Last week I got a new car.
At 23, in post-college autumn, I bought my first car just days after my birthday. I was moving to the Poconos for a job and a car was a necessity. I got a loan from my grandparents and bought a 2012 Ford Escape with 42,000 miles on it. White. Front wheel drive. Boxy. I needed a car and I wanted something I could adventure in, something big enough to sleep inside of if needed. Yes, I needed a car for my job, but I had bigger visions beyond that.
Life unspooled in both predictable and unpredictable ways. I slept in that car a lot. With my sister in front of a county park in South Dakota. On the banks of the Great Salt Lake with a storm rolling through. On the side of Route 1, mere miles from where I now live. I slept in that car for three months straight in 2017 and then sporadically after. When winds were too much for my tent, when noises in the dark freaked me out, I’d crawl inside the back, head pushed up against the front seats. It always felt safe.
Over the 10 years I owned him—Chester, named by my sister on our 2017 road trip—I drove 150,000 miles, five times across country.
Bumpers scraped: one, front, on a half wall I couldn’t see.
Accidents: zero. No collisions, not even a fender bender, and I was never pulled over either.
Years driven without AC: nine. The AC broke pretty shortly after I bought him and I didn’t get it fixed until the AC compressor seized, broke a lot of things beneath the hood, and the only way he’d be driveable was to spend $2K to fix him.
Places I got stuck due to FWD: one, Colorado, on a huge rock I drove over after taking a turn too sharply. I had no cell service and hadn’t told anyone of my plan, but I managed to flag down a car of guys who let me use their AAA. The AAA man managed to pull the rock out with straps and we all cheered. Around the campfire that night, the guys said they would’ve cried if they were me, but I didn’t cry and I guess that’s something.
When people grow older, their hair grays, their skin loosens. In age, Chester grew rust. The whole undercarriage was a muted copper and the wheel wells in particular were vivid with rust that spread like lichen. It would start as a fervent spot of orange on Chester’s white coat, and then it would turn brown and dark, cancerous looking. While driving, I would sometimes hear a small clink, the sound of something falling away, and I think it was the lip of my wheel well breaking off due to rust.
At the end of his life, the back hatch didn’t open unless you pried it with a crowbar. The AC worked but only on full blast or not at all. The screws holding the back window in place rusted through, so that didn’t open either unless you wanted the whole thing to fall down. There was no bluetooth or audio port, so you had to use an audio converter from Amazon that sometimes filled the whole car with static. There were woodchips in the back, sand in the front. The seats were permanently stained from sunscreen and salsa and sweat. The dashboard was always grimy from constantly driving with my windows down.
But he still drove. Even until the very end.
My goal was to reach 200,000 miles, and we made it to 198,000. I’d talked about getting a new car for years, but kept putting it off. It was too stressful. Too many choices. Too much money. And Chester still drove. But when he broke down last spring and I burned a bunch of money so he’d drive again, it became apparent that a mechanical failure could happen at any time, and what would I do then? How much was I willing to spend on rehabilitation for a 13-year-old car? And, in a nearly zero public transport community, what would I do if my car failed me?
This is what I’ve been thinking about: how do you know when it’s time to move on? How do you know when it’s time to give up on something? Someone?
The finance guy at the car dealership congratulated me on getting my Ford to almost 200K. He could still be a good daily driver for someone else, I said. There’s nothing wrong with the transmission.
The car will go to auction, most likely the dump. People will take parts, maybe the dashboard, the tires, and then it’ll be scrapped, he replied.
I signed paper after paper. I promised I wouldn’t put snow chains on my new-used car and wouldn’t hold them liable if I did. I said yes, you did provide me a license plate holder on the front. Yes, I am the sole owner of this Ford, and no, there’s no lien on him, no, he’s never been used for Uber or Lyft.
I asked my dad to take pictures of me with Chester, two final shots of me on the back bumper, the same position I’d been in for many photos over the past decade. I got zero pictures of my new car.
I don’t feel excited about a new car, not yet. What I feel is sad. I think of the characters in Toy Story and how they felt abandoned when their human left, destined to be forgotten, or worse, the incinerator. Jessie, my favorite character, even has that song “When Somebody Loved Me,” a song about becoming unloved by your human. I imagine Chester alone among the shiny Mazdas in an over-illuminated lot in Torrance on a strip mall street that looks interchangeable with so many others in the U.S. with a Lumineers album still in his CD player, and I wonder if I should have kept him longer, to the final bitter end, to the point where we’re stuck on the road side together in a climactic, explosive ending, and the roadside assistance man shakes his head and whistles, examining the pair of us stranded, thinking I’m stupid for going so far with such a shitty car. Chester never got to experience a tow truck! Or a flat tire! Or an accident!
And then he’ll be at the dump. Scavenged for parts like roadkill. Picked over and alone, the other discarded appliances watching him ache in his abandonment. And that’s what it feels like, you know? Abandonment. I was the one who left this time. I left. I walked away. I left him there alone.
I read elseship: an unrequited love story by Tree Abraham while in Torrance getting my new-used car. It’s a nonfiction journal-poetry-type book, a piece I think I would’ve adored in my early 20s but now simultaneously find too much and underdeveloped. In it, the writer analyzes her feelings for her roommate, the deep love she feels for her while acknowledging those feelings are not returned in like. I wonder if my distaste for the book is a lack of sentimentality, a lack of romance or feeling, things I possessed in multitude when I was younger but now question if I still have. Did I use to feel things more deeply? Am I so balanced and even-keeled that strong emotions elude me?
Chester proves otherwise. It’s the saddest I’ve felt since my last breakup. Just writing about his imagined evening at an L.A. dump makes me cry. And I feel grateful that I still feel such things. That I feel so strongly for people, for places, for my beloved bedraggled rust-bitten seat-stained car.
On the day I left Morro Bay to head south and car shop, I lost my car key. I’ve never lost a key before. Not a car key, not a house key. I’d had my parents mail me my spare car key a year ago since it wasn’t of any help stowed in a drawer upstate, and when I left my apartment that morning, I grabbed the spare for the first time ever. Maybe they’ll pay me more with two keys, I thought. And then I grabbed coffee and a bagel at the corner cafe, and when I got back to my car, my key was gone, lost somewhere in the rain, the metal attachment snapped right off.
Maybe it was on the floor of the coffee shop or maybe it was on the ground right under my car. I don’t know. I didn’t look for it. I had the spare and that was fine. Off to L.A. I went. But I still think of that missing key, the strange timing, the good fortune of the spare. I like to think that it is still on the ground just down the street from me.
*******
an incomplete list of things I found in my Ford Escape while cleaning him out:
— an owl book that I’ve meant to give my friend for over a year now
— two smooth river rocks
— hiking poles
— an earring of the Big Dipper
— my box of “essentials” that had things like hand warmers, water, toilet paper, a bike helmet, and whatever else I was too lazy to clean out
— several packets of instant oatmeal
— sealed K95 masks
— exploded mineral sunscreen
— several receipts and napkins
— my “mo’ money mo’ problems” coin purse my sister got me in Iceland
— an EzPass that hasn’t been used since I’ve moved to California
— a Kaleo CD case that has a mix tape labelled “the friendship mix” inside. The actual Kaleo disc is nowhere to be found.
People in Parks 