Sometimes I think I’m like the author in the movie Stranger Than Fiction, where by writing things, I actually cause them to happen. Last week I innocently penned this: “With the Suburban lightened of many of its wheels and tires, there’s less holding it down, and it may be time to move it on.”

    And then, just like that, it was gone. The ’Burb—o, ye of the rotted brake lines which, beginning exactly this time last year, I spent a month of nights and weekends replacing in a highly questionable bid to extend your functionality one more season. (Who could forget my legendarily execrable brake-line-specific version of The Night Before Christmas, including the classic “A crushing disappointment / creating a flawed Yule / it leaked at the fittings / of the ABS module”?)

    As longtime readers know, many years ago I began a pattern of buying a beat-up Suburban in the spring, using it to take the family on its annual beach vacation on Nantucket, then selling it in the fall, as neither Maire Anne nor I wanted to use a truck that size as a daily driver, despite its having four-wheel-drive in winter. Like the different actors who played Doctor Who, six Suburbans came and went, their appearance different but their functionality nearly identical. It generally worked out very well. One truck died on the sand on the way out to Smith Point, a victim of a wiring harness that had chafed and shorted a wire to ground, something I had to pay an on-island mechanic to troubleshoot. I had the truck back in a couple of days. Another ’Burb ate its transfer case, making it home to Boston by the skin of its teeth. But averaged over the decades, it was a great cost-effective way to get oodles of people and gear to Nantucket and back, and, while there, have a vehicle beat-up enough that I didn’t care if it got scratched or dented, or came back smelling of bluefish.

    When the garage was finally built in 2005, the driveway was lengthened and widened, which made it possible to keep a truck on the property year-round. I took to holding onto the chosen ’Burb over multiple seasons, pulling it off the road and putting it back on as my needs demanded. After all, there’s nothing like a truck for hauling home newly-purchased wheels and tires, transmissions, and Recaros, not to mention towing whole cars.

    I’d had this one, a 2000 Chevy K1500, for five years. We nicknamed it Fat Bastard, as 2000 was the first year of the somewhat bloated new body style. I even had the mascot to go with it; it had a pull string that made it talk, spewing thickly Scottish-accented lines from the Austin Powers movies.

    Maire Anne liked the truck, but loathed the mascot. For years I would make it appear in places she wouldn’t expect, just to, you know, reinforce that special bond that only a husband, a wife, and a model of a grotesquely fat Mike Meyers character with articulated limbs and anatomically accurate rolls of flesh can share.

    FB was a veteran of four trips to Nantucket. During one of them, it popped the first of several brake lines when I attempted to slow down while turning into a parking spot at the grocery store. I clipped the bumper of a Toyota Land cruiser that was, fortunately, even more decrepit than FB. I replaced the brake line myself, but I had to pay an on-island mechanic to jack up the truck and bleed it.

    During the last two years, FB’s inspectability was a crap shoot. First the body rust absolutely exploded, rendering the truck’s rocker panels a mere suggestion of their former selves. In Massachusetts, if a vehicle has any rust hole in the body, it can fail inspection—but some stations are more forgiving than others. I covered the ventilated rockers and the area in front of the rear wheel arches with metal tape and sprayed it primer that was roughly the bronze color of the truck.

    In addition, the exhaust began to get loud when I’d get on the gas. At first I thought it was a cracked exhaust manifold, but when I looked, I noticed that three of the eight studs holding the driver’s-side manifold to the head had snapped off, so the manifold was no longer sealing well. If you remove the passenger-side inner fender liner (as I had to do to change the brake lines), the access to the side of the head is pretty good. But when I looked at it and considered trying to drill out and replace the snapped studs, I thought, “If you touch this, if you enter the cave, you need to be prepared to battle the beast to the death, including, if necessary, pulling the head and taking it in to a machine shop. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t touch it. Back slowly out of the cave.”

    I backed away. The truck remained drivable, but the exhaust leak from the manifold gradually grew louder, transitioning from something you’d only hear during acceleration to being plainly obvious at idle. Any inspection station could fail you for it.

    There were other issues as well. The air-conditioning quit working two summers ago. There was the persistent smell of antifreeze, something I traced to dried-up intake-manifold gaskets that were reportedly not easy to replace. And the right front wheel bearing was starting to complain.

    FB had one last hurrah on Nantucket in the summer of 2015. It turned out to be our last trip down there. We’d been vacationing there for 30 years, the past fifteen or so with my brother-in-law, his wife, and their kids.

    Now, with our kids and their cousins grown, with changes in schedules and priorities, with my altered employment landscape (a polite way of saying that I find myself currently unemployed), making it difficult to justify the expense, 2016 was the first time since 1986 that we didn’t get our beach vacation.

    After I replaced the brake lines last year, I used the truck as a wintah beatah, as we say in Massachusetts, but I didn’t really want anyone else driving it. It wasn’t a spare car I could give to the kids. When I bought the E39 530i stick sport, I pulled FB off the road for what turned out to be the last time. It spent the last nine months as a mobile storage closet in my driveway.

    So, with Fat Bastard lightened of its load of wheels and tires, last week I looked at it in the driveway, thought that now’s the time, wrote up a truthful, direct Craigslist ad describing the truck’s condition, and priced it to sell at $600. A barrage of text messages ensued, including of course the requisite “wld U tk five 4 it?” (I love issuing a one-word capitalization-and-punctuation-correct response to these: “No.”) When a gentleman called me and explained that he was a dyed-in-the-wool Chevy guy, he knew all about the brake-line and exhaust and intake manifold issues, was tired of his wife borrowing his Tahoe every time it snowed, and worked for a tow company and could come in an hour with a borrowed ramp truck, I said to Maire Anne, “The right buyer is on his way here.”

    An hour later, Fat Bastard was on the ramp truck and headed to his new home. I was sad to see him go, but I rejoiced that he appeared to have a functional future ahead of him, not the crusher. As Neil Young said, long may you run.

    And so, Christmas 2016 finds me with a hole in my driveway, wistfully thinking of the wonderful memories on the beach with family and friends in this battered old truck. Here’s hoping that, at some point, another Suburban graces my driveway, and carries another load of kids, cousins, boogie boards, and fishing rods down to the surf.

    Hey, wait a minute: I’m a writer with the power to put pen to paper and change reality. Let’s hope I can make that happen.—Rob Siegel

    Rob’s first book, Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, and his new book, The Hack Mechanic Guide to European Automotive Electrical Systems, are available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, ECS Tuning, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get personally inscribed copies through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com.