Sleep well my rusty, trusty Cavalier

I know this should be a Thanksgiving column, and it should be filled with writing about Thanksgiving type stuff, like turkey and mashed potatoes.

Sure, I’m thankful for my parents and my friends. I’m thankful I’ve got a roof over my head and a job that doesn’t make me want to perform a home lobotomy. I’m thankful there’s people willing to die for the country and I don’t have to fight for scraps of food.

So I’m thankful for a lot of things, but this column isn’t about being thankful.

It’s about my car.

I have to start by saying I love my stuff. I don’t really care if it makes me materialistic, but my stuff is important to me, and the longer I have the stuff the more attached I become to it. When I finally retired an alarm clock I owned since 1996, I felt a whiff of nostalgia. Sure, it’s not a big thing, but I’ve had the clock for 13 years. I’ve lived in four states with it.

So when my car finally joined the rusting choir invisible, I felt sad about it. Let’s face it, my car was epic.

The story of my 1986 Chevy Cavalier started when I moved from Pullman to Maryland. My folks kept telling me Maryland was the land of milk and honey and money grew on trees, and well, Pullman was starting to wear on me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great town, but being 28 in a college town is like wearing jeans at a formal dinner. You just don’t fit in and everyone knows it.

So I had a plan. Step one: Get a job. Step two: Buy a car. Step three: Find an apartment. The first one was easy, so I saved up and bought a $600 car from a friend of a coworker. Then I spent $2,000 getting it so it would pass inspection.

I have a really bad track record with cars. I’d owned two of them to that point and the first one died at the top of Snoqualmie Pass and the second one died when I was living in Pullman. So I wasn’t expecting too much out of this one.

Then I drove it around Baltimore and it didn’t die. I drove it an hour to and from work and it didn’t die. I drove it for three years and it didn’t die.

Then I got this job and I drove it across the country, spent five days in it crossing every landscape imaginable.

It still didn’t die.

I drove it more than 500 miles a month, to city council meetings, to court, to commissioner meetings, to fund-raisers, to Masquers Theater, to a neat art shop in Coulee City and everywhere between.

And it still didn’t die.

I swear it was a zombie car. It had to be roaming the streets at night, feeding on the brains of other cars to preserve its unnatural half-life. It ran on hopes, dreams and a hamster that squeaked when the car got too hot.

Basically, my car deserves an elegy. It wasn’t a beautiful car. The radio didn’t work. It was dinged and dented. The doors were rusted and one of the bolts for the front seat pulled out of the floorboard, but it was stubborn, dependable and had a good run.

So Cavalier, I salute you. May you rust in peace.

Cameron Probert is the Columbia Basin Herald county reporter. His coworkers agree it was an undead car, out running its natural life. But to say it is “epic,” might be stretching the truth just a little. It was infamous.