Eventually this and a failing clutch led to the car being parked outside my father's garage pending some sort of plan (ultimately, the plan was to sell the car, which I still regret letting myself get talked into). While it was parked, I was still commuting to campus every day (online classes not really being a thing yet at the University of Maine at that time), so I was issued the Spare Car.

I should probably explain for those who didn't grow up with this kind of thing. Until quite recently, my father always had a Spare Car somewhere on the premises. Sometimes it came from some relative or other for whom he'd found a newer replacement and taken the old one off their hands. Often it was just whatever car he'd been driving prior to his current main car, since for most of his life he declined to trade in old cars when buying new(-to-him) ones on general principles.

In this case it was the latter. The car in question was a 2004 Pontiac Grand Prix, which started life as his wife's boss's company car. Said boss bought the car for himself when its term of company service was up, then eventually sold it to Dad. By the time it came into my hands, it had something like 240,000 miles on it, but, amazingly, everything still worked.

It also had the oddest wheels of any car I've ever had.

alas! that's the Saab in the background

On the driver's side, they look perfectly straightforward--five-spoke alloys with a sort of "turbine" (or possibly "shuriken") style to them. The thing is, Pontiac didn't bother making the version for the other side of the car...

... so over on that side, they're going backward.

Those wheels were pretty (apart from their odd directional quirk), but mechanically they were a mighty pain in the ass. We used to take them off each fall and put on a set of steelies with snow tires on them, because it was easier than changing just the tires and it kept the fancy wheels out of the snow and salt. The fall changover was always an ordeal, because those wheels really didn't want to come off the car.

And when they went back on in the spring... well, you know how owner's manuals always say to retighten the nuts on alloy wheels after the first 50 miles they've been back on the car? Well, I'm not sure exactly what physical process happens with alloy wheels that makes that advisable, but the black Grand Prix was very, very subject to it for some reason. After the first spring changeover while I had it, one of the front wheels nearly fell off before I even made it home. I ended up stopping at a fire station and borrowing their torque wrench.

I also crashed it twice, both times in winter. The first time was completely my fault. I was on my way home from class one snowy night, and I had slowed down, but not enough. I hit a patch of ice and the car slid dramatically sideways into the snowdrift thrown up by the plow at the side of the Interstate. I was fine, and the car was mostly fine too, but it wasn't getting out of the snow without help and I couldn't get out of the car until it got out of the snow, because it was buried up to the bottoms of the windows.

I called the State Police to report my situation, but before a trooper could arrive, a county sheriff's deputy happened to pass by and noticed the anomalous situation. He summoned a tow truck and hung around until it came to pull the Pontiac out of the snow. Nice fella; he even retrieved the torn-off driver's side ground effect and front inner fender from wherever they'd ended up and tossed it in the back seat for me so I wouldn't have to get out and wade after it.

Apart from the ripped-off plastic, the car was undamaged. I drove it to Dad's, and the next day he nailed it back together (almost literally; for the rest of its life, you could clearly see the row of screw heads inside the inner fender where he'd reattached it to the car). There were a couple of big cracks in the plastic bits up front, but those don't do anything anyway, so we were back in business.

The second winter crash was stranger. I was on my way home from the Camden Conference, a foreign-affairs conference held each February in the coastal town of Camden, which I had attended as part of a course for school. It was snowing hard when I set out for home from Camden at around noon, one of those slushy days when the temperature isn't far below freezing, and I was being quite cautious as I drove along the coastal stretch of U.S. 1 between Camden and Belfast. I couldn't have been going more than 30 or 35 miles per hour, on a road where the speed limit is 55, when the car just sort of... unhooked from the ground.

I had no further input into the situation at that point, just riding along as the Pontiac executed a graceful 270-degree rotation and backed off the lefthand side of the road into the ditch. This time I could actually get out, because the snow wasn't very deep there, but the car was once again not going anywhere without help.

Infuriatingly, while I sat there waiting for the State Police (occasionally turning the car on to wipe the fast-gathering snow off the windshield, then turning it off again so as not to gas myself, since the tailpipes were buried), traffic kept zooming past on Route 1 in both directions at speed, as if no weather was happening. Pickup trucks, station wagons, hatchbacks, everybody zooming by, while I sat there just waiting for someone else to find the same patch of black ice I evidently had and come hurtling into the side of my car... but no one ever did.

Presently a state trooper pulled up, and we both got out of our cars to survey the situation. And here's the thing: the Pontiac was perfectly perpendicular to the road, neatly backed into a gap between a tree and someone's mailbox that was about six inches wider than the car. It looked for all the world like someone had, deliberately and with some care, parked it there. Like, in better weather, if the owner of that mailbox had wanted to sell a car, that's where he would have put it with a FOR SALE sign on it (but perhaps a bit farther back from the road).

"Nice work putting it right there, though," the trooper remarked, deadpan.

"I can't take credit for that, Sir Isaac Newton was driving," I said, and he laughed.

Postscript: I sent the invoice for the tow truck from that incident to the Political Science department at the University, on the grounds that I wouldn't have been there if they hadn't made me go to Camden in February, but they didn't reimburse me. I wasn't really expecting them to, I just thought it was funny. At $65, I estimate the owner made approximately $10 per foot on that tow, since all he did was drag the Pontiac out of the ditch.

