Car Trouble, Part 1

I had a car in Wales.

 I know what you’ll say. Really? A car? That’s amazing!

 Don’t be snide. You’ve had cars too, I realize that. But when I lived in Wales as a graduate student, in the early 1980s, a creature came into my life for which the term “car” is unsatisfactory. Calling Gimli a car would be like calling your mother a mammal. Which is true, but in most cases insufficient.

On the outside, Gimli was the color of a week-old mushroom. His interior was bright red. He was a 1967 Morris Mini, and his relation to the Mini Coopers of today—those flashy, sturdy, burly bugs that tool confidently across our highways—is semantic at best. The ancestral Minis of the 1960s and seventies looked like starved versions of today’s cars. They were smaller, skinnier, frailer in every way; if they’d had lungs they would’ve been consumptive. I’m not tall, but I could look down on Gimli’s roof. Driving him on the motorway, my line of vision corresponded to the top of a tractor-trailer’s tires.

Even within the breed, Gimli was the runt of an automotive litter. He was rickety with rust. Every now and then he’d sputter, and I’d have to get out, crawl underneath, and bang his petrol pump with my shoe. The driver’s door didn’t close properly, which meant that in rain he took on water. And it rains a lot in Wales. Going uphill, backseat passengers’ feet got wet; going down, the tide shifted to the front. And yet Gimli and I undertook trips that other Mini owners never dared dream of, let alone embark upon (this may have been a function of my foolhardiness and naïveté, but it reflected well on Gimli). He served many; he flew like a wayward wind along the ringletted roads of West Wales. Read More »