Buick Estate Wagon

Station wagons were the minivans of their era. Our family had two of them, one in the late 60s and the other in the 70s. We had spent a sabbatical year in England in 1972 and 73, and my dad had ordered a new car for us to pick up when we returned to Canada, I think in August of 1973, after flying to Toronto, where we stayed with my Great Uncle George and Aunt Rose. But when my dad went to pick it up, whatever car he had ordered wasn’t available. Wrong car? Not the features expected? Bait and switch? So my dad cancelled the order, went to a different dealer, and bought a yellow Buick Estate Wagon with wood-panel sides. It even had air-conditioning! We probably got a 1973 model, but the picture here shows 1972. I remember going out to my uncle’s garage, where the car was parked, just to sit in it and inhale that new-car smell. I was eleven years old. The thing I remember most, though, was that our new car had power windows. They didn’t work while the car was parked (I tried), but I thought it was so cool—and made me think we were rich, because only the fanciest of luxury cars had power windows. I had to be told not to play with them when we went for a few drives, and then drove from Toronto to our house in Winnipeg.

My memories of that car mostly involve long family trips. When my dad was off for the summer (professor of architecture at the University of Manitoba), we took extended family vacations lasting two or more months. We drove to Banff, Jasper, and Waterton in the Canadian Rockies, out to British Columbia, to Yellowstone, to Utah, to California (Disneyland!), and two summers to the Maritimes and to Florida, though I missed those trips because instead I had summer jobs (1979 and 80). I was jealous of my sisters those two summers. I wrote journals for most of these trips, in a box somewhere. I remember we would load up the car the night before we left—and load up the trailer, which at first was a Starcraft tent trailer, later a regular camping trailer that didn’t fold up. Both could sleep eight people. On some trips we would hoist our Laser sailboat and a silver Grumman canoe onto the Buick’s roof rack, and I and my siblings learned how to tie them down safely. We always put a twist in the front straps so they wouldn’t vibrate too much in the wind.

Sometimes we would leave before dawn, so dad could cover a lot of miles before the sun came up on the long and boring westward ride across Saskatchewan. When this was the plan, all the seats in the back of the station wagon were laid flat and my mother put out blue sleeping bags and pillows for each of us four kids. That would be illegal today! My mother would sleep in the front bench seat with her head in my dad’s lap. We’d leave at 4:00 in the morning and begin waking up at 8:00 or 9:00 having already made good progress across the prairie.

On one trip, we were all in the car, ready to drive out, this time in daylight, when my mother asked if any of us needed to go to the bathroom before we left. I did, so I went inside to pee. When we got back to the house two months later, after a long hot summer, we were immediately assaulted by an awful smell that filled the house. I had forgotten to flush.

Another memory was the car’s eight-track player. Ours was never a musical family, though we kids were all sent to piano lessons, because that’s what one does. But music was mostly utilitarian—sounds to fill silence on our long drives, which my dad had recorded onto eight-tracks from a few vinyl records on the stereo at home. One such recording was instrumental music from an album that I’ve since figured out was Easy Listening with Bert Kaempfert & James Last from 1975. The eight-track configuration would loop the songs, so if we had a particularly long stretch of driving, the songs come back around a second time, or even a third, and I remember particularly liking “Fly Me to the Moon,” followed next by “Happy Heart.” I loved it when those two songs came around, even if it took almost an hour each time. I remember we once stopped for gas just before “Happy Heart” started, which was so disappointing, and then my dad switched to a different eight-track when we started driving again. To this day, “Happy Heart” is a sentimental five-star song for me (this instrumental version by James Last, not other versions with vocals). Its simple but buoyant melody filled my teenage heart and made it happy. It was one of the earliest songs I remember where it occurred to me that I could choose to like or not like an individual song. I have my dad to thank for that, and those long car trips, even though he never opened a single other musical door for me. Well, maybe he did, by having a cool stereo at home where I could listen to vinyl records (my parents bought me headphones).

At some point my parents must have sold that car or traded it in—our Buick Estate Wagon, yellow with wood-panel sides. I don’t remember when they would have parted with it, or what they might have bought to replace it. That probably happened after I left home for college, in the early 1980s. I imagine what’s left of the car is rusting in some junk heap somewhere, or maybe the metal was melted down and repurposed. It would be nostalgic to have one of those glorious power window buttons on a shelf of curios in my house. Does eBay sell those? Eventually, my parents got a minivan, after retiring and moving around 1999 from Winnipeg to White Rock, British Columbia. When my wife and I started a family, no one made station wagons anymore. So we too got a minivan, a 2002 Honda Odyssey, and perhaps our two kids will have travel memories like mine, but somehow I suspect not. Our minivan had power windows too.

—21 February 2025

Postscript

See also my “Jumping to the Pump” haibun and “Childhood Journaling.” And here’s a poem of mine from Brussels Sprout X:2, May 1993, page 16:

rain-spoiled picnic . . .

in the back of the station wagon

a chip-bag uncurls