“Can I take a few pieces?”

I looked down at the shards of prismatic textured plastic in her hands, sparkling in the late-April sun. The deer had done a number on the front of our little blue hatchback, and we were about to leave it behind for the tow truck to take to a scrapyard.

A few days before, I was driving along a dark stretch of U.S. 19E just after sundown—the little blue car dutifully eating up the last miles of Carter County, Tennessee, before crossing into North Carolina. My younger two daughters and I sang along to the Avett Brothers, Secret Sisters, and other bands we were about to see at MerleFest that weekend. I brought them up early to get the most out of our tickets; Rachel and the older two girls planned to come after school on Friday.

On the home stretch of our trip, a doe bolted out of the woods. I was doing 60, and had less than a split second to hit the brakes. The sudden merger of flesh and metal shook the car, a reverberating thud quickly echoed by screams from the back seat. Slowing to stop on the side of the road, I knew it was going to be bad—by my meager phone flashlight, I could see the hood bowed up, the bumper and grill and right headlight all shattered, the front quarter-panel accordioned, and the passenger door deeply dented and unopenable. The doe must have spun around and impacted the door with her head. Fur fragments were embedded in every crevice across the front.

I carefully limped the car to my parents’ house in Watauga County, amazed that it could still get us the last 40 miles so mangled. She took care of us to the end. A more thorough inspection by the next morning’s light and a call to our insurance agent confirmed the suspected diagnosis: total loss.

“Based on the year, make, and model, we’re going to total it. So if you want to go ahead and get all your personal belongings out of the car and take the license plate off, that will speed up the process.” I got an old paper sack out of my parents’ recycling bin and went to work purging evidence of my ownership from what was soon to be a pile of spare parts or scrap steel.

When we bought that car as newlyweds—brand new, to take advantage of the warranty—we joked that we’d take care of it well enough for it to be our future kids’ first car. It almost made it. Our oldest daughter had learned to drive in it and had made her peace with receiving this now-grizzled hand-me-down as her first set of independent wheels when she turned sixteen in a few months. Now that it was totaled, she wondered if taking a memento would break some unstated insurance rule.

Grieving the Inanimate
When they arrived and saw the car, Rachel and our oldest daughter cried. My dad, in a well-meaning but poorly-timed effort to take the edge off, told them it was “just a car.” It didn’t help. They took it for one last labored loop around my parents’ gravel driveway and said their goodbyes. It felt right, even natural, to grieve this loss. Eighteen-and-a-half years is a long time to own anything in this era of disposability.

It’s not just time, though. This is the car that sat in the pull-through at the hospital for a whole day when we rushed in for our first daughter’s delivery, and it’s the car that brought at least two of our kids home for the first time from a different hospital. This is the car that took kids to and from school, even as they dubbed it “the volcano” and complained about how its navy paint and black interior didn’t go well with hot Tennessee sunshine. Later, it became my daily driver, making countless commutes up Lookout Mountain to my office, and then covering over 40,000 miles between Chattanooga and Atlanta while I worked through a seminary degree over 6 years.

“Part of life” is an understatement.

Even friends and acquaintances responded to the story with real sorrow. As relieved as they were that none of us was hurt, nearly everyone gave us a version of “Oh, I’m so sorry about your car. You’ve had it for such a long time.” More often than not, stories of their first car, or their experience of losing a beloved vehicle, followed. When you live where almost everyone has to drive almost everywhere, I guess it’s only natural that we become our cars to an extent—a holdover from naming and loving our horses, perhaps. I wonder, though, what else might be going on.

Materiality and Humanity
Nearly a year later, I can’t stop thinking about our ability—even need—to mourn something that was never alive.

Every human-made artifact, whether hand-crafted with love by your grandma or mass-produced in Mexico by a multi-national corporation headquartered in Japan, tethers us to the created world. Material objects force us to step out of our heads and into our bodies. They invite us to the work of life, acting on matter to create movement and change, subduing the world with care and curiosity. Whether we can name it or not, we long for what is real.

At times, it can feel like reality is on her back foot. Large-language models are an easy contemporary target, but this isn’t new. Some blame Medieval nominalists for giving us the idea that ideas of things are the things themselves. Some point fingers at Descartes, Derrida, or Dewey. Maybe it all goes back to “did God really say” and the introduction of doubt into harmony. It’s hard to deny that our ability to sift the actual from the fake is fading. Whatever is created or human-made—whether with high or low technology, requiring time and effort— is qualitatively different from anything generated by amalgamating human-created content or available at the touch of a button, with all the labor behind it hidden from us. In the exchange, we may be becoming somehow less alive.

