Four Teenagers Drive A Saturn To Mexico

The following events are all true, at least from my perspective.

My brother always said that, “Old cars are great because the only surprises you get are good surprises.”

I had a surprisingly good car growing up.

When I was sixteen my dad sold me his 1997 Saturn SL1 for $600. It always smelled weird and had odd stains in the carpet. Our family’s theory was that someone died in the backseat. Since I was working part time as a sales associate in the menswear department at a local department store, the car was a significant investment for me. Still, it was one of the best investments I ever made and I still have a fond spot in my heart for the plastic masterpiece that is the SL1.

Preparing the Car

Of course any car, no matter how finely manufactured, is incomplete without some personal modifications. 

My friend, Tony, was actually the first person to modify my car. He was in the engine bay swinging a 10mm Craftsman in a wide arc when suddenly there was a loud pop followed by a screech as he jumped out from under the hood. A loud hissing sound and a cloud of something spewed out of the engine bay. We all stood around the car and asked each other what was going on. 

Soon Tony’s dad shed some light on the situation. “That’s all your Freon leaking out!” he said. Freon is the magic sauce that’s stored at high pressure in your air conditioner. Tony crossed the positive terminal of the battery and the high pressure aluminum line with a wrench, causing a sudden arc of electricity to burn a hole in the line, allowing all my Freon to escape the air conditioner corral and gallop around the atmosphere like a herd of wild horses, never to return - which was great for the Freon but not so much for me. The air conditioner was never fixed.

The next modification was initiated by my friend’s sister who deftly removed my fender by backing into it with her car. What would’ve taken me an hour to remove only took her fifteen seconds. Plus, the result was exactly the same - broken pieces everywhere. I fixed it by swiping every single bumper sticker from the local Sunoco gas station and used them to fabricate a flexible, lightweight skin over the gaping hole. Plus, this repair saved weight, which is important when you’re a performance enthusiast like myself.

I needed to save weight because the next modification involved throwing seventy five pounds of the best subwoofers and amplifiers that the local pawn shop could offer into my trunk. I was a stereo buff and admittedly stereos don’t help with performance but they do help the driving experience. I could wire stereos together using only zip ties, electrical tape, and mismatched pieces of wire. In fact, that’s the only way I did it.

The big stereo, although admittedly a creature comfort, was necessary if you were to hear any music at all because my friend Bryan and I had cut my muffler off and installed in its place an oversized chrome muffler tip. We affectionally called it a “fart pipe.” It was bit tacky and drew some less-than-flattering comments from my dad but he was traditional and practical and so surely if he was complaining then I was on the right track. Besides, anything that made that much noise was definitely going fast.

The most useful modification was a large roof rack. Bryan and I fabricated a roof rack out of tube steel, scrap diamond plate, and a piece of plywood. Once it was bolted together we sprayed the whole thing with truck bed liner for a nice, classy finish. We attached it to my Saturn with metal roofing screws. The whole assembly was topped off with an aging Sears cargo carrier that was held on by bright orange ratchet straps.

It was a distinctive car.

Planning the Trip

As my high school graduation was drawing near, I got the news that my friend Adam, who was doing volunteer work at an orphanage in Mexico, was getting married! It was great news because marriage is sacred and all that, but now I had a good excuse to go on an adventure to Mexico. My friend Bryan and I promptly made plans for a road trip.

“Hey Bryan, let’s drive your motorcycle to Adam’s wedding!”

“Yea!”

Bryan had a motorcycle. I didn’t have a motorcycle but that was fine - I’d just ride on the back of his! We’d simply pack two backpacks and head for Chihuahua, Mexico… 2,150 miles away! We young, dumb, and filled with a fatal dose of youthful optimism.

Fortunately two other friends, James and Nathaniel, decided to go along. In retrospect, this was providential intervention because, since they didn’t have motorcycles, we reluctantly dropped the motorcycle idea and decided to drive my red Saturn instead. It got the best fuel mileage, had four doors, and was the least expensive car to abandon in Mexico if the situation called for it.