In spite of those incidents, the Pontiac served me well for a couple of years. It wasn't without its faults, most of which it shared with all of the so-called "four-door coupes" that carmakers have tried to do over the last 20 or so years. The coupe-style roofline with four doors instead of two makes for very small door openings, and I'm a very not-small guy, so there was a particular sort of personal origami required to get into and out of the car. This trick never failed to astonish small children who saw me perform it in, e.g., supermarket parking lots. I was once asked to do it again because a particular little boy's (absolutely mortified) mother had missed it the first time.

Once inside it, though, it was very comfortable. Because it had started life as a company car for a branch manager of an oil supply company, it was a GT2, the fanciest Grand Prix trim level they made that year (second in price only to the GTP, which was the version with the supercharged engine, but GTPs weren't as plush on the inside). It thus had almost every option Pontiac offered, including heated leather seats, which were still a novelty item in 2004 on anything that didn't say "Mercedes-Benz" on the back. It had a head unit that could play cassettes AND compact discs. I used to kid Dad when he bought it that you could tell someone else had originally ordered it, because he would never have bought a new car with any of that stuff in it. This was the Cadillac of Pontiacs.

It was also the only car I've ever seen with a calendar in it.

That was the default screen for the trip computer (which would also do all the usual trip computer things, like elapsed time and distance and a hilariously inaccurate distance-to-empty estimate). We've all seen cars with clocks, but the '04 Grand Prix is the only one I've had that would tell you what the date and day of the week were. Note that it doesn't specify the year, even though, in order to make the day of the week come out right, it had to have a setting for same.

One of the things I really miss about that Pontiac is the gauge cluster color. It was all that shade of orange, which made the cockpit very soothing at night, because it meant the instrument lights didn't have to be very bright to be distinct.

this picture wasn't taken at night, but you get the idea. also note the license plate of the car ahead, which was the main reason I took the picture; behold the world's only fully self-aware Camry driver

Another fun trick this car had was its speedometer. You'll note in the photo above that it doesn't have the usual second, smaller ring of markings calibrated in kilometers per hour. Instead, if you pressed a particular button on the dash, the illuminated "MPH" on the speedometer face would go out, "km/h" would light up instead, and the analog gauge would adjust itself accordingly. If you did that while you were driving at highway speed, the needle would suddenly jump from 75 to 120, which was great fun if your passenger hadn't noticed you pressing the button.

The metric button was occasionally useful, because in those days, for convoluted reasons, I was seeing a dentist up in Canada, where they go for that sort of thing. On one of those trips, it was a very pleasant day, and I had nowhere else to be, so despite the fact that I'd just had one of my lower molars completely rebuilt, I decided I would take the opportunity to go on a little field trip to a place I had always wanted to see.

Many years ago, when I was a wee lad, I was poring over a map of Maine and its surroundings, as you do, when I noticed an arresting place name in the Canadian province of Québec. Off in the woods north of the western of Maine's two northern "horns", in between the Saint Lawrence River and Lake Témiscouata, there's a town which rejoices in the name "Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!" Exclamation points included. I had been meaning to go there for years, since long before I could drive a car. It suddenly and randomly occurred to me on that sunny summer day that I had plenty of daylight left, I was already in Canada, and I should finally go and see Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!

So I did, and here's the thing. On a small-scale map, it looks like it's really not that far from Perth-Andover, New Brunswick, where my dentist's office was located, to Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! It is, in fact, slightly more than a hundred miles. Now that's not super far away, it's not like I randomly decided to drive to New Mexico, but still, it was farther than I thought it would be when I set off, and with the best will in the world, the Trans-Canada Highway in rural Québec and New Brunswick is not exactly Interstate 90 between Springfield and Schenectady.

It was worth it, though. Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! is a tiny town in the woods without much to see or do, but it's very pretty countryside, and it does have points of interest. There's an astronomical observatory there, and a nice little country-town pharmacy. Like most towns in French Canada, it possesses a colossal stone church, which looks like it could probably hold not only the town's entire population of 1,318 but also everyone who lives in the adjoining territories.

And, of course, me being me, I only took this one photo the whole time I was there.

In my defense, by the time I actually reached the town, the anesthetic had worn off and I felt a bit like someone had hit me in the side of the face with a shovel. I was also hungry and very thirsty, having been advised not to eat or drink for at least four hours after leaving the dentist's office, besides which, I had discovered earlier in the day that my credit union-issued debit card didn't work in Canada. (Luckily, I thought to fill up just before entering Canada, so I didn't need gas.) Aching and tired, I looked around, satisfied myself that I had seen what there was to see, and then headed back.

I crossed back into Maine at Madawaska, almost exactly at the four-hour mark, and the first thing I saw after clearing Customs was a Tim Hortons donut shop. Now, I've had some tasty donuts in my life, but I have to say, the glazed chocolate donut I bought at that Tim Hortons late on that long afternoon may have been the single most delicious food item I have ever placed into my chewhole.

The moonshot Pontiac soldiered on for another couple of years of hard service, going back and forth between Millinocket and Orono every weekday, until--coincidentally enough, in my last semester as an undergraduate--it finally developed the habit of just... suddenly shutting off occasionally. It only seemed to do so on the Interstate, and repeated attempts to diagnose it led nowhere. All we, Mr. Goodwrench, and an independent mechanic ever seemed able to find was what wasn't causing it. I think it was probably the engine management computer, but those are expensive, so we didn't buy one just to find out. Instead, the car was semi-retired to "just driving around town" duties and I moved on to the next chariot.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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