“When’s the last time some noise the car was making could be fixed with a 3-dollar bottle of fluid? This is awesome.”

I am merging onto the highway in Burlington, Vermont in our “new” 1999 Nissan Altima, which we’ve had for a couple of months, and talking to my girlfriend Natalie about the automotive miracle that has just occurred.

“I know,” she says eagerly—and if this were a movie, the foreshadowing string music would begin under her next sentence. “It’s just so nice to finally have a car that works. New tires, new brakes, new shocks; the cruise control and A/C are solid – and now that the power steering fluid's in, no more weird noises.”

Oh, what fools these mortals be.

The reason we’re headed to New York is because, as you likely know if you are bothering to read this, my buddy Seth won a 2011 Ford Fiesta he gets to drive for 6 months. This is the weekend he picks it up, and though the Ford folks have indicated that the events are for winners only (an admittance policy that has excluded me from more than just this event, now that I think about it), we have hopes that I may be able to sneak in and film a little, and share with him the experience and excitement of picking up the car.

Plus Seth has made it clear he wants the next 6 months to be a team effort, and that, as his “video guy,” I am an important part of the team. And Natalie and I need a vacation, because we have just spent the better part of three months putting up a full-length Broadway musical with middle school students. (There are more ways to have a harrowing adventure than driving to Mongolia, you know.) So we hop in our new car, and we go.

The trip down is a breeze. Sun. Music. A brand new iPhone to play with. And for the first time in forever, no schoolchildren butchering show tunes. We are carefree. We take our time. We take photos.

We’ve arranged to meet Nat’s friend Stephanie in the city, and to our surprise, we are not in Manhattan more than 5 minutes when we find a choice parking spot for the Altima.

It’s a beautiful, warm spring day, and we walk hand-in-hand through a little park downtown, breathing deep the foul-smelling air. Both of us spent time living in New York, and it feels nice to be back. It feels nice to be anywhere, frankly. Strolling through the park, I notice this warning scrawled on a park bench:

After making a mental note to watch our winter clothing, we meet up with Stephanie for a little German bratwurst and beer, then go out to a cozy jazz night club for drinks and conversation. We’ve dropped a hundred bucks we really don’t have after only 2 hours in the city, but we don’t care. We’re having a good time.

I check my phone and realize it’s 10:30 and I have a text from Seth. He’s out with some of the other Fiesta agents in midtown. I calculate that by the time I go back to the car, get my gear, and head uptown, it’s going to be far too late to do anything. He tells me it’s going well so far, I tell him we’re having fun, and we agree to hook up the next day.

The next day, Monday, it is pouring. We wake up in my friend Jaimee’s house on Long Island, which is where we drove last night, banging on the door and waking her up at 1 a.m. because she forgot to leave the door unlocked.

After spumming around for the better part of the day and determining, through intermittent texts with Seth, that security is pretty tight around the Fiesta events, we decide to have lunch with Jaimee and check out her new business – a mobile, waterless, green car washing service called Eco Wash. They’ve just set up shop inside the Sears Auto Repair Center, so we cruise over there to get the tour. It’s exciting stuff, and I hope if we wind up down there with the Fiesta this summer, we can get the car “eco washed.”

Seth is finally able to call. They’ve just set up his Bluetooth in the Fiesta, and he is driving around a rainy track at a course in New Jersey, having the time of his life. He says they are about to turn the Fiesta agents loose with their new cars, earlier than expected. After some quick MapQuesting, I realize that if we both leave at the same time, we can meet up at my friend Eric’s house off I-87 on our way home. I’ll be able to check out the car, get some video, we can all have dinner—it’ll be a blast.

“Let’s do it,” Seth says, and we hang up. We hug Jaimee good-bye and get in the car, meandering through the rear of the Sears parking lot, trying to find our way out so we can hit the highway.

We have almost reached the back of the lot, and are driving down a row of parked cars. At the end of the row, there is a small street—one of those two-lane strips that runs from one end of the lot to the other. After a rolling stop, I turn 90 degrees to the right, merging onto it at about 5 mph.

