Subaru: Car of my soul

I am not much of a car person. For a long time I didn't have strong car preferences, so I drove whatever was easily available--from my dad's El Camino when I was a teenager to a ratty little Datsun in college. But then in grad school, ten years ago, I happened to find a car that changed my perspective. It was the first car I ever bought myself, a 1986 monkey-shit brown Subaru station wagon. Damn, did I ever love that car.

There were lots of things wrong with the car: It had air conditioning initially, but that died fairly early on. Some Friday afternoons in the summer when Baxter and I would be driving from Nashville to Cookeville to visit my family, we would stop off at Percy Priest Lake and get completely soaked so that we could make the 70-mile drive with some evaporative cooling. It wasn't zippy--in fact, it was the opposite of zippy. I saw a bumper sticker on an old Subaru one time that said, "Zero to 60 in 11 minutes," and that was about right. If you needed to pass someone, you really had to plan for it. It had a persistent clacking that sounded like playing cards in bicycle spokes--loose valves, apparently. For several weeks when I couldn't afford to get the starter fixed, I had to park on a hill and push start it.

And yet it was such a great car. I hadn't been searching for a station wagon when I found it, but about 20 minutes after I bought it, I decided that there was no reason for me ever to own a car that was not a station wagon. It was brown inside and out, a kind of defiant ugliness that fit with my own struggling sense of style. It fit me--when I drove Robin Morgan around in it, she said, "This is a feminist car." I suspect that what she meant was that the car was full of trash because I was clearly too busy trying to change the world to keep it clean--but still, it was a nice compliment. And somehow that car had the best smell--a kind of old dusty book smell that was enhanced by dog fur. That Subaru was my quintessential car, the car I judge all other cars against, the car of my soul.

And now look what's happened: I've bought another Subaru station wagon! This one is quite a bit nicer, but I'm not going to hold that against it. They don't make brown Subarus anymore, which is a shame, but it's got the same flat-folding back seats and loads of room for the dogs to roam around while we cruise around town. And although it doesn't have the same smell as my other Subaru, it does have an entirely pleasant dusty smell all its own, and the dogs are going to fur it up, and it'll be just right.