Road Trip Redux - 2023

I took a day to rest and do laundry when I got back from Guatemala and left the next day on a road trip.  On that same day, my wife arranged for an early ride north to Rockford to catch a plane for Sarasota where her sister lives.  I headed south mid-morning.  I was driving my wife’s 2018 Chevy Equinox with 39,000 miles.  I felt guilty leaving the Buick parked in the garage.  So guilty I apologized out loud before the garage door shut.

I don’t name my cars, but I develop feelings for them.  I owned a long string of used Buicks, the 2006 Lucerne I left behind on this road trip being the latest one.  I bought them each from my friend Jerry Trost (rest in peace pal) starting with a 1988 LeSabre with a little over 100,000 miles.  

That was the deal.  Used to be that at 100,000 miles the resale price on American cars dropped like a stone, making it a great value for a guy like me.  I gave that 88 LeSabre to my daughter when she was at U of I in 2003 after I’d driven it almost another hundred thousand.  It finally died her senior year.  It was a great car.

They were all great cars.  Each had the 3.8-liter six-cylinder engine.  Jerry thought that was the best engine General Motors ever made.  Called it bulletproof.  The transmission on the 2006 Buick Lucerne went out in Sarasota Florida last year and my wife lost all confidence in its ability to get us home from there once more.  I would have taken it on the trip in a minute.  Nothing beats a big Buick sedan for comfort on a long ride.  The fact that the Lucerne now has 169,000 miles and a rebuilt transmission doesn’t bother me.  But then, I’m not the only passenger on the trip back home.

I missed taking my CDs.  The chevy was upgraded to having no CD player.  I know, they’re throwbacks too, but there’s something thrilling about choosing a CD from a sack full of discs, sliding it into the dashboard, and cranking up the volume.  The Chevy has SiriusXM radio, and I’ve found stations I like, but you never get track lists, songs in the same order one after another, as you remember on those old CDs.  

The kids put Spotify on my phone and showed me how to run it through the Chevy’s sound system.  I wouldn’t let them load the version that costs money, what with the Sirius radio already costing us, and free Spotify runs ads every three or four songs.  Nothing ruins Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited like an advertisement for Avatar: The Way of Water sandwiched between “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Queen Jane Approximately.”

Not that there aren’t good things about the Chevy.  I like the backup camera and the screen where it’s displayed.  I can run Google Maps through my phone to that screen and see my route without stopping to consult either my phone or the Rand McNally Road Atlas.  And those lights on the side mirrors that flash when a car is in the lane next to you?  Handy.

I doubt I’ll get to enjoy the ultimate advancement in automobiles - the self-driving car.  Can you imagine doing a crossword puzzle, perhaps nodding off, while your car negotiates traffic and turns?  That’s a car made for a driver like me.  I can’t imagine I’ll buy a used one of those with 100,000 miles for what I used to pay Jerry for the Buicks.  Or a cheap used electric car for that matter.  Everything changes.

My dad, born in 1909 (114 years ago), used to tell me stories of farming with horses.  His father kept a two-horse team of draft workhorses, along the lines of Belgians.  When dad talked about them, he remembered them fondly.  Here’s his favorite workhorse story.

When gas-powered trucks began hauling goods and supplies on country roads a coal truck went into a ditch near their farm and ended up on its side.  The truck driver walked to their farm and asked for assistance.    My dad and his father took their team down to help.  The driver doubted they could right the truck, given the size and the weight of the load.

As Dad told the story his father ignored the truck driver, hitched his horses to the side of the truck, and set them to pull it back up on its wheels.  At first, they failed.  My grandfather stopped them, let them rest, rubbed their heads and necks, and talked to them.  Then he set them back to the task.

Dad said he had never seen their pair of horses pull as hard or as long as they did that day.  They got down low, threw themselves into the harness, reset their hooves over and over, and began to sweat and pant.  The muscles in their legs and chests bulged and twitched.  Dad thought they were going to hurt themselves.  But his father kept them on task, touching them and talking to them loudly.

And then the truck began to move.  The horses sensed they were succeeding and pulled all the harder.  All at once, as Dad told it, they reached the tipping point.  The truck righted itself, falling back onto four wheels.  A shower of coal nuggets slopped over the top of the truck onto the horses, startling them.  The truck driver was amazed.

“Those are some horses you got there sir.”

“I know,” my grandfather said.  “They’re the best.”

My dad had a way of telling stories.  You could see it happening.  His eyes were alive, his voice rose, and he was animated.  I could sense how he felt about those animals.  They meant a lot to him and his father, their family.  They were prized, valued, and appreciated.

But he only told me that story once or twice.  At some point, all the farmers in Central Illinois sold their workhorses and bought tractors.  That’s the way it went.  They said goodbye to how it once was, no matter how much their animals meant to them, and moved on.

Me?  I have been writing about the Buicks; their engines, their dependability, Jerry who sold them to me, and their repairs – for years and years.  I go on and on about “the Buick” every time I talk about these road trips.  Like those who have gone before me, I’m going to have to let this gas-powered Buick thing go.  It’s becoming part of the past.    

 

Putting nostalgia for my mode of transportation aside, I was more importantly once again on my own, free to go wherever I chose as long as I made it to Florida in a reasonable amount of time.  My plan was to head toward Memphis.  Or not.  Plans exist only in the future.  By living in the present, we are free to change them at any moment.  On solo road trips, after consulting with no one, changes can happen with a mere turn of the steering wheel.

I feel a lot of energy at the beginning of a road trip.  It never goes away.  Once the trip is underway, all things are possible.  I had nowhere to specifically be by nightfall and all day to get there.  Freedom such as that is a rare and lovely thing.

Next up?  The streets of Memphis.