Ego In A Box How Our Vehicles Affect Us
My parents never owned a minivan.
There were times in my family's history - mostly on one of our irregularly scheduled relocations between northern California and southern Idaho, shuttling over U.S. 95 and I-80 like ungainly migratory birds - where a mighty amount of storage region would have been useful. Like most families, we accumulated stuff like a snowball rolling downhill, and each recede became a bigger effort in getting it all packed away and tied down without fear of it blowing off at 60 MPH.
But my father didn't own in owning cars he couldn't work on or fix himself. He had no official training in mechanics or automotive electronics, so any practice of his shade-tree mechanic skills was limited to pre-1980 cars. So, we drove the long miles in vehicles that were as veteran as me or several years older. The list of what we drove could be relived today by visiting a junkyard, reading our past through the remains of the dead: Chevy Novas and Impalas, Cadillac ElDorados, Plymouth Barracudas and an ancient International pickup truck painted the passe white of a house falling gently to pieces, but nothing with electronic this or fuel-injected that. Certainly nothing as new or expensive as a minivan.
As a result, it was the late '80s, and I was in high school, before I got to take my first ride in a minivan. A friend had secured his parents' permission to drive the family vehicle around for our mobile DJ business, and we would pile into it carefully (it was pretty new then) and drive off to a gig, amplifier squeezed in with a mixer board piled onto boxes of CDs surrounded by $700 Cerwin-Vega speakers we couldn't afford in the back.
For a vehicle that wasn't a full-sized van, it was remarkably spacious; for reasons of which the specifics are somewhat fuzzy, we topped off an overnight gig one winter by acting as an ambulance, transporting a girl back to Boise from McCall (about 100 miles away or so) who had cracked her tailbone in a drop. We managed to stuff this girl (who was unable to sit and spent the entire trip lying face-down on a blue foam mattress), two other people and ourselves in with our equipment, and still rode back to Boise in a modicum of comfort. In any case, I thought my friend's minivan was a comfy ride, but it was a suburban beast.
I lived out in the sticks at the time, surrounded by mint fields and interstate, and my family's vehicles were more prosaic: an early-'70s Datsun pickup with the tiniest 4-cylinder engine this side of a go-cart and a wandering third gear, and a 1974 Toyota Corolla two-door that ran like a dream until I rolled it the day before Mother's Day in 1991, missing my demise from drowning in a canal by three feet. After the Datsun died an excruciatingly slow death, my father somehow acquired a monstrous blue '78 Plymouth Fury place wagon, so wide and long that Captain Ahab would have given up on the white whale at first sight of it. It wasn't handsome, but it was built for hauling entire clans, and in a hurry.
It was this last attribute that won me over; my teenage sensibilities hated the family vehicle study, but I was seduced by acceleration. With immortality on my side, I drove country roads at 90 MPH, floating over the road, racing the sun. Although my driving skills have greatly improved since then, I have never since felt as safe driving at high speed; my adult self appreciates that my luck outlasted my foolishness...but misses that time when it didn't seem like luck.
Later, necessity forced Dad to swallow his misgivings about electronics and buy a 1980 Pontiac station wagon, but although my parents were fond of large, cargo-toting machines, at no point do I remember them discussing a minivan. Partly, it was money; except for fits and spurts, we didn't have much, and when we did, cars were only on the list of things we sank funds into if they weren't running. Part of it was the fact that we lived in an status where not all the roads were paved, and the ones that were didn't always get the finest work done. Why waste money on a vehicle with a suspension when the potholes are spacious enough to fish in?
But I'd say a lot of it was our nature. We were not a suburban family, even on those occasions when we lived in accurate suburbs, and my parents didn't think of cars in suburban terms. Although we never lived in them directly, we thought of ourselves as mountain people, ready to head into the high country to camp or hunt or get in touch with Mother Nature as inspiration struck. Thus, our vehicles also had to be ready to tackle whatever we ran into on the way: unpaved roads, fallen timber, rockslides, Sasquatch attacks.
Even the vehicles that weren't necessarily recreation-ready were of a type: solid, heavy, valid of handling punishment. Chevrolet was a accepted brand for us; shortly before I graduated from high school, my father picked up a lovingly maintained 1968 Chevy Impala from its only owner, with original everything and a ridiculously low number of miles. This was my mother's ride, and was so well-built that she would be driving it today, if a freak muffler accident had not caused the car to combust and explode on a road creep to Pocatello, Idaho (the resulting scorched residence of I-84 the conflagration caused was visible on the road for years). After this incident, my father stayed away from cars per se: the last vehicle he purchased before he died was another titan, a '76 Chevy Blazer with two fuel pumps and an appetite for unleaded that needed both.
