Because they like the here and now, dogs would never have invented cars. For sure, they enjoy our cars, but only because they associate them with good things like walks. And when they are in the car they don’t look ahead through the windscreen towards the onrushing future. Rather they look out the side window at the present landscape, and they sniff at it greedily from the fast-passing air.
I drove into Rangiora and slap bang into a crawl of traffic. It was hot. I turned the air-conditioning on and bade myself be patient. When cars were waiting in side streets I made a point of letting them in. Not because I am a saint but because over the years I’ve found that the negligible delay of being one car further back is outweighed by the pleasure of being waved to gratefully, of being acknowledged as a benefactor. There’s one little happiness that dogs will never know.
Traffic jams are thwarting things. Here we sit in an expensive metal exoskeleton, a sleek thing that strokes our ego, bolsters our potency and is capable of barrelling through the landscape ten times faster than we can run, but we are reduced to a crawl. The potential for road rage seethes in every jammed car.
Occasionally I saw groups of people seated with beers in front gardens, or along walls, apparently just watching the slow procession of cars. I guessed their presence had something to do with the advertised event, but what that was I couldn’t say. A road race perhaps? A triathlon? Then I began to notice cars parked on the berm and offered for sale, many of them the sort of cars that I can neither condone nor understand, cars that have been pimped and polished, made offensively loud.
A poster gave the game away. ‘Muscle Car Madness,’ it said. And the date was today. Ah well, I thought, each to their own.
According to the internet, muscle cars are certain overpowered American vehicles from the 60s and 70s, huge-engined, big-bodied, brash, consumptive, wasteful and loud. People primp and preen these cars, spend countless hours and dollars on them, race and cherish them, do burn-ups in them and bring them to gatherings like this one to show them off to the like-minded. It’s not an event to appeal to dogs. They wouldn’t see the point.
As we neared the showgrounds, the traffic grew thicker still and slower-moving. I stopped to let a red car in from a side street. The driver and his passenger, both young and grinning, waved me a thank you. The car had an exhaust like a bazooka. A frame around the licence plate read: ‘If it’s too loud, you’re too old.’
I am too old. But I have always been too old. Both my brothers were keen on cars, one fanatically so. I somehow missed that gene. I have never tinkered with an engine, or thrilled to speed and noise. I find all forms of motor racing hateful. But clearly others feel otherwise.
And here on this hot day thousands had flocked to a rural town in North Canterbury. The vast car park was overflowing and, well, it was a relief eventually to leave it all behind and be beyond and moving once again towards the future.
From a bridge over the Ashley River I saw a woman throw a stick for her dog to fetch. The dog dived and swam and fetched and clambered out and shook itself from nose to tail in the endearing way of dogs and laid the stick at the feet of the woman and then began to bark with the excitement and the happiness of doing it all again.
