I was on the bachelor track for nearly fifty years (with one brief and quickly corrected skid). The Offy roadster of my existence had gone two-thirds of the way around life’s brickyard when I lost control, spun, hit Cupid’s hay bale, flipped, and came to sprawled in the infield of happy matrimony, to coin a phrase.
Issue ensued, as issue will. And suddenly in 1997, in the ripeness of middle age, I found myself with six pounds, six ounces of adorable iggum-squiggums in my arms and no fit place to put her and her infant car seat.
My garage (and driveway and barnyard) contained a variety of motorized conveyances, all manufactured before the Clintons escaped from Arkansas. There was my 911. This was appropriate for most midlife crises but not this one. That is, the 911 was better suited to a second childhood than a first one. There was my roofless, doorless, windshieldless express fleet Scrambler. There was Mrs. O’s BMW convertible with seat belts in the back that looked like they’d come off the behind of a pair of 1960 Ivy League Bermuda shorts. And there was a Jeep Cherokee in about the same condition and of about the same vintage as the Cherokee that had been towed across the finish line by a taxicab at the end of the Jeep Canada-to-Mexico run.
Our Cherokee was, of course, what we used to haul Muffin home from the stork roost. It was a good, commodious, mechanically reliable vehicle. But the Cherokee, through no fault of its own, had faults. By 1997 Cherokees, as SUVs, seemed to have been designed about the time of the meteor impact that caused the extinction of the British sports car. This particular Cherokee had been used extensively for transporting filthy dogs, deceased fish and game, and outdoorsmen with aromas both dead and unhousebroken and for the smoking of cigars that smelled worse than all of these. The Cherokee had a permanent, embedded stink so bad that, in place of a pine tree–shaped air freshener, you could have hung a dirty diaper from the rearview mirror and it would have been an improvement.
Then there was the matter of a certain ex-wife who had totaled the Cherokee (and who wisely declined to accept it as part of her divorce settlement). Former husband having been off covering the 1991 Gulf War at the time, ex-wife took the advice of the local insurance agency (Dub’s Auto Liability and Cold Beer) about where to get the car repaired (Dub’s Fender, Body and Live Bait). As a result no Cherokee wheel pointed in the same direction as another. At fifty miles per hour this caused more of a shudder than the details of Monica Lewinsky’s private life. Also something was awry in the headlights, the very same thing that had been awry in my Rent-A-Wreck Mustang years before. The Cherokee’s left beam inspected the roadside for litter while its right beam was fixed on the constellation Cassiopeia.
Time to get a new grocery hauler, parent trap, Keds sled, family bus. Our new car had to be big because, although babies themselves are surprisingly small, their car seats, strollers, collapsible cribs, etc., are all built to accommodate late-career Marlon Brando. And there is no overestimating baby gear. To take Muffin on an afternoon outing required a supply of bottles, formula, Pampers, Handi Wipes, trash bags, spare Baby Gap wardrobes, blankets, Snuglis, rattles, teething rings, Velveteen Rabbits, and copies of Goodnight Moon equal in volume to the pack baggage carried by Roald Amundsen during his 1911 expedition to the South Pole.
On the other hand, our new car couldn’t be too big because we were living half the year in Washington, D.C., where parking spaces were laid out in expectation that the Crosley Hotshot would become America’s dominant form of transportation.
The second half of the year also had to be considered. Summer, fall, and ski season we were in New Hampshire, a state with roads so bad and weather so ugly that Roald Amundsen couldn’t have made it to the liquor store. So we needed rough-terrain capability.
And yet we had to have good highway manners too. Driving between the slicks and the hicks, we covered five hundred miles of idiot-infested interstate. We wanted horsepower, handling, brakes, cup holders, and a ride that wouldn’t make Muffin upchuck more than the International Tot and Toddler Union’s mandated minimum of once between each rest stop.
