My First Car

There are some memorable milestones in life that, when reflected on, present themselves in vivid, emotional detail. For me, one of those milestones was my first car. I remember the moment I took possession of her, the smell of the interior, the bright fall day, sitting in the driver's seat holding the wheel, and imagining all the places I would go.

The car, a VW Beetle, was not much to look at, a beige brownish color, its paint weathered to a point where it would never shine again. The dashboard's round speedometer looked to me as an instrument of new freedom. The year was 1974, and I don't believe I ever knew the exact age of the Beetle, but suffice it to say, she had a couple of decades of prior use.

I paid $200.00 for her and remembered thinking it was a bargain. Cars that spent time on the roads in Minnesota had a propensity for rust, and the Beetle was no exception. The rust on the Beetle was especially prevalent around the wheel wells and the panels closest to the road's surface. The most noticeable issue was a softball size opening in the driver-side floorboards that went clean through to the street. My first thought upon seeing the hole was to dismiss it as a cosmetic problem that did not affect the car's operation.

It was hard to find anything negative about the car to compete with things like a four-speed stick shift with a shiny plastic ball debossed with a shifting pattern on its top. I had not driven a car with a manual transmission yet, but I did own an off-road motorcycle, so I was familiar with the concept of a clutch. It took a few excursions to get the hang of the shifting, and the only precarious moments involved stopping on a hill and trying to get going without hitting the car behind me.

The Beetle did not have much power but cornered well and was fun to drive. One quality of a car people looked for in that region was how well the heater worked. In my excitement of ownership, this critical step somehow slipped my mind, and I discovered, as fall turned to winter, that the heating system was nearly non-existent. The same pesky rust eating the car from the ground up had destroyed the conduits which supplied warm air from the engine. Adjusting to this reality, I dressed like a polar explorer whenever driving the car.

There was a funny moment while driving in a fall rainstorm and going through large puddles of water. The hole in the driver's side floorboards, which I believed was purely cosmetic, suddenly turned into a geyser between my legs. The solution based on available materials at my parent's home consisted of cutting a piece of plywood to a reasonable semblance of the floor. The wood did not exactly create a seal, and during a subsequent winter snowstorm, blowing snow found its way through the hole, forming a miniature four-inch snowdrift inside the car.

The first thing to go wrong mechanically with the car was the starter, but since it was a manual transmission, I was able to start it with a bit of momentum. It was a small feat of coordination involving pushing the car from the driver's side to gain some speed, jumping into the driver's seat, shoving the stick into first gear, and popping the clutch to get the engine to turn over. Soon I was looking for every incline in the city for parking to assist in restarting the car. That same winter, the brake lines developed a leak causing the master cylinder to lose pressure for applying the brakes. With a bit of practice, I mastered the art of braking through downshifting, and when I needed a complete stop, I employed the emergency brake.

Life seldom follows the road-maps our minds conjure up, and the places I imagined I would travel on that first glorious day never came to fruition. My first car had left me stranded on lonely rural stretches; in winter, it was like driving a freezer on wheels, and the vehicle challenged the meaning of workaround. Looking back on that day when I sat in the driver's seat, my hands on the wheel, I realized the value of the experience and would never trade that away.