Hull Loss

Huntsville, Texas. With apologies to the community, there is little to distinguish Huntsville geographically from the litany of towns its size across Texas. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Red River there’s a wide swath where the prairie meets the forest in gently sloping hills, where the highways and farm to market roads cut across wildflower patches and cattle pastures between the thickets and the downtown thoroughfares. Huntsville just happens to be one of them, and when it appears in the news it’s usually because it happens to also be the primary center for executions in the state of Texas, where the lust for legal human blood runs hottest in the nation. Should the United States ever establish formal diplomatic ties with Thanatos, it would be a natural location for a consulate. I was more interested in seeing the 67-foot-tall statue of Sam Houston that also happens to be located there, so once on my way back to College Station from north Texas I took a detour through the town. This is the furthest east I took the first car I ever owned, a 2007 Honda Civic.

Big Bend. A poet once lamented that Mexico is so far from God and so close to the United States. The latter part feels viscerally true in Santa Elena Canyon, tucked away in what might be the most remote of the national parks in the contiguous 48 states. The Rio Grande River cuts through limestone laid down during the Cretaceous Period here, leaving two imposing cliffs vaulting toward the sky above the hiking trail that follows the curve of the river. It seems at places you could extend two hands, the fingers of one grazing Texas and the other touching Chihuahua. I was struck by the silence of the place. It was so quiet the silence felt immersive, like a tsunami of stillness washing over me. After dark I drove the Civic to an empty patch of desert and lay down on the trunk and rear window to watch the stars. The Moon seemed so bright this far from civilization that I wondered how it could possibly be just a reflection of the Sun. This was the farthest south I took the Civic.

Boston Bar, British Columbia. I grew up not far from the canyonlands carved by the Colorado River and its tributaries in the American southwest, so the gross topography of the Pacific northwest wasn’t wholly unfamiliar to me when I first arrived there. The life there was really something else, though. The shades of green of conifer trees, their deciduous cousins, ferns, and mosses seem to cover every square inch not cultivated and tilled by humans or water. The effect is magnified further at some distance from the great city centers of Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver. I was reminded, driving through the Fraser Canyon, of Gordon Lightfoot’s ode to the wilderness spanned by the trans-Canada railroad, how long before the white man and long before the rail the land was “too silent to be real.” It was easy to fall for the illusion here that the planet Earth is wide enough for humanity to grow forever and always enjoy a wild homeland. Eventually I felt I’d wandered far enough from home and turned around at some undocumented furthest north.

Cape Flattery. Heading northwest from the centroid of the contiguous United States, this is the end of the line. Cape Flattery is the extreme tip of the Olympic Peninsula. Depending on your frame of reference, this is either where the North American continent yields all at once in a series of cliffs to the wild Pacific Ocean, or where the ocean acknowledges the land, transitioning from thousands of miles of open water to the sheltered Strait of Juan de Fuca. There was nowhere further west for the Civic to drive. When I arrived there I didn’t feel moved to peruse the safety signage and since the bounds of the trail were poorly marked I found myself dangling my feet off the edge of America. It was a wonderful moment, sharing wordless communion with the bald eagles soaring on the ridge lift of the bluff and watching the sunset colors begin to show in the cloud formations off Vancouver Island. It began to snow on the ferry ride across Puget Sound on the way home, and the slippery drive up the Edmonds hill turned out to be the only time I ever drove the Civic in significant snowfall.

Those are the extreme points where I drove the Civic, but of course there are countless other trips and excursions contained within those corners. It was a real workhorse of a car. Several times it made cross country trips. Phoenix to College Station. College Station to Boulder. College Station to Phoenix. Phoenix to Seattle. Seattle to Glacier National Park. Seattle to Los Angeles. It was a machine at home chewing up the miles. There’s a stretch of I-10 in west Texas as remote as the Australian outback, where the speed limit is 80 miles an hour. The Civic comfortably cruised at 90, and I’m sure I could’ve pushed it further, but that sort of excess seemed unnecessary.

Most of the trips the car made were mundane and forgettable. I wonder now what percentage of the vehicle’s odometry was devoted to trips between Green Lake and Tukwila, Los Feliz and Long Beach, Los Feliz and El Segundo. These commutes were all unique, the way each moment of life is unique, but in memory virtually indistinguishable from each other. My brain seems unable or unwilling to give them any special significance.

By contrast, the trips I remember were remarkable. I was stunned the first time I drove through Snoqualmie Pass, approaching Seattle from the east by land. I drove through a world of mist and mountain, forest and lake that seemed like something straight out of a Hollywood interpretation of a fairy tale. I discovered a nameless patch of I-84 between Pendleton and La Grande that seemed so spectacular it might be a national park in a state less blessed with wonders of nature. Twice in quick succession the Civic took me to observe syzygies that will never occur again in my life. First, an annular eclipse of the Sun at the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Later that summer, across the Cascades and out of the rain to observe a transit of Venus in the clear air of Ellensburg. Many times I followed the hand signals of auto deck crews to park it uncomfortably close to the other cars being ferried around Puget Sound and the Salish Sea. I drove off to marvel at the little pocket worlds of life and color and land within the water in that corner of America.

The car had over 90,000 miles on the odometer when I bought it. That was a source of some concern. Several times it acted up or gave up on the road completely, and I had to sink a thousand dollars or more to keep it going, like a game over moment at the world’s most expensive video arcade. Still, the final score was nearly 232,000 miles, just one Earth diameter short of the average distance between Earth and the Moon. I wish I’d treated the car better during this time. As my life evolved and became more complex and stressful I lost the will to care for it like a loved possession. Still, it did its job for my family and me admirably.

I don’t remember what the last drive I made before my wedding was. It was probably from Boeing Field to Green Lake, after a relatively normal day of work, but it may have been some errand. It snowed the next day and I worked from home, then I called in sick and took a Lyft the day after to SeaTac. I departed that December a virgin and a bachelor and returned a husband and a father-to-be. Nine months later I placed a carseat in the back of the little red Civic and drove my newborn son home. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember for sure anymore, but I think this car also drove my daughter home from the hospital. Stress and exhaustion do remarkable things to a person’s memory.

On the morning of Good Friday this year I took my children to Dockwiler Beach. There was a marine layer overcast, so we couldn’t see much, but we heard the roar and buzz of jets taking off from LAX while my son and daughter dug sand and chased seagulls. I refueled in El Segundo and headed west on I-105, then north on I-110, as I did many times while I worked at ABL. That turned out to be the last road I ever drove the Civic on. Two cars collided at low speed, low enough that there were no injuries, that the gas generators in the airbags remained unignited, ready to protect in the event of more serious danger. The kids were unperturbed. The insurance declared repairs uneconomical and so I wrote off my ownership of this car that carried me so far, down so many roads, for the last nine years.

As I gathered my belongings from the car I took a moment to pause in the driver’s seat and think of the time I’d spent there over the almost-decade I’d owned the Civic. It served my family well, and for that I’m grateful to the team at Honda that designed it and the team in East Liberty, Ohio, that assembled it. On Wednesday this week my wife and I signed the paperwork to begin ownership of the first new car we’ve leased together as a family, a Ford Fusion Hybrid designed in Michigan and assembled in Hermosillo, one of the sister cities of my hometown. Driver interface technology has advanced so ferociously in the last decade that it feels like a completely different sort of vehicle than the Civic. If the Civic was a go-kart, the Fusion is a starship. I hope and believe it will serve our family well, just as its predecessor did.