I drive a 2000 white (well, supposed to be white) Buick Lesabre. I am 22, and officially the youngest person to have ever owned this car, ever. The only other drivers I’ve seen behind a similar wheel are 60 year-old or older women that drive 35mph at all times no matter what. Anyway some nick-names include: The White Lady, The Snow Cat, LeSabre (pronounced LA-SAAB-RAY), and “you ugly piece of crap” but only when I’m angry.
My grandmother gave me the car the spring of 2006. I previously drove my Mom and Step-Dad’s hand-me-down 96 Ford Windstar, that I made very “Nicole” by replacing the backseats with a couch and using the chairseats as furniture in my apartment. Both vehicles have been huge blessings. Not having car payments for the last 6 years has afforded me tons of freedom, and flexibility with the vagabond-esque life that I lead.
The car had about 25,000 miles on it in 2006, and now has over 130,000… and for about a year of the last 5 I was travelling abroad… We’re talking about some serious mileage here, mostly attributed to 6 cross- country trips, (Colorado Springs to the New Hampshire coast or vice versa) and driving all over Colorado, and its neighboring states.
So I guess we should start at the hood… The grill is all smashed and the license plate is a bit curled under the bumper because of an accident I got into in the spring of 2008. (I swear the demon car that I hit appeared out of thin air) It never got fixed because I only pay for basic liability insurance, and other than the aesthetically pleasingness of the vehicle, there was no harm done. The bumper hangs daringly close to the ground, because when my transmission died I didn’t want to pay for a tow truck so my step-dad and I tow-roped it to the shop, and due to my spastic braking we almost tore the entire bumper off.
My side-view mirrors have remnants of red car paint that will not come off no matter what I do. This is a result of a prank-war during the summer of 2006. My gas gage has been broken since I got back from my first trip to Africa in spring of 2007, but I try to keep track of the miles, and I’ve only run out of gas 3 times. The alignment is past the point of no return, so I have to drive with my wheel an eighth to the left just to go straight.
My left-side window motor is completely shot. This means I cannot roll up or down either window on the driver’s side. Currently, the back window is duct-taped shut, and I used to be able to duct tape the front window shut, but now it is seriously stuck ¾ of the way down. This means that I drive with it down all the time. It was down the entire drive from Colorado to New Hampshire at the beginning of April, it’s down through rain, and freak New Hampshire snow-storms like the one we had the other day. I have to wear sunglasses when I drive through the rain, because rain drops hitting my eyes at 65mph does not feel very good.
Here’s the story: the week in November that I got an estimate to get my windows fixed was the very same week my friends and I officially decided to go to Peru in late February and take advantage of a 500 dollar round-trip ticket deal… Consequently the window repairs would have cost the same. So, instead of fixing my window I went to Peru, which was glorious, and worth way more than a working window. Since then my life has been moving in fast-forward, including but not limited to, a family trip to Vegas, packing all my things, and moving to New Hampshire with no real cashflow to speak of. But now that it’s April, and there are 5 million other things wrong with my car, it would be silly to pour that much money into it when I’m not sure if it will survive through the year, besides, I have no air conditioning for the upcoming summer, and I’ve kind of gotten used to my defunct windows.
My radio stations… yes, radio, that thing with the all the stations that plays too many commercials that people used to listen to before xm, and Sirius… ipods, and mp3s… are: #1 FNX Boston’s indie rock, #2-4 random hip-hop/rap/top 40, #5 classical, and #6 oldies. The number and seek buttons are beginning to wear off because they’ve been pressed so many times. And my speaker’s are a bit blown, mostly due to having to listen at exceedingly high volumes to hear over windy interstates. I actually do have an extensive itunes music library on my laptop, but I am currently without device to play them in my car. I had an mp3 player once but I either lost it, or it broke… it’s hard to remember which now.
Sitting in my passenger seat is a left over package of beef jerky from my last road trip that I’ve been nibbling on, a half-empty bottle of diet coke, and a parking ticket that I’m pissed about having to pay. At the foot of the passenger seat, and strewn across the back are sneakers, cleats, vibrantly colored flip-flops, shorts, a light shirt and a dark shirt, a tank-top, water-bottle, frisbees, tennis racket and tennis balls for any beach or sporting opportunities that might present themselves.
Also in the back is a blanket in case a passenger ever gets cold during the breezy ride, garbage bags that I shut in the driver door in case it’s raining, and duct tape covering up chocolate milk, and countless other beverage stains, cracker crumbs and stale bits of McDonald’s french fries mostly left behind by my younger siblings currently aged 5 to 18.
The trunk is now relatively empty, although in a given moment, it can fit all my worldly possessions… The left-side blinker doesn’t work due to a shortage in the part in my steering wheel, consequently resulting in getting the middle-finger more times than I can count. My right tail-light is broken, because my friend Laura was borrowing my car and backed up into something. She hands-down offered to get it fixed and a bit tipsy, I begged her to pick up my bar tab one night instead.
So there you have it. That’s my car, and that’s me, hood to tail-light… I do things as cheaply as possible, I would rather go on an adventure than live comfortably, I don’t like nor have stuff, I believe drinking with friends is more important than tail-lights, I really can’t be THAT into appearances, and the looks I’ve gotten as the Snow Cat purrs along the road have virtually made me unembarrassable. There is an anonymous quote with which I will take artistic liberties and have no qualms, that says “My intention in life is not to arrive at the grave with a body that is perfect and well preserved, but to skid in sideways, battered, and scarred, and bruised, shouting holy shit! what a ride.” When I push, pull, or drag my beloved Buick to the junk yard tomorrow, or a year from now I’ll know that she enjoyed the journey as much as I did. And similarly I hope the body that I will one day turn in will be an outward record of funny stories, tearful breakdowns, and spontaneous adventures, complete with a few parts out of whack, and others that are totally shot, so that even the gravediggers (I actually want to be cremated, it’s just a metaphor) will know that I loved the ride.
