Your First Car

Following Robb, I thought I’d play this meme.

Here’s the meme. Long answers or short.

1. What was your first car? Model, year, color, condition?
2. What adventures did you have in it, good or bad?
3. What happened to it, what’s the end of the story?

First car was a 1978 Dodge Aspen WonderCar (it’s a wonder it runs!) I picked up for $150 in the summer of 1990.  It was a silver 4-door sedan, with a 225 Slant-6 with over 150K miles on it (an engine you couldn’t kill with an axe) & a slipped collar.  For those not familiar with the term, a slipped collar is when the shifting linkages between the shift lever on the steering column & the automatic tranny are no longer in their original configuration.  The end result of this malfunction was that when I was in Park, the gear indicator was just to the right of the ‘R’, and when I was in low-2, it was just to the left of ‘D’, with all the other gears in there, somewhere.  Also, this being Wisconsin, the chassis was starting to strongly resemble Swiss cheese.  Suffice it to say, I kept a toolbox in the trunk & learned a LOT about fixing cars.

It was a fun car, with just enough get up & go to satisfy me, but not so much as to get me in trouble.  The bench seats provided ample space for making out with girls or hauling as many friends as you could stuff in there.  Despite the mechanical quirks, it was a good car.  I only had two notable events in the car, otherwise.

The first was a lesson in ice.  I was driving to school the day after an ice storm & blizzard, and the county hadn’t salted everywhere yet.  I was about a mile & a half from home when the car last traction at all 4 corners & literally just slid off the road.  The shoulders along the road were very deep, enough so that had it been summer, I would have wrecked the car.  However, this being winter, and just after a blizzard, I just landed in a big pile of snow.  I wasn’t going anywhere, but the car was OK.  I walked home & paid a neighbor $20 to bring his tractor down to pull me out.  Once I knocked all the snow out of the engine compartment, she started right up and went to school.

The second was a lesson in fog, and death.  It was December, I’d had the car for all of 6 months, but we were old friends by then.  It was night, I was driving to pick up a girl for a dance, and cruising along the road I took to school every day.  It was cold, and misting a little, with the weather promising to turn ugly later that night.  I passed a car (legally) that was doing 35 on a country highway, and then I crested a hill.  At the top of the hill was a truck with it’s hazard lights on, and a fog bank.  I noticed the truck, hit the fog, took my foot off the gas, and just coasted.  I knew the road, every twist & turn, and I knew fog like this was local and would likely end in less than a mile, so I wasn’t in a huge hurry to slow down.  A few seconds later, I saw lights flashing on the side of the road, something orange & white filled my headlights, and I got to experience massive deceleration.

My seatbelt saved my life, although it was a smidge slow to engage.  The car didn’t have airbags, so I kissed the steering wheel.  I had some bruised ribs, a bloody noise, a busted lip, and I had done something to my heel, but I was alive.  I couldn’t see out the windshield because the hood was all crumpled in front of it.  I couldn’t open the front doors because the frame had deformed so much.  I was able to get out of my seatbelt & crawl into the back seat, where a couple good kicks got one of the doors open.  The rest of it was a bit of a blur.  I remember more tires squealing as the car I had passed before tried to avoid hitting my car, and failed (although he was below 5mph by the time he hit).  I remember calling my dad from the house I had crashed in front of, and then going to see what I had hit.  It was a skid loader, it was a good 100 feet from my car, on it’s side, and a man was upside down in the cockpit (his head on the floor, his feet poking out the top of the roll cage).  Then I was talking to a Sheriff deputy, who asked me what happened, asked me if I was wearing my seatbelt (I responded by asking him to go look at my car again and come to his own conclusions), then dad was there & I was heading home.

Over the next two weeks I learned more about what had happened.  I had learned that a local farmer had a wagon full of corn with a broken axel on the side of the road.  He had instructed two farm hands to get the corn out of the wagon before nightfall, since we were expecting freezing rain that night, and those two had fucked off until it was too late.  So the farmer had mustered up a group to help him unload it.  They positioned two trucks a quarter mile or so away from the work site, and turned on the hazards, then went to work.  They noticed the fog roll in, but hadn’t realized how thick it was, so they never did anything more to provide oncoming cars with more warning.  I was the next car to arrive after the fog showed up.

I also learned that the farmer, who had been operating the skid loader, died in a coma two weeks later.  School was a bit rough after that, as the farmer had been related to about half my school, and the rumors flew fast and furious (I was speeding, I was drunk, I was stoned, I thought it was cool that I had killed a guy, etc.)

Examining the car a few days later, it looked like I hit a solid wall.  The front license plate was still flat.  I remember the horror in my mother’s eyes as she looked at the wreck, and then at me with utter disbelief that I had walked away from that.  The rotted out chassis actually saved me, as the engine dropped and went under the car, instead of through the firewall.  Still, the car was dead.  That engine would survive an axe, but not a head-on collision.

I had to go see a judge about all this, since a person had died.  The deputy, however, backed my story & told the judge that I wasn’t driving recklessly, and that the farmer had failed to adequately provide notice to oncoming motorists, thus contributing directly to his own fate.  I was able to walk away from that one.  A friend of the family, who was a deputy in the county I lived in (the wreck had happened one county over), told me I was lucky it had happened there, because her boss would have done everything he could to make sure I was found guilty of something.  That was my first indication of just how unjust our justice system could be, and it scared the hell out of me.