Keeping all this in mind (and, with a wee one in the house, keeping anything but prayers for nap time in mind was a task), I talked four gullible automobile companies into loaning me their products. Each vehicle was kept for about ten days, repeatedly upchucked in, and returned splashed with formula, smeared in fanny rash cream, full of trash bags, Handi Wipes, unmatched Baby Gap socks, Velveteen Rabbits with the stuffing coming out, torn-up copies of Goodnight Moon, and a dirty diaper hung from the rearview mirror.
We borrowed a Dodge Grand Caravan ES minivan with all-wheel drive, a just introduced M-class Mercedes-Benz, a Volvo V7OR AWD wagon, and a Toyota Land Cruiser. The test cars were given standard owned-by-busy-parents maintenance. (Tire pressure, oil, and coolant were never checked. Gas was bought from the nearest pump even if it sold kerosene, brevity of fill-up stop being the key because the only time Muffin slept was when the car was moving.)
All four vehicles failed in one important respect. The interiors could not be cleaned with a garden hose. When will the auto industry get over it with the deep plush carpets, velour upholstery, and delicate electronic do-jiggs in the dash? What Americans with children want is something that can be run through the car wash with the windows open (and maybe with the urchins left inside). While we’re at it, please let’s go back to simple, sturdy lap belts in the middle of rear bench seats. An engineering degree is required to rig an infant seat in a shoulder harness. If it isn’t done right, and you leave a window open, you can find that the inertia locks have played out and that seat and scion are flapping outside in the breeze.
One more suggestion: a fender-mounted, flip-open exterior ashtray and cigarette lighter. These days, no decent, caring person fires a butt with a bambino in the car. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a place where you could sneak a smoke while keeping an eye on the little devil.
I have discovered that what a family needs in a brat buggy is a thing that has voluminous interior space and modest exterior dimensions, that’s car-like when a car’s required and truckish when there’s trucking to be done, that’s good on slippery surfaces (including the garage floor with upchuck and fanny rash cream on it), and that doesn’t cost as much as the majority interest in Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of Pampers, that I seem to have bought.
What I have also discovered is that this vehicle already exists. To my wife’s and my dismay it’s a minivan. The Dodge Grand Caravan was the best kiddie kart we tried. There was zip enough for any kind of driving you’d care to do with a tiny most-important-person-in-the-world aboard. The AWD worked well. (I tested it in the playground sandbox.) Seating was so ample that my wife and I started discussing those fertility drugs. Maybe, next trip to the obstetric ward, we’d come home with everything in it.
The cargo space seduced me into all kinds of fix-it projects. Not until I got the plywood, Sheetrock, and twoby-fours home did I recall that I don’t know how to fix anything. And there were compartments, cubbyholes, pockets, and nooks sufficient for storing a dozen backup Velveteen Rabbits in case the current one went blooey.
And we wouldn’t buy it.
I looked at my wife and said, “A minivan is what we need.”
My wife looked at me and said, “A minivan is what we should have.”
Then we looked at each other and said, “Nope.”
We weren’t the only ones who felt this way, obviously, or there would have been a lot fewer SUVs (like, none) on the road. And now, eleven years later—Mrs. O and I having abstained from minivan ownership through the whelping of three progeny—the minivan is a dying vehicle type, being replaced by something called a crossover, which combines all the humdrummery of a minivan with an SUV’s preposterousness. What was it that was wrong with the poor, derided, soccer-mom, suburban-boob minivan?
Easier for me to say what wasn’t. It wasn’t the styling. To my eyes, the mid-’90s Chrysler family of minivans had better, cleaner, more fashion-forward lines than the Ferrari 456M. It wasn’t snobbery. My favorite car that I’ve owned was a 1981 Subaru wagon. It wasn’t machismo. I once traded in a Rabbit convertible for an Alfa Romeo Graduate. It wasn’t fear of appearing to be a member of the AARP. I always rent Town Cars for that nostalgic “Avast, matey! Right full rudder!” road feel. And I’m not easily embarrassed by what I drive. My first set of wheels was my grandmother’s 1956 four-door Ford Custom in salmon pink.
