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// When I was 14 years old, my parents set up a house swap in England. The English family got our post-war fixer-upper on the west side of Vancouver; we got the headmaster's house, attached to a public school in Oxford. (I still think we got the better part of the bargain; my sister and I soon discovered a passage from the house to the empty classrooms. For a couple of weeks there, we were in Hogwarts heaven. Or rather, C.S. Lewis-land, as this happened pre-J.K. Rowling.) I remember that my mother went to fetch the keys from the headmaster's son, who was in his twenties. She was a little miffed that he didn't come and drop them off himself; but when she got back from his flat, she told me, with evident wonder, that he'd told her that he didn't own a car, and expected he never would.
I remember thinking to myself: Wait? Is that a possibility? You can be an adult and never own a car?
Over the next few weeks, I realized that, yes, in certain places, living without a car is completely normal. We travelled all over England, and eventually to Ireland, using public transportation. I even made my first solo excursions on British Rail. (A day-trip to Bath, in which I had a thrilling flirtation with a much older woman—she was, like, 18 years old—in a second-class compartment. She was amused; I was blushing scarlet.)
This is proof, if nothing else, that travel broadens the mind, and opens up future possibilities: I'd been exposed, briefly, to a different way of life, and it was clearly a vision I filed away for future use.
Back in British Columbia, I returned to standard North American adolescence, which in the 1980s was haunted by the aggressively-marketed romance of highways and gasoline. (Think: Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run", The Road Warrior, the Back to the Future DeLorean...) I got my driver's license at 16, and one of my first jobs was as a delivery driver for a dental lab.