“Hey, since we’re driving to Mexico, why not swing west first and see some sights?” someone suggested. We all agreed that was a good idea but couldn’t agree on which sights to see.

“Let’s just head west and see what happens,” someone else suggested. We all nodded. It’s not hard to convince a bunch of eighteen year olds to live by the moment. Nathaniel brought along his dad’s internet hotspot, which at the time was a novel concept. We had internet on the go! The plan was to Google a spot of interest somewhere close to us, go there, enjoy it, and then Google another spot of interest close by. We would repeat this pattern in a general westerly and then southernly direction until we got to our destination!

We were giving ourselves a month’s timeline to get to Mexico and back. Some of quit our jobs and some of us begged for extra time off. Because of this, money was in short supply. We planned on tenting in campgrounds to keep costs down and adventure running high. We packed a portable gas grill with enough BTU’s to heat a can of ravioli.

The planning was done. All we had to do was pack.

Packing

A week before our scheduled departure date, a group of my friends went to the beach. Nathaniel, my road trip buddy, was along and was demonstrating his prowess on a skim board by doing involuntary somersaults in the surf while cursing. I was impressed by his cursing, but not so much his skim boarding . Suddenly his skim board bounced off his toe and into the surf. His cursing got louder and he hopped around on one foot holding his toe, like a flamingo who just got bit by a crab. He wouldn’t stop complaining about how much it hurt. Still, we were used to Nathaniel’s sudden medical conditions that conveniently gave him an excuse to be subpar at rock climbing, mountain biking, surfing, skim boarding, or whatever activity he was attempting at the moment. Imagine our surprise then when he showed up a few days later with a foot brace that looked like an awkward flip-flop. He mentioned something about a cracked metatarsal.

A few days later, Bryan was helping his parents build a brick wall. He was cutting bricks with a cut-off saw, using his flip flop and big toe to keep the brick square against the saw rail when he suddenly slipped and almost chopped off his big toe! He hobbled into the emergency room and was seen by a doctor. Bryan mentioned that he wanted to get patched up quickly because he was going on a road trip to Mexico and he didn’t want to miss it. The doctor stopped what he was doing and said, “Huh. That’s strange. I worked on another guy just a few days ago who broke his toe. He was also going on a road trip to Mexico.”

Bryan laughed. “A guy with glasses?”

The doctor lit up. “Yea!”

“Yea! I know him. We’re going on the same road trip! Was his toe actually broken?” The doctor mumbled something about metatarsals.

Later James reported that he bruised his toe that week at work by dropping a hammer on it. I’m not a superstitious sort but I began shopping for some steel toe shoes.

Packing the Car

Finally the departure day arrived! We all gathered around the car with all our luggage and looked at each, then at the car, then at our pile of stuff, then back at our car, then looked at each other again.

“Uh. How are we going to get all this crap in that little car?” James asked. Well, actually James never would’ve used such coarse language. Bryan probably said that. At any rate, the question was asked and it was a great question.

“Well, let’s pack the most important stuff first and then leave behind whatever doesn’t fit.” Apparently everything was important because it all fit although it did take some teamwork to get the cargo carrier closed. One person laid on it while another clicked all the latches shut. The carrier still had a gaping hole in the front where the lid didn’t have enough structural integrity to contain the contents. We assessed the situation and concluded that this was an unacceptable situation because our carrier would be filled with water or bugs in little time. We strategically placed another ratchet strap across the bowed lid and tightened it until it resonated like the big string on a guitar, then stuffed the hole shut with something disposable like Jame’s t-shirt.

Packing was done. Now we had to fit the people into the car.

The very first snag we ran into was Nathaniel. He claimed that he needed to keep his foot elevated for at least two weeks and then mumbled something about metatarsals. He insisted on sitting in the back seat and setting his leg straight forward on top of the center console. His foot stopped just shy of the shifter lever. My Saturn was a five speed manual, just like any performance car is, and so this unfortunate configuration resulted in Nathaniel’s foot being hit every time the driver shifted into fifth gear. It was inevitable. Vroom. Shift. “OWWW!!! My foot! Watch it!! That hurts like a blankety-blank elbow in the blankety-blank.” Nathaniel’s complaining would fade just as the driver found it necessary to shift into fifth gear again, thus reigniting the tirade. We all laughed. Nathaniel’s dramatized medical conditions were hilariously realistic at times.

