RIP Red Hot, 2001-2017 (My car, 2010-2017)

I'm in love with my car. 

If you spend a lot of time driving growing up, then you never forget your first car. The car in which you learned that everyone else on the road is a bad driver--except for you, of course. The car that gave you the freedom of the open road. And the car in which you maybe learned the consequences of that freedom, improperly exercised: speeding tickets, car accidents, breakdowns because of bad maintenance (you can't ignore those flashing indicators forever). Although America's car culture has waned in recent years, and some would like to get rid of human-driven cars, America is still the most car-centric country in the world. And for many teenagers, a license and a car open up an entire world.

And so I could not help but to feel sad yesterday, when an era ended at the Butler household, as my first car made its last journey from our driveway on a flatbed truck to be donated. Red Hot, as so christened by my sister Annie, had served our family well for the past 10 years. She drove the 2002 Red Ford Escape from 2007 to 2010, after the unfortunate demise of another vehicle. And starting in February 2010, about a month after I finally got my license (on New Year's Eve 2009), Red Hot was mine.

Mine, all mine. 

It's weird, what you remember about something. I can remember the first time I drove Red Hot to my high school. It was a typical gross Cincinnati February day, cold enough to be unpleasant but not cold enough actually to snow, so we got rain instead. The song "Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James and the Shondells (whose frontman is a Dayton, Ohio native), played on the radio. I can remember when Red Hot's odometer hit 100,000, in the spring of my senior year of high school. I can remember most (though not all) of the incredible assortment of passengers who, at one point or another, occupied my car with me at the wheel. I can remember getting lost in various places throughout the state of Ohio, and having to intuit my way back in an age before smartphones (or before I had a smartphone, anyway). I can remember summer evenings on highways with the windows cracked and the radio playing "Hotel California" (sans colitas) or "Running On Empty," and nights with the eerie backing of Pink Floyd, "In the Air Tonight," or Coast to Coast AM. It's possible I'll have similar experiences again in a different vehicle, perhaps, but never the same ones.

Red Hot's final odometer read out under our ownership.

Like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, Red Hot developed many quirks over the years. The AC was never great, but, eventually, it stopped working altogether (which is why I would have my windows open on highways on summer evenings), though the heat functioned fine. This served me well in Michigan, where Red Hot lived out most of the prime of his life. But the heat was never powerful enough to melt the arctic runoff ice off the windshield very quickly, especially in the middle of a Michigan winter. The CD player could hold multiple disks at the same time, but only worked when it felt like it, and there was no way to predict when it would. The options were usually burned years prior, by friends or family members, though one CD with the "Chariots of Fire" theme on it made for some fun serenades of runners. The interior upholstery of Red Hot began falling apart early; I kept it up with as much duct tape as needed. The brakes also weren't the greatest. They never hurt anyone, but using another car's brakes always surprised me; I realized that some brakes didn't require a life-or-death push. But, as with many things, the quirks soon became part of the car's appeal.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing, though. It's worth remembering that there is always good with the bad. Red Hot is no exception. He suffered two accidents, one of which was my fault, and the other of which I watched happen helplessly from outside of my car. Fortunately, he survived both. He also survived many random maintenance issues: a brake broken by winter weather, a battery killed from being too wet, stopping the car in the middle of a drive to school. And perhaps because he was red, and because I was a young adult male, Red Hot also attracted the attention of northwestern Ohio's finest on a couple of occasions on my way to and from college, the first of which was occurred while I was distracted and jamming out to "Kashmir" by Led Zeppelin. I don't blame Red Hot for any of this, of course. For until we have self-driving cars, and unless we are caught in situations in which weather or physics deprive us of control, what we do with our cars merely reflects what we do with ourselves. That is always the essence of driving, the first real power-trip any of us have. At 16, the state deems us fit to control a machine that hurtles along the roads with thousands of pounds of momentum, alongside other machines moving in the same or different directions. It is an awesome power, and with awesome power comes awesome responsibility.

A selfie, taken in Red Hot on May 29, 2017, at the end of my last-ever time driving him.

I drove Red Hot in high school, went a few weeks in college without him and found it impossible. From then on, though I never took Red Hot on a true road trip, he dutifully ferried me back and forth between Hillsdale and Michigan on multiple occasions, the last of which was May 2015, a few days after I graduated. Alas, when I moved, car-less, to D.C. to become an urban coastal millennial, Red Hot's utility to the Butler family rapidly faded. With his capacious trunk space, he was great to have on hand for moving furniture, mulch, and dogs. And when all seven Butlers were home for special occasions--the holidays, a wedding, a funeral--he helped to ease tensions by allowing everyone to get around as needed. I was particularly pleased to return home and always find him there, waiting for me.

Red Hot, waiting patiently in our driveway, on his last day with the Butlers. 

The simple fact that he was there was comforting to me, a reminder that I could come home at any time and it would be like I had never left. This sense of returning was especially acute on the two occasions that I drove Red Hot to my high school as a college graduate: first, for my 5-year high school reunion (which probably wasn't long enough to be significant, if I could still drive my high school car to it); and again, for the last time, in May of 2017, to visit a high school teacher in the classroom just before his retirement. But most of the time, when my parents' now empty nest was at its emptiest, and there were no children around to drive him, Red Hot sat in the driveway unused, collecting rust and dust.

It is a struggle to pick just one experience to define my time with Red Hot, so I'll go with one of the more recent ones. On January 2, 2017, I started Red Hot just as "Champagne Supernova" by Oasis, one of my favorite songs, came on the radio. I was heading to downtown Loveland, for lunch with a friend. As I made the short drive, I rocked out to the song, turning up the volume at the moments when I knew the song kicked into its highest gear. I pulled into my parking spot at The Works, a fine brick-oven pizza restaurant in downtown Loveland, the moment the song ended, giving me a memorable experience and revealing to me how long it takes to drive to downtown Loveland. And on the way back, a few minutes before I returned home, "Time To Pretend" by MGMT, a song I richly associate with my high school years, came on the radio. I was hoping for as neat a return home as I'd enjoyed on the way out. As I approached my driveway, though, it didn't seem that I would get it. But when you have a car, you can just keep driving until the song is over. And so I did.

Red Hot's final moments in our driveway. 

These and many other memories and experiences and feelings mark my time with Red Hot, and have given him a steadfast place in my memory (and contributed to a love of driving that will make me resist self-driving cars when the government makes them mandatory sometime around 2050). But these objects for which we are nostalgic are not always themselves the real cause of the nostalgia. It's more the experiences they enabled, and the people we shared them with. That is what we're fond of. And that is why I will miss Red Hot.