More Than Just an Automobile

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I bought a new car this week. My old car ran a red light and plowed into a vehicle crossing the intersection from the opposite direction. In my own defense, l was not the driver at the wheel. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but my little Nissan did not survive the impact. Since the days long ago when I got my driver’s license in New Mexico and my dad’s idea of driver’s training was to point me up the freeway ramp entrance for my first lesson, cars and I have had an oddly personal relationship.

In college I drove a 1958 (57?) Studebaker I called “Prudence” because she was very cautious about sticking her nose into moving traffic. My roommates and I found that if we patted her dashboard and spoke soothingly words of encouragement and support, she’d eventually gear up the courage to leap into an intersection—her forte was zero to 10 miles an hour. She was not a particularly attractive old girl but so well-known around campus that once when I lent her to a buddy for the weekend, at least two people called me to let me know “Prudence” had been stolen and was currently involved in Provo’s nightlife—which made me laugh out loud. Not “the stolen car” part; the Provo’s “nightlife” part.

But Prudence was the model of the collegiate middle class when compared to the car I traveled in when I went out with my boyfriend/later fiancé. He drove a Volkswagen so aged we called it Rommel’s Revenge after the German general of the same name who rampaged across Northern Africa during WWII. The VW had once been painted a kind of steel gray but was beaten and dented to the point that we couldn’t be sure if that was the original paint job or just scratches from scraping against dozens of other cars over its 20-year life.

In fact, Rommel was so ancient, the passenger-side floor had literally rotted out. My thrifty–dare I say “cheap”?–soon-to-be husband solved that problem by liberating a piece of scrap lumber from a nearby construction dumpster and cutting it to fit over the hole in the floor of the chasse. One wintery night when we drove to Salt Lake for a movie, snowplows clearing off the lanes of I-15 in front of us splattered slushy muck behind them, which forced small geysers of freezing, icy rivulets up around the unsealed edges of the makeshift plywood patch. We arrived at the theater with my frozen toes sopping wet, and my pantihose splattered with mud. (I am not making this up!)

After we got married, we upgraded to a later model Volkswagen. By then my trusty Prudence (the Studebaker) had died and refused to be resurrected, so we sold her to a junk yard. In an odd moment of business sensitivity, the owner invited us to watch that sweet old girl being demolished into a messy square box of scrap metal which he would later make a profit on. My husband and I stood across the yard from the giant crusher as Prudence groaned and shrieked her way into oblivion. After a moment of profound silence, we thanked the scrap yard owner and went out to lunch.

We could never afford a brand-new car, so the long string of used cars we’ve owned over the years have tended to last five to seven years and then given out. One of those deaths was memorable because we had six or eight kids and were on the way to Las Vegas to visit the grandparents. About 70 miles out of Vegas, the engine exploded leaving me and the kids sitting under the shade of the dead car in 110–degree heat while my husband hitchhiked into town to get my brother to come rescue us. (Despite my children’s fervent prayers, it did not cloud up and rain.) Twice though, before rescue arrived, concerned truckers pulled off the road, parked beside us, and provided drinks and entertainment for my kids—bless them.

My new car is another used model. But it has a back-up camera, heated seats, charging stations for several kinds of technology, and a moon-roof (the title of which the dealership told me was substituted for “sunroof” when people my age who could afford a vehicle upgrade started to worry about getting melanomas on the exposed parts of their thinning hair–first world problems!)

My husband isn’t impressed by its fancy gadgetry. Comfort is not one of his criteria for transportation. He just needs a good radio and a purring engine. To my knowledge, he’s washed a car’s exterior fewer than ten times in our more than fifty years of marriage. But he’s a familiar figure at the local wash-it-yourself place because he always begins a repair project with a high-powered spray cleaning of the engine before he tinkers with it—an optimistic endeavor belied its effectiveness by the permanent grease stains which litter his “work” clothes.

When the salesperson handed me the keys of my new car, I pushed the start button (no key needed!), and the engine roared into life. Despite the intervening years and without conscious thought, I patted the dashboard and whispered, “you can do it” as I moved the gear shift into drive. And just like that, my new car became a familiar, trusted friend.