This is the story of a remarkable machine:

The Old Man


Since the early days of automobiles motorists have sometimes affectionately (or otherwise) referred to their vehicles as if they were living creatures. They even give them endearing (or maybe not so endearing) names and nicknames. The most common term of endearment is “Old Girl.”

The car I drive is certainly old—it is a 1991 Plymouth Colt with over three hundred and thirty thousand miles on it. There aren’t many like it left on the road. But I don’t call it “Old Girl.” There’s nothing the least bit feminine about this machine. I drive an Old Man.

The Old Man is rugged. I don’t mean three-ton, four-wheel-drive, can-pull-a-house-if-you’ve-got-a-strong-enough-chain rugged. The Old Man’s a little guy with a fraction of the engine displacement of the gas guzzlers the macho men like to drive. I speak here of no-frills rugged. The Old Man has no power steering, no automatic transmission, in recent years no air conditioning, almost no soundproofing, and rides like a log wagon. Even after he’s been washed (which, I must confess, doesn’t happen often enough) his white-painted metal panels look a little worse for wear. For all that, I like the old fellow.

Why? Well, first of all he isn’t too thirsty. Even with all the years he has on him he gets better than forty miles to the gallon. He also doesn’t have gourmet tastes—he runs happily on 87 octane fuel, the cheapest grade you find at most American stations. I have to make my gas money stretch. The Old Man helps me do that. And he’s a good car for the world in which we live. In an age when gas prices are the highest they’ve been, when the world’s fuel supplies are more and more controlled by assorted tyrants and fanatics, when greenhouse gasses are wrecking our climate, it seems to me that vehicles that aren’t too thirsty make a certain amount of sense. In the 1970s, when we had our first big oil price shock, millions of Americans dropped the gas guzzlers and bought more reasonable and economical vehicles. Today, with pressure to economize as great as ever, most people seem content to keep the guzzlers, paying more and more for gas even as they go ever deeper into debt. That the American public seems to have become less sensible since the 1970s—the 1970s, mind you!—is a frightening thought.

I also like the Old Man because he’s unpretentious. People don’t drive cars like the Old Man because they’re trying to look like they’re getting ahead. They just want to get around. The Old Man wasn’t built to be a status symbol. He was made to move people and their stuff from one place to another. And he has done a lot of it! If he was a human being he’d be somebody who had spent a long life doing some unglamorous but very necessary job—a janitor perhaps, or a yard mower, or a mason’s mud man.

In a perverse sort of way, the Old Man is also rather nice to drive. He’s a driver’s car. Most cars today have systems that are fully automatic and computer controlled. A driver who turns a steering wheel or mashes the gas pedal is not directly controlling anything, but rather informing the car’s brain of the desired action and trusting it to carry out the order. The Old Man’s manual steering and transmission put the driver firmly in control. And you can roll the windows up and down without having to worry about a fuse going out. That’s especially important since, as I mentioned above, the Old Man has no air conditioning.

The Old Man has had a hard life. When he was new my Mom drove him as a daily commuter car. She works in a neighboring town and must travel 30-odd miles a day just getting to and from work. Mom put quite a few fairly easy miles on him. The hardest thing she ever did with him was take him on wildflower-gathering trips into the mountains with her friends. She was impressed with the little car’s ability to turn around on a narrow gravel road.

Then Mom traded up to a larger vehicle, and Dad turned the not-yet-old vehicle into a work car. At the time Dad had a much longer commute, often an hour or more either way, to the commercial masonry jobs where he worked. The little Colt racked up lots and lots of miles of running up and down the highway carrying Dad and his mortar-encrusted tool box. Naturally it wasn’t the cleanest car in the world, though Dad took good care of it mechanically. He had taken a liking to the little car, and would strive to get the most out of it. Dad was and is quite a good shade-tree mechanic.

When my car needed some repair work, Dad let me borrow the Colt for a time while he took mine home (I was living in a neighboring state) to repair it. It got me around the streets of the big city just fine. The Colt required a new battery while I had it. A friend who helped me change the battery, unaccustomed to cars that had spent some time on gravel roads, described the old battery as “jack nasty.” No, that car had certainly not been pampered.

Dad went on driving the car—and on, and on. The 100,000-mile analog odometer turned over…and turned over again…and turned over once again. At some point the car got a new engine, and various other components. By now it had become an Old Man. Dad bought a parts car to begin cannibalizing to keep it running. I’ve helped him strip parts from it to transplant into the Old Man on at least one occasion.

During one of my vacations home Dad, my brother, and I made a couple of trips around the state in the Old Man to examine historic bridges. It’s a little family hobby of ours. The Old Man rather uncharacteristically took out with us twice on one of these trips. The second time we found ourselves sitting on the side of a crowded interstate, listening to Chinese opera and Latin American radio evangelists as my brother passed the time by playing with the portable radio set he had with him. It was one of the more bizarre experiences of my life. Each time the engine started up again after a bit of a rest. From this Dad diagnosed an intermittent fuel filter problem. Replacing the filter cured it.

A couple of years ago we moved back to Arkansas. I live within walking distance of work and like to walk, so I do not have to commute. So I very seldom need our car. Once in a while, though, I still require something to drive. We could not afford to buy anything else. Dad had a solution. He let us have the Old Man on a sort of indefinite loan.

And the Old Man is with us still. I drive him a couple of times a week. Mostly I stay near town. Now and then business or other need takes me a pretty good ways, up to several hours’ drive. So far the Old Man has always gotten me there and back. He still gets good mileage, starts reliably, and does not use too much oil.

I get a little leery of driving the Old Man on long trips. He is the automotive equivalent now of a healthy man in his eighties—he still gets around well, but you know that in the nature of things he is living on borrowed time. So far he has taken me every place I wanted, and brought me back as well. He can still do 70 on the expressway, though I do rather worry sometimes about how much his hood vibrates at that speed.

A couple of times a year I take the Old Man out into the mountains. This is a real test of his senior citizen mettle. He doesn’t take really steep upgrades well, but he tries his best. He can handle winding gravel roads and mud and keep on going, filthy but unbowed. He hauled me and two nephews and our gear to the jumping-off point for an overnight hike, and next day carried our mud-caked bodies and gear (we got five straight hours of rain on the trail) back home. I’ve never had him off-road, but some of the places we’ve driven have certainly stretched the definition of “road.”

Mostly the travel is nothing glamorous. I run errands in town for work, and drive him to church. One day I took four young nephews to see a movie in a distant town, in a drive that packed the un-air conditioned car and tested my nerves. The Old Man never complained. He just takes whatever he has to take and keeps going.

Dad’s really very proud of the Old Man. Dad likes to get plenty of mileage out of his vehicles. The Old Man is the ultimate example of that. Not long ago a mechanic Dad knows warned a dealer in extended lifetime vehicle service coverage to watch himself around our home town—there was a guy there who could keep a car running longer than anybody he ever saw. He no doubt had Dad’s record with the Old Man in mind when he said that.

A few weeks ago I took the Old Man home to have his oil changed and get a bit of work done. He had a timing chain that Dad had warned could go at any time. But it didn’t.

I still drive the Old Man. Maybe some day he will finally give out and leave me stranded on the side of the road. I hope, though, that he’ll remember who he is and what he’s made of, and keep going a little longer still.

I remember cars like that. Used to love my parent's red Maverick. But, or course, they're long gone now.