Ode Number one on my car of 11 years

The first in a series of elegies for my silver steed, Peppy.

Peppy isn’t. Peppy never has been. But pep as a virtue is overrated and not often required in a city known for traffic congestion. What is really required is grit and patience, and the ability to squeeze into small space. Which are, or were, among her greatest virtues.

Well that day is come. It’s not quite here yet, but Pep, my 2014 Silver Prius C with 185,000 of hard ramblin’ is near the end of her road. She and I have seen enough of this great land to confirm first hand that under the virtiol, madness, and betrayal, she is a beautiful place.

She’s had red dirt of the Burr Trail road caked on her, she’s been exploring for petroglyphs, been on the Aquarian Plateau, seen Chaco Canyon, and up and down from the Sierras so many times, she can identify wildflowers by sight.

But my trusty Peppy was declared a total loss back in February after a cosmetic ding to her passenger side doors (not her first scrap), courtesy of a Frenchie in a rental car making an illegal left on a rainy night. The rental was beefy and Pep took the brunt of it. After a corporate delay made longer by a string of sub-contractors, the appraisal came in at the end of March and my claims adjuster told me that Peppy could either be surrendered for 7800 or I could receive a payout for 6200 and keep the car to junk or salvage myself.

I took the pay out check. My current financial status was broke, hovering on becoming more broke. Obviously, I was determined to keep her on the road. Especially with a shrinking industry, inflation, a year of injury, and the threat of tariffs from a madman / cuckold grifting the American public. I was in the middle of navigating the miracle and wonder of the DMV, sidestep by sidestep, to obtain the necessary salvage title when I detected a new rumble as we made our way down the 89 around the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe.

It’s always a sound. It could be nothing. Or it could be what you think it is. Hope can be a determent in these cases.

We used to put horses down when they went lame and hard men long accustomed to the practice would weep. And then write songs about their mares to sing when they were lonely on the trail.

Today, we pay a mechanic seventy five bucks to run a diagnostic and confirm what we already know about our trusted steeds.

It was her catalytic. Which is a death sentence to a total loss, eleven year Prius hybrid as dinged up as she is. The part runs in excess of 2200.

It was a windy day. A mean gust of winter was coming down from the high country and whipping across the lake. I sat with Chekhov by a placard honoring the words of Mark Twain while we waited like loved ones for someone in a hospital.

Juan, the mechanic at Sierra Tires in King’s Beach on the north shore delivered the news straight. I took it well and confirmed I would make it home all right. He advised that I just ride her till the wheels fall off. But my registration is due soon, and I know her days are few. And they will be loud. We all rattle toward the end.

My main goal while I was up in Tahoe was to not let the news ruin my trip. There’s a zen lesson in all of that - making peace with our demise so as not to miss the miracle of life. It was a lesson with deep roots as I make the yearly pilgrimage up there because that was where I was when my mother died six years ago. It holds a special place in my ancestral bones. And I go up to say hello to mom. Not Goodbye. And every time I do, I return with more lessons about life that I get to contemplate the whole way through the San Joaquin on my return trip to the city of angels and my studio apartment.

How do you measure the feelings you have about a car? Or the miles you shared? They do more than carry us to and from where we want to go. They do more than bring us home again. They hold us when we are most alone and at our worst, too. We make love in their back seats, and sing to endless horizon. They symbolize our wildest and purest spirit. Our cars become much more than their duty. Even the coldest of Americans can’t help but personify their whips.

We must honor them in song.

Mine was a good car. And tougher than she looked. She’s had her hybrid rebuilt. Twice. A head gasket. She was my first foreign car, having been raised by good midwest stock, it took so many shitty American cars that fell apart on me and left me stranded to un-brainwash myself from the legacy of our innate mechanical superiority.

Toyota built me a good one. Her brakes have never even had to be adjusted. And she would never have had to have her hybrid rebuilt twice were it not for the incompetence of some deep Sun Valley Prius hustlers who no longer are in the employ of a particular “Prius Specialist.”

We bend a lot when we’re broke. We get eroded by challenge and become more refined. Elemental. A part of our environment. One doesn’t have to be Robinson Jeffers to see that we become like rock and sand and sea.

That transformation happens in an urban setting, and by life, in a subtle way. We vanish under dings and scratches and faded colors. We stop shining in the California sun and become a little less glitzy.

But those faded colors and scratches and dings all record a story we would have forgot any other way. Especially in a vanishing republic at the end of a continent and at what many think could be soon the end of days.

We must share a eulogy for the beasts that got us here.

So the next few months I’ll devote to me and my car- and the several women who shared it. Peppy is not unlike many other cars that I once ignored and passed judgement about (and the person driving it). She is one of many in a city of perpetual renewal and wax jobs and dirty air. And sunshine.

She may be old, but there was a time when she shined.

Cars in the Midwest rot from the inside out from salt on the roads every winter but not out here - here they endure to tell the tale of seasons that come and go, unannounced. That is why we worship the car so much out here.

Just ask the Beach Boys.

I got Peppy eleven years ago after divorce in a fever when my previous car’s air stopped working and it would cost $1500 to replace the Freon. I didn’t have the $1500, so I put $500 down and took out a loan.

I was going to make a killing driving for this new technology called Lyft drive share.

I’ll pick her tale up next week with her origins and halcyon days on the trail. She was bright and her tread was full. And we were going to be the ones to find the heart of America.

An image from Pep’s early days while camping in the Alabama Hills BLM land.