Welcome to my Wild West!

What’s the one luxury you can’t live without?

In some areas, it’s easy to live without a vehicle. Home, work, and consumable supply exists within the distance of a walk, or linked by public transit.

Outside of larger cities in the inland U.S., several miles separate towns and homes. Sure, a person can walk or bike these distances, but it would take. most of a day to travel one way.

For some, a car is a luxury. Certainly, owning some cars is a luxury, but in rural U.S. having access to a car is necessary.

Historically, towns located along railways spread no more than 10 miles apart thanks to the need for water stops. Then, diesel electric engines pushed that stopping distance out to the maximum distance a car could travel.

Now, many of those towns have dried up in the last 70 years. Even if a town has a post office and a bar, it may not have a grocery store or gas station.

With growing frequency, small towns with such amenities close before 8 pm. That’s a dangerous move for towns located within a half-hour of a larger city where stores are open until midnight or all night.

Even back when a driver passed through a town every ten miles, homesteads sprang up over ten miles from towns. Non-agricultural employees drive as much as 40 miles to work every day.

Public transit systems for such a far-flung customer base are too expensive to even consider.

For us in the rural Midwest, luxury is buying or leasing a new car every two years. That is truly unnecessary and possibly contributes more to the U.S. carbon footprint than driving those vehicles over a decade. I will look into that and write a blog on that subject at a later date.

Cars serve more than practical purposes. Jack Sparrow said in Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl, “What a ship really is, is freedom.” That line inspired me to dub my old black Jeep “Pearl”.

For that reason alone, I can’t do without a car. I will give up my cell phone, computer and TV before anyone will take my car.