i want to write about my old car.it was a blue-green 1996 Geo Metro. It is pictured here parked in eastern washington with a tumbleweed on top of it. (i used to get a big kick out of tumbleweeds, being from the midwest and all).
this car was a miracle car. i had been driving a '93 ford escort that had been hit by 3 different deer (i never hit these deer- though one of them did run into my drivers side door once- another miracle story). people harassed me about it alot, about the old beat up escort. i loved it though, plus i didn't have a lot of cash. well i was a youth leader back in these days at my old church. i made the comment one day that the only way i would get a different car is if it was a geo metro because i knew they were good on gas millage. well lo and behold someone knew someone and the next thing you know i had this car for $2000. it was in perfect shape with only 67,000 miles on it. It was a manual transmission and I got about 45-50 miles per gallon.
to make a long story short, i went everywhere in this car-- went all over the country, including the east coast, canada and to southwest missouri several times, where the people who are like my second parents were living at the time. one time, before i went to see them, i got the car an oil change. then i proceeded to do 85mph down to Missouri on a 3-cylinder engine without checking the oil once. i thought it would be ok since i just had an oil change. wrong!
long story short, it made it there. We loaded it up with oil before i left again for michigan, and i was told to just keep checking the oil. but then on the way home transmission started to go out in gears. through missouri it would only get into 4th-- by the time I got through Illinois it struggled in 3rd. In kalamazoo i called my stepdad who informed me that if i couldnt get it home i might as well kiss the car goodbye. i loved that car! and i got in home in 2nd gear! i thought it would die. but it didn't it kept fighting! what normally took 12 hours took 21 hours, but i made it home safe and with my car.
it never ran out of gas. what i mean is i would risk it all the time because it got such incredible millage. once i had the car a couple of years i started to get really careless about it. for example, i knew that it took about $1.85 to get to my mom's house from the community college and visa versa. it would be so low i would pray to God not to run out of gas in the cold even though it was my own stupid fault in the first place for not putting enough in. sometimes i just didnt have the money. but i knew that if i could just come up with something like 80 cents by the time i got to the gas station between the college and the house, i could make it!
in the winter i used to run outside with my hair wet in the morning (in michigan a bad idea). i would sleep late, not have time to warm my car up and just jump in like a mad woman. the college was 45 minutes away, and i was always running late. i would jump in shivering before the windows were even totally defrosted and then drive east into the rising sun down a snow covered glacier-like road for 5 miles while my hair turned into ice... and back then i still smoked too. so throw smoking clutching coffee careening down hilly 19 mile road into the sun with no visibility into the mix.
i never had an accident. i would have premonitions of deer, slow down and then, lo, deer (this happens to a lot of michigan drivers though, deer are everywhere, we are always thinking about them).
i used to basically plow my way home through insane blizzards in this car. one quarter i took classes at the more northern campus, which was a huge mistake. at the time though i thought of it as a challenge. i had fun plowing through snow in my ridiculous geo.
in the summer of 2002 this car actually was submerged in the chippewa river. thats right, but by "coincidence" (i dont believe this) i found a guy to fix the whole thing for 500 bucks! we're talking new engine, plus a bunch of electronic stuff.
the car was never the same after the river incident. i wrote a poem about it years ago but i don't have it any more. it started out something like "the day the river ate my car i was ...(something something)". basically the emergency brake failed while i was obliviously enjoying the day at the park: note to self, never park on a hill by a river.
in 2004 when i moved to eastern washington to do americorps, this little baby made it! By then it had 140,000 miles on it. thats right, i put 70,000 miles on the car in about 3 years. i am very bad at math, but like i said, i always got at least 45 miles to the gallon. that tells you about how much running i did in this car!
when i lived in eastern wa i used to floor it to Ptown in my geo. i could make it from Othello to southeast Portland in 4 hours if i didn't stop. once i made it in 3 hours and 45 minutes. I just floored it. Those trips were crazy. I never had enough money for gas but always made it home somehow. Maybe this was more about my being bad at math than God intervening, but that drive was just really wild. There is this one exit, in between Umatilla and the Tri Cities called Locust Grove Road. I was always below E on gas when passing that exit, usually at about 2am. It was about 15 more miles from Locust Grove Road to the nearest gas station and usually this was "ok even though im not sure i believe in God i am going to pray right now" time because i always always always thought i was going to run out of gas. I could never drive by there, even when i had enough gasoline, without thinking about it. It was like a joke between me and God.
The geo is gone now. I sold it in Othello for $500 bucks. I had to. It needed too much work. I begged the guy I sold it to not to scrap it but to promise to try and fix it. He probably thought I was nuts but he promised anyway. I hope it is currently helping someone else get someplace, any place.
So, I don't know if this story counts as talking about God in my life. I certainly thought about God a lot in that Geo, thats for sure. Part of it too i think was just the vulnerability of driving that vehicle so much. I damn well knew if I hit anything i mean ANYTHING even at 35 miles per hour, it was pretty much going to be over for me.
I was hyper aware of my own mortality in that car. The roof of it was practically made of aluminum-- if a kid sat on it, it would start to dip and cave in a bit.
Anyway, that was the little Geo.
It was definitely a faith experience, cruising around in that thing.
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