Gas Is Sky-High and the Glaciers Are Melting. But I'm Not Junking My Great American Joyride.

But memories like that are already gathering dust. The first 100 years of the auto industry were mostly an interesting trip to Disneyland -- with lots of zany, unexpected diversions. When I look ahead now, though, all I see is fog and haze, heated by hyperbole.

What worries me most is the rush to blame all environmental -- and many societal -- ills on cars. Come on, people. Lighten up.

Cars define our lives, transporting us to work, school, grocery stores, banks, malls, furtive trysts, whatever. They're "pretty much a part of us," says David Lewis, a professor at the University of Michigan who teaches a course on the global auto industry. "It's pretty hard to imagine a world without them."

They envelop us in slick metal containers that supposedly say a lot about who we are. My Mustang shouts, "Short skinny guy over 50, seeking validation and maybe a couple of inches of height from a white muscle car with silver skunk stripes." Baptists and senior citizens, meanwhile, drive Buicks. Republicans prefer two trucks in the driveway: an SUV for Mom to use as a soccer bus and a big $40,000 pickup for Dad's power trips. Democrats favor anything nerdy in gray or white, and plaster their battered back bumpers with pious political stickers.

Who cares whether any of those stereotypes are true? Cars 'r us. I know some people in Dallas who opt to live in sun-baked one-bedroom apartments that slump along roaring freeways so that they can spend $800 or $900 a month on a new Corvette or a 3-series BMW or a black C-class Mercedes-Benz.

"Outside of electricity, there's nothing we'd miss more if they were gone," said Lewis, who worked for General Motors between 1959 and 1965 -- a time when, he told me, "that fact alone made you walk taller."

Since then, however, we've developed strong love-hate relationships with cars. Ralph Nader made us fear them. The Middle East forced us to push them to dry gas pumps in the '70s. Today's environmentalists contend that we're choking on them.

Some even say that the very technology that has made modern cars so good is chilling our feelings about them. "Today's cars have so much that's hidden from view," says Bud Lyon, an MIT-trained electrical engineer who owns several car dealerships in the Northeast and collects classic cars. "You can't hold some great part in your hand and see it and touch it and marvel over it like you could a '32 Ford suspension piece."

The upshot is that for lots of folks, "cars are losing their appeal," says Lewis. "I think the relationship will look different in the years ahead.

"But not," he added (with no prompting from me), "for a guy like you." A guy, in other words, who sometimes wears a T-shirt that proclaims, "Still plays with cars."

I'm not blind to the impact that cars have on the environment. On hot days, I can see some of it in the brownish-gray veil that clings to Dallas's flat horizon. But the truth is that every new car or truck today is vastly cleaner and more efficient than anything from 1996 or earlier. And yet, even thoughmy 319-horsepower Mustang is perfectly legal and meets every modern emissions standard, cars like mine -- along with big SUVs, pickups and large luxury cars -- draw extreme green disdain. If we really want to have an effect on air quality, though, we should probably quit throwing rocks at SUVs and get all the old beaters off the road. It's as simple as that. Of course, someone will have to confiscate those junkers from the mostly low-income people who drive them because they have no other practical way of getting to jobs or school.

The fact is, I do my part for the environment. I walk to places in my neighborhood that most people drive to. I try to hold off on air conditioning till mid-June (you try that in Texas sometime). I don't watch television or keep a computer at home, so I'm using a lot less electricity than most of my friends. I'm not, in short, just some aging boomer desperately clinging to my archaic muscle car and some fading notion that I was born to be wild. Well, at least not most of the time I'm not.