When Emily’s friend sent a photo of her dad’s old Volvo with the words Pleasure Vehicle stamped across the new license plates, she laughed. The label felt absurd for a car inherited after her father’s death, worn down by time and memory. But it also felt oddly true. This car had carried her through grief, across state lines, and into unexpected moments of joy. In this piece, Shaljian reflects on how a stubborn, aging vehicle became more than just a means of transportation – it became a quiet companion through loss and transition and a timely call for reimagining her relationship to the pursuit of pleasure.
Contributor bio
Emily holds the Good Grief spaces at otherWise, inviting people to approach loss as a portal to presence. She explores how endings can open us to otherWays of showing up for the preciousness of lives – our own and those of supposed others.
My old car was newly registered in the state of Vermont. After a long back-and-forth about releasing my attachment to this vehicle that had become a special family heirloom and homage to my late father, circumstances led me to sell the car to a dear friend in a neighboring state. When the new green license plates arrived in an envelope labeled “Pleasure Vehicle,” she sent me a picture. I could only laugh. This vehicle had recently been such a source of pain, from the frustrations of continuing to maintain it to the anticipatory grief in realizing that it was finally time to let it go. And still, the car qualified as a pleasure vehicle.
My old car was newly registered in the state of Vermont. After a long back-and-forth about releasing my attachment to this vehicle that had become a special family heirloom and homage to my late father, circumstances led me to sell the car to a dear friend in a neighboring state. When the new green license plates arrived in an envelope labeled “Pleasure Vehicle,” she sent me a picture. I could only laugh. This vehicle had recently been such a source of pain, from the frustrations of continuing to maintain it to the anticipatory grief in realizing that it was finally time to let it go. And still, the car qualified as a pleasure vehicle.
The laugh cut right to the core, releasing whatever recent hardship was clouding the overall picture of it. Through the type of smiling cry that only comes from a grief in rightful movement, I reflected on all that car had given me – the places it allowed me to go, the lessons it helped me learn, and the passengers it carried along for the ride. The memories rolled in, each more special than the last. It certainly earned its new title.
I inherited the old 1991 Volvo station wagon after my dad died. The long, black, hearse-like vehicle had over 300,000 miles on the odometer, and we all confidently joked that it could handle 300,000 more. At the time it hit the market, the car was considered a luxury model – more stylish and spacious than its predecessors, with higher performance capacity and amenities like heated seats and quality speakers (by 90s standards). My dad had bought it used, about 15 or 20 years past its prime, but rocked it like it was still 1991. He would whip around in that wagon blasting whatever tunes the local college radio station was dishing out that week. Working as a carpenter, he often packed out the wagon with long two-by-fours and a whole toolbox of equipment – the unassuming length of the car matched that of the six-foot-five man behind the wheel.
Throughout his 12-year cancer battle, he occasionally tested out the engine’s performance capacity on emergency drives to the hospital in the city, typically a 1.5 to 2-hour drive, depending on traffic – in a record timing of 54 minutes. I never minded running a little late for soccer practice, because it often meant dad would push the limits of the speedometer, and we would feel the whole steel frame of the car rumble underneath Chris Cornell’s grumbling voice or Jimmy Page’s guitar. Station wagon cool was not a thing yet, but my dad always had a way of being ahead of the trend.
By the time I got my hands on the old Volvo, whatever elements of luxury the car once held were long gone. The radio didn’t work anymore, so I resorted to a cassette-tape-adapter device to play muffled tunes from my iPod. The gas gauge had also stopped working, so I had to count the miles on the odometer to know when it was about time to fill up. My method wasn’t the most robust, so friends around town would often find me broken down on the side of the road, having ridden my “I think I’ve got a few more miles” optimism a bit too far. The engine made all sorts of thumps and clonks, which I drowned out with early 2010s alt-rock albums that I downloaded from the library. Unlike film cameras and Levi’s, these cars had not yet reclaimed street credit for their longevity and inherent cool factor. However, I got many smiles and occasional window banter about how that was the same car my mom used to drive! – most drivers in their brand new Jeeps or fancy BMWs passed by with expressions that said could you go any slower in that old hunk of junk? Bubbling up in response was perhaps a mixture of pride, grief, and maybe just a hint of road rage, which sometimes came out in ways that need not make their way into this story.
