Skip to main content

Dirty Brown Subaru Outback

Screenshot from “2011 Subaru Outlack AWD (Walkthrough).”

My mom liked to call the color, half-endearingly, “baby-shit brown.” I’m told Subaru manufactured vehicles in that particular color for only one year, 2011. The biggest Outback model—far from cute. I wouldn’t say that I lived out of it, though that’s not too far off. I was in college at the time, and my living situation consisted of sleeping on a three-season porch in Colorado Springs. I bought the car in Boston, the summer before my junior year, and threw a futon mattress in the back. By the time I got to my porch, I kept as many clothes in my room as I did in the back of the car. Wherever I slept, the temperature was always the same inside as out, and most mornings I was drowning in high-altitude sunshine.

It was a dirty car. If I was with friends and we stepped out of a bar and saw a dumpster in the parking lot, someone would say, “Look, it’s the passenger seat of K’s car.” Lots of laughs. Once, driving from Colorado Springs to Moab, Utah, half the rear bumper released itself from the frame. I could see it waving through the back windshield like a shit-brown flag against the canyons and red dust. I kept promising to plastic-weld the bumper back together, but a Frankenstein-like stitch job with black tape did the job well enough. As they say: duct tape will fix anything but a broken heart. My friends took to calling the car “Dirty Gerty,” with a flair for rhyme. Why Gertrude? Who knows.

The beginning of the end for Gerty came at high speed. It’s not as frightening as that might sound. Visiting home after graduation, near Boston, I was doing eighty on Route 2 when the car stalled. I pulled over to the side of the road and got it started again. On a side street, after I came to a complete stop, the engine stalled again. It was an automatic. By the time I got it to a garage, I was basically keeping a hand, twist-ready, on the key in the ignition. Blown transmission, not worth replacing, considering the condition of the car. After three years, close to a hundred thousand miles, and nights spent in at least half of the lower 48 (MA, VT, ME, NH, RI, NY, PA, MD, VA, OH, IL, IN, IA, ID, MI, MN, MO, KS, NE, CO, UT, AZ, NM, CA, OR, WA) and five Canadian provinces (NB, NS, ON, PE, QC), I donated Gerty to charity.

Because it was a limited model-color run, I don’t see too many Gertys out on the roads. I saw one this morning. In my chest, I felt that familiar flip, my foot pressing the pedal to the floor, climbing something steep, looking over at a friend, Max or Rowan, Fiona or Hollis, with a sea of cans and coffee mugs at their feet.

 

Kelan Nee is a poet and carpenter from Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Felling, is forthcoming from the University of North Texas Press in 2024. He lives in Houston.


from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/vgD6jdV
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.  —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more