The salesman shrugs, rubs his fingers through his hair, chuckles a little, I think, at the question. "Most likely our used lot in Menomonie."
His response provokes a jolt of melancholy I'm not expecting. I generally try not to make a habit of allowing sentimentality to run my life. I'm not the type to anthropomorphize animals or inanimate objects, or lend too much significance to what usually amounts to coincidences. I'm a realist, and the reality is: I've had this heap - a 2001 Dodge Ram - for eight years, by far the longest I've ever owned a vehicle, and trading it in is long overdue. Not only is it on its last mechanical legs (wheezing its way up even the mildest hills), but has in recent years become an anachronistic vestige of my old life, a 'me' that no longer exists.
Yet for some reason, picturing it sitting in a used lot in west-central Wisconsin really has me down. The thought of never seeing it (him..?) again, and that someone else will drive it, and probably only as a junky hunting or fishing vehicle, is making the whole process of getting a new car feel like a goodbye.
Outside of property, the vehicle we drive is probably the physical asset by which we most readily identify ourselves, perhaps because we spend so much of our time in it. Unlike your land, or your home, your vehicle goes with you. It travels at your side; it travels underneath you, actually; it carries you. Think about that a moment: you ride your vehicle, depend on it for safe passage of yourself, your friends, your loved ones, your product and cargo. In profoundly psychological (if subconscious) ways, it's not unlike a relationship a rider may have with a horse, a kind of unspoken bond (at the risk of sounding like a candidate for TLC's My Strange Addiction).
I've owned a lot of cars, 'bonded' with a few of them even, but never felt the sense of loss that is gripping me this morning. I really don't understand where it's coming from; this old beast isn't even my favorite vehicle of all time.
That honor goes to a 1981 Chevy Camaro that breezed through my life almost two decades ago. As Camaros go, it was not a shining example, nor was it quite appropriate for a parent (either the parent I was, trying to stuff my son's car safety seat in the back, or my parents, who did their best to stuff themselves in the back when I took them for a ride). The body style appealed to me (still does) because it had the spoiler, and its sun roof was the closest I've ever come to a convertible. But it was a gutless wonder, struggling to squeeze 110 hp from a 229 V6, and this gutlessness was augmented - and announced ahead of time, town crier-style - by a rainbow stripe along the side and - I'm serious - a factory 8-track player, which still seems impossible, even by 1981 standards, but was very real.
In spite of all this, that car was a pure joy to drive. It looked sharp, looked bad ass (in spite of the rainbow stripe), and I did my best to drive it bad ass, although it wasn't easy. Cruising up and down my town's main drag on Friday night, "taking runs", as we called it, I'd attempt a brake stand at the lights in front of the movie theater, but this generally resulted in little more than a few cheese curds pooping out of the tailpipe, and the situation was not helped by my having no alternative to the radio other than jamming to my one of my mom's 8-track gems. (Er..which I did, because I was kind of a clown and thought it was funny: Carpenters, Captain and Tennille, Bread...rock and snore, baby...rock and snore...)
Still kind of funny, looking back.
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LONG, LOW AND (NOT ALL THAT) FAST: Looking every bit the part (of what, exactly, I have no idea...), I stand proudly next to my 1981 Chevy Camaro, circa 1994. Possessing neither the heart nor soul of its contemporaries, and certainly not its predecessors, it was nevertheless fun to drive, rainbow stripe, factory 8-track player and all. What I wonder is why nobody ever discussed with me how I was dressing back then! And God only KNOWS what that hand-like thing is by the door...
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HUMAN JIGSAW PUZZLE: My father, having just successfully deposited my mom in the back seat in pieces (for reassembly later), struggles to insert himself into the seat next to her. Check out that rainbow stripe!
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Alas, having only the most basic knowledge of cars on a mechanical level, there wasn't a lot I could do to beef up my Camaro. I wound up selling it to a friend who knew his way around a wrench and switched out the 229 for a bored 350 with carb, cam, headers and dual exhaust. The 8-track player, too, went bye-bye almost immediately, replaced by premium sound of the day, and at the very same intersection where not six months earlier I had executed the cheese doodliest brake stand ever while banging my head to Rainy Days and Mondays, he laid a half-block long blackie from which arose a billow of acrid white smoke, created as much by the music blaring out of his stereo as the rubber on the pavement.
I had a Mustang for a while....well, a 1980 Mustang anyway. Boxy and copper colored, it sported 4-eyes and a four-banger that could best be likened to the sound of a dentist's drill. But it was still a Mustang, I told myself, fine lineage there, good stock! At the very least it didn't have louvers, and it too was simply fun to drive, in (and for) all its gutless glory.
And in keeping with my pattern of attaining second or third generation cars that were mere shadows of their former selves, I rocked a 1977 Chevy Nova for a while too. The interior was bright red vinyl and scalding hot on a summer afternoon (wearing shorts? Lay down a towel...). By the end, the rear bumper was half off, and over 45 mph was sort of like driving a paint mixer.
My very first car naturally holds an important place in my heart as well - a 1977 Chrysler Newport. This sucker was about the size of Wyoming, every inch of it hood, with windshield-facing blinker lights on the hood (in case the blinker lights on the dashboard weren't making the driver's intention clear enough...to the driver). It was a sort of poor man's luxury car when it rolled off the assembly line during the Carter administration, and all things considered, was the quintessence of the kind of car I drove then, the car I could afford: a big, rusted out 1970s boat - larger than it needed to be, cheap vinyl seats, analog clock, long, spiny speedometer needle, easy to replace headlights. I was the only thing standing between it and the boneyard, it seemed, combing the back-ass used lots with my few hundred dollars to spend and desperate need for wheels. If I was lucky, I'd find one with a cassette player, but normally, just a radio...a few times nothing but an AM radio. More often than not, I promptly had a cassette deck installed, but every once in a while the clown in me crept out from under the bed and I left the AM radio right where it was, spent my cruising time jamming to radio auctions, lost and founds, community calenders, country music (in days when AM was the only side of radio you could find country music) and polka parties.
That Newport was 'the kind of car I drove' right down to the way it died - unceremoniously failing to start in the Hardee's parking lot one winter night. The engine had seized up, and I was completely broke, and it sat there for several days before I could afford, even, to get it towed...to the junkyard.
So many teenage firsts had been carried out in my Newport, but I did not mourn the passing of that seminal creature the way I did my truck this morning. Though I was far more melodramatic in those days, far more likely to go out of my way to find significance in the passing of each moment and far more inclined to anthropomorphize, I felt no sense whatsoever of losing something I couldn't replace. Reflection, perhaps, because that's how I am, and plenty of frustration, knowing I was stuck walking, or borrowing my parents' car (never a simple matter) until I could afford something else.
But nothing even close to the outright anxiety I'm gripped by this morning, climbing into my shiny new ride with the latest everything, as though I'm losing a loved one. It's with nothing less than bittersweet sorrow that I leave my truck behind at the dealership, and bristle at the thought of the used lot in Menomonie - the pasture - it's being put out in.
Maybe I bristle at the pasture I know awaits me, the used car lot, as it were. Out there, somewhere. Closer than before. Closer than I ever thought it would get.
