by Robert LaFrance
On the last day of August, the day the safety check ran out on it, I took my old van to the ‘automobile recycling centre’. (Junkyards are passé.)
Whatever the place is called, I was sad to take the 1997 Plymouth Voyager in to its final resting place. We bought that vehicle in the year 2000 and, as they say, it didn’t owe us a dime. Walking away from it on August 31, I thought about all the wonderful times we’d had together as my kids grew up while the van, like myself, was growing older. But although I get better looking every day, the old van was rusting within and without. It needed a valve job, a new muffler, two rocker panels, a ball joint, a tire rod end, at least one strut, a lot of body work, and a dozen other things including a back door latch.
I didn’t mean to suggest that we had never had any mechanical trouble with the Voyager. After I had driven the van about a year, it overheated, and I took it to Donnie Hathaway, my late friend who lived in Upper Kilburn. He said that the water pump was leaking but my warranty, which still had a few thousand kilometres on it, should cover it. I took Mister Van to the local garage that did the service work for that warranty company and the mechanic said: “Oh, I’m sure that the water pump is covered, but I’ll just call to make sure.”
After a phone call he came back scratching his head. “That’s weird,” he said. “I called and (begin italics) the water pump (end italics) is under warranty, but not (begin italics) the case (end italics). You have a leak in your water pump case, but your water pump is fine, so they won’t pay for it. I guess it’s in the fine print.” I took the van back to Donnie Hathaway to see if he could find me a secondhand water pump with a case that didn’t leak. “You wait a minute,” he said. “I think I can braise that, but I can’t guarantee how long it will last.”
When I took the van to the junkyard on August 31, 2011, the braising job was still holding, but the warranty company had gone bankrupt in 2007. Now tell me there isn’t the occasional snippet of justice in this world, like when Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden got braised. (However, there’s still Henry Kissinger.)
That van was one of the few ever featured in a Telegraph-Journal Saturday supplement article when, after my older daughter’s second year at Mount Allison University in Sackville, I wrote a story and took a few photos showing just how much stuff one minivan would hold. Every cubic inch of that van was filled with my daughter’s things, and the roof container was packed solid too. One photo I took showed all those things on our porch, and it was clear that a tractor-trailer couldn’t have held all that, but my van did. A bee can’t fly, right?
Then there were the various trips to Gaelic College on Cape Breton Island, to Highland Games on PEI, in Fredericton, and to dozens of soccer games that occurred everywhere from Plaster Rock to Saint John to Moncton to Miramichi and all points south and east. The van showed up at county fairs, family reunions, potluck suppers, at fishing holes and what seemed like every event in the Maritimes.
I remember one of those times when the whole family piled in and headed for the Gaelic College just outside Baddeck, NS, where my daughters were going to spend a week learning bagpipe and drumming stuff. (I hope that not too technical.) It was a Sunday, no garages open, and as soon as we had the van packed I saw that a tire was slack. I pumped it up and off we went. If I could make it to Fredericton, I could get the tire fixed or get a new tire if need be. Hell, we were made of money back then.
At Coldstream the van was weaving back and forth so I had to pump the tire again. Finally we got to Fredericton where I checked the tire. It still held 35 psi; I couldn’t believe it. Should I trust it? Yup. We drove all the way to Cape Breton without a further problem from that tire, and it was months before another tire (not that one) went flat. Go figure.
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