The 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament,
which was also a cross-country march seeking to change the world, lost one
marcher to a vehicular collision. The Great March for Climate Action has gone
for seven months without incident, but that awesome track record came to an end
on Friday, Sept. 26. While walking along Route 65 out of Maumee and toward
Toledo, a pick-up truck operated by a sleeping driver struck me head on. Unlike
the unfortunate Peace Marcher in 1986, I can live to tell the tale.
The road I was walking on that day was a busy, winding
highway with a small shoulder, but the walking conditions were still far better
than many of the roads we traverse. We often find ourselves on narrow roads
with no shoulders where cars either have to go around us or pass within inches
of us. This is a danger we have been hyper-aware of since day one.
The cart that I have been pushing all of my gear in took on
the brunt of the collision and saved my life. The collision wasn’t a brush or
even a sideswipe; it was a full, head-on contact at nearly full highway speed.
I had glanced down at my phone briefly, and when I looked up the truck was
right there in front of me, and I only had time to scream. Because it happened
so fast, my body did not have time to tense and I remained relatively limp,
which worked in my favor. When the truck struck me, I was thrown completely off
of my feet and into the air. I landed in the yard I had been walking along and
rolled through the grass. I was back on my feet in moments, feeling dizzy but
relatively okay.
The remains of my push cart after the accident. Read about why I decided to start pushing my gear here.
As the adrenaline wore down over the next half hour, I would
discover that I had a fat lip; abrasions on my left knee, my right hip and my
right forearm; and that my lower right leg was heavily bruised with a dent in
the skin and muscle. The next day my neck would be sore from whiplash. But
nothing was broken and not a drop of blood was spilled. I didn’t even need to
go to urgent care — some Ibuprofen and an ice pack was all I needed. My good
luck is hard to believe.
However, as I’ve walked from New Mexico to our present
moment in Ohio, I have seen thousands that weren’t as lucky as I was. Dogs,
cats, raccoons, opossum, songbirds, geese, a great horned owl, deer, rabbits,
frogs, butterflies and creatures so ground into the pavement they were
unrecognizable. A scrap of fur here, a jaw bone there. I have stepped over
them, around them, and lifted up the front wheel of my cart so as not to run
them over. I have stooped down to pray for their souls, I have fallen to my
knees and cried and I have spray-painted two roadside memorials in an attempt
to make a statement. I now wear a feather in my hair from a Canadian goose
murdered and left to rot on the shoulder.
Canadian goose in Ohio
Memorial for an opossum in Iowa
Memorial for a slain fawn in Iowa
With the invention of the car, our entire infrastructure was
transformed. Think about it — you can travel from one end of the country to the
other without ever leaving a strip of pavement. And then you can come back and
take an entirely different route on a different strip of pavement. This
infrastructure requires that we slice through forests, drill tunnels into
mountains, blow up hills and crisscross rivers, cutting up valuable wildlife
habitats into neat little packages that are convenient for humans and no one
else. Rather than looking at roads as a necessity for our daily lives, we need
to start looking at them for the scars on the face of the Earth they are.
With the invention of the car, we could place two buildings
ten miles apart from each other and call them next door, and thus the morning
commute was born. Of course I need a car if I’m expected to get to work on
time! While marching I have learned to completely disregard the advice and
directions of locals. When they give us walking directions, they’re thinking
about it from the perspective of a driver; they never tell us about nice biking
or nature trails. They also have no concept of distance. If a local tells us
something is three miles away, in reality it could be as little as a mile away
or as much as six miles away. Our constant reliance on cars for travel has
disconnected us from our environment — we can only understand distance in
“car-time” and we do not appreciate the actual effort it takes to get from
place to place. Have you ever noticed how much more rewarding it is to walk or
bike somewhere? Isn’t it amazing the details you notice when you’re not inside
a car? How beautiful the world around you suddenly is?
I’d like to revisit a set of statistics from an old post on my blog: Americans now use motor vehicles for more than 90 percent of
their daily trips. A quarter of all car journeys are less than two miles.
Our precious cars are born out of our
disease of convenience, and the effects have been devastating. Massive fossil
fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, disconnection from our
environment, loss of ability to conceptualize time and distance, habitat
destruction, species loss and endangerment, human injury and even death.
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