Over the years I became fond of striking deals with the Deathtrap, a '91 Plymouth Voyager that my mom bought new in January of that year. Just get me to Lawrence, just get me home, that's all I ask.

For weeks I'd been asking the Deathtrap to get me to Chicago. It was quite honestly my final request, as I hadn't been planning to use the van there at all. Public transportation and my old Rockhopper should be enough to get me around, I reasoned, and rather than apply for parking I could just leave the Deathtrap at home and fly back and forth from grad school.

In hindsight my detour to B-town was ill-advised. It meant an extra sixteen hours of driving, time enough for an incredibly inconvenient malfunction.

And sure enough.

Four miles from Curtiss, a Wisconsin town that the AAA agent at first tried to assure me did not exist, I pulled to the side of the road with an overheating engine. The Deathtrap had been overheating a few weeks ago when I drove to the Cities for Carry-Out's wedding, and again earlier that day as I left Appleton for good with all of my worldy possessions, but in both cases I attributed the fault to the stiffling heat, hilly terrain, and a foolish decision to use the air conditioner.

In fact, I'd added coolant two weeks ago, rightly figuring that I was running low. But since I was in a rush to get back to Appleton, I added it to the overflow tank ("reserve tank," I thought in my ignorance), indicated by the red arrow, rather than wait for the radiator to cool down and pour the fluid down the proper hole, indicated by the green arrow.





Unbeknowst to me, my new coolant wasn't doing anything in the overflow tank. While talking about coolant systems with the tow-truck driver, who was driving me to a place in Chippewa Falls in case I needed to catch a bus home, I realized the error of my ways.

Once we stopped I added coolant right to the radiator and turned on the van. I decided to drive, and for a while things went well. Or differently, at least. The Deathtrap now had a problem with stopping: it would die at any stopsign or stoplight.

B-town residents may remember that I had this same problem several summers ago and it simply went away. So I kept driving. Right before the entrance to 94 in Eau Claire, the car struggled to maintain speed and then stalled. There was pope smoke and a vague burnt rubber smell, I opened the hood expecting to see flames.

I was relieved and thought I could fix the problem. If it wasn't coolant maybe it was oil or transmission fluid, though both were at acceptable levels. I topped them off, but that was the last time I drove the van. I'd just witnessed its death throws. It had driven 217,653 miles, about half of those with me behind the wheel.

The second tow truck brought me to St. Paul (where I wouldn't need a hotel) but got very lost trying to find the place AAA had directed us to. After half an hour of looking I called for directions to a new place, which turned out to be in Roseville. Spent the night at Dylan's and got a ride back to the place on his way to work the next day.

But they didn't have time to look at the Deathtrap. I had it towed a third time, to a place on Riverside Avenue. The guy said he'd call me after he was done looking at it, but he didn't (perhaps he felt like padding his hours to justify the $90 bill for the estimate), so after exploring the neato bike paths along the Mississippi River for about an hour and a half I went back to find the van already serviced.

It was not worth fixing. As my dad had prophesied when I first told him about my car trouble, I'd burnt a hole in the radiator and fryed the engine. One of the cylinders was misfiring and the guy said there were a number of other things going on that made the Deathtrap a lost cause. I called AAA for a fourth tow (towing is free for distances under 100 miles) and went out to a place in Savage, where they concurred and offered to take the van for salvage.

And that's the picture at the top of this post. The Deathtrap sitting in the yard, with everything of value removed. I waited for a few hours (thank you, iPod) until my dad came to retrieve me and drop off the title, and 33 hours after I'd left Appleton I was finally home.