Teens and Automobiles

My eldest daughter had been driving for about six months when (yesterday) she had her first accident. It was a bad one too, flipped the car on it's top. It must have been terrifying for her, I know it was for me when I got the phone call. She is stiff, and sore, but otherwise intact. It could have been so much worse. We are all lucky she walked away from this one.

As a father, I worry about her every moment she is out on the road, fatal accidents happen each day and things can go wrong so fast out on the highway. I preach and harp on this fact all of the time, because I need her to understand that the roads are a dangerous place. I cannot keep her from driving, nor would I want to, but there is a strong instinct to keep her safe, to keep her out of harms way. There is a temptation to just drive the girl where she needs to go, like I have all of her life until recently. Letting my daughter grow up is hard, but inevitable. I remember when I started driving, my father imposed a curfew that lasted all of two weeks or so, I broke it so often I think he gave up.

My first car was a 1970 VW bug that we pulled out of a farmers cow pasture. This story sounds cliche but it really happened. My father and I pulled the bug out of the weeds, put in a new battery, topped it up with some fresh gas and it started right up. I believe he paid $300.00 for the car. I was now the proud owner of some four wheeled freedom. I loved my VW, and while it was ugly it ran well and had some character. I wrecked it shortly after I got it, I was on my way to school with some friends and one of them had moved my rear view mirror to fix his hair (it was the 80's and he had pretty hair). So I started adjusting the mirror back to a position where I could use it and neglected to keep both eyes on the road. In a split second I had ploughed into a parked car from behind. The parked car wasn't damaged much but my beetle was done.

I was 16 and back to riding the school bus for awhile, this lasted about a month or so when my Grandparents offered to help purchase another car. We searched about our small community for a week or so when dad found a 1972 AMC Gremlin. The car was pretty ugly, it was a Gremlin after all but this one had an abundance of surface rust marring the exterior. Today I understand why dad wanted me to get this car. Aside from the price being right, it wasnt too fast, or too sexy and was mechanically sound. He wanted me in an unglamorous car, better to stay out of trouble that way.

The "Grim Gremlin" as we affectionately called it soon started falling apart. I locked up the brakes in my own driveway one winter afternoon on a sheet of ice and hit the telephone pole that supported our "area light", right in my own yard! I saved up my money and bought new parts at the junk yard, I pulled the dents out of the grille area, taped up what I could with duct tape and bailing wire and got back on the road. This car would never pass a safety inspection but it always started and got me where I needed to go.
Later that summer, the reverse gear went out of it, so I had to be careful where I parked. Then the shock absorbers went and it rode like a stagecoach. One afternoon my evil step brother was horsing around with a bb gun and shot out the back window. By now the car was just a rolling heap but I kept driving it.
The most famous thing about this car was the afternoon my senior year in highschool when a bunch of friends and I skipped skipped out and drove the car to a secluded area (we lived in the middle of nowhere, in the country, so there was no shortage of secluded areas). One of my friends older brother was a sign painter, so we had loaded up on cans of sign paint and rollers and brushes and painted the car. The rusted Gremlin now had a coat of multi colored paint, stripes and dots and bright colors. It was quite the way to get noticed, amazingly most of the kids in school got the joke and thought the brightly colored car was cool. Instead of having the class of '84 sign my yearbook, I had them all sign my car in blue paint. Now the car was a rolling symbol of our last year in high school.

Just before graduation I was driving home from school when one of my friends (in a new red Pontiac Fiero) ran up behind me and started acting like he wanted to race. I floored my tiny six cylinder and took off down the road ahead of the Fiero as my friend tried to pass. Suddenly the hood of my car (held to the hinges with bailing wire) flew up and hung by one thin wire to the corner of the engine compartment. I slowed and pulled over. Here was the hood of the car hanging in the air like a sail. Not knowing what to do, I pushed the hood over till the binding snapped and let it roll off into the ditch on the side of the road, with the intent of getting it later.

The next day I borrowed my dads pick up truck and went to get my hood. The part was nowhere to be found. My friends and I looked high and low for the hood, even asked the local farmers if they had seen it, but no one had. We joked for years afterward that one of the hillbilly families in the area had grabbed it and made a psychedelic coffee table out of it.

I turned 18 and only days afterward I decided to leave home, to go live in San Diego with some old friends, to make my way away from the family. I traded the Gremlin for a piece of ham radio equipment and that was the end of an era. I got on a plane and never saw that car again. I am asked about it still, if I am haunting my old home town. There is a surviving photo of it around here somewhere, I hope I can find it as that photo is the last proof this auto ever existed.

I can't imagine what my father thought about this auto adventure. I am sure he lost sleep wondering if I was getting trouble, if I was driving safe, if I was coming home at night. I never once got cited in this car, drank beer on back roads and never got caught, remarkable when you think about it. This car screamed to law enforcement that we were probably partying our butts off, I may as well have had a sign painted on it that said "We are HIGH pull us over" but I got very little harassment from the law.

My daughter simply lost control of her car, no booze or drugs involved, she was alone so there was no rough housing with her friends. I hope it serves as a lesson that keeping ones eyes on the road is vitally important. I am giving her my car tomorrow, as I am buying another, I can only hope she has better sense than I, and maintains the cars current color.

This is day 10 of trying to blog 30 times in 30 days.