For liability reasons, the garage gofer escorted me up a flight of creaky stairs to the room where my friend rested.
We side-stepped two drop cloths hung from the ceiling like laughable privacy curtains in a hospital room and I stopped cold. I knew him immediately: his toothless grin and the crushed right cheek of a fender I’d patted for good luck when we rode him from L.A. to Portland.
I’d named him Magellan after the Spanish explorer. In 1518, his fleet swept through the Tierra Del Fuego in search of the East Indies. I thought that naming my car after an explorer would make me more of one.
It did, kind of. My wife and I rode many tail- and head-winds in Magellan. He’d ferried us to Ventura where our first dog, Louie, joyously scrambled the sea foam. He shuttled us at a funereal pace to re-home Louie after he bit three people. He was our one-car caravan the day we adopted our Lilly, the Boston terrier. He swished me through a year’s worth of rain and tears to reach my dying father’s side. He shielded us from the Central Valley’s tar-ripping heat en route to my Bay-dwelling in-laws. He captained us through the pitted Siskiyou Pass toward our new lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Magellan was my quest to circumnavigate life. I know even Priuses don’t live forever. But, I’d secretly hoped he’d remain our faithful ride until age blurred street signs and our reactions times pushed the margins of safety.
During a stopover in The Philipine’s Mactan Island, Ferdinand Magellan the explorer was shot in the right leg with a poisoned arrow. He died shortly thereafter. Three weeks ago, Magellan the car was mortally wounded when I filled a left-hand turn lane and another Prius slammed Magellan’s starboard bow. The impact shot Magellan and me into the path of oncoming traffic. A van screeched to a stop 20 feet in front of Magellan’s smashed body.
Neither the other driver nor myself were seriously injured. Pictorial evidence and the debris field left no doubt: I’d slipped into the left-turn lane a few feet early. Mia culpa. I killed Magellan.
In the salvage garage, a dusty mist hung above Magellan and had rained upon his undamaged hood. The garage gofer stood back as I ran my fingers gently along Magellan’s face and shuddered. Someone could use you, I thought. Your surviving parts could be grafted onto other cars with missing pieces. Please. Tell me they can, garage gofer. Yes, sir, they will.
I emptied the contents of Magellan’s hatch and glove box into plastic bags. For 12 years, he shouldered our frayed and torn burden. Parking stubs. Gum wrappers. A petrified protein bar meant for a homeless person. The tire gauge whose threads will never interlock his valve stems again.
One final peek through Magellan’s rear view mirror, then, his windshield. Etched in the hood’s dust were the faint headlands of forgiveness around which Magellan sailed.