The First Breakdown

We drove about twenty miles before the car developed some sort of unexpected electrical glitch and the stereo stopped working. I was used to the expected glitches, such as having to thump the dash to get my dash lights to work, but this glitch took down our stereo! The stereo was the only thing loud enough to drown out the exhaust notes and Nathaniel’s metatarsal rants. I had used a lot of electrical tape and hose clamps to splice a two gauge power wire together and now it was giving us trouble. How could anything with that much electrical tape on it stop working? The tension applied by a tightly wound roll of electrical tape could pop a watermelon, yet somehow my power wire had wiggled loose. We rolled into a garage, bummed a wire strippers and another roll of electrical tape from a very nice mechanic, and soon were on our way again, hoping that the pattern of stopping every twenty miles to fix something wouldn’t be repeated.

The Second Breakdown

Our first memorable stop was the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. Then we drove through a corn field called Kansas. Bryan was the one driving and he decided to “rip it off like a Band-Aid” so he drove through the entire state in one sitting. Well, almost. It was the middle of the night and we were passing through yet another cornfield. Or was it still the same cornfield we drove through when we entered the state four hours ago? Anyway, the car suddenly just went dark. It was like we switched from riding the space shuttle to canoeing on a moonlit lake in a millisecond.

“Hey! At least my check engine light finally went off!” I yelled at Bryan. The volume of my own voice shocked me. We could hear was the long dry grass scraping the floor panels as Bryan coasted to the shoulder of the road. The crickets played their wings like tiny fiddles. We could measure our own blood pressure just by listening to it. Yelling was suddenly an inappropriate form of communication.

Bryan popped the hood and we started poking around. That’s when I looked up and noticed the stars in the night sky. I had never seen such a cosmic display before in my life. I was standing in the middle of the a deserted highway in Kansas in awe of the night sky. Cornfields do not give off light pollution like the tire factories and endless suburban sprawl of my homeland. Soon Bryan discovered it was merely a loose battery terminal. We whipped out the wrench set we brought along (our wrench set had only one handle and the word “Crescent” stamped on it) and fixed the problem. We were driving through cornfields once again!

Camping in Colorado

A few days later we arrived in the Rocky Mountains and set up camp. The car was so full of cargo that whoever sat on the back seat needed to stack things around their legs. Then, as we drove down the highway, these things slowly settled into cement around our feet. This meant that to get out of the car, we had to open the door and throw ourselves violently out of it, lifting our legs up and out as we fell sideways through the open door leaving behind a pile of stuff with two holes where our legs had been. We got pretty good at it.

After we were out of the car, we would unstrap the cargo carrier. The straps would twang and flip off as the plastic cover bounced open on its hinges. The contents would rise out of the carrier like a loaf of quickly rising bread. We could have a proper refugee camp set up within minutes.

This particular campground in the Rocky Mountains was memorable because it had a men’s bathhouse with no door. This made for uncomfortable situations where you would walk in, assuming the lack of a door was an open invitation, only to be met by someone sheepishly huddled over a bare toilet in the middle of a large room. The shower cubicles were on the far wall behind the huddled toilet person. You quickly had to decide if you wanted to bolt back out the door, therefore confirming that the situation was awkward and thus making it more awkward, or if you wanted to continue nonchalantly into the bathhouse like finding someone on a toilet was no big deal. The showers, at least, had curtains strung in front of them.

We were lounging around a campfire when Bryan announced that it was time for his toe stitches to come out. Of course now we were a thousand miles from the doctor who put them in. James was a nursing student at the time and offered his help. “I think I can take them out. All you do is pull the string out. It’s just like unlacing a shoe.”

