The Lessons of my Jeep

I test-drove a 1995 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme today, white with a nice red interior and under 80,000 miles.

Assuming the owner accepts my offer, it will be my second car. After all, my Jeep may be more fun than a barrel of mid-size sedans but the gas is killing me. The time has come for my precious Jeep and I to part ways.

After I made the offer for the Oldsmobile, I drove back to my dad's station and started cleaning out all the garbage from my Jeep. I had to get all the old papers and dirt and other undesirable things out of it so it could sell. No one wants to buy a dirty vehicle.

But as I dug through all that mess I kept running into memory after memory. So many of these things that had happened to me and my Jeep in almost six years of driving.

I bought that Jeep in mid-May 2000, just days after the last day of class my freshman year of high school. Ed Bowen, head football coach and guidance counselor there, had this red 1990 Jeep Cherokee Laredo he'd replaced with a Chevy truck and wanted to sell. My dad arranged the offer, which was a good one, and I drove it away with 152,500 miles on the odometer.

I never test-drove it, but it wasn't my first experience with it. That Jeep was one of the first oil-changes I ever did, and it was still fresh in my memory when I bought her.

It was $3,000, as is. My dad and I took out a loan for the whole amount. I was supposed to take three years to pay it off. But by taking extra hours whenever I could at my summer job as a hardware store clerk, I did it in six months.

My dad wound up helping me out with that Jeep pretty often. We replaced a lot of parts on it, including the water pump, thermostat, coolant bottle, tires, and other things. He kept that sucker running.

I barely drove it that summer, since I didn't have my restricted for most of it, but there are plenty of memories from those halcyon days. Mr. Bowen took her hunting -- he had a license to shoot from it due to a lifelong fight with polio -- and would fire from the driver's seat after rolling his window down. Every time I hit a bump that first month, a .223 shell would fall out from inside the heater. I guess the shells ejected out of his rifle, down the defroster vents and eventually found their way down.

One time I was sent to pick up my little brother Drew from a baseball game. The lot was right at the fence line, and I parked somewhere near third base. A pop fly went up, up, up and then down, down, down, right into a pinstripe on the hood.

I also remember something my little brother Ryan did that summer. While I was sitting in the driver's seat with the engine dead, not really doing anything, he yelled at me. He was standing at the front passenger-side corner of the hood. He was holding a rock. He took the rock and scraped the hood in a circle on my hood. My mom stopped me before I could smack him. The doodle is still there, a few loops in the paint.

On Sept. 1, 2001, I had my first accident with my Jeep. Bill Cashman, a rather old man who is no longer with us, backed into it in the parking lot of Baker's Apple Market. He nailed the handle of my tailgate with the corner of his bumper perfectly, keeping it from opening until I got it fixed well over a year later. This was not my first car accident, that happened with my dad's pickup in early October 2000. It was a few days after the bombing of the USS Cole by Al Qaeda, and after my accident 10 days before 9-11, I became rather paranoid. I outgrew it.

Drew started high school when I was a junior, and I drove him to school every day that year. It snowed a bit that winter and one time Drew volunteered to get the snow off my Jeep so we could go. He used a snow shovel, though, and wound up breaking one of the Jeep logos off the tailgate.

I also got in trouble with my Jeep for the first time about then. I took her out to the area under the dam at the reservoir here. In a moment of mental weakness, I tried to take her mudding and got horribly, horribly stuck. It was stupid of me, even more so because it was illegal to drive off the roads in this particular area. The friendly ranger made me do 10 hours of community service working with old, dead spruce and pine trees for my crime, leaving my hands black and stinging from the sap.

The fuel injectors also went bad that year, and we had to replace them all. By bad, I mean they fell apart and sprayed gas all over the engine compartment and eventually leaking into the cab. It took years to get the smell out of there.

At some point, the ceiling fabric came unglued and hung down, rubbing against my head and scaring me often. I fixed it with 150 multi-colored sewing pins. I pulled it tight against the insulating foam and jammed the pins in there, making it look like the Jeep had a strange case of Chicken-Pox. My friend Jocelyn, I think it was her, made a smiley face once with a bunch of pins above the front passenger seat. It is still there.

During the summer of 2004, the Jeep was my trusty steed during my internship for the Manhattan Mercury, taking me to all sorts of stories. During Country Stampede that year, someone broke into it by breaking a rear window. They stole a flashlight and a cheap pair of Bushnell binoculars. I covered that window with duct tape for more than a year before getting it fixed.

I didn't drive my Jeep at all in Spring 2005. I was in DC from January to mid-April. My dad and brother were left in charge of it. When I got back, more things worked on it than had when I left. I did not complain.

I did drive it plenty that summer, having to cover County Commission in Riley County that year. It was then that the cruise control stopped working, so now my right leg always hurts after a long drive.

That Jeep is very precious to me. The odometer hit 186,000 miles this week and she's in pretty good shape for the shape she's in. She's for sale now to a good home. I'm asking $1,500 right now, or best offer.

I have to say, this whole experience brings to mind one of my favorite songs, "Ford Fairlane" by Bobby Pinson:

"The carburetor needs a kit,
The driver's-side visor's ripped.
It's getting a little hard to shift,
And the knobs are missing off the radio.
It's lost its glossy candy apple shine,
The ink has faded on the 'For Sale' sign.
The only driver that car ever owned.
First million dollars takes it home."