I had to take the car (I've owned it long enough for a simple definite article) through AirCare this week, for the last time.
It got a simple pass after they hooked up its electronic guts to a computer and determined it had been a good little engine for the past two years. They printed out my pass form on the last dot matrix printer in B.C. and sent me away.
It's the last time I'll have to get the car AirCared, as the program is ending as of this year.
That will feel strange. I've been driving cars through AirCare testing bays ever since I started driving. The program started in 1992, two years before I got my license.
My cars and AirCare have seldom been friends. Like most of us, I owned a series of early vehicles that teetered on the line between "car" and "pile of rolling metal."
My worst car was a 1988 Hyundai Stellar.
Never heard of the Stellar? That's because of its painful failure to live up to its name. A small fourdoor sedan, it's main selling feature was the very small amount of money I paid for it. It took me to and from college and survived almost through a full year of my first postschooling job.
Even before its untimely death, it had seen the white light at the end of the tunnel a few times.
It's most impressive near-death experience was
its black lung disease. Apparently, for the entire life, the exhaust system had been building up deposits that were slowly choking the engine to death.
The car started losing power so slowly that I hardly noticed, until going up hills was as painful as a three-pack-a-day smoker climbing 10 flights of stairs.
I took the alleged car to two repair shops.
The first one quoted me a price of $1,300 to fix it, approximately five times what I judged the car to be worth. The next shop suggested $1,600 would be an appropriate repair bill.
Possibly taking pity on my sad facial expression (I was still in school and approaching dead broke) the fellow there suggested I take it to Kershaw Performance, an old-school shop that still operates here in Langley.
The Kershaw mechanic poked his head under the hood, said he could maybe do something about it, and then took out a thin piece of steel rod, inserted it into the engine, and whaled on it with a ball peen hammer. After he dislodged the accumulated gunk, the car ran for another year before
They charged me $25. The Stellar's tale was not yet over, however. I put it up for sale, basically willing to accept any offer. A friend of a friend of a neighbour turned up and offered me $300 for the barelymobile vehicle, and I took it without haggling. He then gave me $150 -all in $5 bills that smelled suspiciously of cannabis - and drove it away. After he was gone, I noticed that he had filled out part of the transfer papers incorrectly. I tried to call him, but for three days, he ducked my calls, probably because he didn't want to pay me the remainder of the money.
The next day, I got a call from the RCMP.
Did I know that a car registered to me had sped away from a police stop, run over a stop sign, and crashed into a ditch? Had the driver, now in cells, stolen my car? I explained the situation, and I swear I could hear the officer on the other end of the line roll her eyes when I mentioned the pile of $5 bills.
The car was still legally mine, she said, and I could come down to the impound yard and pick it up if I wanted to pay the fee.
Otherwise, it would be crushed into a cube. It would cost about $150 to get it back.
I left it to its fate, and it has now likely been reincarnated as a crate of toasters. Matthew Claxton is a reporter with the Langley Advance.
