SAYING GOOBYE TO VOLVO
It came suddenly, anticlimactically.
A total stranger rolled up in an uber and showed me a wad of 20s, I signed over my title, and watched him drive away in the car that has been my spiritual anchor for the past 16 years.
It was my ex that actually tracked down the Volvo 850 in the summer of 2006. We needed a car to drive back to Ohio from Oregon for our senior year of college, and I was new to craigslist and wasting my time chasing lemons and scams. She called a dealership and they had this single-owner pristine ‘94 trade-in. The salesman gave me a hard time and complained about his divorce but I bought the damn car.
I knew nothing about cars. I drove that thing across the country without checking the oil. Then it started making a noise like a blast-beat on a piccolo snare. I took it into the shop and learned what engine oil was and what happens when there isn’t any of it in the engine of a car. That was 16 years ago, I’ve kept a few quarts in the trunk ever since.
In 2014 I was lax on maintenance and the timing belt snapped, which on my model means that the engine goes crunch. I posted a picture of the 850 facebook saying ‘RIP’ only to have a friend tell me that his brother did engine repairs on 850s in his front yard for extra cheap. I paid 800 dollars cash for an engine rebuild (the shop quoted 3500). He rebuilt the thing in his front yard and the goddamn thing has gone another eight years.
When I was in graduate school and had no money for another car, I prayed for it to not break. And in answer to those prayers, everything BUT the engine and the transmission broke: The back trunk springs went out. Shocks went out. Headlights went out. Radiator cracked. Fuel Pump went out. Who knows how many sensors. A raccoon bit into the fuel line THREE TIMES IN ONE YEAR, leading to my gasoline spraying into the street upon startup. I got that fixed by a shop twice and by a friend of a friend when I was desperately broke in the pouring rain in a driveway during the height of the Covid panic. He refused any money; my friend got him a gift basket.
I drove across the country again. The thing burned oil. I put more oil in. It kept driving.
I learned how to replace the blower motor. The Heater Core. Charged the AC… replaced the coolant reservoir after it blew all the antifreeze out the side of the car on the highway and I got to see for the first time that the temperature gauge did in fact measure temperatures over ‘50%’. I found a guy named Robert who posts how-to videos for old Volvos on youtube. I kept the goddamn thing running.
Eventually I got through graduate school. I got a job, and some more money. Enough money for a car. I told myself, ‘I’ll just keep driving it until it breaks. It’s barely worth anything anyways.’ I was lying to myself. I knew it was worth something
It never broke. It just never broke on me. Well, every other conceivable piece of the car beside the engine and the transmission broke… but the damn thing would start and the gears would turn and the wheels would move and it took me where I needed to go so I never got rid of it.
Let me go backwards.
I graduated college in this car. I drove cross country at least four times in this car. Filled it with every belonging I owned maybe six times. I had my heart broken in this car. When I was in a horrific Van accident with my friends on a tour on the north shores of the great lakes in February 2008, we flew to portland where the Volvo was waiting and we crammed inside and finished over 20 dates of a cross-country tour.
That was probably the best experience I had traveling with friends playing music. The Volvo turned what was a tragedy into this unforgettable, uplifting memory. We stood on the shores of the pacific ocean, in the sunshine, two weeks after the van accident, tracing goofy shit into the sand and the Volvo was there.
I got really sick in the Volvo; I drank a lot. I had beer and liquor stashed in the Volvo for a time. I got sober in the Volvo. Still sober. I drove around people from AA meetings and outpatient in the Volvo. I moved. I moved again. For years I never got a moving truck, just loaded the Volvo again and again. I listened to really, really loud music and made a scene in the Volvo; it always had great speakers. I’ve taken advantage of it’s tape-cassette player to use four different adapters (kept breaking them) to plug into minidisc players, mp3 players, ipods, iphones.
I learned what it meant to chain-smoke in the Volvo, and then I quit smoking in the Volvo too! Staying up late outside of Marinos, three days in to quitting cold turkey, feeling like I was high again after all those years sober. I drove home in the Volvo and listened to loud music and I’ve been quit for years now.
I went to open mics in this Volvo. Band after band after band. Toted around music equipment... so many times.
I met my wife in this Volvo. Driving back and forth across Portland, her house to my house. My house to her house. My place, 4 sober guys crammed into a boring two-story in SW, her place, 4 cool ladies living aside from the local bible college, having a different experience. Helped her tear up the carpet, and, eventually move, and move, and move, and get married.
Let’s return to the present. What did I learn? I didn’t take care of it, it took care of me. I used it to take me wherever I wanted to go, whether it was fucked up or healthy. It broke, I fixed it, it kept going. Sometimes I paid others, sometimes it was a shop, sometimes it was a hobbyist, sometimes it was a friend, sometimes it was me… I kept fixing it.
Eventually I didn’t want it to go. Eventually I gave up on selling it, and I just told myself the car would tell me when it was ready to go, with some catastrophic failure, which never happened.
I have a nice car now. Admittedly, it’s way nicer to drive than my old beat to shit Volvo… that I drive with the dip-stick popped to keep the engine pressure down because I never fixed the PCV system so the car fills with exhaust when I have the blower motor running and am stopped at a light. The Volvo with the turn signals that I have to flick the hazards off-and-on to get working (???). The Volvo with the 2x4 in the trunk perfectly sized to hold up the back hatch with the broken springs. The Volvo with the ceiling carpet ripped out on the moonroof because it was coming off and I didn’t want to jam the moonroof motor. The Volvo with the burn marks near the driver side door carpet where I dropped a lit cigarette all those years ago. The Volvo that I have to press the manual-gear-override button to put into drive because the sensor is broken. The Volvo that I had a friend disconnect the check-engine light from the inside of the dashboard because it wouldn’t shut off because of some stupid expensive sensor I didn’t care to fix and I needed to pass DEQ. The Volvo with no working dome lights because I stupidly cut the wires going to the driver-side sun visor because the goddamn plastic came apart and it kept falling into my face while driving and I didn’t know it was all on one circuit. The Volvo with wheel nuts so worn out on the rear tires that even though I know how to change a spare, I can’t, because the nuts are too stripped for my tire-iron to get a grip, and I have to call AAA like an idiot. The Volvo that clicks if you turn it too hard to the left (so don’t turn it so hard to the left!).
Yes, after driving a nice car, it is nice to not have to deal with all of that.
I still never wanted to get rid of it. I had some fantasy that I could save it in my garage for years and one day teach myself total car repair and rebuild every broken accessory and axle and door and spring and wiring and… and… the truth was, I repaired what I needed to, exactly when I absolutely needed to, and no more. The car would have sat in my garage until the oil dried and the battery died and it wouldn’t run anymore. It’s nice to drive a nice car.
And in five or ten years, when I have a bigger garage, or a bigger front yard, and kids that are more grown up, and a lot more time, I might try and get another old car to fix up. Or maybe I won’t, because what I really had was an old car that I drove through every hairpin and winter storm of my life for the past 16 years and it’s actually the years that I miss, the moments that I’m saying goodbye to, and this piece of metal that drove me through it, I squeezed every last ounce out of that fucking thing and that’s what I admire the most in life, when you use every last ounce of a moment and there’s no regrets and you took it all the way there. The Volvo took me all the way there, to a house, to my wife, to my kid, to my job, to my family, and I squeezed it, I squeezed the moments, for everything they were worth, and despite it all, it just wouldn’t die.
So I sold it for 700 dollars cash and watched a stranger drive it away, squeezing the last of its precious moments.
It’s the moments we miss. The metal breaks down. 16 years is a lot to say goodbye to.