The Adventure Car
Swerving off to work in the earliest hours of a clear frigid morning, the brightest shooting star that I’d ever seen shot through the sky and lit up the horizon like a beacon from heaven. I was worrying about bills. I was worrying about life. I’d been gunning the gas so I wouldn’t be late.
Breath steaming in the headlights, engine rumbling defiantly in complaint of the delay, I braked to the shoulder and stepped into the winter darkness to make a wish. I wished that I could pull back onto the road of life behind the wheel of my adventure car, and I wished that I could fly like a shooting star straight past the office and back into the carefree wilds…
By John Luthens
My earliest drive into the great outdoors was fueled by the poetic mantra of getting away with as little work as possible and rolling down roads less travelled.
Kicking up dust down dirt lanes and deer trails, plowing through the brush of bottomless trout swamps. I cruised the fields and forests on the horsepower of my own two feet and never had to worry about running out of gas, which, as it turned out, was a direct economic consequence of the first half of my poetic creed ensuring that I never had money to afford any better mode of transportation.
Inevitably, the time came when I was forced to leave my childish code in the rearview mirror. The natural world had grown too large, the less-travelled roads too long to walk. And, being that my father flat-out refused to let me keep driving the family station wagon through the trout swamps, I needed an adventure car of my own if I wanted to keep my wanton lifestyle rolling.
I kicked at the tires of gainful employment for an entire summer in the hayfield vistas of northwestern Wisconsin. Painting barns, picking rocks, trying not to get stampeded by cattle. They say hard work has its rewards, and I couldn’t agree more. Farmers have the finest bass ponds around. If I was careful to hide my fly rod beneath the tractor seat, the pounds of fish I caught in the back-forty easily outdistanced the pounds of rock I’d been sent to pick.
Dreams of budding adulthood came to fruition twofold by summer’s end. I was blacklisted for life from every hired-hand circle in the farm country of northwestern Wisconsin, which was a strategic career move that likely helped out the farmers more than me, and I got me an adventure car of my very own, which was a career move that immediately began paying out dividends like a loaded slot machine.
She was hiding shyly beneath a tarp in a barn that I was supposed to be painting; A glorious 1972 Chevy Nova, rusted and weathered gun-metal green with its odometer stuck stubbornly in the glory years and only a hint of chewed wiring and mice droppings on the floorboard. I’d peeked in innocently enough, looking for a place to hide my fly rod, but I came back out in love with the farmer’s daughter.
I bartered like a gypsy and got her for a song. The farmer was even kind enough to have the tank topped off and the engine spitting with adventurous fury when I went to pick her up. He’d never been too keen on the bass-fishing angle of my work ethic, and I think he had a real daughter who was around my age. He wanted to me to drive away as far and fast as possible and never look back.
We were inseparable after that; rambling, camping, bumping together to the ends of the earth and through outdoor tangles that even rabbits had trouble navigating. We ran beneath oaken cathedrals of autumn fire, and I hunted squirrels while sitting on her hood. We scouted for deer stands down fire lanes that weren’t big enough to make it onto a map. And as for the trout swamps – we were welcomed into the bogs of hidden streams where few dared to tread and none possessed the insanity to drive.
Come winter, we plowed onto snowbound lakes and laid miles of tip-ups for pike. My adventure car was even equipped with a convenient rust hole in the bottom that was brilliantly engineered for panfish jigging. I needed to leave the doors open and my head hanging out to avoid asphyxiation when I kept the heater running, but the Nova’s legendary status as a portable ice shack is a hot-stove topic in northwestern Wisconsin’s ice-fishing world to this day.
Of course, like any union, we had our share of disagreements. She drank oil like it was water, her starter was cranky if she thought we were going to work or school, and she was prone to throwing tantrums and getting stuck in the furthest corners imaginable. I might have sworn at her once or twice, and I accidentally dusted her side with birdshot when we were road hunting grouse together, but we never stayed mad for long and were usually humming along in time for our next adventure.
Sadly, when the time came to leave my small-town wilds behind and move off to college and work in the city, my adventure car and I said a tearful farewell and went our separate ways. She was a country girl at heart, and she would have been miserable in the urban jungle.
I turned her loose to run carefree into the hills, hunting, fishing, exploring – starting and stopping when she wished with her engine growling disdain for all things work and worry, peering through the adventurous eyes of her headlights and into the starlit sky of eternal youth.
I hope she is still out there, doing exactly that… I can’t help wishing that I was too.
John Luthens is a freelance writer, photographer, and outdoor journalist from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com, or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com