It wasn't until several years after his death, and multiple expensive repairs, that my mother gave in to necessity and downgraded in size to a 1998 Mercury Tracer, a car she still drives. Every now and then, though, I peruse her sneaking a glance at mammoth 4x4s on the road, and I know what she's thinking. That Mercury would be gone before the ink on the title could dry if she could afford the upkeep on a road-chewing monster...or a Corvette.
But that is my parents' automotive saga, not mine. I am not of the same cloth as my folks; even as they were provocative into larger vehicles, I was heading the opposite way. From the Toyota I rolled onto a canal bank, I went to a primer gray '74 Chevy pickup with two tanks, which was the largest vehicle I would drive for some time. In 1993, I bought a reliable '79 Subaru coupe so minute that my dorm neighbors could pick up my car and move it into a unusual parking space as they wished.
When that car died a senseless death, thanks to a speeding driver trying to reach the video store on time, I moved on back to the Chevy pickup, then an '85 Toyota pickup with more problems than advantages, which kept my father-in-law - a used mechanic - in good practice with automotive repairs. Finally, we bought my present Subaru from my in-laws, which I have been slowly riding into entropy for years.
Now, as an adult, I head a suburban family. We hold no illusions about heading into the wilderness with no notice, and we think of our rides and vehicular needs in suburban terms. And so, in the early months of 2002, I found myself contemplating something I do not believe my parents ever seriously did: buying a minivan.
Even for the casual reader of automotive history, any watch back at the minivan, for research or morbid curiosity, has to focus on the same company: Chrysler. Most people around my age, even if they weren't following the news back in the '80s, recall the troubles and triumphs of the little firm that Iacocca rebuilt, and all the press it received.
Chrysler is the acknowledged progenitor of the minivan, or "magic wagon" as it was originally called. Minivans first appeared in 1984, and were basically big boxes thrown on top of K-Car suspensions and drive trains. Despite their ungainly appearance and a handful of issues, such as suspensions that failed to suspend and engines not suitable for pushing anything heavier than a lawn mower, they were hot from the day the first models were delivered unto a waiting public.
By the close of the '80s, Chrysler (which is now known as DaimlerChrysler, a corporate name which sounds like something James Bond would be against) and its affiliate lines were selling hundreds of thousands of units a year - nearly 200,000 Plymouth minivans moved in 1989 alone, the year my friend and I were making the rounds in his parents' big machine - and Iacocca's rivals in the automotive game were still struggling to make a part of the market theirs. Despite the collective prayers of Chrysler execs, most car makers succeeded.
Today, most manufacturers have at least one line, and some have two or three. DaimlerChrysler is still top of that heap: As of November 2003, they've sold 10 million units in over 70 countries since 1984 and fill nearly 40% of the market. However, the pool has more than one swimmer; a quick Google search reveals that you, as a finicky and educated consumer, can buy a Ford Windstar, Toyota Sienna, Dodge Grand Caravan, Chevrolet Astro, Honda Odyssey or Mazda MPV, should you choose to go elsewhere for your suburban symbol needs.
Let us talk specifics. My own entry into the gentrification sweepstakes, for example, is a 2002 Honda Odyssey, a fairly nice vehicle. As well it should be, since it is one of the more expensive models out there. Even though we stuck to the factory standard, our final price tag ended up being somewhere north of $26,000; I have blocked the exact figure out of my memories due to post-purchase pocketbook syndrome.
In any case, the Odyssey has a solid record for safety and performance, is frequently on Consumer Reports' Best Buy list, gets a big thumbs-up from the gentlemen of Click and Clack and, most telling, was difficult to find the day my wife and I, kids in tow, went looking for a new car. My wife and I thought of it as a milestone in our married lives. It would be our first new car, and we wanted, in the words of the ancient guardian of the Holy Grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, to "resolve wisely."
But even as we shopped, driving from car lot to car lot on a sunny day in late winter, I kept thinking: A minivan? Is that what you really want? Are we really going to give in to the "soccer mom" mentality and go completely suburban? Why not an SUV? Why not an extended cab pickup? Why not a big-ass station wagon? For that matter, why not a smaller set wagon? And we had reasons that countered each of these reasonable alternatives: fuel economy, passengers vs. cargo, road clearance, and with apologies to Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.