Technology and all our making ought to enhance human capacities, not diminish them. Maybe the best way we can teach up-and-coming generations to mind the widening gap between solid and simulated is to give a strong formation in analog life. Teach the process before you reveal the product. Create embodied knowledge of the difficulties of materiality. Taste and see that the world is good. Write with a pencil on paper. Paint something. Cook over a fire. Build a piece of furniture by hand. Without engaging the world as it is, we risk falling into a basic illiteracy of reality.

Part of what I loved about our recently deceased hatchback was its near-complete lack of technology to assist the driving experience. It had no cruise control, no blind-spot warning, no auto-braking or warning systems. In other words, it was a perfect car to learn to drive in, forcing attention and an embodied connection with the road. Newer “safety” features, without an understanding of why and how they work, will lead to more distracted, disengaged driving.

Institutions, social norms, language, and other abstractions are meant to be tethered to created realities, too. Even religion operates on this plane. As He forbade Israel from forging images, God also gave explicit details for deeply material spaces and vessels by which he was to be worshipped. When God’s people lost sight of that, they drifted into an un-real worship, confusing sacrament for superstition. Defeat, disorder, and exile followed. We are not made to make our own meaning without input from the essential givenness of the world.

Circles of Life
Immediately after the accident, as the adrenaline subsided, I started to think through what happened and what, mercifully, hadn’t. Another motorist stopped behind us to confirm no one was hurt and that we didn’t need a ride anywhere. “That was a hard hit! It’s scary when they jump out at you like that and there’s nothing you can do.” I’m always thankful for the way even strangers look out for one another in these mountains.

As he got back in his truck and drove on, I looked around the car one more time, glimpses of my resigned face blinking back at me from the window, orange from the hazard lights. I checked on the girls in the back seat. They were shaken, crying. I opened the door to sit with them, to tell them it would be OK. They weren’t concerned for themselves, though. “What will happen to the deer?” our youngest asked through tears. “Is she going to be OK?” I had to break the news to them that I did not think, based on what I know of physics and physiology, that she would have survived.

As we went through the weekend, live music and family fun took the edge off the experience, pouring real joy into the new wound. Perfect weather and the blinding chartreuse of Appalachian spring foliage does a body good. Our older two girls even managed to meet and get a photo with one of their favorite performers while exploring the festival’s instrument tent.

Still, come Sunday, we had to leave our old car behind and all pile into the other vehicle for the 5-hour drive home. It was quieter than usual for a car full of kids. We were all feeling the absence. As we crossed back into Tennessee, I slowed down a bit to point out to Rachel where it happened. Really, though, I was looking for the deer. All along the northbound shoulder across from the old Whiteway Grill, the pavement was clear. No blood, no carcass. Maybe she survived somehow. Maybe she stumbled on and died in the woods. Maybe, thanks to Tennessee’s 48-hour roadkill harvest law, she was curing in someone’s garage after processing.

Whether then or later, her death would feed back into the life of the world, nourishing other organisms large and small. The car, on the other hand, might be sitting for a long time. There isn’t a similar circle of life for machines. Sure, parts might have been put to use in other cars of the same model, and (in a disjointed play on reincarnation) the modest insurance payout we received got plowed back into another used Japanese hatchback. Maybe, if prices of raw materials spike someday, it may be stripped and recycled. For the most part, though, the end of its road is a material cul-de-sac.

But memory and invention work on non-living things as surely as microbes and fungi do to organic matter. Art and architecture and all our artifacts become inseparable from us once we’ve let them into our lives. We contain multitudes, and much of what we contain is artificial. But perhaps, in their assumption into our mental and spiritual worlds, such inanimate objects become truly alive. Holding on to things that are “just stuff” is anything but irrational for a people who know that they are also dust-made and dust-bound, this side of the resurrection. A few pieces of plastic can carry a lifetime of memory. Trash and treasure alike keep us grounded to a world that will always stubbornly resist our attempts to pretend we can live without it. In whatever elements of remembrance and consciousness persist in new creation, some of our stuff may even be eternal.

Crashing into Reality: Machines and Mementos

Justin Lonas

Josh Nadeau

Crashing into Reality: Machines and Mementos

Justin Lonas

Josh Nadeau

Trash

Revenge