HumorIs – Adam Overland

A brief memoir of shitty cars, dangerous drivers, and unbreakable bonds

Growing up we always had shitty cars. Dad was a self-taught hobbyist mechanic, mostly out of necessity because my parents didn’t have much money with five kids, but he also had a knack for it and enjoyed figuring things out on his own. Never once until well into his retirement did I see him bring a car to an official mechanic, and so the shitty cars kept running, and cars, like clothes, became hand-me-downs. An older sister would go off to college and graduate to perhaps a slightly newer model, more reliable because she and it would be farther from home, while the older model stayed closer to the mechanic and was inherited by the newer drivers—my older brother, and I, the youngest by two years. 

My first car was a rust colored 1981 Datsun that I shared with my brother in about 1993 when I was going on 16. Not the cool, sporty Datsun 280z that is now somewhat of a collector’s item, but the generic Datsun, the 200sx hatchback that had a kind of slatted shade guard on the rear window, not unlike those Venetian blind style sunglasses that were either briefly cool in the 80s, or that were not actually cool but were so novel and ridiculous that some people bought and wore them just in case they might be cool or would soon become cool, until it became obvious that they would not ever be truly cool, even with Macho Man Randy Savage of the WWF as acting mascot. 

The entry for those glasses on Wikipedia now throws more shade than the glasses ever did: “The horizontal plastic ‘shades’ neither provide protection for the eye from UV light nor prevent a substantial amount of light from entering the eye.”

The shade guard on the Datsun functioned in much the same way. 

But the Datsun was a rear-wheel drive stick shift with a light rear end, and that couldn’t have been more dangerous—or fun—in those slippery South Dakota winters for a newly minted driver. Experimenting, getting a feel for it, I’d rev the engine, pop the clutch, and send the ass end fishtailing around corners on residential streets or pirouette endlessly in parking lots with no dry pavement in sight. Back then driving was new and fun, and while it’s no longer new, I still find it fun. 

I am one of few people I know who will often drive—even on long roadtrips—for hours without music or talk radio. Particularly on highways, I find it soothing to just drive, to listen to the tires on the road and the wind whistling through the cracked and broken window seals, time passing like rapid fire white lines shot from some faraway horizon you never reach, all at once moving fast and not really going anywhere at all. 

In my mind, one of driving’s greatest pleasures comes from the feeling of moving along on some concrete highway, listening to a steady metronome of tires thumping in time to divisions in the concrete only to suddenly hit brand new blacktop, unblemished and without a pothole or even so much as a crease, the centerline paint still absent or barely dry, and suddenly it seems as if all sound ceases, as though the tires have left the road entirely and you with them, moving effortlessly away from something, toward something, away from, and toward. 

After the Datsun came the ’86 Ford Bronco II in my junior and senior years of high school, a legendary short wheelbase 4×4 that should have been branded like an old Stanley thermos: unbreakable, no matter how hard I tried. 

Once I drove through a parking lot divided with curbed medians, each a long thin rectangle about three-to-four feet wide with two trees evenly spaced. I lined up for takeoff perpendicular to a dozen of them and hit the gas. Accelerating to perhaps 25 mph, the front wheels contacted the near curb of the first median, launching the front end of the Bronco into the air between the two trees like goal posts, and just as the front end rose so you’d be looking through the windshield starward, the rear wheels would catch the curb and send the front end crashing down on the other side, clearing the median entirely, like a true bucking bronco given the spurs at a rodeo. By the time the bucking would begin to settle, the next median was on you and there you went again, teeter-tottering violently at unsafe speeds through a concrete playground. I should note that there wasn’t a whole lot to do for fun in the town I grew up in.

After the Bronco I was off to college and my next vehicle had briefly belonged to a sister or two and then my brother before it finally got to me. It was a two-toned black and gray early ’80s Mercury Capri, a breezy name for what was essentially a small tank. Many years later I would visit the island of Capri off the coast of Italy, and I can tell you that, whatever of the island that inspired Ford/Mercury to name the Capri, it drowned in the rough seas before making it to Italy’s mainland and/or the Ford design department. 

While the Capri was technically the cousin of the Ford Mustang, sharing the same chassis, it was most decidedly the bad cousin, the one who lived in a small town with nothing to do but drive up and down all six blocks of main street, skip class, and get pregnant before senior year of high school.

The Capri leaked oil and you’d have to have a couple quarts on you at all times, but once, after I’d forgotten to check it for a long time, I pulled the dipstick out and it was bone dry. How long had it been running without oil? Did it care? It didn’t seem to, because another time, on a short road trip to see friends, I pulled over to add oil. Taking the lid off the quart, I went to pour it and the little plastic safety seal left behind from the cap slipped off and directly into the engine. It was gone and there was nothing to be done, and the car didn’t know any better than to keep running as well as it ever did. 

Years later Dad would donate the Capri, still running just fine, he said, to the American Lung Association. But when they sent someone to pick it up, it died 100 feet from the house and would not start again. If cars have souls or share them with us, the Capri’s could not bear to leave the family it served so well.

I could be misremembering the years of the vehicles here. Somewhere in there was a late ’80s Ford Escort station wagon with front-wheel drive and no power. But it doesn’t really deserve more than an honorable mention here, because it wasn’t fun to drive and often the engine killed for reasons unknown. I’m not sure if my brother cared, but I held a grudge against Dad for buying cars that were boring. I should note that none of these cars were “ours.” He and my mom drove them too. They were all pieces of shit (except one, which I will save for another time), but did they have to be boring? Of course, Dad just wanted something affordable that ran.