Mrs. O and I talked it over. The Dodge minivan just made too much sense. If you have children it makes sense to buy a minivan. But having children doesn’t make sense. If you split your time between two houses five hundred miles apart, one in the arctic boonies and one in the political jungle, it makes sense to buy a minivan. But splitting your time between those two houses doesn’t make sense. And besides, this is America, we’re not supposed to make sense. We’re supposed to make whoopee. The minivan made too much sense to lead to anything in the whoopee-making department. (A full-sized van might have been a different matter. “If the Van Is Rockin’, Don’t Come Knockin’” and so forth. But that’s the subject for an essay about practicing to have children in a car rather than actually having them in there with you.)
There was probably something that Chrysler could have done about this sensibleness problem. How about supplying the minivans with waterfall front fenders and inboard headlights like the old Land Rovers, plus a spare on the hood and a safari roof rack? Or how about an NO2 boost that I—on solitary midnight Pampers supply runs—could use to blow the doors off some Hair Club for Men member in a Viper?
Or, since Chrysler had at that time just been purchased by Daimler-Benz, how about putting a big, fat Mercedes star on the front? This worked for the next car I borrowed. I hate to break the news to the uber-boober denizens of suburbia, but the M-class Mercedes is a minivan. It’s a refined, eminently off-roadable minivan upon which the Mercedes-Benz stylists have, perhaps, put in a little too much overtime. But there is no mistaking the fundamental slope-nosed, one-box, volume-maximizing shape.
There was zero danger of being called sensible in this—it was a Mercedes! But that had its good side as well. The M-class rode like your boss’s executive office chair, steered like the prize dressage horse owned by your boss’s wife, and stopped faster than your paycheck would if you got caught naked on any of these things.
The M-class was so well built and safety conscious—front airbags, side airbags, crash absorption frame that inflicts minimum damage on other vehicles—that it would have put Swedish au pairs out of business if it could have been trained to wear a bikini. It was reputedly very good in the bumps and stumps, though I didn’t get to try this. (The miniature O’Rourke was doing most of the 4X4ing in the family at the moment.) And the 215 HP V-6 meant you could get to the next rest stop almost in time to avoid … Oh, hell.
The sole problem with the M-class was that Mercedes had worked so hard on making it compact that they had … well, they had succeeded. The M was, not counting height, as small as a Ford Mustang. The Volvo wagon was actually 5.3 inches longer than the Mercedes, and the Dodge minivan was 4.5 inches wider.
M/B put a lot of inside into this outside. On paper the M-class had 44.7 cubic feet of space behind its second seat—more than the Toyota Land Cruiser and within a large duffel and a case of booze of what the minivan had back there. This was a remarkable amount of cargo capacity. But the capacity turned out to be remarkably vertical. “No stacking when you’re packing.” That’s the rule once you have a kid. Sudden stops could turn into a luggage London blitz on baby. Rear vision was obscured, allowing highway patrolmen to sneak up and ask why the heck you’re doing a hundred with the family in the car. And when you opened the M’s top-hinged tailgate, strollers, portable cribs, bottles, Pampers, Baby Gap inventory, and gummed bunnies got unloaded a little faster than you planned—right onto the pavement. My advice to Mercedes: give the design efficiency a rest. Kick back, loosen up, and add a foot to the back of this thing. (Which advice Mercedes would, eventually, take with its R-class, its GL-class, and its M-class redesign.)
The surprise rug rat ride was the Volvo V7OR AWD wagon. With a 236 HP turbocharged five-cylinder engine and 3,788 pounds of curb weight, it could blow the doors off at least the more cowardly Viper drivers. The Volvo made me wonder if there was anything else that the quiche-eating, Whole Foods–shopping, Clinton-voting Yuppies weren’t telling us. If this Volvo was anything to go by, the Think Globally/Act Locally crowd may not be the dorks we thought they were. Maybe their bizarre behavior is the side effect of really good drugs.
