There’s this movie about all these animated cars that act like people—people with wheels, anyway—and how this quirky tribe of vehicle-men (and -women) lives on Route 66, watching their livelihoods slowly dry up for want of tourist dollars.
Here’s the plot: The town operated for years as a waypoint for weary travelers, offering fuel, a place to rest, and kitschy mementoes. The various business enterprises’ operators became a community. Practically a family. But when a major highway or freeway or expressway or whatever way it was blasted through the landscape a few miles away, it cut the charming town off from the rest of the high-speed world. People … er, cars … soon rocketed past, fixed only on the destination, not the journey. The old-fashioned, low-speed blip on the map started falling into disrepair.
This being a kids’ film, some lesson-learning car with a bright idea reinvigorated the dejected jalopies and somehow managed to give the town a draw strong enough to pull busy commuters through an exit and into the recently repaved streets bathed in the gentle glow of neon signs and soothing tones of AM-radio-type tunes.
Cut to the real world, where cars don’t talk or think for themselves (K.I.T. and Herbie excepted, respectively). Drivers fix their eyes on some distant destination and plow through the journey as fast as they can without getting caught by CHiPs or having to stop for more than a few minutes at a rest stop—if even that. I’ve seen more than a few Gatorade bottles filled with mysterious yellow liquid on the side of the 101. Ew.
Traversing this great state from south to north (or vice-versa) is a daunting endeavor, but it’s made possible by places to stay along the way. You can find food, somewhere to sleep if necessary, and plenty of beautiful vistas and unique tourist stops if you make time to look for them. Which, despite the go-go attitude of some car folks, people do.
When a high-speed rail was announced, I winced—and not just because I doubt it will happen in my lifetime. If it all goes according to the billions-of-dollars plan, the L.A. to S.F. trip could be made in a fabled just-less-than-three hours, which sounds like gold for state-hoppers but not so great for the people who live in between and depend on travelers.
Then along came Elon Musk, the PayPal cofounder who could literally misplace a million dollars, shrug, snap his fingers and say “darn it!” and then go back to his daily life. You might remember him as the guy who wanted to get people on Mars, like, a decade from now and who fired up SpaceX, a launch company that set up at Vandenberg Air Force Base and started sprucing up the place, I guess in anticipation of the whole Mars thing.
Elon, setting his sights on a more terrestrial goal in recent days, just announced plans for a Hyperloop project, which would theoretically fling people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour.
Nobody but nobody is going to be dropping any dollars in Santa Ynez or Santa Maria or anywhere on the Central Coast when traveling at 800 mph. They won’t even be looking at the scenery.
The local and fabulous PCPA prides itself on being the only professional acting conservatory between the two metropolises. People come to this area specifically to see plays and musicals here, making the conservatory a tourism draw. And that’s just one example.
How many people intentionally stop in our piece of the state because they’re on their way to somewhere else? Maybe I should have researched that figure before I started writing this column, because if it’s not a whole lot, I really don’t have a foundation for my point.
Regardless, who knows how a several-hundred-mile leap will impact the parts of California people would be leaping over? I could be less a canary at this point and more a sky-is-falling Chicken Little, but that movie I was talking about earlier really impacted me. Those cars had nothing left to live for. Nothing! And they worked so hard!
I couldn’t figure out how they built stuff, though. Like the little switches on things. With no opposable thumbs, how could they manipulate tools? And if the cars kept replacing their parts as they got worn out or broken, could they theoretically live forever?
This stuff keeps me awake at night. I wish it didn’t.
Look, speed is good. I zone out as much as the next bird on those mega migration flights, and I long for something to break up the monotony—which is why the charming towns and surprising cities I come across are such a welcome delight.
A high-speed rail system or Hyperloop wouldn’t cut the Central Coast off from the rest of the state, leaving us to shrivel and die, but it would reinforce the horrible notion that the only thing that matters is the end goal.
Sometimes you have to make time to stop and smell the windmills. Yep, I’m looking at you, Solvang.
The Canary worries that her cousins at OstrichLand would get lonely if tourists started flying by. Contact her at canary@santamarisun.com.
This article appears in Aug 15-22, 2013.