Why is it so hard to say goodbye to an old car? Because of the miles lived.
The sun sets, as seen from the side of the road west of Meade on Nov. 4, 2025. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
This is a story about a car.
And of time, memory, and knowing when to let go.
On the last long trip in our old Jeep I topped a hill west of Meade in southwest Kansas one evening and was buffeted by the wake of a double tractor-trailer going the opposite direction. Trucks on that stretch of U.S. 54 Highway don’t dawdle, and the turbulence rattled my hood so hard that the exterior latch on the passenger’s side came loose. I cursed and pulled the Jeep over at a wide spot on the shoulder, put the gearshift in neutral, and set the parking brake. Then I got out to inspect the damage.
Owners of older Jeeps might know the weird hood flutter endemic to the vehicle. There’s a center latch underneath that keeps the hood from flying up and smacking the windshield, but there are two outside latches that keep the corners of the hood more or less secure.
On this particular model of Jeep, a 2010 Wrangler JK, the straps of the stock hood latches are made of rubber, which stretch as they age and make the hood flutter more severe. After a few years, the rubber breaks, which makes for an unpleasant highway experience, and you also lose some hardware. During the life of the Jeep, I had replaced the latch-strap combination at least three times.
I finally tried an aftermarket all-aluminum latch, which took an hour in the driveway and resulted in skinned knuckles from jamming wrenches inside the fender to reach some of the nuts, but I hadn’t gotten the tension right, which put me on the side of the road dealing with the problem. I didn’t have the right hex wrenches, or enough daylight left, for a permanent fix. So I resorted to a temporary repair.
Columnist Max McCoy made this roadside repair to the driver’s side hood latch of his Jeep during a 2022 trip across Kansas. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
In past years, I’d used an assortment of bits and bobs to secure broken hood latches while on the road, including once using an old fishing stringer. I had since learned to keep a small roll of baling wire in the back. As I finished up the temporary repair and snipped off the excess wire with the cutter on a pair of needle nose pliers, I looked back down the highway toward Meade and saw the all-but-full moon just above the lonely horizon.
In the other direction, the setting sun was a blazing beacon.
It was Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025.
The juxtaposition of sun and moon seemed significant.
I was on my way to the Oklahoma panhandle to research a forthcoming book, and even before I left home, I was having jitters about the fitness of the 15-year-old Jeep to make the journey.
The engine was still good, but the clutch was beginning to slip after nearly 180,000 miles. The passenger side headlight sometimes winked out, but thumping it usually brought it back. There was a Christmas tree of warning lights on the dash from an ABS module that had failed, and I had spent much of the last month haunting dealerships in various towns across eastern Kansas in a vain attempt to find one in stock. The part appeared to be on permanent backorder. The brakes still worked, but I didn’t have any of the fancy stuff like traction control. The factory CD player in the dash had stopped working about a decade ago, the passenger’s side heater didn’t work, and a rear main engine seal was leaking, requiring me to add a quart of 5W-20 every couple of thousand miles.
Perhaps worst of all, a driver in a Dodge truck had failed to yield at an intersection during a September trip to Texas and struck us a glancing blow, creasing the driver’s side rear quarter panel and shattering the plastic fender flare. I had gotten a replacement fender from eBay and attached it with fasteners from Harbor Freight, but there was still the smear of green paint from the Durango on the Jeep’s silver panel.
It was the only mishap in the Jeep, and it scared me and Kim badly. The Dodge had come from behind a semi into our lane, and although I steered far enough over to prevent tragedy, there was still contact, accompanied by a loud bang and flying debris. Nobody was hurt in the collision, but it was a lesson in mortality. If my reaction had been a split-second later, if the point of contact with the Durango had only been a few inches ahead, it would have been grim.
For years we’d had a sense of safety in the Wrangler, but the cold equations of physics had allowed us a glimpse of the catastrophe possible in meeting a bad driver at the wrong time. I developed a fear of passing semis because you never can tell what’s lurking on the other side, but that feeling eventually passed. The Wrangler was old and battered, but it had kept us safe in the only accident we’d had in 14 years of marriage.
But as I stood at the side of the road, at the crest of the hill outside Meade, I finally admitted to myself that the silver Jeep had likely reached the end of its useful life as a highway vehicle. It was a realization I had been resisting because the Jeep wasn’t just a vehicle. It had become a four-wheel-drive icon of freedom to roam. I’ve driven Jeeps daily since 1999. If you’d like to know the story of the first military Jeep sold to civilians after World War II, you can find it here. Jeeps are noisy, finicky, and sometimes just plain trouble, but there’s no substitute for authenticity or trail-worthiness. I’d had the silver Jeep, the 2010, the longest of any, and it took us from Sacramento to upstate New York and just about everywhere in between.
