It’s one of life’s great conundrums. When do you stop pouring money into that old bucket of bolts?
Bolts being the operative word, as not all that long ago I pulled my 17-year-old Honda Pilot into the driveway and happened to notice that three of the five right-front lug nuts had snapped off. “So that explained the rubbing sound,” I dumbly mused.
It likely hadn’t been thus for too many miles, but who knows, given the heap’s rugged and rattling ways, like an overgrown Model T or something from “The Beverly Hillbillies” — with mattresses, ladder-back chairs, and a galvanized washtub piled on its roof I could make like a climate refugee.
One of the reasons it’s in the shop is that its odometer has clocked 287,000 miles and I’m determined to make it to a milestone 300K. As a sympathetic tow truck driver out of Hampton Bays said to me, “Once they get to that many miles, there’s not much else that’s gonna go on you.”
New cars are certainly nice — quiet, smooth, ever more reliable. But also techie, alien, at a certain remove from the human operator.
What was that saying from the early days of computer programming? Close to the machine. Referring to a simpler language in more direct communication with the thing, as opposed to that which is elevated and elaborate behind a slick and friendly user interface. And so with the beater car.
Something my wife and I share is a 1970s to mid-’80s upbringing without money in moneyed surroundings — Westchester County for her, the Hamptons for me — in ramshackle old houses, hers owned, mine rented. A stripped-down Dodge van here, a Ford Pinto with explosive rear gas tank there. It’s what we know.
I was a child of divorce, however, and it was during the not-much time with my junk king father that I learned how to strain against a dead vehicle with the driver’s-side door open, get it rolling, then hop in and pop the clutch to turn the engine over. And you’re on your way. So very satisfying.
Such has gone the way of the aerial antenna, sadly. Maybe one day when my ship comes in I’ll head back into the past to once again command a manual transmission.
That’s right, drivers, one hand on the stick shift, not on a screen.