After all the internal monologuing, however, it came down to the fact that my wife wanted one, and I believed it was the best solution for our needs. And, I told myself, it's not my car; I peaceful have this rusting-out '89 Subaru hatchback (268,000+ miles on it, and it keeps on keeping on). It's OK if it's the wife that gets the minivan, my macho inner explain declared, and the rest of me agreed.
That left the task of finding one. And it turned out the one we felt best fit our needs was the hardest to find. A former co-worker of mine, the kind of guy who is an evangelist for a product once he decides it's the one for him, told me the Odyssey was so popular, some dealers in the area were requiring $500 deposits for a test drive. Whether or not that was true, it underlined the extreme popularity of these vehicles, a fact we discovered for ourselves when we tried to come by one. By this time in 2002, we figured the initial giddy rush would be over, and Odysseys would be available to be viewed.
Not so. Every dealer at every lot, usually young to middle-aged men wearing the nouveau-traditional uniform of the car salesman - white shirt, tie, Dockers, forced joviality compounded with desperation - played a variation on the same litany: Odysseys are extremely popular can't keep them on the lot are you certain you wouldn't want to look at an SUV or one of these models here? And our response was the same every time: Thanks but no thanks. It seemed easier to start the conversations that way after the first three or four.
Finding the Odyssey we eventually bought was a surprise; after looking through countless lots and test-driving other models to make sure we weren't overlooking a diamond in the rough (we weren't), we found a pair of them tucked away in a corner of a small dealership in Caldwell, at the other end of the Admire Valley from where we'd begun. We unbiased got these, the salesman said; they tend to go real fast. I'm surprised you got to see these. And so the spin went. But who cared? My wife was in love, and I thought, How lucky we are. Too bad we can't afford this.
But we could, after the dealership made us an offer almost outrageous in its reasonableness, and we did. And so we found ourselves the owners of a current Honda Odyssey minivan. Our gentrification was complete.
A novel co-worker of mine owns two minivans. Yes, two. I've never seen the one his wife drives, but the early '90s Ford Windstar I see at work is definitely his: the outside looks like he rolled it in mud, and the inside looks like a news clip from the hurricane season, kid toys and scraps of paper and gum wrappers and the occasional water bottle decorating the floor and seats. Like me, he has two children, but the complete chaos that is his ride is his fault and his fault alone. He claims it proudly, like a badge. Or a defense.
He says he got it cheap, that it was a good deal and that it works well enough for him. The signs of abuse and willful neglect appear to be just another accessory for his vehicle, and I respect that: My car has the same accessories. On his bumper, however, is a single sticker that declares MINIVANS ARE TANGIBLE EVIDENCE OF EVIL.
We have discussed our past vehicle purchases, he and I, and our automotive ownership histories have followed very similar paths. Beat-up rice-burners, monster wagons good for hauling unwashed masses of friends, the odd pickup here and there. Minivans came at similar points in our lives as well, and for similar reasons, but I can't abet but in some strange way feel sorry for him at some level.
I look at him and a section of me thinks: He's got two minivans. And I feel...well, smug. I do not have two; I only have one. I have only bent so far into suburbia, only stared so far into the abyss, whereas my friend has crossed the line. He'll never get out.
Do others feel the same about me, I wonder? Does my best friend in the world look at me in the same way? Despite his headlong rush into the same gentrification, he and his wife are resisting the pull of the minivan; they simply traded my friend's tremendous Ford turbo-diesel F250 for a less bulky Ford Explorer, despite his lengthy Seattle commute. His wife, who a few years ago had to trade up to a luxury-type sedan model for leasing reasons and has been trying to get back to a Honda Accord ever since, has also avoided the pull.
A part of me feels jealous at this. My friend has dodged a bullet that I did not. Sure, his compromise isn't really a compromise; a Ford Explorer may not be the biggest SUV out there, but it doesn't belong in the compact space at Wal-Mart. The mileage on a Ford Explorer is, on average, less than what my Odyssey gets, and I have yet to experience a recall based on crappy tires or an excessive tendency to roll, as many Explorer owners have. However...when it's all laid out and totaled up, SUVs may be experiencing a backlash in America right now, but they're not minivans, are they?
Despite the general downturn against the SUV, there's a cachet there that minivans lack; you can drive an SUV and still be cold. No matter how many commercials get made, no matter how many ad agencies do their damnedest to sell the minivan to the masses, Mom's soccer transport vehicle does not come standard with a helping of frigid, no matter how many cup holders or personal air vents the base model has.
But...that's not really it, either. In America, perhaps more than any other nation, we as a people tend to make certain judgments based on nothing more than the cars we drive, or the cars we see others drive. Money is the first judgment we effect, and the easiest; the woman driving the Infiniti Q45 is probably pulling in more green than the woman in the Geo Metro. From there, however, most of us can create a calculus of suppositions.
