Why do car fires fill me with a happy nostalgia?
Last night, there was a car fire on the interstate in Seattle. It was fun. Well, it was fun for me. I wasn’t the guy or gal or folksy non-binary term whose car was engulfed by flames and heady plumes of acrid smoke. Probably wasn’t as fun for them.
I learned about the car fire because I was watching the Cubs. The Cubs were playing the Mariners, and the flaming car was right next to T-Mobile Park. I think there was a westward wind. The bottom of the fifth began, and the camera got hazy, and Boog Sciambi said something like, “Hey Taylor, is it smoky down there? I feel like I’m smelling something,” and Taylor McGregor said something like, “Yeah Boog, there’s a car on fire.” Here’s a video. The camera cut is optimally timed. I think that’s why I found the car fire so funny. I was not expecting live footage of the car that was on fire.
Whoever’s car it was did a pretty good job of handling the fire. If I remember right from later in the inning, the driver had gotten the car to one of those little no-man’s land triangles between the on-ramp and the highway. The triangle you pass before you merge into traffic. The one where people only drive if they’re manic or behaving in a manic fashion. I like this about us people. Not the manic part. The part where the driver got the flaming car out of traffic before they exited the vehicle. A great piece of humanity right there. Our petroleum-filled vehicle ignites and we ask, “How can I make this more convenient for other motorists?”
How does a car catch fire? Is PG&E involved? Does the car explode if the fire reaches the gas tank? Why doesn’t the fire immediately reach the gas tank if there’s a line of gas leading from the tank to the engine? There’s a lot I don’t know about cars. But I do think I’m understanding the nostalgia around car fires.
I think the reason car fires take me to a simpler time is that all the cars I’ve seen on fire have been old, and many of them have been in clips from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. These fancy new cars don’t catch fire.* Old cars? They caught fire all the time. Newsreels used to be full of cars on fire. At least in my memory. I got to see a car fire in person once. Maybe in 2014. It was a sunny day and I was on a bridge. Maybe the 80/94/294 bridge over the Thornton Quarry? The flames looked hot. They were those sunny day flames. Translucent. I think that bridge is also where I rear-ended a guy a year and a half later. I felt bad about that. His dog was in the car, and he was going back to Ball State after Thanksgiving. He was a nice guy. Good people in Muncie. Even the transplants.
* This isn’t true—I gave a Lyft ride once to a woman whose car had recently self-ignited. I think it was a Tesla. I think I had to go back to her house because she left something in the back seat, too. But by the time I’d gotten back to her house I’d picked up Fargo from daycare, so I showed up with a dog when ten minutes earlier I had not had a dog in the car. To her, it probably looked like a big happy Bernedoodle had ordered itself a Lyft.
