropping people off. "Some of them intentionally look straight ahead so that they can pretend they didn’t see any people waiting at the stop, which causes some people to step out into the street and knock on their doors. It’s pretty dangerous, on those hills, but people get frustrated after four buses have passed them up and they’re half an hour late for work."

But her spiritual practices lend higher vision. As a member of a weekly Benedictine prayer community, she’s become attuned to rhythms of the day and the connection to the natural world.

"Early in the morning when I’m leaving home, and late at night when I’m returning, I encounter people out walking their dogs. Cats are hanging out on the doorsteps, and birds are hanging out in the trees. Sometimes I see raccoons and possums in my very urban neighborhood. You’re very close to the weather, and not just rain, but wind, heat and cold. There’s nothing to mediate between you and the elements when you’re walking or waiting for the bus."

Traffic as art

Ultimately, commuting is an intriguing paradox: It’s about choice within no-choice.

Back in the 1960s, when the monk Merton lambasted the automobile as the symbol of everything that was wrong with American society, one of his contemporaries offered another way of thinking. Al Hansen, an artist, was a founder of 1960s happenings – the art form melding theater, music, and the visual arts. For him, traffic was a symbol of all those gritty things in life that serve to wake us up.

"There is the traffic jam, the construction job, the bus that gets four flat tires all at once for no readily explainable reason, the train that stops mysteriously in the middle of the tunnel under the East River," he wrote in A Primer of Happenings. "To the average person, these might be minor tragedies; a happening person would exult that the normal, mundane order of things has been suspended or changed vividly. To us, the unexpected is not a threat; it is welcome."

Colleen O’Connor is a freelance writer based in San Francisco, Calif.