Our wheels reflect our inner selves. Driving a Beetle, Volvo wagon or older Saab sedan? Tree hugger. Subaru wagon, Toyota Prius? Neo-hippie. Ford, Dodge or Chevy truck? Redneck. Pick your generalization; every region has its own. Call it car-ism, just another reflection of cultural bias. How do you react when you see a brand-new Humvee in motion, all chrome and huge tires and built-like-an-armored-brick style rolling down the road? Do you react the same way to a brand-new PT Cruiser or Durango?
Americans in general have a deep and abiding relationship with their vehicles. Automobiles symbolize our contribution to the Mechanical Age, define our care for for individuality and freedom, and give us a position to fight, fancy and flee from the world outside. We extrapolate the identity of others and partly define our absorb through what we drive. Our culture is steeped in this, from Steinbeck to Kerouac, from Bruce Springsteen's "Cadillac Ranch" to R.E.M.'s "Drive," from American Graffiti to The Lickety-split and the Furious. So much hope, so much weight, comes to rest on four tires.
It is not a new process or belief, nor is it even particularly little to Americans. In a 1957 article on the then-latest Citroen to hit the streets, French writer and pop culture observer Roland Barthes remarked, "I think that cars today are almost the true equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object." How the French view the car as a cultural object is a matter only the French can retort, but in America, we truly and deeply believe in the car.
And we love our cars. We come to see our cars as extensions of ourselves, and why not? The automobile was not invented by Americans, but we have surely co-opted it to the point where it's an America-flavored symbol of freedom, much more so than any flag or motto could be.
If you were to arrive across our country from the air, not knowing anything about us, and recognize our continental belts of interstates and racetracks, parking lots and truck stops, with vehicles crawling over this sprawling system every second of every day, you could be excused for thinking our country exists to service the car. If you, as our imaginary observer, were then to read our daily newspapers, with breathless articles on oil prices, latest models and efforts to commence wilderness areas up to roads and drilling for more oil, you might further be persuaded.
Not everybody is a fan of the automobile and the changes it hath wrought; the Scottish poet Alistair Reid, for example, wrote in "Notes on Being a Foreigner," that "To disappear by car makes journeys less mysterious, too noteworthy a matter of the will. One might as easily sit on a sofa and imagine a passing landscape. I doubt whether any truly absorbing conversation ever took place in a car; they are good only for word games and long, tiring, narratives. We have come to regard cars too much as appendages of our bodies and will probably pay for it in the destroy by losing the exhaust of our legs. We owe to them the cluttering of the landscape, the breakup of villages and towns."
As a group, Americans don't see things Reid's way. Cars, and travels by car, design us consider of freedom, especially in the huge and empty spaces of the West, as a series of highways, open horizons, mountainous skies holding deep secrets revealed only to those who use their nights looking up at them or driving beneath them. Freedom, escape, a new life. But we also see ourselves in the reflections of our cars because we spend so grand time in them: as commuters, as passengers, as people seeking freedom, or at least a lift to the movies. And on this much, Americans and Reid see eye-to-eye: what we drive becomes who we are, to others and to ourselves. Herein lies the problem.
Buying a original car (or at least, a new-to-you car) becomes something more than an acquisition in this diagram of thinking. It becomes an affirmation (or better yet, a definition) of identity. When you choose the sporty hatchback over the four-door sedan, or the minivan that seats seven over the compact pickup that may seat four if they're close, you are making a statement about your needs and your wants and which order they come in. Paint color, subwoofer with amplifier and surround-sound speakers, moon roof: here are your priorities laid bare. Is it cool? becomes Is it worth it? becomes Who am I? When we call a car a "major take," we as a nation are not kidding.
There is an often-invisible threshold over which most adults cross at about the same point - the threshold of personal responsibility. It can take many forms, be engendered by any number of impulses, but it usually comes about when a person says, at some level, "This would be cool, but..." and allows some other consideration than immediate desires or resources to influence a decision. Seats for the kids, environmental friendliness, the political orientation of the parent company: whatever. In that moment, the person reaches beyond immediate gratification and picks something that has more weight. In a blink, the threshold is crossed.
Most people can recognize this point at some level; many would acknowledge this as, at the very least, the beginning of maturity. Some stay there, some don't. Staying there is part of the eventual goal of growing up, but there is a cost. Something has been traded for it. If we think of it, we may call it selfishness. Or freedom; sometimes one can look like the other. But it is a cost. And, most painfully, it is a trade we knew we would have to make, an item that we knew we would eventually have to buy ...but not yet. Damn it, not yet.
