I just sold my first car, a beige 2003 Ford Ranger. Admittedly, I sold it to my father, who is planning on keeping it in the family, so it’s hardly goodbye forever. Still, it feels like telling a school friend we’ll see each other after graduation – we will, perhaps, but it won’t be quite the same.

My grandfather, a man who does not believe in keeping cars more than 5 years, gave me the Beige Banana in the summer of 2009. It was an absurdly excellent car for a 19 year old – only 34,000 miles, a pickup truck, with four-wheel drive and four seats, as long as two of your friends didn’t mind squeezing (they didn’t, as it turns out).

I loved the car immediately. Like the Black Pearl, it was more than its components – it was freedom. I drove myself to college in the Beige Banana, all of my things packed into the back and wrapped in a giant tarp. It drove me and my friends on countless beer runs – once we even piled five large young men into its tiny cab. It drove me home for breaks, and back to school again when they were over. It drove me through snow storms when the rest of Chapel Hill was afraid to leave the house.

The car drove me to my first camping trip, in the Uwharrie Mountains of North Carolina. I remember bouncing along dusty roads, listening to Mumford and Sons, feeling that I had found my element. Those were the first of many nights I spent it the back of the truck, turned diagonally because I am just slightly too tall to lie straight, but feeling self-sufficient and alive.

In the next couple years, I drove as many miles on dirt as pavement – the car took me to Green River Preserve, to parties on the top of a mountain, with 15 people in the back, screaming and bruising as we bounced over the rocks. When Megan and I started dating, if you can call it that when you’re both working at a summer camp, I remember driving aimlessly on our days off, always with the windows down and always wishing the CDs and the gas tank and the day off would never run out.

The Banana drove us both to Maine and then back south for my last two years of school, and a new purpose for the truck. It continued to drive me on camping trips every now and then, but more than anything else, the car was a portal to Charlottesville, Virginia. I still know every inch of the route from Carrboro – winding Old 86, quaint Hillsborough, where the speed limit drops to just 20, then 86 to the Virginia line and the Valero gas station with the cheapest gas. Then onto 29 through the land of empty fields and rolling forests and two-choice radio: country music or the Bible Broadcasting Network. After Lynchburg, the hills got higher and higher, ending with a crescendo on roller-coaster dips just south of Charlottesville. Then, my senses fully activated as I pulled into town, I noticed smaller things – the light at Shamrock street that I almost never made, the students trudging along JPA, the many bicycles of student housing. Then Brandon Ave, and its tiny parking lot, and after that, Valley Road, dark and dim in the evening, the towering trees cutting out almost all light, and the mournful sound of a freight train rumbling along the tracks behind Megan’s house.

The Beige Banana took me on many more trips after graduation as well, and probably spent more nights sleeping in its back that summer than I had in the 5 years previously. It wasn’t an easy time for me – I was heading to Norway, leaving my friends and my girlfriend, and until my plane left, I felt adrift and often alone. But I was never far from my truck.

…

I’ve had many adventures without the Beige Banana. I didn’t drive it for my entire year in Europe. I went on adventures before my grandfather gave me the truck, like my post-graduation road trip in my Mom’s Honda Odyssey. I’ll go on adventures now that it’s passed on to someone else, too. Maybe it’s moving to a new city, a new, shared home, and starting a new, big-boy job, but saying goodbye to my truck feels like saying goodbye to all of those adventures, the emotional intensity I remember them with, and the whole era of my life they defined. Now, suddenly, I feel like I’ve grown up, when all I’ve really done is sell my truck. But anyway, goodbye, Beige Banana, and thanks.