Читать книгу Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future - Amanda Little - Страница 34

With 145 laps completed and 43 to go, the #17 car shuddered and began to skid out. A collective groan went through the stands. The engine had blown out, not an uncommon occurrence in racing given the strains put on car engines. I didn’t have long to wonder whether this was the “big one.” As #17 began to fishtail, it clipped the nose of another car riding its fender and set off a domino effect. At 200 miles an hour, even the slightest disturbance can force air under a vehicle’s chassis, popping the car up like a Frisbee and flipping it on its back. The result was an eleven-car pileup that brought the race to a stop and the entire audience to its feet.

Looking up, I was struck by the appearance of the crowd. For all the wealth of competing logos and gear available to them, by far the standout choice among the Talladega fans was patriotic garb: the grandstands looked like a pointillist painting in red, white, and blue. I approached one bystander, a sixty-three-year-old account manager at a North Carolina carpet company who had been coming to NASCAR races since they were held on dirt tracks in the 1950s, and asked him about this apparent connection between stock car racing and patriotism. “Those fellas are fast, proud, fearless go-getters with rebel hearts,” he said, nodding toward the track. “That about sums up the American spirit, don’t it?”

I’d take it a bit further to say that no consumer product more wholly embodies the American ethos than the automobile—“the heartbeat of America,” as Chevrolet famously dubbed it. The word derives from the Greek root auto, “self,” and the Latin mobile, “moving”—words that could be said to define the American dream: we each propel ourselves toward the life and destiny of our own choosing. In these individual pursuits, we also consume on average 1.5 gallons of gasoline per person per day. This fuel consumption—roughly quadruple that of the average European—is due in part to the great distances traveled in our largely suburban, auto-dependent lifestyles, but also to the fact that we have some of the lowest fuel economy standards of any industrial nation—lower even than those of our up-and-coming rival China. All of which contributes to a habit of domestic consumption that far exceeds our ability to produce domestic oil.

There were moments when I felt like the whole NASCAR enterprise should be illegal—just as racing was prohibited during World War II in order to save fuel for the troops, and just as gas was rationed during the Arab oil embargo. Why shouldn’t Americans be asked to give up activities such as NASCAR as we grapple with war, dwindling supplies, and a growing environmental crisis?

But while I half expected to feel some indignation, I didn’t expect to enjoy the whole experience so much. The body-rumbling speed, the roar of the crowd, the open-throttle sense of freedom, the cars shifting and moving in a V-shaped flock formation like mechanical birds in flight—the race had a thrill factor and a beauty that seemed, if only for moments, to justify all the fuel required to bring it to life. I came to understand that these questions were more gnarled and complicated than I’d thought. That NASCAR was more universally American—more me—than I’d ever realized.

What I couldn’t get my mind around was how, exactly, it had come to this. I wanted to know the story behind America’s long-running love affair with cars. How did we develop a fetish for cars so consuming that we’d spend money and time watching them drive around in circles? How did Detroit automakers, and American consumers, become so reckless about our fuel consumption? How did so much of our lifestyles, our very identities—our neighborhoods, shopping centers, transportation networks—come to revolve around the combustion engine?