Nevertheless, I was keenly aware of the value of this vehicle beyond the whims of social trends or the practicality of its mechanics by modern technology’s standards. My 15-year-old self, freshly equipped with a junior driver’s license, was beyond grateful to have access to a car at all. But more than that, every turn of the ignition was a small loving reminder of my dad and all the life he lived behind that wheel – a pleasure that could not be matched by any of the enticing attractions of late teenage-hood. Every drive was a chance to time-travel to a place where his energy was still so alive; it was a pleasure that was precious, priceless and profound.
Acquiring and maintaining the car came with another gift of inheritance – a relationship with an old friend of my dad’s and the car’s long-term mechanic, Gert. An old Danish man with over 50 years of experience specializing in foreign cars, Gert was a wizard with the old family Volvo. He kept that car running when no one else could, coming up with creative solutions when parts became harder and harder to come by, beyond the point that most mechanics would have given up on the clunker. When I was a kid, my dad would head over to Gert’s Garage to get work done and come back many hours later. I remember feeling an extra sense of lightness in him after a trip to Gert’s, a joy in his eyes that only comes from passing time in the easy company of good friends. He would go in for a tune-up, and stay for the joy of it. As the old adage goes, time flies when you’re having fun – and from my dad’s demeanor and the late hour he returned, I could tell that Gert’s Garage was fun.
I had heard second-hand stories growing up about the adventures that Gert and his wife, Carolyn, had embarked on in the various pleasure vehicles that the mechanic wizard kept up and running. I remember the 5 year period when my dad couldn’t get those tune-ups and hangouts, because his mechanic was out sailing the globe. When these sea-farers finally returned, I remember shyly accompanying my dad on a trip to the garage just to catch a glimpse of the adventurous sailors. I had so many questions.
These two didn’t fit into any of the categories of “types of adults” that I held in my growing index of the world. They offered something else – a way of living that was free of the artificial demands of our culture to follow some strange formula for living that all the others seemed to obey. I had painted a picture of the couple as free-spirited modern-day hippies that lived a life well-balanced in work and play, with a spirit of adventure and a devout confidence to live life on their own terms.
But these stories only skimmed the surface of a life that had seen such incredible waves and covered so much ground. It wasn’t until I found myself frequenting the little garage under the humble studio space where they lived that their stories came alive. I went in for a tune-up, and stayed for the joy of it. When I think about the hours my dad spent at Gert’s, I wonder if maybe he saw a version of a life he yearned for, too.
A stark contrast from his own – which was full in very different ways with the adventures of fathering four young girls with my mother and trying to keep food on the table, all the while battling a mutiny of his own cells and all the pressures and instability that illness imposed upon a family – my dad’s reasons for spending long stretches at Gert’s Garage became more clear. Gert kept my trusty pleasure vehicle up and running, and I kept in touch, more and more frequently as the years went by.
Strange new sounds under the hood and even dangerous mid-drive breakdowns weren’t a source of panic the way one would expect them to be. Car trouble meant I would get a phone call to Gert, and he would remind me of what his father always reminded him, It’s better to get going and break down than to never get going at all. Over the phone, we exchanged stories of adventures – them on old Volkswagen buses and sailboats, me on college time and loans, taking advantage of any opportunities to travel and experience life in new ways.
In their lived stories, I saw more space in the world. A way of living that encouraged me to expand beyond the bubble I found myself in. And they saw in me a flame that no one else quite knew how to tend, encouraging my curiosity and spirit of adventure and inspiring my inquiries around what it takes to live a life with intention.
“Out there, I discovered so many simple pleasures of living. A sky of stars so bright you blink in disbelief, the sentience so pure it must be a dream. Catching a sunset in the mountains, and defying everything you thought you knew about time by running uphill to catch it again thirty seconds later. Standing amongst ancient Sequoias, tuning into the hum of a living, singing old-growth forest.”
As I entered my 20s and began exploring my own dreams and desires to find pleasure, purpose, and freedom in a world that grew increasingly less inspiring, Gert and Carolyn’s stories shone a bright light down paths that otherwise would have remained in the dark. Before my last year in college, they drove their old VW bus all the way from New York up and across to Alaska with their dog Max. They celebrated the Summer Solstice in the Land of the Midnight Sun, where the light does not cease to reach the ground at the Earth’s most dramatic angle of tilt towards our massive burning star.
