A few years ago I was a die hard Ford pickup truck owner. There was nothing you could do to convince me that a better engineered or more utilitarian vehicle could be owned. I had a big 1990 F150 and it seemed there was nothing it could not accomplish.

I got married and decided I wanted to spend a month or two in Europe opening up my mind with my new bride. She brought a 1987 Jeep Cherokee into the household by marriage and firmly resisted my requests to sell it, as we only needed one car between us. Let me tell you, that Jeep was easily the worst engineered car I have ever worked on (a bad year for AMC anyway, since they were bankrupt and had just been acquired by Chrysler). She’s a pretty strong willed gal, so I knew arguing with her was useless, and I had to hold back my tears when I sold my Ford truck for $4000 in order to fund the honeymoon in Europe. I felt like I had turned my back on a friend, and the Jeep Cherokee sitting in the driveway just added insult to injury….

Part One: Deliverance

We left for our honeymoon and spent the first two weeks in the UK walking the Thames path from Oxford to London. Somewhere past Abingdon, my wife slipped and sprained her ankle very badly. I carried her pack while we limped on to the Clifton lock, hoping to find a rail connection to Reading near the river. As we walked past the lock, the lock keeper emerged from his hut and asked about my wife’s obviously painful limp. I explained our predicament and asked for directions to the nearest rail station.

The lock keeper pulled the door shut on his hut and said, “I’ll do better than that.”

He led us around to the back of the hut where his old Volvo 245 was parked. I will never forget the moment I laid eyes on that car–it makes me teary eyed just thinking about it now. With no words he opened the tailgate and carefully placed both our packs in the back. He helped my wife into her seat and closed the door, and then jumped into the driver’s seat. I wanted to express my concern about the possibility of someone needing his services at the lock while he was gone, but I was too wrapped up in the car and the relief it and its driver were bringing us to open my mouth.

I sat in the back while he sped us down a series of narrow roads towards the train station at Didcot. This was my first automotive experience in Britain, and once I got over the weirdness of driving on the left side of the road, I marveled at the generous visibility afforded by all that sparkling glass in his Volvo. There was a heckuvalotta room in that car. I saw my wife’s worries about a ruined honeymoon melting away into the Volvo’s seats.

The lock keeper graciously delivered us to the rail station and Didcot, and I nursed my wife’s ankle back to health in Reading.

Part Two: Ominous Signs

Later in the trip we stopped in Whitby on the east coast for a night. Traveling on a budget, we called the local youth hostel and applied there for room and board for the night. They had plenty of room, so we started walking to the hostel. I had heard the hostel was run by a Swedish couple in an old cinderblock building, and I knew we had arrived when I observed two beautiful Volvo 245s parked out front. I am always cognizant of patterns in my daily life and I was struck by the reappearance of this stalwart looking, broad shouldered vehicle. We turned out to be the only guests that night–good luck for a honeymooning couple.

After trekking all the way up the coast to Scotland, the Outer Hebrides and the Shetland and Orkney Islands, we jumped on a ferry and started off for Norway. By this time it had been nearly six weeks of travel and we were winding down with a brief jaunt through continental Europe. From Bergen to Oslo and finally on a train down through Sweden, I soon became aware of my fate. As our train zipped toward Gothenburg parallel to a busy freeway, I glanced out the window at the modern Swedish landscape, its freeways crowded with Volvos. We splurged in Gothenburg and stayed at a hotel, and I walked around the eerily quiet downtown streets at dusk, pondering the Swedes, their cars and my future.

Part Three: “Something boxy.”

Weeks later we were back in Texas weathering the intense summer heat. The Jeep Cherokee had no working air conditioning or radio. While I felt that I could do without such luxuries, my new partner was a very effective lobbyist for improvements to transportation infrastructure. We spent an evening rationalizing the need to sell the Jeep and buy a car that we could rely on and which had all the necessary comforts. These are the kinds of precarious discussions which have the potential to destroy marriages.

I thought back to the merciful lock keeper and the Swedish hosts at the hostel. I thought about the cars I saw in Gothenburg flying down the freeway next to our train. A certain shape formed in my brain, with big, clear headlights and pillars that formed sobering right angles. I decided to ask a very vague question of my wife, just to see if we were really meant to be together (both me and the woman and the car).

“Generally speaking, what kind of car do you want?” I tried to sound open minded, though my mind was already made up.

“Something boxy,” she replied without hesitation. Right answer.

We were driving around in the evening heat in that horrible Jeep during that conversation, and I quickly turned the car down a street where I knew there was a Volvo. I pointed at the now familiar shape as we drove by an example parked on the street.

“How about a Volvo?” I asked.

In one of those moments when you know you’ve found your soul mate, my wife and I exchanged excited confirmation of our ideas, to the point of feeling limited by speech and wanting something more to celebrate the meeting of our minds. Ah, the trappings of marriage!

Part Four: Conclusion

A few weeks of searching on the internet brought me a promising lead in Houston. I arranged to see the car.

The seller was a pleasant Indian man, and as I entered the parking lot of his condominium, I observed him polishing the glass on a very clean and handsome ash colored 87 Volvo 245. I introduced myself and started asking about the car.

“Oh, this isn’t the one. The car I’m selling is in my garage.”

He led me to the garage and explained that he had bought two 245’s in 1987, one brown and one ash colored. In an interesting twist, he noted that both cars had a stress crack in the windshield at exactly the same spot, and the odometers on both cars quit at 118K miles. I drove the brown wagon and was very happy with it. He produced all the records which showed that it was dealer maintained, even up to the last oil change about two months ago. This is the kind of original-owner car I had always dreamed of. I told him that I wanted to discuss it with my family and would call him in two hours.

I talked with my family and got a positive opinion from them, but I just couldn’t get the ash colored wagon out of my mind. I called the seller and offered him a little more money if he would sell me the ash colored 245 instead. I felt this was my best insurance against buying a lemon. He covered the phone and spoke briefly to his wife, who consented. Two hours later I was driving the ash 245 back to Austin.

Since then I have felt nothing but pride for my Volvo. In an era where scorn is cast upon pickup trucks, SUVs and their drivers, our Volvo escapes their scrutiny with a low profile and spartan styling that makes it seem invisible to the masses of people who prefer contemporary car designs. When we bought our first home a year ago, the home inspector/engineer (a man whose opinion of engineering I respect) grinned knowingly at our 245 as we drove up to meet him. As we sat outside our house, he related how the Volvo is like a “people’s car” and seems invisible to the police despite the occasional bout of speeding. After moving into the house, the Volvo proved invaluable in the daily trips to Home Depot, where the 245 never failed to impress me with the amount of building materials its cabin could swallow, or how easily a few sheets of 4×8 gypsum could be strapped to the roof.

The first neighbor I met was a young woman who slowly crept by in her beat up 85 Volvo 245, grinning that same knowing grin out the window. Within minutes discussion had moved from the neighborhood to where the best pick-and-pull yards are. And just yesterday I met another neighbor whose 88 Volvo 245 will no longer start. I helped her diagnose the problem and fix it quickly (bad electrical grounding).

We stood next to her wagon and talked about its history. She mentioned she had considered selling it but couldn’t bring herself to do it. When I suggested that the 245 could be called a modern classic, we both nodded and grinned knowingly.