The End of An Era

Well kids, the time has come. Nobody wanted the Eagle, but I needed some money, so I put the Altima up for sale yesterday. Already, I have three potential buyers, so this is going way better than last time.

I've been mentally preparing myself for this event for a while. The Altima, you see, was my first car. And at the time, I was a Californian. Put the two together, and you have a sacred rite of passage, more significant than anything else that happens in youth. Even if you live in a place that isn't saturated with car culture, even if the stoichiometric ratio is not in your DNA, your first car is something special. It's fun. It's freedom. It's enough responsibility to make you feel serious, mature, important, maybe for the very first time.

That's what I got on December 17, 1999, and again almost exactly 4 years ago, in this form...

Here we have the good side:

The not-so-good side:

and the final score, within a few miles or so:

The Altima has been the catalyst for a long list of "good old days". All my friends from high school, and many friends from college rode in it, all over 4 western states. From the beach, to the mountains, to the desert, it's carried musical equipment, groceries, things it was never meant to carry, and at one time, all my earthly possessions. It's lived in every state I've lived in. The albums of all my favorite bands have been played to death on those speakers. Every girl I've ever loved has sat in that passenger seat, sometimes late at night. 

Many of the ups and downs of my youth and young adulthood played out with this car in the background, or even the foreground.

So it's no wonder that our friend is tired. It's time for it to drive off into the sunset. More than that, even, it has become the casualty of pragmatism. It's worth more to me as cash than as transportation. Obviously you can't put a price on memories, but the memories will be there just the same either way. 

Ah yes, the memories. The time when me, Leslie, and her friend Becky who was visiting from North Carolina, stole a wooden pallet and ran it down to the beach in the back seat for a bonfire. The time when Joey ran full speed into the corner of the open passenger door and burst a blood vessel in his arm (still sorry about that one, man). The seminary carpools. The drag racing (the folly of youth). The late-night toilet-papering missions. The back-and-forth trips to Orange County, to the Salt Lake airport, to rock shows, to Guitar Center. The breakdowns, the repairs. The minor collisions, the repairs. So many, many repairs. 

It seems likely that I'll sell it tomorrow. If I don't, it shouldn't be long after that. So, Altima, the point is... me and all of those people I mentioned, whether they know it or not, bid you a fond farewell.

One Headlight

The Wallflowers were one of the great bands of the 1990s. The 1st-generation Nissan Altima was one of the... mediocre cars of the 1990s. Today, they have something in common. The Wallflowers' first and probably biggest hit was "One Headlight", and that's what the Altima now has.

You might think it's because the bulb burned out. But oh no. Not this car. I noticed a few weeks ago that the driver's side headlight was getting dim I didn't think much of it until the other day, when I decided to spring for a new set of bulbs. Well, I went to connect the new one on the driver's side, and found that the electrical connector had somehow gotten so hot that it melted. So that explains the dimness and the fact that now, it won't work at all. At least the one on the other side is fine.

So it's to the point that there are parts wearing out on this thing that were never even meant to be replaced. Now that the Eagle is nearly done, the Altima is clearly releasing all its pent-up frustration at being sidelined all that time. Luckily though, it was a quiet time for repairs while I was working on the Eagle. But if it's not one thing, it's the other, I guess. I'll have to hit the junkyard this weekend for another connector. And maybe a few more odds and ends that you can't get any other way.

The Altima Pitches Another Fit

Since last Labor Day weekend, the Altima has only enjoyed a few moments in the garage, and then only when it was being worked on. For a while it sat in the driveway, but now that the Eagle is de facto transitioning into a daily driver, the Altima has been relegated to the cold (hot), lonely world of street-parked cars. With no shelter from the sun, wind, dust, or bird poop, it decided to make another play for attention. Kind of a childish move. Just sayin'.

Last Monday night, me and the boy went to put gas in it, and when I got to the pump, I noticed that the brake lights were on even after I got out of the car. I fiddled with the pedal and when I couldn't hear the click of the brake light switch, it was pretty clear that the switch was stuck in the "on" position, and therefore had gone the way of all the earth.
Time of death: 8:07 p.m., 182,950 miles.

The car is effectively crippled until I put in a replacement switch - probably this weekend - since the lights will drain the battery when the car is parked, and cause a confusing safety hazard during driving.

The brake lights were on all the way back home from the gas station, where I unhooked the negative battery cable. This is the car equivalent of Time Out, and it's the kind of attention you get when you misbehave. You can drive again when you have a new switch, but this kind of behavior is unacceptable, young man.

****

UPDATE: The brake light switch itself was fine. It was the little rubber button that pushes the switch's pin, that had broken into several pieces and fallen out onto the floor. Solution: swap in the other rubber button from the cruise control switch. Glue the broken pieces back together, and use that one for the cruise control switch. Return previously purchased part. Spend no money :)

Altima Interlude

Today we take an unscheduled break from the Eagle saga to talk about a different project, that was never properly recorded. A less extensive one, but in some ways a more significant one, even so.

Around Christmas time in 1999, I was in the market for my first car. It started, as it always did back then, with the obtaining of a paper-and-ink copy (right?) of Auto Trader magazine, and ended in the driveway of a house in Temecula, CA. There was a dude named Ruben, he wrote us a bogus bill of sale to skirt a few Golden State tax laws, the money changed hands, and so did … the Altima.

Fast-forward almost 11 years, and the Altima had seen it all. Endless commutes to and from high school, college, and everywhere in between. Serving as not only my first car, but that of all my siblings, the Altima was put through its paces and then some. It had stayed in California while I went to Arizona, but fate brought us back together in August of 2010.

After years of abuse, alternating weather extremes, minor collisions, and the relentless march of mileage, the Altima had one foot in the grave, but still managed to reluctantly cough to life when you turned the key. Three years later, and thanks to many man-hours and numerous replacement parts, the Altima has a new lease on life. This new life, though, is likely to be shorter than the first. A few days ago, the odometer clicked over to 179,000 miles, and though the car runs far better than it did at 160K, the big two-hundred is not far off.

The Altima is on the cusp of its twilight years. It’s not hard to see why. A few examples… It’s burning a quart of oil every 1,000 miles; its junkyard bumper is held on with zip ties, right next to its bent-up junkyard fender and junkyard headlight; there are mysterious rattles and vibrations that come and go, and will probably never be fixed. It turns 19 next month, and has already led a long, hard life. Like many fellow retirees, it will probably never leave the Valley of the Sun again, even in death… which I don’t think will happen soon (at least not before the Eagle can take its place), but I’ll be here to report it when it does. 

There is some reason to think that it may have been trying to leave this world for some time. There was the time last year when it started voiding its coolant all over the road via a bad water pump bearing, in the middle of the summer. Then several months later, a front tire developed a high spot which over a short time caused some of the suspension and steering components to be shaken to pieces. In the last six weeks, there have been two minor collisions. One was from an ill-advised left turn, and the second from another driver inexplicably backing up into the rear end in a nearly-empty parking lot.

I say “inexplicably” but I think we all know what’s going on. It’s tired of life, and it’s trying to end it. Even my young son can see the writing on the wall; "Dad, I think this car is giving up on you," he said yesterday. Sometimes it draws other cars into its feeble suicide plots, but nothing seems to work. But I try to look at it this way: if you don’t feel you’re succeeding at life, failing at dying is the next best thing, right?