Car bazaar

Maybe it’s just the design of the particular parking garage I use, but whenever I steer my car into its gaping maw and see another vehicle following suit behind me, I consider it a bad omen. Ditto for when I’m following someone in front. Every time two or more cars drive into this garage at the same time, it starts off a race of sorts. One car turns left, the other turns right, and both gun it up the gradual incline, jockeying to find that one space, that single magical gleaming empty socket, that will save us 30 seconds on our walk to the office.

The winner gets bragging rights. The loser gets a spot on level 5, which in Parking Garage Land is akin to being stranded in the nosebleeds at Gillette Stadium. With clear skies and a high-powered telescope, you’ve got a fighting chance at spotting the sidewalk.

You don’t really give the term “rate race” much of a thought until you become a part of one.

The bigger the city, the more of a hassle the simple act of parking becomes, and that’s one of the biggest adjustments to make when you’re used to a more rural way of doing things. Even though I grew up in Lewiston, Maine’s second largest city, it was still small enough that you didn’t have to worry about where you were going to stick your wheezy old Chrysler with the dented fender. You drove to a place, said place had a parking lot, and you parked your car and walked inside. Simple. Easy. The way it should be.

Then you meander into a city like Portland and the rules are different; everything’s amplified, ratcheted up about 10 degrees. And so instead of each individual business and home playing host to its own parking lot, you’re stuck dumping your vehicle into a monolithic hunk of concrete about the size of one of Jupiter’s moons. By the time you find a space you forget why you even drove there to begin with, and if you do decide to venture downtown, it takes a canteen, a map and a camel just to make it there in one piece.

Perhaps it simply takes some getting used to, but in six months of commuting to P-Town, that hasn’t happened for me yet. Time is the big issue here. We’re accustomed to think of distances in terms of how long they take to traverse; Ned’s Edible Undergarment Emporium is 10 minutes away, Bob’s Booze Bonanza is 20, etc. For the most part, that means it takes 10 minutes flat to get from your front door to Ned’s, including the 60 seconds required to park your car and the 30 seconds necessary to walk across the asphalt and stroll into his establishment (which, coincidentally, is running a special on milk chocolate jockey shorts). Vehicle arrangements are built into this arithmetic.

Not so in the city. When someone says it takes 20 minutes to get to Portland, they’re speaking strictly about the city limits. If your destination is a restaurant in Monument Square, you have to tack about 15 minutes onto this total -- 10 minutes to find a space and an extra five to hoof it there, assuming you hit all the pedestrian walk signs and have rocket boosters in your sneakers. If you want to eat in Portland before the next Labor Day, your best bet is to be a seagull.

Matters get worse the larger a city becomes. Let’s say you want to go to Fenway Park in Boston. Anyone in southern Maine who loves the Red Sox knows it takes a sliver over two hours to get to Beantown by Amtrak, but that’s just to pull into North Station. From North Station you have to buy a subway ticket, figure out your inbound from your outbound, hop into a rickety Sucrets tin that smells like cat food, and then trudge a mile or more through sidewalks choked with hot dog vendors and college students drumming on buckets. The only way this takes fewer than four hours is if the radiation from an atomic bomb blast gives you superpowers, and one of them is the ability to slow the rotation of the earth.

In 1908, the Ford Model T was unleashed upon the masses, marking the first time that automobiles became affordable to middle class consumers. This was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it spawned car culture and its accompanying benefits, like an interstate highway system and the tacky yet lovable fuzzy dice industry. Henry Ford would have been proud.

On the other hand, it created headaches. Motorists who don’t use their turn signals, school buses that halt traffic every two-and-a-half feet … and high-rise parking garages that charge exorbitant sums for the simple act of stopping and turning off your engine. Henry Ford would have wept himself hoarse.

But it was inevitable, really. The more cars there are, and the fewer places there are to stick ’em, the more the evils of garage parking become a necessity. And who doesn’t want a car? People who never leave the city, and pigeons. Those are the only two groups.

This is reason number 257 why small cities and rural towns are so appealing. Larger cities -- the ones with parking garages -- are hard-edged and institutional. Their people are hemmed in by uncompromising geometry, and their cars and hemmed in by concrete walls, stacked like sardine cans in a grocery aisle.

Cars are supposed to be about freedom and movement, the thrill of the open road, the sense of possibility when the engine roars to life. The romantic mystique of the automobile is that it allows us access to any place we could imagine that’s traversable by land. They don’t belong in block-like slabs. They belong under open skies, and within easy access to our destinations, with a short jaunt the only thing separating us from hopping in and feeling the wind on our faces.

See? Bet you never thought a trip to Bob’s Booze Bonanza could be such a spiritual experience.