The picture above is nothing special. It was a test picture I took with Rona’s new camera just to make sure the camera was working before she takes it on a trip. There was no art in framing it, no thought in the shot, just true point and shoot.

But since I shot it a short while ago, I HAVE begun to think.

That’s my 2001 Isuzu Trooper. It’s got well over 200,000 miles on it. The automatic windows on the drivers side don’t work. It’s got some rust I can’t seem to stop. It’s been wrecked at least twice – once by the previous owner, which left an odd dent in one the doors, and once not long ago when a gentleman backed into me in a parking lot.

But to me, it’s something special. It’s my fourth Trooper. The first two ran up to between 250 and 350 thousand miles. They carried my family all over the eastern United States. I particularly remember trips back and forth to Disney, and Christmas visits to my parents, the Trooper, which is a very basic box on wheels, packed full. They are not fancy, but amazingly tough and reliable and they last a long, long time.

One of the things I particularly love about Troopers is that they are so plain, so simple. Driving one reminds me of the same feel I had riding with my grandfather in his red International Harvester pickup. Talk about simple. The thing clunked into gear with a solid “clank” and while it wasn’t fast, you could feel the solidness of it.  Having a vehicle with that same feel to it brought to mind my grandfather every time I drove into it, every time I pushed the stick shift into gear and felt it pull off from a stop.

My father had Troopers too. In fact, he gave me my first one, a generous gift at a time in my life when I needed that help. I think he’s had four or five of them himself. He still drives one today. It’s the “go to” vehicle for us in RIchmond, the one my sister borrows when snow hits the city, or I borrow when I need to haul something.

After my divorce, I bought another old trooper. My work depends on my always having transpiration and so a second car make sense. If one is in the shop, life and work goes on.   I was happily reminded of my Grandfather yet again as I drove the car to my apartment for the first time. It helped that it was red, the same color as my grandfather’s pickup. There was something comforting about the old fashioned red bock with the mechanical field in the midst of a life falling apart in a way that made no sense to me at the time.

That one however, didn’t make the 200,000 mark. One day during a Christmas trip, the engine caught on fire on the side of interstate 95, south of Washington DC. Bright orange flames flew from the engine to the back in a matter of minutes. I got the kids out and a few things before the fire department came and cooled off the remains. In the end, that one got towed away and was crushed into a bright red (with charred black) cube of burnt metal.

I got an award out of it though. My niece, who was riding with me and my son that day, later created “The Big Award” for taking care of them in the midst of what, for all of us, but particularly for the kids, was a harrowing experience. “The Big Award” was carefully handcrafted and is a treasure that I have out and on display to this day.

My sister and her husband had one for many years too. A Forest Green one that served them well until one of their daughters, whilst learning to shift in a school parking lot, found the wrong gear didn’t combine well with a solid push on the gas pedal and sent their Trooper careening over the curb, and through the brick wall into the art classroom. Yeah, they are that tough. (Dad and daughter survived just fine.).

I like simple and I like tough, so a year or so later, as I prepared to move to Vermont, I bought my fourth, the one you see in the picture above. I still needed a second car, and a four wheel drive is important up here in Vermont. This was, with it’s odd dent in the door was available ridiculously cheap and I bought it. Four years and close to a hundred thousand miles later, it’s still my every day transportation, carrying old furniture I might be repairing, my bike, my daughter’s life at college, whatever needs to be carried. My other car is a convertible, but this is the one that holds the most emotion for me, odd as it seems.

Part of that emotion is built on the memories, but part of it belongs to this one in particular. Because moving to Vermont was a big deal for a Virginian steeped, maybe steeped too much in Virginia. I moved here for love, that most risky, least practical and most important of reasons, and it marked a major change in life that I chose, not one that was chosen for me.

So, all that, in a brief test shot off my back porch flooded through me. And I could go on and on.

Because life is like that. It’s not about things or titles or money or jobs. It’s about stories and memories and the things we come to love for not always rational reasons. Yes, I could give you lots of rational reasons for having the Trooper. It IS reliable. It DOES last forever. It holds an obscene amount of stuff. All that practical stuff.

But that’s not why I love the dang thing. It’s because of the memories and stories and possibilities that it has come to represent. My house and life is full of things like that. But I’ll stop here.

You get the idea.

Tom