I lost my car today. No, this is not the ramblings of an old man, roaming around the Target parking lot, forgetting where he parked and muttering curses loud enough for anyone nearby to steer clear. I—unknowingly at the time—was a victim of the San Diego floods of January 22, 2024.
If you haven’t heard of this wicked weather wonder, just go to YouTube and search “San Diego flooding” and watch what comes up. The San Diego area got anywhere from 2.5 to over 4 inches of rain (what we’re normally supposed to get in a three-month period) in less than 12 hours. I was safe at home in my second floor apartment in Coronado, watching the courtyard outside of my balcony where the water backed up, but never got to any kind of dangerous levels. Once the rain stopped around noon, the waters quickly receded.
But what I didn’t know was what was going on outside of my little nest, where the streets were totally flooded. My building manager showed me a photo of her car, parked out in front of the leasing office, with water up to the bottom edge of her door windows. At some point on Monday (and again on Tuesday), I thought, “Maybe I should go make sure my car (safely parked in the garage, I thought) is okay …”, but like a lot of things these days, thoughts that enter my mind don’t stay very long.
So today, 48 hours after the deluge, I went to my car to take a little jaunt to a bookstore. I opened the door and thought, “Gee, my car smells funny.” I got in, and once I put my feet down, I knew why. I had a giant puddle in the well below my seat. The passenger side and the back seat were the same. The floor mats were soaked and there was a small lake of water underneath them.
Now, I will admit to being a sometimes surprisingly naive person. So, I started the car, and lo and behold, it started fine, all the interior lighting came on, the windows worked … in fact, everything electrical worked. The seats were dry (except for the lower edge of the front seats, they were damp), the console and the dashboard were dry also. But the top of my steering wheel was covered in brown dirt and grit, but just the top; the steering column was totally clean, as was the dashboard. I can’t figure out what caused that. The water was definitely NOT up to that level. If it was, the seats would have been soaked through.
I went and talked to the building manager and asked how flooded the garage was. I pay $50/month extra to keep my car semi-underground, and she showed me some photos that looked like six inches or less. I wondered if maybe the car got a kind of waterfall effect from above. The garage is beneath the tennis courts and there’s a gap in the upper wall between the ceiling and the wall. I talked to my friend and she said call your insurance company, which I did … but more on that later.
I will tell you that at this point, I was in shock. I still am as I write this, about 8 hours after I discovered what happened. I went to the maintenance workers office in the garage and asked to borrow their shop vac, which I used to get all the standing water off the floor. I pulled out the floor mats first, and they were a lost cause, just totally soaked through.
But when it comes to lost causes, so was the car. Like I mentioned, I started it up and even took it for a little drive. I moved it out into one of the complex’s parking lots, so I could take a better look at the damage; the garage is kind of dark. And then I drove it back into the garage and started the whole shop vac thing.
Having done what I could with that, I came in and called my insurance company and that’s when the big, round, wrecking ball hit me smack in the forehead. By their standards, the car was a total loss, so the very nice agent on the other end of the line told me she’d pass it on to a different department (the total loss one) and they would contact me and come and tow it away. They’d perform a valuation on it and let me know what they would pay me, minus my $500 deductible.
My car is—well, I guess now was—a 2006 Honda Civic Coupe. It’s a very pretty shade of blue, so much so that when it was brand new, strangers would come up to me in parking lots and say “What color is that?”, and I would promptly say, “Blue.”, and they would undoubtedly mutter “dick” as they walked away. I bought it new in 2006, and have had it for 17.5 years now. It has just a little over 86,000 miles on it. I drive it less than 5,000 miles a year and I’ve keep it in great shape. There’s some minor cosmetic damage to the body, just some scratches and dings. It’s a great car and it’s been very faithful to me (I tend to anthropomorphize things, although I never did name the car, but I do view it as a longtime, close, personal friend). It’s been a wonderful car for someone like me, who knows nothing about how it works other than how to pump gas and change the windshield wiper fluid.
