The Blue Car and the Trees

Last Monday, I dropped off the Blue Car for service. A day later, it was 100 degrees in Boston with the heat index reaching 110 by afternoon. I couldn’t have timed things better.

The Blue Car is my daily driver from spring through fall and I generally love every minute behind the wheel, but there comes a time in summer when I grab the Subaru’s keys on my way out the door and the Blue Car stays in the garage. I don’t handle heat well and when it’s really hot and humid, my relationship with the Blue Car becomes strained; the black vinyl seats and no air conditioning make it a heat box that brings no joy. Call me a wimp, but the lack of AC is one (and maybe the only) downside to the Blue Car. We all have our faults, right?

I think back to my childhood and wonder how we did it. My brothers and I would pile in the back of our Ford station wagon (no seat belts back then) with no air conditioning and not a single rear window that opened and utter not a single complaint during the long summer days. But last Tuesday, the air was thick with humidity and it felt like a wet steamy dishcloth was wrapped tightly around me. The last thing on my mind was driving the Blue Car.

Fear of experiencing hot and humid weather is a major factor in my road trip preparation. It’s why I plan to ship the car to Europe in February of next year and start the road trip by March. I will head south first, exploring Portugal, Northern Spain, and then Italy down to the boot and back before the weather turns beastly (and just to be clear, when I describe weather as beastly, it always means extreme heat and humidity, never extreme cold, a blizzard, or thunderstorms, tornadoes, or hurricanes). I will leave Italy and head north as the days get warmer and I hope to be exploring back roads in Scandinavia by the time tourist season and summer is in full swing.

I did my US road trip in the fall, hoping to avoid the worst of the summer weather. And yet, the beginning of the journey is burned in my memory (pun intended). Four days into the trip, I was in the Hudson River Valley of New York and the heat wave hit. There was a lot I wanted to see in the towns and cities peppered up and down the shores of the Hudson: gilded age mansions inhabited by the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, art galleries and sculpture parks, farm to table restaurants, and the Walk over the Hudson pedestrian bridge in Poughkeepsie. One morning, I was an hour in the car and felt the first trickle of sweat run down my back. I wondered about something I had heard once: “ladies don’t sweat, they glow.” Whoever said that did it just to make women feel bad, and they certainly never drove the Blue Car in extreme heat.

My plans for the day quickly changed. I went to the Lyndhurst Mansion and when I got back in the car, the steering wheel was so hot I couldn’t touch it. I had no interest in another stop and no appetite for lunch. A quick check on GPS located a nearby public library where I assumed I could enjoy some air conditioning. Once there, I spent three hours cooling off while doing some research for next stops, writing, and downloading photos.

The next day, despite even higher temperatures, I kept my plan to visit Storm King, a 500-acre sculpture park in New Windsor, NY. And because I had wanted to visit for years and didn’t want to miss anything, I rented a bicycle to cover more ground. This is the point in this story where I could, and probably should, use the word “foolish.” Yes, I managed to see most of the sculpture in the park, but when I returned my bicycle to the rental kiosk at 3pm, I was soaked through (I am reluctant to tell you this as I would prefer my readers envision me with prefect hair and beautiful clothes during every moment of my trip). I was also feeling fuzzy and nauseous in what was clearly a case of heat exhaustion. I got horizontal on a bench until I felt well enough to get to the car, look up a nearby hotel, and check in for the night. I cranked the AC and fell asleep, thankful for the cool air in my room.

As uncomfortable as those four days were, they could have been so much worse.

Trees saved me.

On my first day in the Hudson Valley, I finished my tour of the Vanderbilt Mansion and headed to Stone Barns at Blue Hill for lunch. I checked the maps app on my phone and I had two choices: Route 9, which runs close to the Hudson River, or the Taconic Parkway, further inland. The word “parkway” told me all I needed to know. The Taconic’s mature trees and narrow roadways formed a shaded corridor that was an oasis in the blazing sun and I was rewarded with a drive that was at least ten degrees cooler than the open roads.

From that moment, I was in tree worship mode. I pulled up satellite view of Google earth to study every route, every choice. I didn’t want to know where the tolls were, or the quickest way to get somewhere. I just looked for the masses of trees and avoided the long barren stretches of highways and streets on the screen.

The roads with dense tree cover were a welcome respite from the heat and being the urban planner that I am, I played a guessing game during my time in the Hudson Valley. The lack of air conditioning in the Blue Car immersed me in my environment and I began to think about census data, topography, geography, and density.

Whenever the tree cover started disappearing in the landscape, I knew one of two things was true. The first possibility was that I was entering an area of commercial development. “Strip” malls are called that for a reason. Sprawling low scale commercial areas are stripped of all existing vegetation and topography – hills flattened, and trees removed. It’s cheaper to redevelop that way. The result is large expanses of asphalt and not much green – not fun on a hot and humid day.

The other possibility? In residential areas, lack of tree cover along the street told me the median income of the neighborhood was going down; the fewer the trees, the lower the salaries. As simple as the idea of planting a tree sounds, trees cost money – in the initial care of constant watering and the later maintenance of pruning and disease control. In lower income communities, the few trees that do exist get lopped off by power companies if no one is paying attention and branches are drastically “pruned” back on truck routes to make way for tractor trailers.

I saw things I wouldn’t have noticed in the cool comfort of an automobile and this is the thing about the Blue Car –sometimes there is no escaping things. I view this as a good thing. I have friends who have suggested installing air conditioning but I have never seriously considered it. From what I hear, it won’t necessarily work very well. More importantly, as much as I like my creature comforts, I like the way the car connects me to my surroundings even more. I have a better understanding of where I was, and I remember more about those moments in the Hudson Valley, because I had no air conditioning.

I also gained a new appreciation for trees after those sweltering days. I have always been a lakes and mountains girl – gravitating to the cool quiet of the forest and the sense of calm it offers, even if the world around me is in turmoil. But I am sad to say that before that trip, I mostly took trees for granted in my daily life. After the first week, trees offered a magnetic pull on me for the rest of the trip.

Two months later, I was on the coast of Oregon, making my way down from Astoria to California and on to Los Angeles. Late one morning, I felt the redwoods before they appeared. The air changed and had a sweet scent and there was a quietness around me that was new. A quietness I could sense, even in the Blue Car with its air-cooled engine running at high revs. When I finally entered Redwood National and State Parks the roads were fantastic but I had to stop, and the Blue Car didn’t seem to mind. I pulled over to the side of the road, grabbed my packed lunch from the cooler, and sat down on the forest floor. I spent an hour in that quiet majestic place and could have spent a year. The Latin name for the redwood tree is Sequoia sempervirens. Sempervirens is the species name and translates to "always green" or "everliving." This seems just about right to me; the shade, the protective canopy, the fragrant branches, and the quiet all restored me in some mysterious way, just as the redwoods’ cousins came to my rescue in New York earlier in the trip.

When I think about potential themes for my European road trip, I think about great driving roads. I think about off-the-beaten-path towns. And of course, I think about cheese. And now, after last week’s heat wave in Boston, I am reminded to think about trees and how happy the Blue Car and I will be in the great forests of Europe. I am thinking about the Black Forest of Germany, the Białowieża Forest in Poland – a vast complex of primeval woodlands, the Sonian beech tree forest in Belgium, and the conifer and mixed forests of the Pyrenees Mountains.

And that’s just the beginning.