Wednesday, November 20, 2024 Big Bertha

The year was 1998. We were expecting our 6th child and officially outgrowing our 7-passenger van. It was time to broaden our vehicular horizons, so we figured we might as well go straight to a 12-passenger van, rather then mess around with the 8-passenger models. My husband began looking around and we prayed for the right van, but he didn’t find anything. And then on a business trip in Wisconsin, he was passing a car dealership and saw a large van in the parking lot. On a whim, he pulled off the freeway and circled back to check it out. The dealership had taken delivery on this behemoth, but then the original buyers backed out so they were stuck with it. A deal was made, my husband went on to his meeting and a nice older couple from Wisconsin drove the van to our little city in Minnesota to deliver it.

It was pretty impressive, a gleaming Chevy Express 2500 in Toreador Red (or “dried blood color” as my mother put it). I was almost afraid to drive the beast. It was so tall! When I got ready to park it in the garage, I succumbed to nervousness about it and asked a neighbor over to see if it would fit. My nervousness was well placed – he said it was too tall. My husband made some adjustments to the garage door after he got home to make it work. We named her “Big Bertha.”

Big Bertha was the first new vehicle we’d ever purchased. We decided that there would be NO food eaten in the car, EVER. This lasted until we had to take the kids somewhere longer than a half-hour drive; in other words, not long. Bertha was a thing of beauty – capacious, comfortable, and quite a smooth ride! We loved having room to spread out when we went on long trips. With six children you can bet that there were times when we needed to separate them due to fighting/arguing. We learned early on always to have an empty ice cream bucket in the van. I’ll bet all of you parents know what that was for, but for everyone else, I’ll just say that sometimes vomiting happens.

Bertha served us faithfully and reliably for all these years. She lugged all 8 of us out West and back many times. We’ve put 210,000 miles on the old girl. The once-gleaming van is showing her age in more ways than one. She sounds like a bucket of bolts sometimes and is literally held together in certain places by duct tape. The front windshield has a long crack in it. Bertha no longer is able to figure out when the gas tank is getting low, so we keep a piece of paper in the van that tells us at what mileage we need to fill up. The driver side door doesn’t close very well. Oh, and that baby who was born in 1998 used Big Bertha during the summer after his freshman year in college to drive to and from a painting job he had. He managed to get a fair amount of paint on the inside, just getting in and out. Bertha wears those paint splatters proudly.

I’ve never had any sort of sentimental attachment to cars until Bertha came along. I suppose we’ll face a repair job someday that we can’t justify spending the money on and we’ll have to get rid of her. When that day comes, I will weep.

I’ll probably put this in an ice cream bucket in the morning.