How my first car was destroyed by squirrels

The first car I really owned was a 1981 VW Dasher diesel station wagon. Army green, with the front end definitely fading and headed toward rust. I paid 300 dollars cash for it in the fall of 1994, prepped to drive it out to college for my senior year. I also spray-painted it with rustproofing one afternoon to change it to a flat black of sorts (it seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time), and it went from Maine to Vermont on a single tank of gas. I only had it for three months, but it was particularly memorable primarily for its untimely demise. At the hands of squirrels.


I suffered a bit of a nervous breakdown during exam week of my fall semester, and my parents came out that evening to come get me when I temporarily withdrew from college. My mother drove the minivan packed with my stuff, and Dad and I took my car to head home.

We made it as far as Montpelier when it started making some really ugly engine sounds. Hammering, groaning, could-fly-apart-at-any-moment noises. Under the circumstances, we opted not to go any further and got a motel for the night so a mechanic could look at the car in the morning.

(My Dad reassured me that he did not see this in any way as foreshadowing where my mental state was headed. For this, I was grateful.)

The nearest dealership was in Barre, and we had it towed there. The mechanic was a short, grey-bearded, solid guy who had worked in Waterville for 20 years before coming out to Vermont. He was shocked at my car. “Haven’t seen one of these in years….” he muttered. “I’ll see what’s up.”

We waited about a half hour when he came back out, a look of shock and horror on his face. “You gotta come see this,” he said, and motioned us back into the shop.

We walked back into the shop, where Weird Al was playing on the shop radio. (I did consider this a foreshadowing of the condition of my car.) Sticking out of the middle of the engine was a long-handled torque wrench. “Pull on that,” he said.

My father and I both did – the wrench did not move. “That should swing back and forth with no effort at all. Your pistons have all frozen up.”

“How did that happen?” my dad asked.

The man reached into the opened engine block, and pulled out a handful of broken acorns. “Car’s full of ‘em. Some squirrels have been using it for nut storage, apparently.”

I nodded. “They guy I bought it from did say that he’d let it sit outside for a year.”

“Yep. Any other car wouldn’t have even started up. You’ve been driving this how long?”

“Three months. And back and forth to Maine twice.”

He shook his head. “Always wondered what it would take to kill one of these diesel engines. And now I know. A bunch of fucking squirrels.”

We sold the car to one of the other mechanics at the shop for a hundred bucks – the nearly-new studded snow tires would fit his own VW, and he’d use the car for storage out in his back yard. “All the stuff the wifey doesn’t want me keepin’ in the house,” he said with a wink.

Mom unloaded the van and drove back out to Barre to pick us up. Dad and I still laughed about it for years. He also agreed that I needed a replacement car, and we found one during that month I was home recovering – a 1986 Honda Prelude that served me well for many years (and has a few stories attached to it).

My brother Andy also insisted it was time he got his own car as well – he got a Dodge Daytona that my Dad warned him against after test-driving it (when we got done testing the Prelude, Dad said if I wasn’t buying it, he was). The Daytona was a story unto itself, going through three engines in about two years before the mechanic insisted he was NOT installing a 4th into that heap-o-crap car. (Andy also totaled my Dad’s car running into a deer going back and forth to the garage after the death of the final engine, just in case there was any question about the bad mojo attached to the Daytona.)

My current car is very boring – first really “boring” one I’ve owned, and I’m finding I rather like it that way.