The First of the Beater Cars

The first of the beater cars was a 95 Escort Wagon and I bought it in October of 2004. My mom had been up for a week and I'd been driving her car to work as mine was gone. I was talking to her previous to her arrival she asked me if I still wanted her to come despite my accident.  I told her I needed her to come because I'd probably need her car. (Nothing like using someone for what they have!) In the meantime I had talked with a close friend Jerry Keranen about the possibility of buying his car (the escort) as he and his family were moving to Maple Rapids, MI and he needed to get rid of it. I was in dire need of a car and after he talked it over with his wife they sold it to me for $300. I drove it until May of 2007. Since trouble seems to always know where I'm at I had some unique experiences with that car. One winter I was at a friend's house and we had just had a heavy snowfall. I went to leave and backed into a drift. I stayed there most of the afternoon until someone could come to pull me out. I got stuck a lot. It got to the point when I'd go out to a friend's house and when I walked in the door Bruce would ask "Are you stuck?" I was even given a tow strap one year for Christmas.

During the summers I mowed lawns and I usually kept my lawn mower in Eagle River because all the lawns I mowed were there. However, one time I had brought my lawn mower into town and it started to rain. Because I didn't have a garage I called a friend and asked if I could just stick the lawn mower in his garage. He didn't have a problem with it so I went ahead and stuck the mower in his garage. The next day I went pick it up. He wasn't home and so I went to his garage and got the lawn mower.  I had put the middle seat down so I could get the lawn mower into the car. The thing about Escorts though is that the middle seat doesn't lie flat. It lies on a bit of an angle. I was in a hurry so I picked up the lawn mower and put it into the car, pushing it as far up as I could and then proceeded to close the hatch. I didn't count on a roll effect. When I pushed the lawn mower in it didn't stay where I had pushed it so when I closed the hatch the handle was where the back window was supposed to be. So when the back window and the handle met there was a bit of a falling out...of the window. I was going to fix it but since it only rained twice that summer (once at the beginning at once toward the end) all I did was buy plastic to put over the window in case it rained and that temporary fix lasted the summer.

I added some racing stripes to the car that summer as well. It was not my intention. I was crossing the bridge between Houghton and Hancock and I encountered a thirty foot RV trailer being hauled by a Suburban. To put it simply we both were in the same lane and didn't know it. He had a wide turn which blinded him on the left side. I was passing on the left side. When he straightened I found out he was in my lane as he pushed me into the median. It was the first accident I've ever been in that wasn't my fault. What a feeling!

At some point  a note was left on my car offering me a new hatch for $50. I was about to go out of town to see my brother in Washington, DC so after I bought the hatch a friend put it on for me.

That winter I put a snow scoop in the back of my car.  It wouldn't fit and I tried to force the hatch closed.  Bad idea. The hatch jammed and eventually I had it rigged so that a wire that was hooked up to the handle on the inside could be pulled from the outside thus making the door usable. However it was hard to reach into the back seat to pull on a wire and push a door open from the inside. Well that was nothing a walk down the beach of Lake Superior couldn't fix.  I got a piece of drift wood that I used to push the door open enough so that I could go around and just open it from the back.

Then the hood latch broke on a trip to Wisconsin and had to be tied down with baling twine. Eventually I got it tied down with actual baling wire. It was worked very well until the wire froze and broke. After that it was zip tied shut.

At one point the key broke off in the ignition so I kept a spoon on the console.  I had bent it in half and could just stick the flat end in and start the engine.  That was a great car but it's probably a good thing that it's off the road.  I never did figure out why it was overheating.