Living Big Out West

You’ve got to love a road trip with the kids in the car. It’s like being stuck at an all night Miley Cyrus concert listening to teenagers screech lyrics I can’t understand. By the time we hit our first pit stop, every surface of the car is sticky and it looks like our neatly packed bags have exploded and rained toys, doll clothes, ear buds and DVD’s all over the car. If they aren’t asking how much longer we’re going to be on the road (answer: forever!!), then they’re fighting about who gets to pick the entertainment. I’m not sure they fully understand how lucky they are to have an in-car theater. Our entertainment growing up consisted of trying to keep Dad from falling asleep at the wheel—although I’m pretty sure it was the constant blabber of three girls that was putting him to sleep in the first place. If we were traveling through a populated area we played the abc game with billboards or slug-bug, but since I’ve lived in the west all my life we were generally traversing desolate stretches of desert—if it was 20 below zero in the desert.


That’s the thing about living out west. We just don’t understand the country’s obsession with compact-ness. As I toss my kids and my bags into my 4-wheel drive SUV with a big enough engine to tow nine Chevy Volts, I feel free. We have enough room to bring snacks, entertainment, and miscellaneous relatives with us. Sure, a stop at the gas pump is downright shocking but it’s part of living big and it’s the way we like it. Which is why we can’t understand the government’s excitement over commuter cars the size of bicycles that cost ten times more than a solid used truck and can’t hold a day’s worth of groceries in the trunk. They look like Tinker toys that could be blown off the road in a strong wind—and winds are that strong out here.

And, by the way, I am not going to ride my bike to the grocery store. I see all these advertisements for walking communities where everything is within riding distance and I’m puzzled—how, exactly do you tote home the six gallons of milk that I have to buy each week? Do you balance them on your head like an African water vase? I’ve always been a little klutzy and milk is pretty sticky stuff to have dripping around your ears everyday. I had a friend tell me that you just have to plan to shop for dinner each night on your way home from work. Obviously she doesn’t know how much I hate grocery shopping because that concept alone is enough to send me to green communities with a bullhorn and a protest sign. If they take away my Costco, I’m going to get angry. Maybe I don’t need a bag of marshmallows the size of a pillowcase, but I can fit it into the back of my SUV so it’s coming home with me anyway.

I realize that we’re all responsible for this planet and I try to do my part by (occasionally) remembering those green bags that cost me a buck a piece at the grocery store and I walk around the house turning off the lights that my kids leave on all the time. But I’m just not ready to have other people tell me how to live. If I had wanted to walk to work and live in a high-rise with no vehicle then I would have moved to New York, but I live in the west where we have more pets than kids and some of them are larger than battery powered cars (the pets, not the kids.) We vacation in motor homes so we can watch the football game in the middle of a tree-lined forest and we build houses with square footage counts well above 750.

It’s not for everyone—and that’s just the point. The country is divided politically because we lead vastly different lives depending on where we settle. It’s probably as difficult for a New Yorker to see my lifestyle as desirable as it is for me to see theirs as the American dream. But I love that we have a choice. So when I honk at your tiny car, it’s just a friendly western hello—I really wasn’t trying to scare you off the road, it’s just I have a bigger horn than yours.