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Bucolic Agony: Rural drivers well aware who's taking the gas-price hit
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Published: June 15, 2008
"Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average," read a headline in The New York Times one day last week.
At our house, that statement came more as affirmation than as news.
I've been commuting 60 miles round trip daily from my little patch of bucolic bliss to work in Winston-Salem for going on 33 years. If I could figure out how much money I've spent on gas just to get to work, and what else that money could have bought, I'd probably be extremely depressed. When you add in the cost of vehicles (usually driven to death before they are paid for), tires, insurance and maintenance, it's almost as if I've been working largely so that I could afford to drive to work. That does not make a whole lot of sense.
And, of course, it hurts more now than it did when I embarked on this insanity in 1975, when the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was less than 60 cents. That was back in the good old days, when once, finding myself on assignment in Danbury with gas tank and wallet equally empty, I cleaned out my car and dug up enough change to raise the needle to a quarter of a tank.
The Times story explained that rising gas prices are causing some Americans to suffer a lot more than others for the obvious reason that some of us drive a lot more than others. And many of us who drive the most live in rural areas where almost nothing is close by and there is no public transportation. It's not just jobs. At our house, if we want to go just about anywhere other than to the mailbox, the woods, the barn or the creek, we drive there.
Come to think of it, because of the mindless way we have let suburban sprawl creep across North Carolina, separating neighborhoods where people live from commercial areas where they shop and work, and not building many sidewalks even where walking might be a possibility, probably a great majority of us drive nearly everywhere we go. But those of us who live on beyond suburbia, out in the sticks, have farther to drive to get to anything.
In some ways, we have been victims of our own "progress." Fifty years ago, towns as small as Madison and Walnut Cove had their own theaters, so local folks could go to the movies without a major trip. But better roads and multiplex theaters in bigger cities eventually spelled the death of the hometown picture shows. We view most of our movies on the TV screen these days.
Making matters worse, as the Times story noted, is the love that we country folks have for our pickup trucks, most of which are not known for their fuel efficiency. The Times did not elaborate, but it's worth noting that an awful lot of the pickup trucks you see in these parts are of the giant variety —monstrous duallies, and trucks with cabs that are big as some people's living rooms.
We love trucks at our house, too. I drive a Prius hybrid, but when my husband borrows that car because he's going farther out of town than I am, I commute in his pickup. It has only the standard four wheels and I can — barely — climb into the cab without needing a stepstool, but it is big enough that I am terrified whenever I have to park in the newspaper's lot (my space is beside that of my boss). We have another truck too, our son's vintage Ford, which gets maybe a mile to the gallon but does roar impressively. We've always had at least one truck. At least we do live in the country, heat with wood, garden and have animals, so we actually use the trucks as trucks and not just as oversize means of getting here and there.
For some time, we've been using one credit card specifically for gas purchases, paying it off in full every month. That helps us to see exactly how much we spend on gas. Opening that bill is becoming increasingly painful, but I am grateful that so far, we are able to pay it.
Others are less fortunate. The Times story quoted Fred Rozell, who works for the Oil Price Information Service, saying that "This crisis really impacts those who are at the economic margins of society, mostly in the rural areas and particularly parts of the Southeast.... These are the people who have to decide between food and transportation."
Some of these people are my neighbors in Stokes County, where 69 percent of those who work commute outside the county to our jobs. One of the county's greatest blessings — the beautiful Sauratown Mountain range smack in the middle — is also one of its greatest challenges. The towns are small, with limited jobs, and mostly oriented outward, toward cities quite a few miles distant. Stokes is about to get some commuter help from the Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation, but the bus will stop in King. That doesn't do much for those of us in other parts of the county, who can be in Winston-Salem by the time we can drive over or around the mountains to King.
Had I envisioned $4 a gallon gas, I might not have been as quick to take a job 30 miles from where we'd set down roots 33 years ago. Now, there's not much to do but take the hit and think about where to cut back. We have gotten ourselves into an unsustainable way of life, but one that unfortunately is difficult to change overnight.
■ Linda Brinson is the Journal's editorial-page editor. She can be reached at lbrinson@wsjournal.com.
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