It was the fall of 1975. I was starting college and my Dad gave me my first car: a 1969 Plymouth Valiant, slant six, shift on the column. It wasn’t glamourous, and it wasn’t my choice. But it did turn into an adventure, a true adventure, not the Detroit/Hollywood adventures of television commercials: sleek vehicle cruising along the Pacific Coast Highway, hugging a ribbon of a road, waves crashing below. No, the Valiant was hugging the right lane, the “slow lane”, and if anything was crashing below, it was the muffler dragging along the pavement.
My dad called the car “trusty” and he was right. The Valiant’s engine started every time I turned the key, every time. Everything else was cosmetic. The speedometer didn’t work, it just flopped back and forth from 0 to 100. Back and forth. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t have sped if I tried. Cosmetic. The passenger side door wouldn’t open, which was okay, because I almost never had a passenger. Nobody could remember when they had their last tetnous shot. The rust scared them, I guess. Cosmetic. The hood was tied closed with a rope, and back in the days of full service gas stations, I got a cheap laugh watching the attendant trying to figure just how he would check the oil. No boy scouts there. Cosmetic.
For all our family cars, a tetanus shot was a good idea. Sometimes I felt self-conscious driving the Valiant in my home town, a rust-free town of affluence. But the Valiant gave me an edge. I could park my car anywhere, get out, slam the door and walk away. I didn’t have to lock it. No one took it when I accidentally left the keys on the hood. After classes, I realized that I couldn’t find my keys. I hurried to the parking lot, and sure enough, there were my keys, on the hood, just where I left them. I laughed out loud. Keys on the hood and the car was still there. “Trusty.”
That car got me to every place I was going. It never quit on me. Except there was one time it delayed me. A hose went out in a small town between college and home. I guess it was a town. It was a gas station and a mechanic at a cross roads. While I patiently waited for the new hose, another family came in for a repair. The son was wearing his Westpoint uniform. He was proud. His parents were proud. We were nowhere near Westpoint, not even in the same state. Why he had it on, I couldn’t figure, except pride maybe. He earned it.
When the mechanic came out of the garage bay, wiping his hands on a blackened rag, he told me my car was ready. He glanced at the young man, and asked, “You work at a hotel around here?” There were no hotels around there. There was nothing around there, except the state highway the rest of us were eager to get back on. The pause was long. The response was curt, “No, I go to Westpoint.” Unaffected, the mechanic just said, “oh.” Then, with my new hose and a lighter wallet, I got on that state highway and bee-lined for home, as much as my trusty Valiant could bee-line.
Not only did the back wheels keep turning the front wheels, as my dad used to say, but that car taught me how to be resourceful and even creative. It was nearly a zen-like experience the day I couldn’t get the driver’s door to close. That was a new challenge, but I remained calm and focused as I got the rope out of the trunk. Rope was standard equipment in that car, so was an old wool army blanket to put under a rear tire to get traction in icy weather, and so was the chain, in case someone had to pull my car, which I felt was a rather negative thought I didn’t want to have in the car’s presence. So, I rolled the front and back seat windows down on the driver’s side a few inches, closed the door as well as I could, and tied it up. I felt pretty proud, cruising down the interstate, until it started raining and I got wet.
Years later, we traded in the Valiant for a bare-bones, not-a-single-frill, small, beige Toyota pick-up. “Trade-in” is a bit of an over statement. We didn’t actually get any money, the dealer just took it off our hands. It was ready for “Valiant Heaven” by that time. The Toyota was great, but its newness and dependability made it boring. Nothing was broken. It took no ingenuity to drive the thing. No adventure, no lessons on humility, no opportunity for creativity.

Nothing memorable about it. What real fun was that? Everyone in America should have to drive a slant six, shift on the column, aging Valiant, especially uppity teenagers. It would be like mandatory Peace Corps service, without the foreign language, or going to Oz without the ruby slippers.