I have been happily car-free now for more than a decade, and I suspect I’ll make it to the other side without having had another car again.
Don’t get me wrong. I like to drive. I just don’t want or need the expense and hassle of car ownership. And it’s mostly the hassle. Even if someone gave me a car, paid for parking, and took care of insurance, I’m not sure I’d want to own one again.
Easy enough when you live in a city with reasonably good public transportation, and live pretty close to that reasonably good public transpo. When I first went car-free, I relied on Zipcar, which has cars less than two minutes from my front door. And then one day when I was returning my Zipcar, a fellow returnee asked me whether I’d ever heard of Uber.
Well, no, I hadn’t. But she started raving about it, so I took a look.
Now I pretty much Uber anywhere I can’t walk to or get to via the T or commuter rail, or when I really, really, really want door-to-door. I do occasionally Zipcar, especially when I want to pick something up. Like a Christmas tree. But mostly I Uber.
Even when I indulge in an occasional expensive Uber from my sister’s in Salem - which every once in a while I do because I just don’t feel like waiting for the train or walking home from the train station – it’s still a lot cheaper than owning a car.
Then there are the psychic costs of car ownership. Like hunting for a parking space. Or having to shovel out your car if you don’t have indoor parking. Or getting rats in your engine, something that I hadn’t thought about in a while, but which did happen to me that once.
If you live in a city, you will at some point or another have to contend with rats. I have – blessedly – never had an indoor rat (just an occasional mouse) in my house. My husband had a rat back in the day before we lived together, and that was quite enough for me. (And, of course, when I waitressed at the Union Oyster House nearly 50 years ago, it was a firing offense if, when there were patrons in the house, you screamed when a rat crossed you path.) But even if rats are “just” an outdoor, you do see them out and about.
Newbury Street is Boston’s nicest shopping street, but if you’re walking along Newbury at dusk, there’s some likelihood that you’ll see a scurrying rat somewhere along your stroll.
I sometimes see one take a dive into a storm drain on Charles Street. Occasionally I happen upon a flattened carcass. And at night I sometimes hear them rooting around in trash out back of my place. (No matter how many times I post signs asking people in my building to put garbage-y trash – as opposed to recycle, which the rats don’t care about – out on the morning of trash pickup, several still persist in putting theirs out the night before. And let me tell you, rats do enjoy going after banana peels and avocados.)
But my worst near-encounter with rats was when got in my engine.
There are two parking places out in back of my condo building. I don’t own either of them, but at one point one of the owners who does let me use his for a while.
It was still street parking, but it was yours, and you didn’t have to roam around for 45 minutes looking for a tight spot that might take you 45 minutes to get into, and which you almost always had to vacate at 7 a.m. the next morning to make way for the streetsweepers. So I was delighted to park out back.
One of the few car things I know how to do is change the windshield wiper fluid. So one fine day, I popped the hood and, gallon jug of blue fluid in hand, went to fill’ er up.
What was that chicken bone doing on the engine? Those pieces of pineapple? That gnawed hunk of fruitcake?
My first thought, oddly enough, was that someone had set up some kind of Santeria voodoo altar in my car.
Then I saw those telltale, lozenge-shaped pellets. Crap! Rat scat!
Yes, indeed, some of the locals, not content to scavenge my neighbors garbage bags, wanted to bring their take out in, to the warmth of a dining car. My car.
Well, yuck.
That was it for my parking out back. I’d switched to street parking on the sections of blocks where people didn’t put their trash out, or where they used lidded containers.
I mentioned the rat-fest to my next door neighbor, and he told me that they’d had rats in their car, but I wasn’t to tell his wife.
A colleague told me that some friends of hers who lived on the Boston waterfront had also had rodents under their hood.
So it’s a problem, if not a widespread one. I suspect that most folks I know have never had a rat-in-the-engine problem.
But there are other situations where animals go looking for mobile homes. Years ago, my husband’s Uncle Bill, who lived in a small town in Western Mass, had a woodchuck that took up residence in his car. And in Central Europe, there’s a plague of stone martens. Unlike urban rats looking for a place to dine in comfort – or Uncle Bill’s woodchuck, who for whatever reason just wanted in (probably just to aggravate Bill, which is how he took it - the automotive mission of the stone marten is:
…gnawing on rubber. Specifically, it likes to crawl into car-engine cavities and chew on the wiring.
As a result, in Germany, car insurance that covers Marderbisse (marten bites) is a must. According to gdv, an insurers’ group, martens were the fourth-leading cause of non-collision auto damage in Germany in 2017. They chewed through €72m ($79m) worth of cables, up from €66m the year before and €28m in 2005.Source: The Economist)
Marderbisse, huh?
Must not happen much around here. Even with all those ads for Farmers Insurance, which boast that ‘we know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two”, and roll out every possible quirky and weird thing that can happen to your car, I’ve never heard of Marderbisse. But fourth-leading cause of non-collision damage would put it right up there, I’m guessing with, bears breaking in looking for food, thieves breaking in looking for electronics, and vandals pegging stones.
Cars aren’t the only places that stone martens like:
In 2016 one hopped onto an electric transformer at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, short-circuiting it and briefly knocking out the particle accelerator. Earlier that year the LHC lost power when a cable was chewed through by an animal which, though rather charred, appears to have been a marten.
The LHC was one of the places my husband had on his bucket list. He never got there, but I’m quasi on the hook to strew a couple of grains of his ashes there some day, even though I have absolutely no interest in being around a particular accelerator. But maybe some day.
It’s not clear why martens like chewing on electrical insulation. There’s speculation that insulation made in East Asia is attractive because it can contain fish oil. Or that it’s young, stupid martens (as opposed to older, wiser martens) who like a good chaw – enough so that they’re willing to risk death by electrocution.
But marten motivation is likely to remain a mystery. At least my rats were just looking for a warm place to enjoy dinner and didn’t do any damage, beyond the unnerving “can’t unsee” sight of rat crap in your car.
One more reason to be happily car-free…
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