The Conestoga wagon of the future

My relationship with cars has always been an intrepid one. When I was a teenager, my parents offered me three choices as a coming-of-age experience. These were a car, one of those Draw Blinky mail-order art classes of the time, or a trip to Europe on a Girls of Sussex County tour.

Fortunately, I didn't choose the Draw Blinky art class, for it might have changed my painting style for all time – and not for the better! Now I know that most teenagers would have chosen the car, but being a Luddite, I was scared to death of the process of operating a vehicle, so I chose the trip to Europe.

My next-door neighbor/friend, whom many of you may know as Jack Bushey, had volunteered to teach me to drive. We spent many Saturday afternoons practicing on the back roads of Sussex County. However, years passed by and I still had no license; I went to college out west, and I certainly wasn't going to drive there, also being seriously lacking in directional ability. I still have to put my hand over my heart and say the Pledge of Allegiance every time I have to turn right or left.

When I returned home after college, my mother had bought me an orange Volkswagen Super Beetle convertible. She accepted my choice of color for once, not like the Jane Pauley-type outfits she usually picked out for me. I'm sure her car color choice would have been beige. It sat in the driveway for months while I studied the manual for the driver's test, but what really scared me was the road test. My mother made me even more nervous by saying, "I hope you'll pass; you have that Fowler inability with mechanical things," meaning her mother-in-law's family.

Finally my mother and stepfather went on a weeklong trip to Wisconsin, and I stayed home with the soothing, kindly, motherly Gladys Brittingham for the week. Gladys cornered me one day, jingling the keys to the VW, and stated, "We're going over to motor vehicle right now, and you'll pass. You're smart enough!" And so we did, and I passed, feeling more even proud and liberated than when I graduated from college!

That was when I parallel-parked for the first and last time. I sat in our driveway and started and stopped the poor car over and over again to prove I was mechanical enough to do it. Of course, the car had been purchased with a practical purpose to get me to the school-teaching job my mother wanted for me, but more importantly, it gave me the happy freedom to move to my first apartment on Rehoboth Avenue in the Moore Building.

Many years and several cars later, when my mother passed away, I inherited her navy blue 1995 Ford Escort. I suppose it symbolized my mother, for I became obsessive about its care. Our house in Wilmington on Greenbank Road was, indeed, situated on the top of a high bank with a steep flight of steps leading up to the house from the street. These became challenging in the winter.

I would tread down those steps at midnight during a blizzard to throw a quilt on that car’s front windshield. The pale, fogged, yellow-green headlights were like her own eyes. When the headlights became uneven, I took the car to the local Ford dealer. It was over 12 years old at the time, and the repairman pointed at it and laughed! I chastised him, saying, "You should show more respect for old Fords!" Later, a sign in front of their door said, "Old cars are welcome here."

These new electric cars frighten me now. In 1966, my parents drove me from Milton to Las Vegas, New Mexico, along Route 66 – more than 2,000 miles away. Our car broke down in Tulsa, Oklahoma. How are drivers to know if we can find those electrical charging stations on a long trip? I suppose there are really expensive hybrid cars that run on an electric charge as well as gas, but how many people can afford them?

I just finished watching the TV series "1883" about a wagon train on the Oregon Trail, and all of their trouble and danger. Will cars become the Conestoga wagons of the future? Will we live like they do in Cuba where cars that are decades old are still kept running because the Cuban government wouldn't ship new ones?

I hope my Alien-green Kia Soul can make it unless I meet real outer space aliens along the way who are willing to help me, instead of Comanche Indians.