What You Bring With You.

  

All the way out Hwy. 170 on the way to Bodie, I was thinking to myself how nice it would have been to have brought my car instead of hers.  How fun the little Alfa would have been on the twisting mountain road, fresh, high altitude air spilling into the cockpit, warm sun reflecting off chrome.  How charming the whole experience would be, without all the casual modernity of my girlfriend’s Saturn Ion.  Then she drove right off the end of the pavement as the “highway” rather suddenly turned to dirt.  Where the Alfa would have shaken its doors off moments before beaching itself on a small rock, the little Saturn continued untroubled along an increasingly unsurfaced surface.  It wasn’t the first time, nor the last that weekend, that having a modern, practical car was something for which to be thankful.  

Human beings can bond with just about anything, but the charm-free zone that is the interior of a Saturn Ion sedan should test that theory to its limits.  On this trip however, the little car performed all that was asked of it, and in so doing, enabled one of the nicest, most fulfilling road trips of my life.  The eastern Sierra Nevada are an amazing collective experience; In three days that Saturn took us to everything from a former concentration camp, to the oldest trees on Earth.  In between, there was a ghost town, four volcanoes, a huge salt lake, and many hours of excellent bird watching.  In the process, the car was transformed from a basic utility into a repository for memories of a great adventure.

  As an enthusiast, I’ve spent countless hours thinking about what car I wanted to drive where.  Although I love racing, I have little time for dreaming about racing cars, or track days, because to me cars are about where they can take you, and how they get you there.  Like, I suspect, a lot of us, I’ve tended to emphasize the conveyance over the destination.  But for all its romance, a good road trip will scrap most of your idyllic daydreaming for more practical concerns, and in the process, remind you that the road matters as much as the car.  For every mile of seductively sinuous asphalt that weekend, there came a point where we would have had to stop and get out of the sports car, and into an inconveniently unavailable off-roader.  The Saturn never missed a beat, never made a fuss, never even seemed to notice that it was being used for something far beyond its maker’s intent.

  Cars are storytellers in their way; they carry their history with them wherever they go.  Some of them come to you with stories already hanging from their mirrors, and it can be easy to forget that an old car was once new, and not suffused with the weight of memories.  What will one day become period charm is usually the practicality of simply building a new car at the time, and treasured patina the buildup of years of constant use.

  A Saturn Ion sedan may never be a sought-after classic.  It is unlikely that one of the worst-regarded products of GM’s history will transcend its troubled birth to find fond remembrance in popular culture.  At best, it’s likely to be relegated to the kitsch status afforded the likes of Nash Ramblers and Ford Pintos.

  For me though, this one example of the car has already become something more.  Kitsch is often just a veneer of irony, covering genuinely positive feelings for a a faithful appliance.  In this sense, this particular Ion has acquired a charm which my Spider, for all the history instilled in it from day one, and all the patina wrested from the years since, has yet to replicate.  It has joined the ranks of  the sky blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser and yellow Volkswagen Super Beetle that were the first cars of my life.  It has, by enabling through practicality, become a part of what may be one of the nicest chapters of my own story, and ours.

  Sometimes, it’s not how you get there, it’s simply the act of going that matters, and the stories of others, no matter how dramatic, are no substitute for miles rolled off under you own wheels, on the way to wherever you’re going, and who you’ll be when you get there.