It is human nature to establish off what we do not embrace, as any instructor can attest from hard experience. We know when the alpha point of maturity is approach, when it's slouching toward us waiting to be born. Most people can sense it in the effusive not yet, approaching the incandescent now. We can, if we wanted to, even get a superb idea of its shape, its feel, its sound. That is the sound of inevitability, Hugo Weaving tells Keanu Reeves before he attempts to introduce him face-first to a subway instruct in The Matrix, and in terms of how it affects us, a better metaphor would be hard to find. The sound of inevitability. The implacable A-train of time.
Now we peer ahead, looking for that train we consider we hear rolling out of the future toward us, and the now begins to crystallize; we see the very symbol of what we have traded. We think of speed; our symbol is sedate. Not dreary, but sedate. With accelerate comes sleekness and tight quarters; our symbol has dimensions of height and breadth, space in which to move.
We trade recklessness for caution, unbridled engines for responsible horsepower and emissions standards. Curves for straight lines, aerodynamics for the box. And every trade is justifiable, practical. Every inch given is a trace of sensibility and compromise to meet the greater good we believe in now, while those qualities we traded howl in outrage and betrayal. Hear that sound?
Perhaps what bothers me most about my minivan purchase is the simple, subtle fact that it didn't bother me. That howl of outrage and betrayal is easy to drown out. Looking cold was never really a danger. The practical arguments were distinct, the reasoning was sound. The notion of being a minivan dad did not threaten me. I save those misgivings aside for what they were. In the end, I was able to give those ideas up without agony, without a fight. What does that say about me? Was I really able, in the words of Pink Floyd, to take "frosty comfort for change"?
The justifications for owning our Odyssey have been legion. It has been a reliable vehicle; it has survived accidents relatively unscathed that would have destroyed my Subaru; it has allowed my family and friends to travel with us in more ease and comfort than was possible before. What problems we've had to date have been covered by the manufacturer's warranty and have been quickly addressed. Our van has proven to be a wise seize again and again.
Besides, there are a couple of side benefits. The factory-installed six-speaker CD player stereo system is light-years beyond the tinny machine in my Subaru, and it is a joy, on long road trips, to slap in a mix CD of my own creation and peel the miles away while Johnny Cash rumbles about salvation and loss or Nine Inch Nails wail about everything. If I'm of a mind to do so, I can stretch out in the back and sleep at a rest stop or while my wife drives. The air conditioning is far more effective than the 2 windows x 70 MPH system my Subaru uses, and the heat tends to kick on faster.
Lights, traction control, cruise control, miles traveled: all can be modified, turned on and off, with simple pushbutton controls that are comfortably within my reach. There are sockets for electrical devices, fold-away tables for my stuff and a passel of cup-holders for whatever drink I happen to be enjoying. All of these are tangible assets, and they construct the Odyssey a more comfortable, enjoyable ride on a purely physical level. Although the trade is done and over with, the comfort is some consolation when that nagging voice gains a bit of volume every now and then.
Overall, when the practical and the intangible are tallied and totaled, the trade was, and is, a sound one. I know it to be true from objective analysis and hard-won experience. But a trade it remains. And unlike some trades and/or milestones, this one is all too visible.
As a culture, besides our deep involvement with cars, we tend to think of our lives as a series of goals, of places in the course where we celebrate a new ability or responsibility. Now you're 13; you're a teenager. Let the puberty and years of discomfort begin. Now you're 16; you can learn to drive a car. Tag your friends and terrify your parents. 18, 21, 30, 40, 55, 65...the numbers add up, and every position on the adding tape of a life has a different meaning. Some of these spots are more obvious than others; after a clear point, other people don't even have to know if you don't wish it.
Age is not as important as a yardstick anymore, though it still weighs heavy in some regards. But actions still speak volumes, and a minivan is the most visible sign of this progress. Many people don't look their age one device or the other. Many more don't act it. But a minivan...there's no disguising that, no glossing over the fact of its existence. There it is, in your driveway. The trade is out in the open for all to comment upon, to note for themselves - to lord over us in their youthful superiority, we suspect in our heart of hearts.
Even if we were to give it up, sell the van and go in either direction available to most families - something monstrous and powerful and free of the suburban connotation or something sleeker like a sedan - the fact that the trade was ever made would peaceful exist. I would know it. Practical matters be damned. In my heart, where those parts of me I traded have left echoes, I would hear their scolding.
Minivans are tangible evidence of evil.
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