This Old Car

            It was a sultry rush hour afternoon when the tow truck hooked and lifted the car’s crumbled front end.  More than 10 years and 200,000 miles hauled off from the present to the past.  It was my childhood, too.  My father bought the car when I was five, and now less than a year from driving it myself, the Cruiser became history like the bricks and mortar of my old grade school. 

            But unlike school’s surrounding walls, the Cruiser personified the wind we felt with the windows down during our distant and divergent road trips.  It transported us to the sandy shores of the blue Atlantic, through the narrow streets of the French Quarter and over every road paved and graveled in the Great Smoky Mountains. 

            But trips West I remember best.  Our summer road trips started with 440 miles and a two-day visit with grandparents after which my father roused us in predawn darkness and herded us to fluffy pillows awaiting us in the car’s backseat.  The Cruiser backed down the driveway and moved forward out of Wichita, beyond the pale of my mother’s final resting place.

            As we headed west across Kansas, our car appeared as nothing more than a ubiquitous Ford Taurus.  But as it carried us along the two lane highway that divided the Plains’ amber waves of grain that flanked it, the sun rising behind us, the morning light glistening on empty railroad tracks that paralleled the road and reflecting off solitary silos which marked the tiny towns on the horizon, and my father’s spirits brightening too, I knew we were in no ordinary means of conveyance.  My father aptly christened the Cruiser.  We were on a cruise on the open seas, our sorrows left behind on distant shores.        

            We would live in and out of the Cruiser for the next three weeks, our life essentials squeezed into the back trunk: sundry camping gear, duffel bags of clothes, and hiking boots to trek the great outdoors.  And no cooler.  Ice was for wimps my father explained.  There wasn’t any room anyway.  It took geometry and a good cussing to pack the trunk right to get it closed. 

            The Cruiser traversed the back roads far removed from the hollow interstate.  Scenic byways was our creed.  We felt the openness of the Great American Plains, the majesty of Colorado’s purple mountains, the deep canyons and red rock of Utah and Arizona, the empty expanse and the panoramic phenomena of Wyoming, and the big sky of Montana.  Along the way, my father explained geography, meteorology and the words and sounds emanating from the cassette player of music recorded before I was born. 

            There were also raucous times when boredom set in.  Three boys in a car without a mother’s intervention engendered more fights than the Balkans.  We were referred to alternatively as the Three Stooges or Huey, Dewey and Lewey, and we stooged and squawked until my father could stand no more. He hated stopping so instead his arm reached round back blindly to the rear passenger seat—the Chair we called it—grabbing for anything to pinch or yank the unlucky one guilty or not into submission.  Dad did not care about justice; he just wanted quiet.       

            Real quiet came late at night when I road shotgun with my father.  The Cruiser whirred steadily, my younger brothers sawed obliviously, while my father waxed philosophically on matters I only partly understood.  He occasionally listened to me too, the car’s hum sounding like a charmer’s flute bringing forth my reluctant words about our lives, and the death of my mother.   We learned more about each other on those star filled nights than we ever could in a hundred co-pay sessions with a psychologist who could never impart the time and space that the Cruiser afforded us to try to heal.

            Near the end, the Cruiser was the most shop worn car in the neighborhood, and the best traveled like an old favorite uncle staying juiced and entertaining not caring how much time remained.  It was filled with life’s nicks, dents and rust, and squeaked loudly when its worn suspension recoiled over bumps.  It reeked of a hundred camping trips and years of sweaty sporting gear hauled and left overnight in the trunk.  More importantly, its tranny slipped between gears and the engine’s dwindling compression propelled the car with a stuttering acceleration.  But once it hit cruising speed, the old boat still steamed smoothly to its destination.   

            The final mission as my father called it was a trip closer to home in the Missouri Ozarks for a float trip down the Eleven Point River below Greer Spring.  On that Easter morning, we had the River and its songbirds, cranes and kingfishers to ourselves. 

            On Monday, as the Cruiser swayed with the winding Ozark roadway en route home, my father pointed to a spot on his door where a triangular piece of trim at his window’s corner had fallen off exposing the interior door’s skeletal metal frame. He picked up the piece and said:  “I could put this piece back on but I like it better off because it shows the car’s character. This old car is falling apart, but it has been paid off for a long time.  We can afford a new one like the neighbors, but we’ll buy one only when we have to.             

            “You know what this means?” he said as he pointed to the exposed door frame.  “It means we don’t give a damn about what people think.  It means we can afford to go where and when we want ’cause we’re not bogged down with car payments and high insurance. And I sure as hell don’t care if you guys spill anything in here.  That my son is freedom.  A new car won’t give us that.”

            Six weeks later, the Cruiser collided with another vehicle. It was like old uncle caught a winter contagion.  It did not take much to total out.  My father had dropped collision coverage long ago.  The old car was bleeding antifreeze as the hook lifted the front end.  No one was hurt, but my father looked on in shock anyway.  He said mournfully: “The Cruiser was driven hard and put away wrecked.”  It seemed a fitting epitaph. 

            The next week, my father pulled in the driveway in a brand new minivan.  It smelled like a new car does.  But not like freedom.

Paul Lore,

2000