What I don’t know is that a 20-year old Mexican kid named Roger is flying through the parking lot on this street at about 40 mph in a brand new Nissan Altima, and by the time we see each other it is too late. His front passenger wheel smashes into my front driver’s wheel, and the impact hits me so hard I can feel my brain bounce off the inside of my skull. Natalie screams. To my surprise, the airbags have not deployed. I grab Natalie’s arm and repeat the words, “Are you all right? Are you all right?” twice before she says “yes” and at least three times afterwards. My head is reeling, my body aching. I kick open the door to see a heavyset Mexican kid coming around to my side with that “What the hell?” look on his face. (Why do people always start with anger and confrontation?)

“What the hell, man? What was that?” he demands to know.

I am dazed. “What was what?”

“You pull out, you no look, you pull out? What the hell?”

I raise my voice slightly.

“I’m fine. Thank you for asking.”

He backs down, but only a little.

“You all right? You okay?”

“I think so, yes.”

“What the hell, man?”

And the rest I don’t understand, because he is already on his cell phone, talking in Spanish.

I’ve been in a few fender-benders in my day, and the protocol usually seems to be as follows:

1. Get out and make sure everyone’s okay
2. Determine that both cars are essentially fine
3. Apologize
4. Decide we don’t want cops and insurance companies involved
5. Shake hands and part ways

It’s clear that’s not going to happen this time. A split second after the crash, our car began making a loud grinding noise, like a fork going through a garbage disposal, and then stalled and would not start again. Broken pieces of plastic, glass and metal lie strewn about. We’re not driving away from this one.

Roger, after stalling a bit and admitting he was in another accident just two weeks ago, finally agrees to call the cops. I call my insurance company, only to find out that I don’t have collision coverage on my policy, a decision I’m sure I made using the following criteria:

1. I’m broke. Collision costs more.
2. I live in Vermont. Though it is possible I could hit a moose, I’m probably at low risk for a collision.

This lack of appropriate coverage means Progressive won’t pay for a tow truck, or damages, or anything. Oh, they are very nice about the whole thing. “Is everyone all right?” at least 4 different representatives ask me, and when they say, “Well that’s a relief,” they actually seem to mean it. But the bottom line is, they’ll pay for Roger’s damages (which look minimal, but will somehow end up totaling $4,000), but because I am technically at fault (his speeding is apparently a lesser offense than my “failing to yield”), they can do nothing for me but jack up my premium and tell me to have a nice day.

In the meantime, I am standing in the rain attempting to push my car 10 feet into a parking space to get it out of the roadway, and can’t even manage to do that. So the apathetic cop has to hang around for another 30 minutes while the guy at the Sears Auto Repair center sends his tow guy out to pull the car 500 yards from the parking lot back into the Sears center (yeah, remember Eco Wash?).

I am shaking, both from the cold, pelting rain and the emotional toll the incident is beginning to take. Roger is harassing my distraught girlfriend, berating me, and telling the cop his car needs a tow, even though the vehicle is clearly minimally damaged. When the tow truck shows up, he greets the driver and the two other Mexicans who jump out as if they are family, which they probably are. They hook up his car, jump into the cab, and are finally gone.

We pull the Altima into the garage, pay the tow truck driver 30 bucks for his trouble, and the very nice Sears auto guy takes a visual assessment of what’s cooked on the car. The whole front end is destroyed, basically—bumper, lights, grille, battery, and a handful of other stuff. The engine looks okay. For a moment we hold out hope that it might be fixable.

After 10 minutes on the computer, however, the Sears guy informs us he’s up to $3,000 in parts alone. We tell him we paid $1,000 for the car, and he replies, “Really? Wow, it’s worth at least three. If you had collision, I coulda written this off as totaled and the insurance company woulda cut you a check for like 3 grand.”

Gee, thanks, Bill.