There’s not a corner of Kansas we didn’t visit in the silver Jeep from home base in east central Kansas, and the towns we explored were a lesson in state history: Arkansas City, Atchison, Cherryvale, Colby, Coffeyville, Cottonwood Falls, Council Grove, Dodge City, Elkhart, Fort Scott, Garden City, Greensburg, Hays, Iola, Lawrence, Leavenworth, Lecompton, Liberal, Lucas, Lyons, Manhattan, Marion, Newton, Peabody, Kansas City, Osawatomie, Shawnee Mission, Topeka, Wamego, Wichita and many others.
The author’s Jeep rests at the Cherryvale train depot during a research trip in 2021. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
I know the Jeep was not a living thing, but an object. Yet those two round headlights reminded me so much of a horse it was easy to forget. I sometimes found myself patting a fender of the Wrangler in the way you would an animal. Kim tells me that I tend to get along better with machines than people — automobiles, guitars and amplifiers, ham radios, old stereos — and that is true enough. It isn’t the machines themselves I am fascinated with, but in the way these machines are connected with the world we know. Whenever we fall in love with a family car, it’s not the car we cherish, but the memories of our lives in that car. Take Kim out of the equation and the silver Jeep becomes just another vehicle.
It wasn’t a particularly valuable car otherwise.
It was a bog standard Wrangler Sport S with a black hard top and alloy wheels. They were produced in the tens of thousands. It was already a year old when I bought it, with a loan from the credit union, and the price seemed high at the time — around $16,000. Looking back, I realize it was among the last of a breed, with no touch screen in the middle of the dash and a mostly analog driving experience, including manual transmission.
Even when it was 15 years old, I still thought of it as the “new” Jeep. It always seemed that way, even when it was beginning to fail. Cars changed dramatically during the time I owned the Jeep, something I was confronted with every time I had to rent a car for business. Everything seemed to be controlled by a menu instead of a switch or a button. Are cars better now? Absolutely. They are safer, faster, more sure-footed. But I think I’ll always miss the silver Jeep.
Among the memories I’ll hold tight to is loading the back of the Jeep with personal things from my office in Plumb Hall after I was among more than 30 faculty members fired at Emporia State University. You can read about the purge in this column from 2022, but what you need to know is that our termination wasn’t our fault. I filled the Jeep with crates of my books, boxes of research, mementos from students. When I swung the tailgate shut, it marked the end of 17 years of teaching journalism, including the anxiety and chaos of the pandemic. The future was uncertain, but damned if I didn’t feel I was ready for anything with that gearshift under my right hand and Kim waiting at home on Constitution Street.
The next couple of years were tougher than we could have imagined.
The one thing that didn’t let us down was the Jeep.
It got us to the other side of a bad stretch. Yeah, it had a few problems, but it never left us stranded. It took us anywhere we asked of it. We did have a bad few minutes in Yellowstone National Park when a snowstorm was blowing in and the electrical system went dead, but a quick brushing of a corroded battery post got us rolling again.
We said farewell to the silver Jeep on Dec. 13, 2025, when we traded it in at a dealership. It had taken a day to clean out all the stuff that had accumulated over more than a decade. The glovebox was a time capsule of registrations, insurance cards, oil change receipts, assorted pens and business cards from people I didn’t remember. Beneath the passenger seat, I found a favorite pocketknife I’d lost three years before. From a plastic bag beneath the hood, zip-tied to the fender, was a spare car and house key to be used in case we locked ourselves out.
We had taken the back seat out so there would be more space for gear. There was camping equipment to get us through a night or two if needed, including sleeping bags and butane cook stoves; there was fishing equipment consisting of fishing rods in cases, a soft-sided tackle box, and a net and a stringer; a tackle box turned into a first aid kit with bandages and pain relievers and anti-itch ointments and other things that might be needed in a pinch; tools, including a tow strap, fuses, jumper cables, a flashlight and a full set of socket and open-end wrenches; a pair of my old boots stuck in a corner of the hard top, along with a clean pair of wool socks; a grey plastic bus bin used as a catch-all for maps, brochures, bandanas, Nalgene bottles, cups, trash bags, paper towels, snacks, a camera tripod and two pairs of flip-flops; and a badly scuffed orange utility box, with assorted outdoor gear, that had been in the back of every Jeep I’d owned over the past quarter century. All three had been daily drivers.
At the dealership, Kim made a final search of the Jeep, just to be sure.
From deep beneath the driver’s seat she pulled, fittingly enough, a reporter’s notebook. It was the last thing the old friend gave up.
I had been reluctant to trade in the Jeep. Even at the dealership, I tried to talk myself into keeping it, lied to myself there wasn’t all that much wrong with it, and thought wouldn’t it be nice to keep just to drive around town? But Kim said it was time, and I knew she was right. Still, we nearly left the dealership — in a different and newer Wrangler — with the keys to the old Jeep in my pocket.
I went back inside and tossed the keys to the service manager, who made a fine catch. And in that moment it was done.
Cheers to open roads and new chapters.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.