A LOVE LETTER TO A FIRST CAR
Modest subcompact car has been across Canada and seen its share of good times with nary a complaint
Tyler Dawson’s adieu to ‘Silver Rain’
What a silly thing, to be upset about selling a car.
It’s just metal and rubber, plastic and carpet, hoses, belts and fluids; a soulless machine, like a lawn mower, a toaster or a hair dryer. And yet, Silver Rain is different. That car’s been with me since 2008. It was the vehicle I drove to Vancouver Island (well, not all the way, a ferry did its part) to hike the West Coast Trail. It brought an astonishing percentage of my worldly possessions to Ottawa when I made the trip east in 2012 for school.
It took me on dates with a few pretty girls. It once drove a load full of cigar-huffing bachelorpartiers to the Rockies — the smokin’ car, we declared — then had to be aired out for days in the middle of winter. I’ve joked about being buried in it, set aflame, like a Viking, surrounded by possessions needed for the afterlife.
I’ve had that car since the days when you could talk or text while driving, before there was even the suggestion that was naughty.
I remember my incandescent rage upon leaving the bar one night and seeing that someone had rubbed the rear wheel well with their vehicle. And the fixes, like struggling to get off the darn crankshaft bolt to replace the timing belt. (I never did get it off, so there was that $326.68 bill from the local Honda dealer.)
A 1998 Honda Civic DX coupe. Base model. No air conditioning (didn’t realize that until I had forked over $6,200 and got it home). No power windows, no power locks. Manual transmission. A six-CD changer in the trunk.
The odometer reads 63,000. It’s really clocked more like 250,000; the cluster with odometer and speedometer died in 2011, and needed replacing. Mechanics have offered to buy the car — before I tell them this backstory. People said it would go forever. Maybe it will — just not with me.
I bought it, believe it or not, out of the Edmonton Journal’s classified ads. Just that small, stampsized ad. I saw it, and knew it was the one for me. Funny how that happens in life: a spark of recognition, telling you something’s got to be yours.
It has been with me ever since, except for the summer it sat in Ottawa while I was in Edmonton working. It smelled the same when I got back, just like it should. Lingering, years later on the floor mat, is the slight smell of vomit that never completely disappeared after a friend emptied his guts onto his feet in the back seat driving home from Toronto. (As for the name, it was just something a friend and I came up with one night, and it stuck.)
I don’t love cars. I’m not a car person. But I love owning a car. They’re freedom, distilled into four cylinders and wheels and a tank of gasoline. Not just personal, but political.
“There are few things in our society, and fewer with each passing year, that offer us so much individual freedom,” wrote B. Bruce-Briggs in The War Against the Automobile in 1977.
At any time, having a car meant I could hop in, twist the key and just leave, whatever that meant. And go wherever I wanted, to escape anything.
For days, the opening chorus line of George Strait’s I Got a Car has been running through my mind: “And I said, well I got a car, she said, there’s something.”
Can’t say this car ever got me a girl. But I’ll miss the worn steering wheel; the chip out of the windshield; the god-awful patch job I did on a tear in the driver’s seat; the clutch with no perceivable friction point.
It’s time to move on to something new. It feels a bit like abandoning an old friend, but these days, I’d like four doors and air conditioning. Still, I hope it gets someone else even further than it got me. Then again, maybe it’ll get crushed into a cube. And life will go on.