Self-Reliance and Adventure and Cars
Last week, I bought a used van. My husband and I have been sharing a car for the last four years and there is no reason I need a car and we cannot really afford a second car right now, but nonetheless it's been making me feel restless and trapped to not have my own wheels. And I've been feeling frequent and very intense longings to go off by myself--maybe into the woods, or at least into a part of the woods where there is a bathroom or at least an outhouse.
Apparently, saying no to most social invitations I get and being careful about under what circumstances I leave the house isn't enough aloneness for me. So I've had these thought like, "What if I had a vehicle, like an RV or a truck or something, and I had some gear that I kept in bins ready to go, and any time I wanted to leave I could just put the bins in the vehicle and hit the road?"
So now I have a used van, and am accumulating my bins of gear. I feel an itch or a call or a jones for some kind of adventure, new experience, reasonable risk-taking that is not overcalculated. And I feel like I'm prepping to act on it. Like a prepper but not like a prepper.
Unfortunately this itch or call runs up against a lot my fears:
spiders
dirty bathrooms
being murdered
being murdered in a dirty, spider-filled bathroom
having to ask for help
seeming incapable
being incapable
car trouble
The first four are obviously totally reasonable. I've been thinking a lot about the last four since buying my van. It's not an ancient vehicle. It's six or seven years old and does not have an extraordinary number of miles on it. Still, I'm afraid of the unknown, of problems coming out of nowhere that I don't know how to solve, and that force me to interact with and rely on others.
The thing is, I have a long history of buying and owning old cars. My first car was a yellow 1978 Datsun I bought for one dollar from people whose kids I babysat. I traveled with a gallon bottle of water in the back because it overheated every single time I drove it. I would just pull over, wait for the radiator to stop spitting, put some water in it, and continue on, NBD. Oh to be 16! Eventually I got the radiator fixed. That car must have lasted at least a few years because I remember having it in high school and I also remember driving it to class at SF State, hearing a faint noise beneath the much louder noise of my cassette of Bryan Adams' Reckless, and watching my muffler bounce down 280 in the rearview mirror.
After that I had a silver Celica, I think a 1975, that I bought from my then-boyfriend-now-husband's dad. I drove that car through most of college. I drove either the Datsun or the Celica on several road trips, including from SF to Santa Barbara to visit my sister, and from SF to close to Medford to visit my parents, as well as random trips to Tahoe, parties, play rehearsals, life.
After that I bought another Celica, maybe an '84, from a random stranger in the neighborhood. It was also silver, a fastback. I loved that car, and commuted with it every day to various jobs, eventually from SF to Foster City, a good 22 miles each way. I had that car until we moved from SF to Salt Lake. It still ran great when we moved, it was just rusty from being parked five blocks from Ocean Beach most of its life, and sometimes mushrooms grew out of the floor mats and we decided to only bring one car with us to Utah. We drove our 1987 Honda Accord here, a manual transmission vehicle that had long since lost fifth gear, and the high beams would not turn off, causing lots of annoyed oncoming drivers to honk at us. Later on we got a 94 (I think) Passat from a shady used car lot. Later still, a 94 Ford Escort that we drove from SLC to Santa Fe several summers in a row in the mid-2000s.
Among those various cars there were: a water pump that went out, an ignition fuse that constantly shorted, causing the car to just die on the highway. The aforementioned radiator problems. A relentless, unsolvable electrical problem (in the Passat, the only true lemon of the bunch). Numerous alternators, batteries, hoses, belts, plugs, calls to AAA, pulling over on the highway and finding a call box in the era before cell phones, frozen door locks, broken handles, rusted bodies, things held together with bungee cords.
When we became the kind of people who could afford to lease new cars, we went all in on that for awhile. What a feeling! The specter of Car Trouble just disappeared. I loved it. I never, ever wanted to go back to driving anything more than a couple years old.
But circumstances don't always work out according to your wants and this time around, if I wanted a car, I needed to buy a used one. And I did and I love it and am excited, but I'm also afraid. The fear I have around this thing, even though it's not that old and I got it from a reputable dealer and have a warranty and all that, almost makes me laugh except that it also worries me. It makes me think about how my tolerance for uncertainty has gone way down since moving "up" I guess in the world--driving new cars and having smart phones, and eliminating as many potential life obstacles that I can with money or credit.
I used to be a survivor, a scrapper. I had fear, like everyone, but I also had a sense of self-reliance and a pinch of healthy recklessness and foolish optimism, and my experience told me I could deal with just about anything that came my way. Maybe it's just an aging thing. Or maybe I know too much. But I also think I'm generally more afraid--of what I'd do without my phone or GPS or warranties or credit or comforts or hair products or various other safety nets.
Which I guess, in addition to the hunger to be alone and find quiet, is part of why this idea of adventuring seems so appealing to me. I want to do it but also I need to do it, to prove something to myself. That even if worst-case scenarios play out, most likely I'll be able to handle it, somehow.
There are of course some things it's wise to fear, and some worst-case scenarios that are truly bad. But I'm not talking about those things. I'm talking about the kind of uncertainty and unknowing that I lived with more or less happily during the pre smart phone, pre new cars, pre middle-middle class, pre information overload portion of my life--basically everything up to and maybe a little past my early 30s.
I want to cut the apron strings of our and my current age, even just once in awhile, to remember what it feels like to rely on myself.
That said, if you see me on the side of the road with a broken down van, feel free to stop and whisk me away to a spider-free hotel. And leave your credit card with me.
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All things Story of a Girl meets Lifetime!