A Trunkful of Hobbies

There’s a well-worn Hollywood trope of a point of view camera shot from the perspective of the inside of a car trunk, looking upward, and then having another character – sometimes the hero, more often a villain and often a hilarious one – slam the trunk closed on the viewer.  Mine is not so dramatic…thankfully.  Instead, I realized that the trunk itself can carry a person’s life in both literal ways and ways that are deeply imbued with meaning. 

It’s about stuff.

We’ve all seen cars that are being lived in…and cars lived within and perhaps also given ourselves a bit of a “word to the wise” moment: there but for the grace of God, etc.  The hoarder cars are another version of it, though obviously worn down with the tell-tale signs of deeper problems.  An example is a car entirely filled with empty cigarette packs, fast food wrappers and Big Gulp cups, parking tickets, shopping receipts, and a dozen or so shoe boxes, half of which have at least one shoe.  The grist for the YouTube and Instagram Reel mill.

I’m not talking about that.  Instead, I mean a trunk (or cargo space…we’ll get into that in a moment) with things that you need to run your life.  In my case, my job requires me to be on the road between Pennsylvania and Maryland with some regularity, so I routinely have things with me that look a lot like my life overall, or at least it comes equipped with the intention of doing so.

What have we here?  Well, the overnight stay luggage is removed, for one thing, leaving the rest with my evening activities I have planned – some target shooting, some driving.  (The helmet, for example, is for the driving…again, thankfully…and by driving, I mean, “at the go-kart track.”) 

This is actually a view within the trunk of my own EV, and Audi e-Tron GT, which is at least some partial inspiration for this blog in its totality. 

So – the inventory: a racing helmet (I left the support collar at home), driving gloves, driving shoes, membership card.  That’s for the driving.  For the shooting: over-under 12-gauge shotgun, shell pouch, hearing protection, dedicated baseball cap, another electronic card for metering out the clays at the range.  One night I went karting, one night I went shooting. 

Without living in a car, one lives through a car.  The EB White quote adorning the Petersen Automotive Museum: “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car” is a thought I frequently consider in the frame of my own life.  It’s never been easier to demonstrate than something like this.  Someday, perhaps, I’ll have my own go-kart track and sporting clays range on my property.  Perhaps I’ll connect them with tarmac and drive my go-kart to my range and back.  Who knows?  But until that happens – the hobbies are a part of me, and the car is a part of me, and it’s the fabric of a life.

I’m not sure how many soccer moms (or dads) think of their SUV, crossover, or minivan that way, or soccer dads for the same reasons.  The vehicle is transport, it’s instrumental in the strictest sense of that term; often, I think, it eludes recognition until there’s 100,000 miles on the odometer and it’s time to part with it that the emotions stir, spurred by memories of the adventures that they had together and that the car served them through.

Could this be a part of a car’s soul too?  Absolutely, I would say yes.

Undoubtedly, there are people out there for whom the car is just an appliance, just transport, and they don’t think of any significance in trading it in, anymore than they would when they go to Target and get a new can opener or pillow set.  That’s fine too, although that’s definitely not how I’m wired.

Although, that being said, I don’t know that I ever really saw my trunk in this way before, just during an ordinary weekday trip for work and back.  One night karting, one night shooting. 

I’ve had some long road trips in my time – northern Saskatchewan, west Texas, New Mexico, Florida a few times, Maine a few times.  No matter which platform I take, I always tended just to view packing as a painful process of spatial relationships.  That’s inside the suitcases and in the trunk, bed, or cargo space; all of it was just an instrumental problem to be solved, and the action is confined to the occurrences behind the wheel. 

Not true.  Or at least – not entirely true.  Loading a pick-up truck with freezers, firearms, ammunition, two weeks of clothes for business, outdoor activities, and casual existence, computers, manuscripts, books…yikes.  There’s a lot there for those trips and I would always get lost in the “need” for something and the associated neurosis with repeated questions of “do I have everything?”

The trunk picture is easier.  It’s contained, smart, efficient, each one dedicated to serve one end: the business part and everyday living, then the sporting clays, then the go karting.

But isn’t that interesting? 

Think of all the lives unfolding inside the cars around us. The newly married, the recently divorced, the grieving, the jubilant, the exhausted parent with three shouting children in the back seat. Each vehicle carries a story, usually invisible to the rest of us.

Perhaps it’s time to pull back, just a bit, and focus on what’s in this trunk.  The shooting elements, from a lifetime of outdoor activities and a love for the mechanical, the gun oil, the smell of a freshly-spent shotshell, the dust of the clay as the shot cloud pulverizes it, the tiny little burst of satisfaction that comes with that expression of skill.  Similarly, for the racing equipment – the helmet, the gloves, the driving shoes, all there to protect and help an engagement with a mechanical device taking you at a (relative) high speed around an enclosed course.  Two-footed driving, wrestling with the wheel, the sensation of movement an inch off the ground as I clip the apexes the best I can.

Have I advanced anything by these hobbies? 

I’m not sure that’s really the point.  When we “spend time” and are aware of that, we are also acutely aware of whether that’s being spent well or not.  We carry our lives around with us in the cars; the concerns about, for, or regarding privacy are all there for each one of us.  On one of those road trips I’ve taken, I discovered one early morning that there had been an intended break-in on one of my SUVs.  It hampered the trip, but didn’t ruin it…at the same time, we have a concern about the lone psychopath out there driving around with things they shouldn’t be.  I think, however, that it is patently obvious that these types of situations are pretty far from the ordinary course of things.  Instead, what we have are our lives.

Do cars have souls? You bet they do. And sometimes, they’re what we put in them.

It’s the stuff we carry, sometimes the stuff we forget about. The things we need for work, the things we bring along for pleasure, the equipment for activities that make life a little richer. Taken for granted sometimes, and other times admired, our vehicles are more than instruments of transportation. They carry us not only to the places we need to go, but toward the lives we want to live.

Sometimes, it takes nothing more than opening the trunk to recognize that.

Drive.