Liberty; or, Don't call him Frank

I hadn’t expected to fall in love. But something about him grabbed my interest and grabbed it quick. Maybe it was the confident way he carried himself, or his smooth moves. Heck, maybe it was his good-lookin’ backside. All I know is, when I glanced back over my shoulder as I was walking away, I heard him as plain as day murmur in sultry tones, “My name is Carlos.”

That was the beginning of our love story. Before long, he moved in with me, and we became inseparable. He was a little rough around the edges, sure. Sometimes he’d embarrass me, the way he growled and complained in public. But, I loved him. He gave me what I craved: Freedom. One-on-one attention. A way to get to the grocery store.

After fiveish years and more than 100,000 miles together, I said goodbye this week to my 2010 Jeep Liberty. It was time. The car no longer had the oomph to carry me safely where I needed to go. But, oh, what heartache it is to say goodbye to a hunk of metal that has been your companion and your friend.

I’ve always named my vehicles ― shoutout to Stanley, Stella, Oscar, and Mary Ann ― so I wasn’t surprised when this one named itself that first day I test-drove it.

The name grew, and so did the Liberty’s back story. The air conditioner knob, labeled in centigrade and not fahrenheit, clued me in to the car’s Canadian origins. Obviously, its real name was not Carlos but the uber-French “Guy,” pronounced the French way, rhyming with “free.”

But Guy, my Liberty decided, was a sissy name. He much preferred Carlos, a name oozing with Latino sensuality. No longer a Canadian citizen ― and, all due respect, buddy, not actually from Latin America ― the Liberty was now an American car, with the American name of Frank, which he hated.

(Those of you who name cars understand all this. Those of you who do not name cars…well, you just don’t get it, and that’s your loss.)

Guy Carlos Don’t Call Me Frank and I were quite the pair. He was loud from the get-go and would occasionally get louder until I fixed whatever was wrong with him, which usually took a while. He had been gently driven before we met, but, boy howdy, did we pack the miles on.

My 50-minute-one-way commute to work was just the start. The new job I’d fallen into was glorious and breathtaking. Despite my utter lack of training or experience, the nice folks at a nice newspaper hired me as a reporter at the ripe old age of upper-40-something. Until then, my life consisted of a string of volunteer and part-time gigs that kept my attention focused on my home, my church, and my kids’ small school. Suddenly, my eyes and my horizons exploded open in this new world of journalism, with Guy Carlos as my partner.

We went everywhere to track down a story. To courthouses and jails and soup kitchens and homeless shelters. To the driveways of brave, kind people willing to tell me their story. We raced to fires and zipped down shortcuts to get to crime scenes. We prowled wooded paths and slunk past drug houses and biker gang hangouts and got stuck on back roads where cell service was nonexistent.

When I wasn’t chasing a story, Guy Carlos and I were on the road to my kids’ colleges many hours away or seeking out forest paths I hadn’t yet wandered. He hauled tons ― possibly literally ― of Lake Huron rocks back to our house and carried my kayak from river to pond to creek. He carried me safely through countless whiteout snowstorms, the kind where you’re sure you’re going to slide into the nothingness and disappear forever.

In 2020, he paraded my robe-clad daughter, clutching her mortarboard and laughing as she sat on his roof with her feet dangling through the sunroof, in our small town’s best effort to give its high school graduates some form of normalcy. When my work life got too intense and I couldn’t take another day of the worry and fear and sadness that came with it, my car carried me away, flying down country roads where placid cows and sandhill cranes and sunlight could make me whole again.

Cleaning him out for sale was bittersweet. Through sniffles and muttered chants of, “It’s OK, it’s OK,” I rounded up the detritus of the past years: pocket rocks and smooth driftwood, shells from the peanuts that kept me awake on late drives home in the dark, dozens of pens I was forever dropping as I scribbled notes on the fly. Bits and pieces of the life I lived with this car by my side.

I saved removing his stickers for last. His back window ― held on by duct tape and Gorilla Glue ― had gradually filled with reminders of moments and ideas that had come to matter to me in this, my new life. A coffee shop sticker and one of Michigan, connecting me to places I love. An “I carry naloxone and I’ll help if I can” sticker to remind me that helping others does not start with judgement. A sticker reading, simply, “Adventure,” reminding me who I am and who I want to be.

The husband’s car was quiet as we pulled away from the Liberty. I took one last look over my shoulder and said one last mental goodbye.

The thing is, I wasn’t saying goodbye to Guy Carlos.

To the car I loved, yes. But my buddy Guy Carlos, the one who heard my tears and my prayers and my shouts of jubilation and my occasional expletives, the one who earned a pat on his dashboard when he overtook a slowpoke on U.S. 23 North and a last kiss on his steering wheel before I walked away for the last time, wasn’t metal.

Guy Carlos was an idea. He was everything that vehicle gave to me while it was part of my life. I lost the car. But I get to keep what it meant to me.

I started this blog post intending to expand it into a nice essay about some bigger concept with universal application. But I think I’ll stop here. Partly because I really, really need to blow my nose and the people in the coffee shop where I’m working are unnerved by the lady crying in the corner. But also, I think it’s OK to talk about letting go of something you love and let that be enough.

Bye, buddy.

Thanks for the ride.

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I have a new set of wheels now. It’s a spiffy 2017 RAV4 with insanely low mileage. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it will. Interested in a visitor? Shoot me an invite, because the Rav and I are anxious to hit the road.

Crisis mode

Ice.

So much ice.

Downed trees everywhere. Impassable roads, driveways, paths.

House roofs groaning under the weight of an 80-foot trunk. Windows smashed by limbs. Sheds crushed. Hours and days of branches snapping and crashing and exploding like gunshots in the woods.

