So it finally happened. Rather than waiting for my '97 Ranger to take things into its own hands, last week I broke down and bought myself a new vehicle. This is actually the first new car I've owned in 15 years, and only the third I've owned in my entire lifetime of driving. And while I've started to give myself permission to feel happy about owning a new car (which is, after all, supposed to be a happy occasion), I'm also feeling a little funny about it...which is really what I want to write about.
But first a little history. My very first car was a hand-me-down 1962 red Plymouth Valiant station wagon (with a push-button automatic transmission)that had belonged to my mother for a dozen years before I finally got my hands on it. Picked up three tickets and was involved in three accidents with that little beauty, the last of which finally killed it outright on a sharp curve on a steep hill on a rainy day in a suburb of Seattle about two weeks before I started college at the University of Washington.
But by that time I already had another ride: an even redder 1968 Triumph TR-250 convertible which my father had bought for me as a reward/bribe in order to get me to study a little harder so that I could get into a decent college in the first place. It's funny how quickly a basically bright but lazy kid can become a straight-A student when there's a sports car as incentive, and although my father complained miserably about that little two-seater roadster, I suspect in retrospect he would say it was the best $2,000 he's ever spent in his life.
And it did double duty; because once I actually started college my younger brother got to drive the TR, and I didn't get back behind the wheel until the start of my Junior year, when HE was a freshman living in the next dorm over, and I could finally afford to insure the thing myself. But of course he kept a duplicate set of keys, and more than once I stopped by my parking space only to discover nothing but an oilspot waiting for me. But at least he always had the decency to return it with a full tank of gas!
When I went off to HDS for graduate school (at the start of his Junior year), the TR once more came into my brother's keeping, and eventually passed from our lives on his watch. I lived quite contentedly carless in Cambridge and Boston, and remained car-free until the start of my internship back in Seattle, where I spent $300 for a 1974 lemon yellow Volkswagen Dasher. That car burned about a quart of oil for every tank of gas, but it got me everywhere I needed to go for a year an a half, before finally perishing in a snowstorm 10 days before I was scheduled to begin my first settled ministry in Midland, Texas.
It was in Midland that I purchased my first-ever new car: a 1985 Toyota Corolla. Of course, being from the Pacific Northwest, I didn't really appreciate how few and far between Toyotas were in Texas in those days; my "new" Toyota was actually delivered to me from a dealership in New Orleans, with 800 miles already on the odometer. I didn't care; I drove that car for eight years (including back and forth between Texas and Seattle three times), while my wife went through four different vehicles in that same period (a used GMC Hornet-which was her vehicle of choice before we were married; a new Ford Escort; a new Dodge Omni; and a slightly-used Dodge Shadow, which she came home with one day after taking the Omni to the dealership to have a headlight replaced, and discovering that she could actually save nearly $100/month if she simply traded it in and bought the Shadow instead).
In 1993 my wife had just finished Law School, and I was about to start back to school myself to study for a PhD. She had a good job, we had come into some money, and so we paid cash and treated ourselves to his and hers Ford Escorts: a little red coupe for her, and a forest green wagon for me. I put 237k miles on that car in the eight years I drove it, commuting back and forth between Portland, Corvallis, and Eugene...as well as all up and down the I-5 corridor from Bellingham to Roseburg preaching on the weekends (just for the record, in that same eight-year period she only put 42k miles on the coupe).
In the summer of 2001, I'd completed my PhD and was about to begin an interim ministry on Nantucket Island. What to do about a car on the island was a frequent topic of discussion among my family. At first I thought I might be able to get by without a car, but I was assured that this would not be the case -- that even on an island, a minister still needs to be able to make those parish visits out to 'Sconset; and in winter there are no buses and bicycles are a little problematic. Then I thought I might swap cars with my daughter, who was then living in Massachusetts but planning to return to Oregon in the fall. But she refused to take the Escort under any circumstances. Finally, when the folks on Nantucket also assured me that the island was an excellent place to have an old car (since when it DOES finally break down, you don't have that far to walk home), I decided to try my luck and try to drive my trusty wagon cross-country.
In retrospect, having lived so much of my life behind the wheel of that vehicle for the previous eight years, I had a lot of emotional investment in getting my CLERIC car to a nice round quarter of a million miles before allowing her to retire gracefully on Nantucket. Meanwhile, my family started a pool about how far backwards along the Oregon Trail I would make it before the car finally expired permanently. The winning bet was that I would never make it out of the state; climbing the Blue Mountains on I-84 I suddenly lost 5th gear, and so I coasted down into Baker City and within four hours had traded in my Escort for a used, 1997 white Ford Ranger X-cab 4x4 pickup.
Unpacked the Escort, repacked the Ranger, settled the dog safely into the passenger seat, and we were back on the road again. Drove that truck for two years on the Island, and another four in Carlisle...and learned to love the four-wheel drive and the big cargo space, but never really did get used to the poor gas mileage (19 mpg), or how tricky it was to park in tight places. Big blind spot too, especially trying to glance back over my right shoulder through both a tinted rear window and the canopy. Put a big dent in the passenger door my first day on the Island, trying to squeeze into my driveway past an inconveniently-located telephone pole; and over the years picked up a few more dents and dings as well...but for some reason it didn't really bother me, because, after all, isn't that what trucks are for?
That Ranger also came in awfully useful moving up here to Portland, and I'm sure I could have happily driven it for many more years, since it only had 134k miles on it and still seemed to be going strong. But I also noticed last winter that it was making funny noises when I put it into four-wheel drive, so last month when I took it into the dealership to have it serviced and winterized, I asked them to take a look. Sure enough, I needed new hubs and a U-joint, plus brake work, a new thermostat, as well as an aftermarket brakelight kit to bring the canopy into confomity with Maine law...$2500 worth of work (which the service manager quickly offered to discount 10% on account of me being clergy).
And I was almost ready to get that work done, when while driving back down to Massachusetts on the day after Thanksgiving I suddenly remembered that burnt-out headlight on the Dodge Omni. Why, I asked, should I sink another $2500 into a beat-up ten-year-old gas-guzzling clunker when I could be driving a new, compact, fuel-efficient 21st-century automobile instead? It just didn't make sense to me. Or perhaps I should say, all of a sudden I just didn't feel like nursing along my old truck from one mechanical crisis to the next, and started looking forward to owning something with a standard 3 year/36k mile bumper to bumper warranty, free road side assistance, passenger-side airbags, and all the rest.
And so the search began. To be continued in part two....
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