Then something strange happens. I notice a plastic receptacle dangling off the bottom of our now-destroyed car, and as I pick it up I see something inside of it…a dead butterfly. I am immediately reminded of the Ray Bradbury short story A Sound of Thunder, in which a man who travels back in time steps on a butterfly and irrevocably changes the future. What is this little thing doing in the engine of our car? How long has it been here? What kind of strange omen is this? For some reason I wonder, since this car was originally bought on Long Island, if the butterfly came from Long Island or Vermont. I think about the fact that the car is ending its life in the place it began. I am heartsick.

Shock makes you philosophical, I guess.

I call Seth, and let him know we won’t be meeting up with him tonight, and why. He reacts with the appropriate shock and sympathy and offers us a ride, but by this point he has been on the road for an hour, and to turn back would be silly. The Sears guy agrees to hang onto the car while we work everything out, and we remove all our belongs from it and place them into Jaimee’s car, knowing that even if we manage to work the logistics from Vermont of selling or stripping the car for parts and score a few hundred bucks off the thing, we’ll probably never see this poor purple Altima again.

As the adventure winds down, we decide to pause for a quick photo op, musing that just one day earlier we had been naively thrilled that all the car needed was a 3-dollar bottle of power steering fluid.

The rest of the tale unfolds as one might expect. We go to the car rental agency. I don’t have a credit card. My debit card requires a “soft credit check” from the rental agency. I fail the credit check. Natalie has perfect credit, but no credit card, and no money in her account. The banks are closed. We stay with Jaimee another night, transfer funds from my account to Natalie’s, and rent a car under her debit card (to the tune of an additional $35 since she is under 25). The rental is, in a hilariously ironic twist, a Chevy Aveo: the Ford Fiesta’s chief domestic competitor and—assuming my opinion is unbiased, which it probably isn’t—a car with a serious lack of balls. We get in the car and finally head north, off this stinking island, in the rain that has not stopped since we woke up on Monday.

Seth feels awful, of course, and asks if I want to borrow his spare car for awhile. He feels like he has just spent two days meeting cool people and cruising around a racetrack in a brand new Ford, and I have spent it dealing with this car-related bullshit, with no real time to relax or even see the Fiesta. We joke that New York has a “one in, one out” policy – if one Vermonter gets a new car, another Vermonter must lose one.

I assure him there is no need to feel guilty, and tell him there is good in all of this. We are okay. Thank God we are okay. After playing the accident out in my head a few more times, I realize that if I’d gotten another 10 feet out into the roadway, Roger would have slammed into my driver’s side door at 40 mph—and I would not have walked away from that so easily. And we learned some lessons, too. Credit cards, collision insurance and medical insurance are necessities, it appears, not luxuries.

Natalie and I stop at a Days Inn in a crappy town in Connecticut on the way home. Ordinarily I would make the trip in a single day, but we are exhausted. Natalie calls out of work for the next day, and we have dinner at a restaurant next door, a steak place that has a definite “70s men’s lodge” thing going on. We eat an amazing meal and listen to three guys next to us – ages 40, 50 and 60, I would estimate – talk about banging their secretaries. And no, I am not even kidding.

On the way out of the restaurant, we notice the rains have stopped. Fog has covered the dark parking lot. A frog hops across our path; another omen of some sort, I am sure, the meaning of which is lost on me.

The next day, we stop for lunch in Brattleboro. It is finally sunny again. Vermont’s air is clean and warm. (Though we are still sneezing out the pollutants from our 3 days in New York.) We stop at a café for lunch and stare across the table at each other, still in shock, exhausted, unable to function. My friend Kelly calls from Boston. She’s heard about the accident, and wants to know if we want her old Civic. For free. It needs a few things, she says, and she was going to donate it to NPR, but she’d be happier if the car went back to Vermont. Where she bought it. Where its life began.

I am touched. I say yes, thank you so much, we will take it. But as I mull over accepting this exceedingly generous gift, I can’t help wondering one thing: if I’m getting a free car from the city of Boston, does that mean, by this new automotive rule, a Vermonter living in Boston has just lost a car?

It’s food for thought, to be sure, but I’m too tired to think about it. I crawl into bed, mutter a garbled "goodnight" to Natalie, and fall immediately into a deep, dark, dreamless sleep.