The lady from the farm thought I knew what I was doing. She was wrong.
Not that I blame her for assuming I could park a pickup truck — I was behind the wheel of one. She expected me to be able to swing it, in reverse, into a muddy spot just big enough for a Fiat 500. A local could have done it, and given I was driving a 5.7-liter Ram crew-cab pickup truck on a farm in Alabama, the lady assumed I was a local.
For better or worse, we make assumptions about people based on the cars they drive. The Prius person is rarely confused for someone who has a Humvee. The minivan has a different target demographic than the muscle car. Rarely does someone with a smallish German hatchback trade it in for a giant king-cab pickup. But the car rental lot, with its mysteries of inventory management, tears all such assumptions apart.
I had reserved a full-size sedan at the Huntsville, Alabama, airport, plenty big to get my wife, kids, and luggage out to a farm for a wedding. But all the car rental people had left was the pickup. My wife’s brother had reserved an SUV for his crew. Instead, he got a white 15-passenger van, the sort usually seen transporting church youth groups or road-repair chain gangs. And my wife’s sister had rented a subcompact econobox. Instead, she roared up to the farm in a snarling, candy-apple-red Dodge Challenger.
If the automobiles we drive say something about who we are, renting a car can be like dressing up for Halloween.
It’s not always the fellow behind the rental counter choosing the costume. When I finished graduate school in Boston, I took a writing gig here in Washington, D.C. One of my pals, it turned out, was also heading down to D.C., and we figured we could save money by renting a station wagon just big enough for all our stuff. I made the mistake of letting my buddy pick it up. He came back not in a station wagon but a black Mustang convertible, its 5.0-liter engine gurgling at me.
“Take it back,” I protested.
“You’ll love it,” my pal said. “It does zero to 60 in … ”
“Take it back.”
“It’s all they had.”
It was such a likely story that there was no room to argue. There was room, however, for exasperation and some halfhearted griping. “Where are we going to put everything?”
My friend had what he presented as a solution: “We’ll put the top down, and then we can pile boxes as high as we like. We’ll just tie it all down.”
By the time we were done, the Mustang looked like the Grinch’s sleigh teetering on the tip of Mount Crumpit.
Even then, there wasn’t room for my prize possession: an arts-and-crafts armchair. Made of straight pieces of heavy oak, it was in the mission style and could have passed for an electric chair. But for all its severity, it was a miracle of comfort for reading. It was never going to fit on the Mustang.
Well, I had to come back to Boston the next weekend and get the chair then. I left it at the end of a hallway on the top floor of the house where I had been renting a room. I taped a note to the chair saying I would be back to pick it up. I figured that would be good enough, given that the other tenants were all seminarians. A week later, the chair was gone.
As for the daylong drive to Washington in the Mustang, top-down and loaded up like Okies escaping the Dust Bowl? It rained.
It also rained (and rained) in Alabama for the wedding in the barn. When the last dance had been danced and it came time to go, the 15-passenger van and the Dodge Challenger slipped around in the mud and tore up the sodden grass trying to get a grip. Not me. As I eased onto the farm’s main gravel lane, I began to appreciate the virtues of my giant pickup truck.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
