When I came out here, there were three conditions: stop in Reno so I could shoot some craps (which wound up with me losing the whole nut in about 10 minutes and learning a valuable lesson about trusting your gut), get DirecTV so I could get Sunday Ticket and keep watching the Redskins (officially terminated many years ago), and buy a new car to replace my 11-year-old Saturn, ideally the New Beetle I was so into.
Today, the last one is crossed off for good.
It wasn’t a Beetle by the time I got it – it was two years later and a Rabbit, built on the Mark V Golf platform (and in every way superior to the Mark IV underpinnings of the Beetle). I fit in it, even in the back seat. It was a hatchback of the type that captivated me on the honeymoon, it was actually made in Germany, it was a perfect “got nothing to prove” sort of car and it felt like a decisive break toward the future, with the blue glow of the dash and the satellite radio built in and the red lights always beaming down over the console. And in its way, it was a trophy of the new job, because it was bought for 1% under dealer invoice on an Apple promotion. We picked it up in October 2006, and it was the capper of what was a really good year.
We called it Harvey (a name bestowed by my surrogate big sister) but it never really had the personality of my old Saturn. It would be tough to match up to the record; in ten years of ownership I think we maybe took it out of California twice (not counting the odd loop around Lake Tahoe) and never since 2010. It has 116,000 miles instead of the 205,495 Danny finished with, and those are almost all city miles, ground out in a 40-mile radius from home by a 2.5-liter 5-cylinder engine that was supposed to provide 4-cylinder mileage with V6 power but only ever worked the other way round. 2007 and 2008 were a bad time to find out your zippy little compact is only giving you an aggregate 24 miles per gallon.
On the one hand, you could argue that it didn’t deliver much in the way of excitement and adventure and really wild things. On the other hand, the adventures and excitement and really wild things are on other continents now, and I’m of an age and station where the car has only ever been registered at a single address, rather than in three different states in 13 years. And it’s not worth sinking the money that would be needed to fix the sunroof, fix the airbags, fix the transmission, sort out that annoying ticking that we’ll never know the cause of, and God only knows what else over the next three years, or five, or however long. Better to just get an adult-sized car with a hybrid or electric drivetrain, optimize for comfort and mileage, and get on with life instead of trying to attach cosmic importance to a thing.
So long, Ploughboy Bunny. A good job well done, all in all.