First time vehicle buyer
The other day I purchased my first vehicle. Along with it came a host of other mundane, silly firsts no one talks about. When I went to the gas station, I had to ask how I would know when the tank was full. I visited an insurance broker’s office, where the walls, floors, and furnishings were painstakingly matched to be the same dull grey. Finally, I felt unfit to own something I had just paid thousands of dollars for. As I admired the vehicle’s glossy finish and absence of blemishes, I was overwhelmed by the thought that there hadn’t been enough checks and balances in the system to keep me safe. There was no way I would make it home in one piece.
I should introduce Phoebe. She’s a Vespa scooter, characterized by her obnoxious orange exterior, big round headlight, and a little “Learner” license tag hanging from her back plate. It was love at first sight of her on a Facebook Marketplace listing, where the dealer was looking to offload her as part of an end-of-season sale. In the photo, she was poorly lit in the artificial lights of a packed sales floor in Nanaimo, which is a 40 minute drive and ferry ride away. I ignored the fact I had never driven alone in traffic before, much less ridden a motorbike, and devised a plan to get her home. I was going to make a day trip out of taking a 3 hour public transit journey to this dealership, then drive it back myself.
I did my due diligence to prepare for this trip. I sent the listing to my boyfriend and asked, “Do you think I’ll be fine driving myself home from the island?” It was an impossible riddle for him to solve. Say yes, and he’d be lying. Say no, and I wasn’t going to take that for an answer.
He went with, “It’s definitely sus.” I was satisfied. Before I knew it, I was packed onto a crowded bus at 7AM, with the audacity to tell myself I was off for an exciting adventure.
Romance is a combustion engine
They gave me two keys to Phoebe, one brown, and one black.
“This key, the brown one, is the master key. It can be used to program new keys for your vehicle. If you lose it, you’re SOL.”
They’re describing the consequences of this bike’s immobilizer, a simple electronic system that has been standard in vehicles since 1992. It’s made of sensors and a few lines of code that make it impossible for thieves to hot-wire the engine. I can’t help thinking it will also make it impossible for me to completely know how Phoebe works.
I harbour deep admiration for machines that perform complex tasks without electricity. I think it’s because they are purpose built by someone who had to spend a lot of time obsessing over a single, seemingly tiny problem. Take the generational craft of mechanical timepieces, where every microscopic part is painstakingly created to solve the philosophical, futile problem of accurate timekeeping. Is there anything that connects us more to another human, past or present, than the desire to create something that will last years beyond our own existence? It’s funny how perpetuity means so much to a mind that cannot ever hope to comprehend it.
Internal combustion engines are arguably more complex than batteries, but there is something primal about fashioning parts to harness the power of fire. I know that so long as all the parts are intact and able to move as intended, I can start the engine. It’s like when you hit the keys of a grand piano and you can see the hammer strike. Older Vespa models came with a kickstart lever where you could manually pump the engine pistons to get them going, even if the engine died. By contrast, newer models like Phoebe are electric-start only. She has some silicon-based secrets I will never see or understand, and if her computer mysteriously dies there will be no recourse.
Fear vs. Dread
I dread driving cars. So much so that in the 7 years I’ve held my learner’s driving license, I’ve driven on just 4 occasions. Each time I vowed I would never do it again. No amount of feeling free was worth the panic that would set in when I rolled into an intersection.
I fear riding. To be honest, I was so scared of my trip from Nanaimo that I hardly slept the night before. I obsessed over merges I’d have to do on unfamiliar roads and I reviewed the entire journey home on Street View. Still today my heart skips a beat when a car drives up behind me as I’m stopped. But these fears are overridden by the excitement I feel to have the wind howling in my ears, to experience the sensation of flying across asphalt, to be in the city I love instead of separated from it by a pane of glass. It’s akin to the feeling of riding a bike down a steep hill, where the pain of pedalling up the hill is behind you and all that’s left is to enjoy the ride down. The best part is coming home from a ride and feeling conviction that I have lived my life to the fullest, with courage.
We’re inherently driven to do the things we fear as we feel pride when we conquer them. Dread, by contrast, is the mind’s way of saying that there’s no payoff for doing the thing we find uncomfortable. I still dread elements of my life, but I’d like to think I’m more equipped now to either cut my losses or turn them into new challenges I fear instead.