It’s happened to just about everyone at one time or another. One minute you’re whizzing along at 75 miles per hour in air conditioned comfort singing along to Human League on your best of the 80’s CD (hey you’re alone, right) and the next minute your car is making noises usually only heard in the hopeless care wing of the hospital. Sometimes, in a useless display of good intentions, your car warns you of impending disaster with an ever foreboding array of idiot lights. These lights build in an crescendo of distress starting with, “alternator”, (yes, I have one of those) to “check engine”, (it was there last time I looked) to “check with your network administrator”, (I don’t know who this guy is but we have a hell of a lot to talk about) and finally, as you’re coasting to a stop, “sudden loss of cabin pressure” (can this happen in a car?).
There you sit in stunned disbelief, warning lights blazing on the dash board, something’s beeping shrilly and Human League sings on, now mockingly, like a clown hired to heckle your botched vasectomy operation. In the days before cell phones you only had two options in the break down scenario; first, was to wrap the seat belt over your head and use the seat belt motor as an assisted suicide devise. Second, was to join with a band of other stranded motorists hoping to work your way up to a position as their tribal medicine man.
Your next inclination is to open the hood and stare at the engine hoping that all it needed was a little encouragement or maybe a stern talking to. If you consider yourself a decent mechanic you still may not be any better off because knowing you have a broken connecting rod won’t do you any good unless you had the foresight to bring a portable lift, a spare con rod and $5000.00 worth of hand tools. Opening the hood is also a way to cry for help while retaining your dignity. In the back of your mind you hope someone will come along with the age old question, “Having trouble?” “Well I was going to fix this broken camshaft with a pair of tweezers and this Human League CD but since you’re here, I could use a lift, I’m late for my oboe lesson.” If after a few minutes of staring at your dead cell phone with no one offering assistance, you race through four of the five stages of grief until you come to acceptance. You accept the fact that you’re walking.
The American highway system is a marvel of complexity and ingenuity connecting the most remote farm in Nebraska to Grand Central Station in New York. It is also the most pedestrian unfriendly corridor of death ever conceived by man. Just four feet of shoulder separate you from two tons of steel blasting by at 70 to 80 miles per hour creating a pressure wave of hot air like Satan blowing in your ear.
There is no more inappropriate feeling than walking on an interstate. It must be what a Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer feels at their daughter’s Christmas Pageant. While you’re walking without anyone picking you up (maybe that tattoo of the skull with the dagger in its eye is a little off-putting) you come to appreciate a car for what it really is; effortless movement because as our forefathers figured out, walking sucks.
Walking along the highway does give you a chance to see the untold story of our automotive corridors, a story told in the odd collection of objects that accumulate on the side of the road. As anyone who’s ever been remanded to community service can tell you not only are the abandoned objects on the shoulders odd but their groupings can ignite the imagination as well. A sock, a crow bar and half a bottle of mouth wash. What series of circumstances could have possible brought this collection of items together along the side of the highway? Did some sock puppeteer, with homicidal tendencies and bad breath commit some dastardly deed at mile marker 138? And what’s with the adult potty chair in that tree?
When you look up and see that sign that says the next exit is still two and a half miles away, that’s when you do it, with God and unidentifiable road kill as your witnesses. That’s when you resolve to never buy another, insert offending car brand here, for the rest of your life and a pox upon your unborn descendants who defy this oath.
The only exception to this car brand abstinence rule is British and Italian car enthusiasts. These tortured soles are spending their pedestrian hours piecing together the palette of smells and sounds that occurred just before their car decided that it would go on strike like the workers who built them.
And that brings me to a final question; we’ve all had cars we hate let us down but does anyone still hold a fond place in their hearts for a car that forced you into a little unintended exercise?
Marve Harwell
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