People yet alive were born before Lancaster County saw its first car. People yet alive were born when Lancaster County was about 90 percent farmland. Now, cars define our culture like other cultures found definition in tea ceremonies or fluted spearpoints. We go abroad and bring back pictures of the tour buses we rode. And the spark in our economy is a tourist industry that invites people to drive hundreds of miles to gawk at Amish who don't own cars.
The vast majority of local people drive to their jobs in cars with just one person aboard. The number of registered vehicles in Lancaster County shot up by 42 percent between 1980 and 1995, and by the mid-'90s it stood at 359,393. Some roads, like Lititz Pike and Rohrerstown Road, saw traffic volumes almost double during that period.
In 1990, for every household in Lancaster County, there were 1.7 vehicles; the figure was even higher in Manheim Township, where the car often has its own room in a house, like the ox in the Roman peasant's hovel. It is often the biggest room in these houses, which from the street appear to be more garage than home.
We scorn the pleasures of the flesh: We ask our authorities to ban Sunday drinking and dancing from our clubs, books of nude artwork photography from our stores. Even cheesecake nose-cone art on a historic World War II bomber arouses indignation -- as difficult as it is to believe, we can be more prudish than our own grandparents.
Yet we have fed our landscapes to our cars. We are a people who punish our flesh and indulge our engines. People order food from McDonald's and eat in in their cars in the restaurant parking lot. People drive to Long's Park or Central Park and sit in their cars by the water, sometimes listening to the radio. NASCAR is our Olympic Games. What the human body was in classical Greece, the automobile is in modern America.
The automobile promised mobility and gave paralysis. It promised freedom and enslaved us to car payments and insurance payments. Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, first noted that a lion would be a great pet if you wanted to seem impressive, but that a man who owns a lion is also a man who is owned by a lion. Like most philosophers, he had a prickly relationship with his neighbors, in this case the fellow citizens of Ephesus. "Be rich, Ephesians," runs one of his few surviving lines, "I can wish you no worse."
Lancaster County in the 1990s is dominated not simply by automobiles, but by the inefficient and ugly variety known as "SUVs."
The number of sport utility vehicles on America's roads doubled in the five years between 1992 and 1997 and more than tripled in the decade after 1987. The government estimated 13.8 million SUVs in the United States in 1997. Other big vehicles are almost as popular. The number of minivan registrations increased by about 61 percent during the same period while pickup trucks increased about 8 percent. Nationwide, there is one SUV for every 13 licensed drivers. There is one pickup truck for every two licensed drivers.
The Ford Excursion SUV, which costs $40,000, is 19 feet long, 7 feet high, and weighs 9,200 pounds. It's the family station wagon on a steroid binge. Its slightly smaller cousin, the Ford Explorer, was the best-selling new vehicle in Lancaster County in 1998. Light trucks (the category which includes SUVs) accounted for 46 percent of all new vehicles sold here that year.
They have opened up a highway arms race and erased the bumper-to-bumper equation, so that a collision between an SUV and a compact car does vastly unequal damage and puts the people in the car at unnecessary risk. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash tests confirm that car passengers suffer more injuries in side-impact crashes with SUVs. And environmentalists say the gas-guzzlers are spewing pollution by the ton. One safety group complained that SUVs sit so high that their lights blind other drivers.
Yet their lofty survivalist spirit is suited to the end of the millennium. One 1999 television SUV ad featured a woman soothing the male driver of a competitor's SUV as if he were impotent, and it ended with a "size matters" joke. Imperious as Irish elk, they are avatars of the jungle law: If someone's children get hurt in a wreck, it won't be mine. It's amusing to note how often the inefficient, graceless beasts bear creationism bumper stickers.