Love and the car, and dreams rebuilt
One evening, more than a decade ago, Dale Ruttan fired up his 1985 Toyota Celica Supra and headed home along Shelbourne Street after a long day at work.
A clinical counsellor, he regularly put in 12-hour shifts on a mobile crisis team responding to all manner of mental-health emergencies in Greater Victoria.
It was intense, difficult work, and Ruttan often used the drive home to wind down by listening to music.
On this day, David Gray’s Life in Slow Motion was playing on the stereo at the exact moment that the Supra was broadsided by another car that was apparently trying to race across four lanes of traffic.
The force of the impact drove the Supra’s passenger door into the centre console and pushed the car into an oncoming lane, where it was struck by a third vehicle.
Ruttan came to with the engine revving and people yelling and the sandy feel of broken teeth in his mouth.
Fortunately, that’s as bad as it got for him.
The father of three walked away with bruises and a concussion, but no broken bones. The paramedics told Ruttan that he likely escaped serious injury or possibly death because his car was so well designed — something that came as no surprise to Ruttan.
The Toyota Celica Supra had always been the car of his dreams. There was something about its strong, wedge-style features that appealed to him.
Even before he could afford to buy one, he hung pictures of the car in his office at home.
He finally purchased a white 1985 Supra with a sunroof and maroon interior from a used-car dealership in 1991 — the same year that his wife, Angela, gave birth to their second child and the family moved into a new house in Gordon Head.
The story goes that Dale got his dream car, Angela got her dream house and they both got Dalan, a brand new baby boy.
In the years that followed, father and son put in a lot of hours on the Supra, washing and buffing and generally doting on the vehicle.
To this day, Dalan, 26, traces his love of cars and engines to the hours he spent working on the Supra with his dad.
He hoped to drive it himself one day, but never got the chance.
He was just 15 at the time of the crash on Shelbourne and, if his dad escaped relatively unscathed, the Supra wasn’t so lucky. It was written off and sent to the scrap yard.
Dalan, who knew how much the Supra meant to his dad, told his mother a few days after the crash that, one day, he would build his dad a new one.
“In my mind, I just accepted that I was going to do it,” he says. “It was just like a fact. It wasn’t a dream.”
Fiercely independent even as a child, Dalan says he always wanted to give something back to his parents for all they had given him. The idea of rebuilding his father’s dream car took hold in his mind and never let go.
Five years ago, he began searching for a replacement in earnest and even bought a black and red Supra in Calgary before realizing that it would require too much time and money to restore.
Then, last year, he found a near perfect match — a white Supra with a sunroof and maroon interior — in Edmonton. It needed a lot of work, but Dalan nursed it back to Victoria and set about rebuilding the entire engine with the help of friends and a local machine shop.
The worst part was trying to keep the project secret. “Whenever I was around my dad for the last four months it was just … awkward,” he says.
“The only thing in my life I was doing was literally working on the car every day, getting parts, sourcing stuff — because you can’t buy them anymore. So you have to get used parts or refurbished parts and try to find people around North America to send me stuff.
“It was just my life for four months, so there wasn’t much to talk about … I couldn’t let anything slip up, you know?”
He planned to hand over the keys at Christmas, but was unable to finish the rebuild in time. So, in January, Dalan called his parents and told them that he and his wife were going to drive down from Shawnigan Lake, stay over and take them out for dinner the next day.
That night, they waited until Dalan’s parents had gone to bed and then quietly pushed the other vehicles out of the driveway and replaced them with the Supra.
The next morning, Dalan told his dad that he had a late Christmas present for him and handed over a gift-wrapped copy of the Supra’s manual with the original key tag from the dealership where Dale bought his car back in 1991.
Dale recalls that he was perplexed by the “weird” gift. Things only got stranger when Dalan led him outside to where the Supra was parked in the driveway.
“As I open the door and I look out there, I see my car,” Dale recalls.
“Your brain can’t compute. Really, I’ve never had that experience before. It just didn’t make sense.”
His car had been destroyed years earlier, but there it was in front of him, exactly as he remembered it.
The only difference, as he soon discovered, was that while his car had been an automatic, this one was a standard — something that registered only when he turned the key and the car lurched forward, almost hitting the garage.
To complete the disorienting effect, Dalan had found a Life in Slow Motion CD and slipped it into the stereo. It was playing when Dale started the car.
The experience was so surreal that Dale says the full impact of what his son had done didn’t hit home until much later.
“Then he tells me that: ‘I built this for you. I wanted you to have your car back.’ ”
That’s when the tears started to flow, Dale says.
“It’s not about the car, really. It’s about the love. To do something like that for me, knowing how much it would mean. … Then it really sinks in, all that he’s done for me.”
Dalan knows his father never would have asked for such a gift, and that’s sort of the point. For years, he says, he has watched his dad give to his family, his church and others without ever asking anything in return.
“He’s got a good heart and he doesn’t expect anything back, so I wanted to give him something that he would never ask for,” Dalan said.
“He told me: ‘If I knew you were doing this, I would have said: “Don’t do it. Save your money. Put it toward a down payment or something, because it’s not worth it.” ’
“But in my eyes,” Dalan says, “it was worth it.”