The first car I owned was a red VW Dasher with a hand-cranked sunroof
whose gearshift came right out of the car whenever an adolescent male drove
it. “It’s something about the way
athletic young men shift,” my mother said, when she guessed that Garret and not
I had been driving when the latest event occurred; my brother had presented the
detached stick to her a few weeks earlier, with a desperate plea for help. The car lasted me only several months in my very
late teens. It was a pretty disappointing
vehicle. The second, which I purchased
when I was about 35 and had moved from big city to small city, was a three-door
Saturn coupe with an electronic sunroof.
(That third door was a brilliant engineering decision.) I bought it when it was two years old, and
drove it for ten years, until some landscaper in an oversized pick-up truck,
misunderstanding the ‘stop’ part of ‘stop-and-go traffic,’ rear-ended me on
route 66[*]. Suburban living requiring a car, I bought the
Honda.
I chose the Honda because it had a stick, low miles, decent mpg and a
sunroof, and the color was interesting without being show-offy. Also because trusted mechanic Ralph put the
kibosh on: all Volkswagens, most Mazdas,
all Nissans, all Fords and every other make that isn’t Honda or Toyota. Boring, Ralph. Very boring.
Boring, though, is so much better than frequently requiring expensive
repairs.
So I’m not a car person. I don’t
name them (M.N.’s Jaguar was ‘Miss Kitty;’ my nieces name all the family cars,
things like ‘Buttercup’ and ‘Azanda.’) When my
car aficionado friends (who mostly don’t name their cars) asked me whether I
liked my new car, I was a bit stumped. I
mean, it runs. And it stops when it’s
supposed to.
Having this conversation with a woman who once told me she’d spent a
sunny Saturday afternoon washing her car’s engine, because she likes to do that
herself, you know? is talking at something like cross-purposes. Prior to that conversation,
I had no idea you could wash a
car’s engine. I would have guessed it
would be bad for the engine to get water and soap all over it. Another friend built her car from a kit. Another enters his – engine shining – in car
shows. When a group of these – let’s
call them aficionados, though ‘loonies’ keeps coming to mind – decided we
should all get together and drive these fancy vehicles through the Virginia
countryside, now that the Corvette’s scratch had been buffed away and the
antique Jeep’s engine tuned and the Toronado’s paintwork shined, I was pleased
to be able to announce that I’d just vacuumed the Honda. They all looked at me funny, and then K.C.
patiently said, “You could drive the Cobra.”
After almost 9,500 miles and six weeks of multi-hour use most days, I
now officially like my car. It did
everything it’s supposed to, it got decent mileage, it never scared me with
weird noises at night in isolated places.
The sunroof is irritating, as it sucks my hair out and makes a lot of
noise, which the Saturn’s never did. The
mileage isn’t as good as the Saturn’s. When
I get up over 65mph or thereabouts, the steering wheel agitates a bit before
settling down, and sometimes the dashboard makes rattling noises. The former, per Ralph Jr., poses no safety
hazard but could be cured with four new tires.
The car is boring as can be – try counting all the blue Hondas you see
someday when you’re driving a fair distance.
But there are so many things a car can be that are so very, very much
worse than boring.
The car did not like the steep hills we encountered in South Dakota,
and I would have to gear down to maintain a reasonable speed at times. Those times usually took me by surprise; it
seems the long, slow climbs are more challenging than the short, steep
ones. More probably I just pay better
attention on short-and-steep stretches. We did just fine in the Arizona and Tennessee hills. I’m sorry I didn’t get to visit Denver and see the Rockies on this trip,
but I suspect the car is better off this way.
I’m glad, too, that we didn’t meet any snowy or icy patches. I’ve never had any problems with those in
NoVA, but they tend to be brief and not very snowy or icy, so I’d rather not
test things in Montana.
It probably helps that I am, mostly, a conservative driver. I like to stick to about 10% over the speed
limit, so six or seven mph for most of this trip. There were moments when the big digital
display started with 9, but they were brief and apologetic. In my entirely subjective experience, I was
more likely to pass other cars than to be passed through the midwest, while in
Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma and from Florida up the east coast, I got passed more
than I did the passing.
I like to drive with the sunroof open and, often, music playing, but I
haven’t yet been taken snuck up on by a siren-sounding emergency vehicle. My ears are good enough, so far, to handle
all the inputs. The first time an
ambulance comes up behind me without my noticing, I’ll turn down all the
volumes. I do not mess around with
emergency vehicles.
The ex once joked that if I ever got pulled over for failure to stop,
he would tell the patrol officer, “But sliding right through that intersection
must be okay, officer. She does it all the time.” That’s a little bit truer than it should be
for a few of NoVA’s many, many, many, many gratuitous stop signs, like the one
near my old apartment that was there solely in case someone was coming out of a
little-used office-building parking lot.
I actually proposed to the ex that we should get out there with a
blowtorch and cut the useless thing down, but he declined. Seriously, you do not need a three-way stop for a driveway.
I stay to the right except when passing. If someone’s tailgating me, I pull over if I
can – and kinda maybe hit the brakes a couple of times if I can’t. I rarely tailgate myself, and when I notice
myself doing so, I know I’m over-stressed.
I use my turn indicators, even when changing lanes, unless there’s no
one around but the truck I just passed, and it’s way back there now, although
often I use the blinker even then.
I suffered no accidents on the journey, and had very little worry that
I might. I am not a nervous driver, but
try to stay alert, and extra aware when I see deer crossing or falling rock
warnings. That said, I agree with
critics who posit that we get far too many road signs, signals and warnings in
the U.S. The one sign that caused me a
brief alarm was in Muleshoe, Texas, that cautioned drivers about ‘Deep Sand’ at
the side of the road. It’s one I’d never
seen before, and I had a quick flash image of the swerve to avoid a deer, and
then the Honda up to its hubcaps in sand.
That’s why we upgrade to the AAA Premier membership before embarking on
a cross-country road trip.
My closest call was actually pretty nervous-making: it was nighttime on route 101. A pick-up truck passed me, moving pretty
briskly, and then slowed down so we were even about a mile later, he in the
passing lane and I in the travel lane.
Next to each other. So, you know,
he shouldn’t have changed lanes right then.
But he did. He started sliding back
into my travel lane while I was still in
it. So my first thought is, ‘He
wants to kill me!’ and my second is, ‘Hey, dummy, pay attention,” which I think while hitting the horn, in time to
wake him up to swerve back before the collision, so everyone’s fine. Rattled by the inattention, but fine fine
fine. And I’m especially glad, because I’ve
gotten to like the little Honda, and I don’t want random sleepy or distracted
or tense strangers pitching it onto the Pacific cliffs.
Funny. When I bought the car in 2011, it
was a hunk of metal. This morning, I
heard someone on ‘Car Talk’ say he has a Honda Civic that he loves, and I could
relate.
[*]This
is not the famous rock-and-roll route 66 in the western US, but the infamous traffic-choked
route 66 in suburban Washington, DC.
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