Power poles snapped in half and leaning at crazy angles. Power lines drooping every which way. Hundreds of broken poles, maybe thousands.

Dark houses. Dark stores. Dark offices. Dark, dark, dark, and cold.

From my warm, lit home in downstate Michigan, I scan headlines and read stories and watch social media videos about the storm of a century that still holds northern Michigan in an icy grip. My friends are up there, people I care about, and I can’t help them. As I write this, it’s been nearly a full week since tens of thousands of northerners lost power, and many of them are still waiting for the lights to come back on. For some, it could be another week, the power companies say.

It’s not just the lights, of course. Not in a rural area in a northern Michigan winter.

No heat, unless you’re lucky enough to have a fireplace or a generator. Inside temperatures not much warmer than outside. No hot water to warm your hands. No hot shower. No electricity to charge a phone. No television, no streaming services, no Alexa. No refrigerator. For those on well water — and, in a rural area, lots of folks use well water — no flushable toilets.

No asking the neighbors for help. They’re worse off than you.

Businesses losing sales, losing productivity, losing thousands of dollars in perishable goods. Hourly employees losing income.

Flooded basements. Five, seven feet of water downstairs. Hundreds of calls a day to local water-pumping companies, begging for help.

Hour-long waits in line to fill gas tanks at the one operating gas station in the region.

Snowbirds fretting in Florida, knowing they’ll return home to yardfulls of trees and rancid refrigerators and just wishing they could do something, anything, to help their cold, tired Up North loved ones.

No electricity to plug in a home oxygen tank or charge a wheelchair or keep medications cold. In an area veined with wooded back roads now littered with tree trunks, less chance than ever that an ambulance or fire truck can get there quickly.

In homes already stressed by ill health, underemployment, or mental distress, more trauma. More worry. More isolation and uncertainty. More chance things won’t get better.

Every power outage I’ve experienced has ended with a little pang of regret. You know what I mean, right? After the first flurry of concern, you get used to it, you find the candles, you make plans, and, when the furnace suddenly hums to life and lights pop on, you have that little moment of, Aaw, I was kinda enjoying the adventure.

This is not that kind of power outage.

A week in, and Up Northernites are still struggling, still fighting for their OKness. It hurts to think of. 

But the worst can bring out the best. And my people in northern Michigan are proving how abso-stinkin-lutely lovely they are. 

In a crisis that impacts everyone, everyone is jumping in and finding someone else to help.

Hours after power started going out, warming shelters cropped up across the frozen region, complete with cots and snacks and hot dogs on the grill. Restaurateurs emptied their coolers and fired up food trucks and cooked hot meals for anyone who was cold.

Neighbors checked on neighbors, inviting them to share fireplace warmth or plug in a phone. A pet store proprietor offered respite to warmth-dependent critters. The sheriff made sure the animal shelter got a generator.

The local cement plant offered first responders gas for their vehicles. National Guardsmen grabbed chainsaws to help DNR officers clear roads. Grocery store employees used flashlights to help desperate customers find food in dark aisles.

Local officials launched the Emergency Operations Center they perfected during the pandemic, orchestrating calm in the chaos. Firefighters and EMTs and police officers and other people-servers stepped up, geared up, and put in long days. Journalists with no power at home kept telling the story of communities that are anything but powerless.

I would never wish a calamity on any community. But when one happens, we get a glimpse of what we are capable of, and of the depth of our capacity to care.

Soon, out-of-area news outlets will stop reporting on northern Michigan’s historic ice storm. The EOC will pack up its dry erase markers, and the warming shelters will turn back into township halls and fire stations and churches. Residents will tell and retell their stories, clean the branches out of their yards, and go back to work, a little more grateful for outlets and light switches that work. Eventually, even the smell of mildewy basements will subside, and roofs will get repaired, and communities will feel normal once again.

But under that normalcy lies the crisis that was there all along, before the ice and the power lines and the flooded basements.

Everywhere, in even the nicest of nice little towns, people are hurting. Mothers are scrambling to evade eviction. Children are cowering under raised fists. Young men who hate themselves are escaping into chemicals. Teen girls hungry for validation are stepping ever closer to danger. Great-grandparents are crumbling into loneliness.

When I remember all the individual crises around me, my chest thumps and my eyes close and I want to run, somewhere I can’t see or think or know about any of it. I have my own crises to deal with. I can’t be in constant crisis mode for other people. It’s too much. It’s a thousand trees down. It’s powerlessness.

But, I tell myself, none of us has to fix all of it alone.

My wish for my dear Up North is that, as it recovers from this colossal challenge, it remembers that some people face colossal challenges every day. My wish is that it finds renewed, united strength to not only return to normal, but to make normal better.

And I want to look to the noble response of those beleaguered northerners and let it inspire in me a new resolve to look for the crises in other homes — and then lend my hands and heart to do something.

I can’t empower everyone. But maybe I can share my warmth to get someone through a cold time. Maybe I can help them recharge or let my tiny light make their darkness a little less dim.

I won’t do it perfectly. But imagine if all of us kept crisis mode turned on, at least a little. Imagine if all of us decided other people need to be OK, too. 

What a storm of caring that might be.

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If you have the urge to contribute to relief efforts Up North — and they do, truly, need relief — the Community Foundation for Northeast Michigan is collecting Urgent Needs funds to provide immediate assistance to local nonprofits serving people facing hardship due to the storm’s aftermath.

Donations can be made online at cfnem.org. Checks can be mailed to CFNEM P. O. Box 495, Alpena, MI 49707. I can vouch for the organization and trust them to use donations the right way.

But your community needs your efforts, too. Help people who are helping people, wherever they may be.

Photo credit: my friend Darby, who has power back now. Yay!