The Road to Independence

I always liked cars, but not the same way you did. To me a car was transportation, pure and simple. I didn't care what it looked like, as long as it ran good and had plenty of room for my hunting and fishing gear, including a couple of beagle hounds. My dad had a station wagon, which was fine for anything I wanted to do. It had a luggage rack on the roof, which carried my canoe, once we learned how to strap it down properly. You have to use straps, not ropes, and you have to snug them down really tight, otherwise the canoe goes sliding around as soon as you get up to highway speed. Station wagons are great for camping too, provided that you're still young and agile enough to change clothes and wriggle in and out of  your sleeping bag in the prone position.

The first car I ever owned wasn't a station wagon, it was a 1952 Ford sedan. I don't remember if it was a 2 door or a four door. I bought it in Alaska, and I'm sure I paid too much for it, but everything was expensive in Alaska. At first I thought I wouldn't need a car in Alaska because there weren't very many roads, but I soon learned that anyplace I needed to go was on a road, and there wasn't enough traffic to make hitch hiking practical. I didn't think I could sell the car for the price of plane ticket back to Chicago, so I decided to drive it there, 5,000 miles in ten days and nine nights. I slept in the car for the first five nights, on a plank platform that I rigged on the passenger side from the dashboard, across the seat backs, to the rear window. It was a tight fit, if I rolled over my shoulder rubbed the ceiling, but I slept well. The only reason I didn't sleep in it all the way home was that there were no free campsites along the road once I got down into Alberta. That, and I was tired of eating Dinty Moore beef stew out of the can. When I walked into a truck stop restaurant, and saw myself in the mirror behind the lunch counter, I decided that maybe a hot shower and a change of clothes wouldn't be a bad idea either.

The first day out I got into a slight wreck just outside of Fairbanks. The car was dinged up a little, and the instrument panel went dead but, the car still ran, so I ran it. I got a flat tire in the Yukon and forgot to snug up the lug nuts after I set the car down off the jack, so the wheel fell of a little further down the road. The driver's side door never did close right after that, so I stuffed some newspaper in the gap and used the passenger side door.

When I got back to Chicago, my dad said that he had bought an auto insurance policy for me after I had written to my parents about buying the car, and that we had to go sign some papers. When we got there the agent couldn't believe that I had been able to register the car in my own name when I bought it. I had wondered about that too at the time. The age of majority was 19 in Alaska, except for drinking, but I bought the car on my 18th birthday. Big Red had to know my age because she had registered me for the draft earlier that same day. There was nothing on the car registration form about age, and Big Red didn't mention it, so I certainly wasn't going to bring it up. Anyway, you had to be 21 to own a car in Illinois, so I had to put it in my dad's name. I had decided on the way back to Chicago that I didn't really want to live in Alaska but, just for a moment, I considered turning around and driving my Ford right back there, just so I could keep it in my own name. If I had done that, I might still be driving the same car around Alaska. As it was, the Ford didn't last long in Chicago. It must have been the air pollution that killed it.