Crash and yearn

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If the Volvo were to be ground up as scrap, I wanted to be there to stand witness. If it were to be shipped overseas, I wanted to know where. Perhaps even keep in touch with the new owner. See what my car was up to.

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Winston Wheeler said he sees people like me at his Florida salvage yard all the time. “Every day, someone comes to get their personal belongings, take pictures, give their car its rightful burial, if you will,” he said. “It’s funny how attached we get to our vehicles. It’s lived our lives with us.”

The one Wheeler never forgets was the ’68 Chevy Nova his dad got him in the 1980s with bench seats, roll-up windows and a hand shifter on the front of the wheel. “It was a horrible car,” he said. “But just like you never forget the birth of your first child, you never forget your first car.”

The insurance auction company said that I could come to the salvage auction to see who bought my Volvo and to call in three months. When I called in two, the Volvo was already gone.

Dan Oscarson, vice president of global buyer marketing for the auto auction company wouldn’t tell me, for privacy reasons, who the new owner was, but he did agree to forward an e-mail to them on my behalf. “Because this car has a piece of my soul,” I wrote, “I would really like to know what happens next.”

But the new owner, perhaps not surprisingly, was “flat-out not interested” in talking to me, Oscarson said. The owner had licenses to export cars as well as to take them apart. So perhaps it was on its way overseas, he said. “In our country, we would throw something like a damaged door panel away,” Oscarson said. “In Bolivia, they’ll pound on it with a blockhead hammer for three days to make it right.”

I imagined my green Volvo tooling around the Andes, perhaps with a flock of chickens in the back. Would it be happy there?

Over the next several months, I called auto parts dealers, dismantlers, junkyards and rebuilders, trying to find the Volvo. Car-love expert Nancy Sirianni, only mildly surprised, said I was showing an unusual amount of commitment to a car that was no longer mine. “It’s very romantic,” she told me. “Like searching for a long-lost boyfriend.”

A man at B&M and King George Auto Parts Inc. in Clinton told me to give up. That finding my Volvo at this point would be like trying to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. “Maybe it’s in Nigeria,” he said. “I watch these salvage auctions all the time and see where the bids come from. A lot of Nigerians love Volvos.”

After more fruitless searching, I ran a Vehicle Identification Number search online. Though owner information is not released, you can see when I got the title in 1998. Then when the insurance company did. You can see when it was auctioned off as salvage. But here’s the thing. The next month, it was declared rebuilt by the Maryland State Police and once again, resold.

Tony Landini of Beltsville Auto Recyclers Inc. said that if the car was rebuilt in Maryland, it most likely is in Maryland still, probably bought by a local mechanic who figured he could fix it and sell it as a family car. “Most of the shops where cars get totaled out can fix the cars. There are very few that really deserve to be in a salvage auction,” Landini said. “But these insurance companies just don’t want to mess with people like you, calling up all the time and complaining. So they take a short cut.”

The Volvo, it appears, has been resurrected. And perhaps it is making grocery and carpool runs for another family, its built-in car seat occupied by another precious child. I hope it is having a good life.

Still, the kids and I, without thinking, all snap our heads when we see one like it on the road. “I just really miss the Volvo,” my daughter, Tessa, will often say.

I did eventually buy another car. One that came with three years’ worth of repair work for free at a shop right around the corner. Truthfully, I bought it because the salesman, seeing how distraught I was, sat me down, gave me a bottle of water and said: “Man, you’re so stressed out. It’s only a car.” So now I drive a silver Volkswagen Jetta wagon. It’s perfectly fine. It gets good gas mileage and takes me where I want to go. It just can’t take me back.

Brigid Schulte is a Washington Post staff writer. She can be reached at schulteb@washpost.com.