Anyway, the Volvo wagon had a backseat that could accommodate two adults and a booster seat as wide as Hillary Clinton’s … open mind. The wagon bed had only 37.1 cubic feet in it, but all of those cubes were safely useful. And the Volvo was even better than the Mercedes for braking, handling, and steering with one hand while reaching around the headrest to extract your cell phone from Muffin’s mouth. The Volvo’s turbo five made a nice noise, too, just audible over the cute googoos, cooings, pfffffffts, and burps emanating from the backseat. The engine sound was reassuring to a guy who wanted to fulfill his parental responsibilities while still feeling that he was a member of the car nut fraternity.
Alas, the Volvo was too small for our travel habits and our one-client day care center. But I would have recommended it, if you had a less materialistic child and you didn’t spend as much time as a migrating gray whale moving bulk over distance, the way we did.
The Toyota Land Cruiser was what we chose for O’Rourkes-on-the-road. And we may even buy one as soon as Muffin’s college fund has enough in it to be filched. (Do I hear a faint whine from decades hence? “I had to go to a school advertised on the back of a matchbook because my father couldn’t bring himself to get a minivan.”)
The Land Cruiser was pure joy, as well padded as Dad, as smart as Mom, and almost as beautiful as Muffin. We took it on an 1,100-mile round-trip from Washington to a region of North Carolina so remote that the locals considered the characters in Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain to be sissified city folk. The Toyota’s 230 HP V-8 charged the hills like a motorized Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan. The handling was as confident as Teddy and his cousin Franklin put together. And the Land Cruiser could get in and out of muck better than the then-current president. We could fit all our stuff onboard and it stayed onboard when we opened the doors. And though the seating position was as high as a guitar player in an alternative rock band, we swept along slither coils of road without any sport-ute effects that demanded Dramamine.
Nothing could be said against the Land Cruiser, except by the therapist Mrs. O and I were seeing because we wouldn’t buy the Dodge minivan. The Toyota was a better-appointed, more feature-laden vehicle and with swankier trim and upholstery than the Dodge, but for half again as much money it should have been.
The Land Cruiser could, no doubt, traverse the canyons of Mars. But, being honest with myself, how often did I take my car to the red planet? In every day-to-day practical way the minivan was a better deal. It was only 7.1 inches longer and two-fifths of an inch wider than the Toyota, but (with third seat out) its stuff and junk room was 58 percent greater. It wouldn’t haul a 6,500-pound trailer like the Land Cruiser, but it would tow a ton and three-quarters, which was almost enough Pampers to get us from D.C. to the cutoff for the Garden State Parkway. The minivan had more rear leg room and better fuel economy than the Land Cruiser, and its power to weight ratio was almost as good. (If you don’t count torque and, since I’ve never really understood torque, I didn’t.) They both rode and drove like cars, albeit the Toyota rode and drove like a better one. And the Land Cruiser, with its frame and body construction and greater heft, was presumably somewhat safer. But, since progeny arrived, I’d become the world’s safest driver anyway—something I accomplished by turning the wheel over to my wife.
The one strong argument I could make in favor of the Toyota was clearance—a New Hampshire road-rut-friendly 9.8 inches versus the minivan’s San Bernardino lowrider-style 5.4. But this meant taller sills, and Muffin was putting on the pounds. I tried to convince Mrs. O that hoisting our daughter, daughter’s accoutrements, and the shopping in and out of the Land Cruiser would be a swell postnatal workout program. She responded (out of daughter’s earshot, naturally) with an Anglo-Saxon verb. Me as the predicate.
Unless Pampers came through with a major modeling contract for Muffin (and we’re still waiting; some would say eleven is too old for a child to be in diapers, but we think Muffin will thank us later, after her career as a model is launched), the Land Cruiser was out of the question. Concerning the minivan, Mrs. O and I battled our inner demons. They won. So the Dodge was out of the question. We stuck with the Cherokee. We were all pretty grumpy about it. But in those early days of parenting, before we’d learned the ropes (you use the ropes to tie up the kid in front of the television), we were all pretty grumpy anyway. So the world was probably a better place for us having kept our old car, because in our old car the world could smell us coming.