Bryan looked a little skeptical but shrugged and flopped his foot up on the picnic table at our campsite. “Go for it. It’s getting itchy.”

James took out a tweezers and unlaced Bryan’s toe as Bryan grimaced and turned white. James didn’t seem to mind it a bit. We all held our breath as we waited to see if the toe would stay on. Much to our dismay, it did. All was well. Bryan put his sock back on.

The wind began picking up as we heated baked beans on the campfire. It kept getting more and more intense until our tents were flapping from a few shaky pegs stuck in the ground.

Later that night hilarity ensued as Nathaniel came down with a bad case of diarrhea, an unpleasant but not entirely unpredictable result of eating campfire beans. Waking up and sensing impending doom, Nathaniel fought to open the tent door against the gale force winds, crashed out of the tent, and stumbled towards the bath house in the pitch dark, dragging along his cheap foot brace that was still attached to his bum foot. There was a drainage ravine running alongside the campground and Nathaniel inadvertently stumbled into it. As his body was overwhelmed by the panic of falling into a dark hole of undetermined depth, he inadvertently relaxed key muscles and pooped his pants! The heated language rising out of that drainage ravine may have actually changed local weather patterns.

Arrival in Mexico

We eventually found our way to the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Four Corners, Arches National Park, Pikes Peak, and countless little campgrounds along the way. 

It was the dead of summer. The windows were open, the stereo was blaring, the engine was roaring, and morale was declining. We collectively began questioning whether our decision to drive my car was a good one. Accusations of being cheap and stupid started drifting my way, accusations which would have been easy to refute if they hadn’t been true. This was the state of things when we found ourselves at the Mexican border.

The Mexican authorities pulled us aside for a “random” inspection although we all agreed that it probably wasn’t random at all. They told us to get out of the car so we did. They seemed a bit taken aback by our methods. James was reading a book called “The Art of Guerrilla Warfare” which he left lying on the seat during the inspection. My car had several bumper stickers espousing the use of firearms. We were a bit nervous. In retrospect, I doubt the authorities suspected we were drug dealers although I’m pretty sure they suspected we were drug users.

Some soldiers motioned for us to open the trunk. I nervously obliged. The trunk lid sprang open and duffel bags, shoes, and dirty laundry cascaded down the bumper and into a pile on the ground. I started undoing the ratchet straps on the roof rack. The soldier emphatically shook his head and waved his hand. 

“No. No. Go!” 

Apparently they didn’t want anything to do with this circus. That was fine with us and so we jumped on the trunk until it closed and then continued south in an overwhelming display of exhaust noise and billowing dust.

Three weeks after we left Pennsylvania, we found ourselves at a Mexican wedding and were enjoying spicy food and warm fellowship. Then we all agreed we were tired of the trip, as fun as it was, and that we wanted to go home as soon as possible. We had all either quit our jobs or begged for an extended vacation time and our bosses were starting to regret hiring us in the first place.

The Return Home

There were a few concerning things that we noticed about my Saturn. 

First, we found out that my accessory belt was missing a large piece of rubber and the remaining pieces were held together by two tired looking strings. We had driven thousands of miles with a belt that I wouldn’t trust to hold my pants up. We fixed my car by carefully rolling around in the thick Mexican dust and applying wrenches to all the right pressure points. 

We had also discovered that metal cords were sticking out of one of the back tires! This prompted us to go to a tire shop and try to communicate that we needed a tire. Our Spanish didn’t translate. Finally we just went out to the parking lot and pointed to the frayed cords. The mechanic understood the problem and slapped on a set of two tires. We were ready to go home!

The problem was that we had all purchased souvenirs. Leather cowboy boots, illegal fireworks, switchblades, and sombreros were purchased before any thought was given as to where we would put them. We found the solution to this. If a passenger got in and sat down, the driver would load cargo on top of the passenger’s lap until it reached their chin, or maybe a little higher. Then he would push on the door until he heard a “click” and proceed to the next passenger to repeat this process. This was the only way to fit it all in. 

