All through my life I have had a love-hate relationship with cars. I love cars, and they hate me.
I love the concept of cruising down the road with the windows open and the radio blaring, the deep-throated exhaust raising my testosterone level.
But in reality, cars are a money pit with four wheels. Not only do they cost a mint to buy, you have to pay for gas – or electricity nowadays – and maintain them.
Often, cars strain the pocketbook. Sometimes they push their owners over the edge.
I had a friend in college who spent every free moment rebuilding a 1963 Volkswagen van. All semester, his dorm room was cluttered with engine parts, wrenches, oily rags and frustration. This was in 1975 at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
Finally, he managed to pull all of the pieces together and, through an act of will as much as mechanical know-how, got the van to run. Not very well, but it did run.
After graduation, we went our separate ways. I got a job as the entire staff of a weekly newspaper in Wrangell, Alaska, and he landed a job working for one of Alaska’s U.S. senators in Washington, D.C.
One day I got a call from him. He was in Canada and planned to catch a state ferry to Wrangell. I invited him to spend a couple of days in my apartment before he headed on to D.C.
I met him at the ferry terminal. No Volkswagen van. When I asked about it, all he said was a string of four-letter words, some that I had never heard before.
Here’s what happened.
He left Fairbanks in the Volkswagen, and everything was fine, until a small noise developed in the engine. The small noise became a big noise and, ultimately, the big noise became no noise at all. The engine had gone kaput. Melted down. Crapped out.
Anyway you describe it, the Volkswagen was toast. He was in the middle of the Yukon Territory with a dead van and a hundred trillion mosquitoes.
There was only one way out. He had a gun, and the van had a half a tank of gas. By the time he got done, the van was burning like a 12-year-old’s marshmallow. He hitched a ride from a passing trucker, who was heading for the ferry terminal in Haines, Alaska. He had only a backpack and a torque wrench to his name.
A true love-hate relationship. He had poured an infinite amount of time and all the money a college kid could scrape together to get that van on the road, and he had been jilted.
I’ve had my share of torrid affairs with cars, too. Just the other day, I decided to fix a small noise coming from the engine of my Honda. I watched a couple of YouTube videos, ordered the part and was all set. After the requisite amount of crawling around on the floor of the garage, I managed to button it back up.
Then came the moment of truth. I started it and it didn’t make the original noise. It made a whole batch of new noises.
To paraphrase my reaction: Well, heck.
Not only that, when I drove it on the road it wouldn’t go faster than 20 mph. And the instrument panel looked like one of those old Pac-Man video games.
Gosh dang it.
My wife was kind enough to lend me her car and took my Honda “brick” to a repair shop. A week later, a real mechanic had it fixed.
And I was back on the road, driving with the windows open and the radio blaring and an empty spot in my heart, and my wallet.
Carl Sampson is a freelance write and editor. He lives in Stayton.