But here’s the thing: I’ve been thinking about getting rid of it for about a year now. I hate to drive. Let me rephrase that: I HATE TO DRIVE. I didn’t learn how to drive until I was 35 (lonnng story), and I’ve owned only two cars in my life. My first was a 1990 Honda CRX, which I had from that year through 2006. (It was blue, too, so cross off “What’s your favorite color, Gary?” from your questionnaire. You have your answer.) I drove it across country when I moved to San Diego from Pittsburgh in 1998, and it was like a little tank; it had absolutely no frills, I bought it at its base price of about $9,999, and the only extra thing I put in it was a radio. It was totally stripped: No air conditioning, no power windows, no power steering. It was a great little car, but if you’re familiar with CRXs, they had no back seat, just a kind of … shelf. When I went back home to visit, my nephew would ask, “Uncle Gary, where’s the rest of your car?”, undoubtedly coached by his dad. It was like someone took a chain saw to the back half of the car.
In 2006, I bought a “WHOLE” car, and I’ve had it ever since. And while I love the car, I hate driving. In December, I took the car in for its yearly maintenance, including an oil change, tire rotation, etc., and while I was at the dealer (not the dealer I bought it from, which is another lonnng story), I asked them to look it over and make me an offer. Kelly Blue Book had it at $2,700, and the dealer offered me $3,500, which I was tempted to take, but I wasn’t quite ready to pull the plug.
I had been telling my friends about my plan to ditch the car for a while now. I had an elderly neighbor who got into a pretty bad accident and ended up in the hospital for months, with a lot of shattered bones (ultimately he was moved into a veterans home back east by his family). And while I seldom took any kind of long trip in the car anymore (to be honest, the longest I ever took while living here, was up to Los Angeles or Pasadena and back), it kind of rattled me. I made up my mind to get rid of my car when I wanted to—to go out on top, if you will—and not when someone decided it for me, like in an accident like my neighbor.
Well, it was someTHING not someone who made the decision for me. The storm we had on Monday was unusual by any means. The news media called it a “once in a 100 years storm,” although I remember a similar one back in 2018 that was just as bad. And for some reason, my car—in a garage that must hold at least a hundred of them—was the only one that was damaged. It was parked in a “sweet spot” (this term used sarcastically) where all the water just pooled from both sides of the garage. Cars near me were undamaged.
How do I know this? Well, while I was vacuuming out the water, one of the maintenance guys came over and asked me how damaged the car was. He told me he tried calling me and even came and knocked on my door, but I wasn’t home. “Were you away?, he asked. I wasn’t, I was home all day. And then as we talked, he told me what apartment he went to and he not only had the wrong apartment but the wrong building.
So the car sat for 48 hours with its own little lake inside. And even if it is fixable, I’m sure mold was already gaining the upper hand. When I took it for that little spin (and yes, I wholeheartedly agree—say it with me—“THAT WAS STUPID, GARY!”), I could hear water sloshing around. The design of the Civic in 2006 had the back end raised uo a little bit, so I think that saved the car from getting water into the tailpipe and subsequently the engine, so that’s why it still started. But in my insurance company’s eyes, any car flood-damaged is a total loss.
I’m still waiting to hear back from them about the next steps. Maybe they’ll come out and see that it starts and say, “Hey, we can save this car!”, but I sincerely doubt it. And the resale value will be nil (as W.C. Fields once said in The Bank Dick), as it will always be listed as flood-damaged. So I guess I move on with my life and see what it’s like to live in Southern California without a car. Perhaps I shall be a pioneer of sorts, starting a whole new movement, “The Church of the Carless.” I know I’ll save some money: No gas, no insurance, no every-other-year smog test, no maintenance, no monthly parking fee, and no random trips to bookstores or comic book shops or Target and money needlessly spent at any of those places, either. I’ve already looked at Lyft fees … it costs at least 20 bucks to go one way to even my closest favorite place. It’s not worth spending an additional $40 to buy something, even if I’m heading to a great sale.
I’m very sad, though. I never expected this to happen. I thought the garage would protect me, not harm me. I was wrong. But I will miss that car, even if I won’t miss driving. The concept of the freedom it gave me is gone forever. But like any long-term relationship, time heals all wounds. It’ll hurt for a while, but I’ll get over it.
And before you ask, retirement doesn’t allow me the financial freedom to buy a new car, even if it’s an old used beater.
Click here to read the concluding chapter in this mini-saga. Life goes on.
innocent-bystander.com 