When I first moved to Calgary at eighteen to pursue my Olympic dreams I had little need for a car. I had a bike and a small circle of destinations that made it relatively easy to get around. I was also student-athlete poor and had no money for an extravagant thing like a car. But as I got older and Calgary got bigger my desire to be able to go where I pleased on a moment’s notice grew. The mountains beckoned, as did shopping malls and interesting places to go.
So when my grandfather passed away and I found myself with a small sum to spend on whatever I wanted, I set out to find a good, small, reliable, used car.
I settled on a light blue 1985 Toyota Tercel hatchback. It cost me $1350. At the time the price of gas was $0.44/L and I could fill it up for $17.00. The tank would last me a month. Grocery shopping was a dream; I could go hiking in the mountains or toss my bike on the roof and ride wherever I wanted. I still rode my bike a lot and didn’t rely on my car too much but just having it was akin to freedom.
I became rather attached to that little car – Herman – as my friend Dave named him. We took to calling him ‘The Herm’ for short. He was cute, practical and would dutifully start, unplugged, with just one turn of the key on frigid winter mornings in Calgary. He seemed to have some personality and in some odd way I felt like he reflected mine – practical, efficient, understated, humble, and at the time, frugal. He also represented my becoming an adult and reaching the threshold of making my own responsible decisions about what I wanted in my life.
I kept the car in good shape, although it rarely needed work. When it did I would take it to a local high school where I knew the automotive teacher and they would fix it up for a dime. I ran out of gas a couple of times, got a couple of flat tires and once broke the windshield wipers after a heavy snowfall, but year after year he just kept on going, doing his job of keeping me mobile.
I drove that car for almost nine years. Near the end there were a few issues that made it somewhat unsafe, like the driver’s side door no longer worked and I had to get in and out of the car on the passenger side (I did this for nearly a year), and it got to the point where a) my Dad didn’t want me driving it anymore and b) I’d saved up enough money to replace it with something better.
There was a tinge of sadness in my heart as I said goodbye to The Herm. I dropped him off at the junkyard for scraps and in return received a voucher for $300 towards a new bike. This eventually became my touring bike, which I christened The Herm Reincarnate.
That spring of 2006 I went to a car dealership and bought a brand new Honda Fit. I once swore I would never buy a new car, but I easily broke that rule by justifying to myself that I would do it once and drive the car until the end of time.
I tried to think of a name for it but nothing ever came to me. This car had zero personality. And while it had a nice stereo, with FM radio no less, air conditioning and power steering, it felt boring and utilitarian. Meanwhile, Calgary continued to expand at a blistering pace and sitting in traffic was increasingly common.
Six years went by before I topped the 35,000km mark on the odometer. My boyfriend and I had moved in together and both of our cars were sitting in the parking lot 95% of the time. We started biking more and discovered the benefits of public transit. Increasingly, the justification for keeping my car weakened.
I no longer felt that this car reflected who I was, that instead it represented all of the things I didn’t want in my life. It drained my hard earned dollars and left me feeling like a caged animal stuck in the now routine Calgary traffic jams. It was the opposite of what I wanted – it was stifling, expensive, inefficient, and unnecessary.
After some contemplation, like nearly a year’s worth, I finally made the decision to sell the car that had no name. I got about half of what I paid for it six years ago and I put every penny into a huge lump sum mortgage payment. I will save $90 a month in insurance and $45 in gas. That adds up to saving $1620 a year.
This time there was no tinge of sadness as I watched the new owner drive away with my car. I will admit to a few moments of panic when I irrationally suspected that the bank draft he gave me was forged (it wasn’t) — but no sadness. It was more a feeling of relief, like my life had just become simpler.
The best part about having one car less is that in many instances it eliminates choice. I can no longer choose between bike and car, my only option is bike. It’s no longer possible to cop out and resort to the ‘easier, faster’ option (although that is mostly a fallacy) of driving. It’s odd how I feel the same sense of freedom now that I did 15 years ago when I bought that first car.
While we are not car-free we are one car less. It will require some creative planning from time to time but for the most part I don’t think we’ll notice the difference. Unless you count less time sitting in traffic, more time outside on our bikes and more money in the bank. We might notice that.
My week began with three days of surprisingly intense work at the CBC, preparing and then calling the races from the Short Track Speed Skating World Championships in Shanghai. This is still high performance sport – yes – but television is a planet unto itself, on which I often feel like a visiting alien. Thanks to the date line and time change I could watch all the races beforehand, analyze in advance and prepare notes so as to hopefully sound smarter than I actually am when the time came to go air. Even still, live-to-air is pretty stressful and the hour whizzed by in a snap.
Dave’s best friend – my boyfriend Scott – grew up skiing at the Craigleith Ski Club north of Toronto and was coached by Nik Zoricic’s dad Bebe for many years. He remembered a little Nik ripping around the ski hill, and he could tell back then that Nik would one day be a world-class skier. This personal, albeit distant, connection to Nik’s death and the raw, inexplicable circumstances of the crash made me feel so sad.
But I wanted to go and see if Right To Play could have the same positive impact there as they have had in so many other places around the world, using sport and play as tools for development in hundreds of thousands of disaffected youth. Maybe this would finally be a bit of good news for the First Nations people of Canada.
I talked to Aboriginal youth in Nipissing and Sheshegewaning First Nations about the Olympics, my experiences as an athlete and tried my hardest to teach them how to skate. I was stressed to the max watching these kids rip around the ice without helmets (a cause that I failed miserably to implement) and optimistically tried to get them to do speed skating drills when all they wanted to do was not do speed skating drills. I was inspired by the few who were keen to learn, and confused by those who were afraid to. Amidst the chaos I wondered to myself if I had made a mistake in being there, talking to kids about the Olympics and trying to teach them to speed skate when they had no hope of understanding my life, in much the same way I had no hope of understanding theirs.
After the skating session in Sheshegwaning was over I felt unbelievably relieved that no one had fallen and cracked open their head. And I was totally unsure of what I had accomplished, if anything at all, by being there. When the Right To Play staff later debriefed about the events that day I was surprised to hear how positive they were and that the kids had been so amazing. From where they had started in October last year, it was a giant leap forward that the kids had shown up at all, that they had paid attention for ten whole minutes and that they had gotten on the ice to skate, with smiles no less. It made me realize how unrealistic my expectations had been, and just how challenging it has been to get this program off the ground.