We pointed the bulging car north and floored the gas, which wasn’t as dramatic as you might think. Of course the irony was that once you got the car going, it didn’t want to stop. This was highlighted a few miles down the road when we entered the city of Hidalgo Del Parral.

Going Airborne!

Bryan was at the wheel and I was sitting in the front passenger seat. James and Nathaniel were sleeping in the back. We were cruising through the city at a pretty good clip when suddenly the minivan in front of us violently left the ground! Dust, bolts, and debris scattered. A huge speed bump lay across the road. No signs, no paint, nothing! There was just a random lump of cement the size of a dead mule stuck firmly to the pavement, laughing as screaming vehicles got launched unexpectedly into orbit. Maybe it was an actual dead mule, it happened too fast to tell. Bryan grimaced and pushed on the brake pedal, using the back of the seat as an anchor for his extended leg. The brakes yawned and ignored his commands. Bryan and I braced for impact while the guys in back slept, blissfully unaware of the impending doom. BAM! The front suspension collapsed and the bottom of the subframe ricocheted off of the speed bump. The back tires kissed the speed bump and waved the surly bonds of earth goodbye. For a brief millisecond we were weightless, floating through Mexican airspace. Laptops were floating in mid air. Cell phones, McDonald’s bags, coffee mugs, and my two sleeping friends levitated above their perches. Stale French fries found their way out from under the seats. As soon as it all started, it ended. The car crashed back down to the ground. Everything else in the car crashed back down too, just in a different positions from where they had started. The laptops landed on James’ and Nathaniel’s heads along with the stale French fires. Coffee mugs landed on the dash. McDonald’s bags landed in the cupholders. James and Nathaniel sputtered awake and began yelling in unison. Bryan and I looked at each other with concern. We didn’t care about the noise from the back seat, we were more concerned about the noise that had stopped coming from the engine. The car had sputtered and died after the ground had tried to forcibly enter the oil pan. Bryan slowly reached down and gave the keys a twist. The car cranked and started again! He revved the engine, and engaged the clutch. Off we went!

Detour!

We arrived at a military checkpoint somewhere several hours south of the U.S. border. They asked many questions in Spanish and we tried to answer in English. They emphatically tried to tell us something. Then again, anyone speaking the Spanish language seems emphatic to me. After a few minutes of fruitless exchange, they sighed and waved us on.

We were excited to be on the move again and happy that we hadn’t inadvertently admitted to having drugs in the trunk. Everything was fine until we got the border town where we wanted to cross. We had driven four hours through hot, dusty desert and arrived at the border town late in the night. We were eager to get through the border and back into our homeland. But when we got there, they wouldn’t let us through!

We were clueless as what to do. We looked at a map and found the only thing left to do was to backtrack four hours to the intersection where those soldiers were, and reroute to another border town. That’s when we realized that whatever the soldiers were trying to tell us had something to do with the border closure. Still, we didn’t feel like backtracking that far if we could help it so we wandered around town looking for someone who knew English. Finally a cashier at a supermarket explained that they had a lot of rain and the bridge to the U.S. was washed out and destroyed. The only way out of Mexico was to backtrack four hours, then drive north another two hours. We all sighed and got back in the car. The driver stacked cargo on top of all the passengers, and we were off again. We were really tired of this stupid Saturn.

Home Again!

Three weeks after we left, we were home again. The Saturn had several thousand more miles on it. It had collected dust from Mexico, salt from the road up to Pikes Peak, sand from Utah, many more bumpers tickers, and trash from every state along the way. It had never let us down. Well, not for more than an hour or so, anyway.

Later in my life I owned three Saturn station wagons and I enjoyed all of them. I’m a practical man. I want a few bulletproof options. I like manual windows. I like things that are mechanically connected to something solid that works whether or not it’s connected to wifi. I don’t like being babysat by something smarter than me, unless it's my wife. You may call me old and grumpy (my wife insinuates that I may have those characteristics) but every time I see an ugly Saturn with unpainted plastic bumpers, I resist the urge to run up, knock on the window, and offer the driver $600 for it.