In An Old Car, Luck Is Your Best Friend
A friend and I go on a 210-mile drive across Washington in my broken old sports car.
Max Larsen’s 1985 Porche 944 sits at a rest stop in Eastern Washington. // Photo by Max Larsen
Written by Max Larsen
There is no other human experience quite like operating a broken car on a moving roadway. There are an incalculable number of situations worse than that simple event; but at its core, it is quite a unique anxiety. Is there a way off the road if my car dies? If there’s not, should I keep going? Is my car capable of continuing on if I decide to keep driving? On a four-hour drive in a (partially broken) 1985 Porsche 944, these are some of the thoughts that brush up against your brain.
However what my passenger was thinking is probably a completely different story. Sam is the reason I went on this voyage via vehicle. His taste in music rubbed off on me in high school and I soon found myself purchasing a one-day pass to the 2018 Sasquatch Music Festival.
“Thinking back it is easy to remember why me and Max decided to make the four-hour trip to the Sasquatch music festival,” Sam said. “Several of our favorite artists were performing all in one spot at The Gorge Amphitheater, which is an amazingly beautiful venue.”
Sam’s family planned the trip, which meant the two of us could have ridden in the lap of Subaru Outback luxury for the 210-mile journey.
Of course, we didn’t. Our decision was one of independence and freedom, or rather the ability to hit a nicotine device without being disowned. This left us with my car. A Porsche? Yes and no. My Porsche 944 was $4100 when I bought it on craigslist and had over 180,000 miles on the original 2.5-liter inline-four engine. It was a humble little sports car, made better by the fact that a modern two-door Porsche will put a $100,000-sized hole in your wallet. Sweet, poor bliss.
“Max had recently acquired his Porsche 944 and we were obsessed with it, to say the least,” Sam said. “Myself not being a car person had no concerns or thoughts about the car being able to drive for three-plus-hours straight in the middle of the summer.”
But what a $4100 Porsche usually has that a newer one doesn’t, is coolant leaks. At 6 a.m. on the day of our excursion, I made that very discovery. A thin stream of green fluid made its way through a cut in the rubber hose and dribbled on the concrete under the car. Like a small crack in a dam, it teased me with its unpredictability. It could have started flowing out at any minute, or everything could be fine.
Duct tape was the temporary antidote for the venom that would eventually bring me to my knees …in a dusty music venue.
In the meantime, we enjoyed our drive. Though one of my eyes was glued to the temperature gauge, the other one saw a wonderful sight. Enough Washingtonians know the beauty of a west-to-east drive through the state. From Kitsap to Grant County you get to see waterways, deserts, evergreens and mountains, each in a different town.
Sam said it was “mostly a gorgeous drive with the exception of the rattling of the crappy speakers.” I can’t deny it — this is all true.
But, in the moments I could detach from the impending radiator failure, the car felt magnificent. The steering communicated what the tires were feeling through all those little vibrations and inspired confidence in rough conditions.
The 944’s interior is designed in a way that lets the outside creep in. The windshield peels back over your head with a low raked angle and reveals clouds you’ve never seen in other cars. The glass hatchback wraps around the back of the car and welcomes in light, creating a more balanced interior experience. But now we have to slow down: traffic.
The only thing keeping my engine from becoming a molten pile of aluminum was speed. Evidently, the fresh air rushing through the grille and into the intake at 70 mph was just barely enough to keep the 944 from erupting like a volcano with Nickelodeon slime. As I press the brake and slowly downshift to slow the car down, the temperature gauge starts to move.
Like the hand on a clock, the needle moved ever so gingerly up and up toward a german symbol that I can only assume means “hot as fuck,” and my natural high from the scenic cruise fell further and further down.
As the heat builds, the leaking coolant grazed the aluminum engine block, vaporizing into a menacing plume of despair. It was decision time — bail off the highway and cool the engine down or keep chugging along and risk terminal damage to its insides.
Still over an hour and a half away, the traffic magically sped up. In our tiny little brains, we figured that going above the speed limit from here on out would help our engine’s chances of survival. In an almost offensively optimistic moment, we carried on.
The hot eastern sun turned our 70 mph drive into a brow-sweating fight for more cold air to rush through the intake. It forced us to take the 944 up to a speed beyond what I consider to be “cruising.” The closer we got to Sasquatch, the tighter the corners and slower the speeds became. As it wiggled its hips through red sand-banked curves, the 944’s innocent pop-up headlights caught their first glimpse of the biggest waiting line this side of the Mississippi.
Over 210 miles of ground covered, the final 300 feet of the drive turned out to be the most treacherous. We sat — or rather Sam sat — while I got out every two minutes to fill the coolant container and limp my sad, hot car up a dusty hill just to park.
By the time the 944 had crested the top of the final road, no less than 10 friendly folks asked us if our steaming pile of car needed help, but the little car carried us to victory.
Three days later, our car fun continued when the 944 exited the festival and puked its fluids across the scorching pavement. Due to my inner rage, the moment was a blur — so I’ll let Sam explain:
“Almost immediately as we left the parking lot the car began overheating. Max pulled us onto the side of the road, looked under the hood for a bit, then we had to wait for the car to cool down. If I remember correctly, we must have repeated this process three to five times over. I was concerned that we might get stranded because everyone else in our group was long gone by that point; but I was also confident in Max’s knowledge and skills to be able to get us home. In the end, Max was able to regulate the temperature of the car somehow and we made it back.”
By the time we got back, it felt like a week had passed. Dropping Sam off felt like the end of a cheesy adventure movie, when the main characters all part ways nonchalantly. But from then on, Sam was always my date to The Gorge.
I can’t help but have sympathy for the brutal and certain terminal damage I’ve caused this car — and for Sam, because I locked him inside of it for four hours. But in the end, the real hero was the man who bought the car from me later that year. To him, I say — good luck to you, sir.