I loved my car.

…and now it’s gone.

It wasn’t my first car, and I’m not certain it’ll be my last, but Rolf the Golf meant a lot to me. After watching it sit unregistered and uninsured next to my house for over a year, I finally got around to posting that Craigslist ad and getting it gone. Here in Portland, I found that I no longer used the thing.

And now I will get nostalgic:

Six years ago, when I bought it, the story was different. I lived in small, rural towns with sorry public transportation, very few services, and very real winters. My car allowed me to ski almost constantly, get to far-flung construction jobs, and take spur-of-the-moment jaunts to Montreal or Kingston, Ontario. The radio, always on, always loud, allowed me to study recordings almost as closely as I did with headphones. There are stretches of the 401 that I will forever associate with a Nina Simone song and gaps in the Green Mountains where Les Claypool’s bass is probably still echoing. Some of my best college memories were of packing into that car in search of small cheesemakers. We’d take hours getting lost on dirt roads trying to find them while listening to CDs borrowed from the college radio station, munching on apples, and stopping at rivers for a chilly dip and country stores for rootbeer and beef jerky. There were miraculously few stains on the interior.

I also drove it across the continent three times. The first time is what brought me here to Portland. I didn’t plan on moving here. I had planned on turning around but when jobs all fell through back east, I decided to stay. The trip took about three months and we made a blog about it. The second time, I drove across Canada–up over Lake Superior–and for the third trip, my lead-foot sister and I made record time from Boston to Portland. Sleeping in truck stops, being fed crackers and cheese from the passenger seat, checking email in small-town libraries…these trips provided me with more memories than I can possibly remember. I cemented relationships with my country, my friends, and myself on those trips. (No more roadtrip cliches. I promise.)

Shortly after college, I also found myself using my car for something else entirely: getting to work–45 minutes each way down Vermont Route 7, sometimes over an hour in snow.

I was spending an hour and a half each day crawling through Vermont’s idyllic countryside, seven and a half hours a week–almost an entire work day. I became so fed up with this that I allowed myself one idealistic rule: I would never drive to work again. I promised myself that I would never put myself in a position where I needed my car on a regular basis. Fast forward a few years to my life here in Portland. Except for when friends borrowed it, that poor car just sat. My life had changed.

At the moment, I hardly ever leave Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary. There’s enough for me to do here in the city where I can get everywhere I want to go by bike. I’m missing out on lots of places, sure, but it’s not because I no longer have a car. It’s because there’s too much going on here. I don’t feel trapped, though. I’ve got Amtrak, Grayhound, friends with cars, and a Flexcar membership in my pocket.

For now, I’m doing fine without Rolf, but I’ll never regret the good times we had. Even if they’re the number one killer of people under 33, a prime carbon emitter, and a huge waste of urban space, cars are pretty amazing things. I feel lucky to have enjoyed the quintessential 20th century American experience of owning one.