Although I was working in a lab in North Carolina doing research that summer, building up my resume as per the planned path to medical school, I felt my heart with them up in the Tropic of Cancer. It was a dream that I didn’t yet know I had, and it unlocked a longing for a different kind of life I had yet to see. That longing led me right into planning my own road trip right after college graduation. I
n 2020, my pleasure vehicle doubled as a quarantine chamber, and although I couldn’t quite cross borders to make it north enough to witness the Midnight Sun, I had the opportunity to explore the giant country I claimed citizenship to from coast to coast. With Gert and Carolyn’s postcard on the dashboard as inspiration, a friend and I set out with little preparation for a couple of months of racking up more miles on the odometer and exploring many new avenues of pleasure.
I hadn’t camped more than a handful of times, but quickly acclimated to spending weeks out on public lands, pitching tents in precarious locations, cooking over a single-burner propane stove, and bathing in quiet bodies of water. Although we stayed mostly clear of cities and highly populated areas, the energy that long overdue demands for justice in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests that summer was felt everywhere. In campgrounds and small towns, I found myself in a different kind of classroom, learning life by walking through it, without any guarantees for any answers, solutions, or neat conclusions. In forests and deserts, my mind finally quieted down enough to see the things that truly mattered. The truths I had been running from on the hamster wheel of modernity finally caught up, and with them, I saw the world and my place in it in a completely new way.
Out there, I discovered so many simple pleasures of living. A sky of stars so bright that I found myself blinking in disbelief, the sentience so pure it must have been a dream. Catching a sunset in the mountains, and defying everything I thought I knew about time by running uphill to catch it again thirty seconds later. Standing amongst ancient Sequoias, tuning into the hum of a living, singing old-growth forest. I found myself free from the pressures I had previously placed on myself to succeed in the world of academia – those that drove me to chase the short-term pleasures of validation and accolades – and sturdy in my ability to see through the other side of loss some years after my father’s death. I was ready to embrace the uncertainty of walking down a path that was not clear, leaving behind the one I had been working on for quite some time.
What followed was a sort of alternative course in the study of life itself – this time from the lens of an adventurous anthropological nomad rather than an eager-to-please, spoon-fed student. Pandemic-induced uncertainty about the future at large relieved me of any sense of urgency to pursue my post-grad med school plans.
I leaned into grief as a way to leave behind expectations for the life I had planned and explored otherWays of existing in the world. I worked as a nanny, barista, baker, and farmer. I started up a small business, ran a ski lodge and worked with celebrity chefs. I lived in 8 different towns in 4 different states, drove all over the country and took a dip into Mexico, too. I made it a point to talk to everyone and anyone I could along the way.
In trying on so many different realities, I found that it really didn’t matter where I was, what I did, who I identified as; each era was different – some objectively better than others – but every one of them had so much to offer me. The pleasures I found in each were always matched with some harsher aspects of living; the freedom I found in open roads and new cities came with shadows of loneliness.
Some pleasures actually only revealed themselves later, as what I learned to refer to as Type 2 Fun. (For example, breaking down mid-intersection on a busy road in Baja Sur, Mexico or getting stuck in a surprise snowstorm while camping in the Montana mountains in June are experiences that you can only enjoy through storytelling after they’ve resolved themselves.)Throughout the years of my alternative nomadic study, I kept in touch with the couple that started it all. When I found myself circling the redundant question, What am I doing with my life?, peace and clarity came from remembering Gert and Carolyn. I would call them up and listen to their latest saga or next wild adventure. And they would ask me – with genuine curiosity and excitement, not a whiff of judgment – What’s next? One day, these adventure enablers called me up to make an offer that I couldn’t decline.
They were planning their next great journey, sailing the inland rivers, lakes, and locks of the intracoastal waterways known to the boating world as The Great Loop. After finding and fixing up the perfect sailboat to live aboard for the next year, they sought a new home for the smaller vessel they had sailed around Long Island in for the last 20 years or so, a 1976 22-foot Catalina sailboat named Lucy.
Although I’d never stepped foot aboard a sailboat at that point in my life, and had no nautical navigation skills whatsoever, I bought it without a moment of hesitation. In the era of witnessing alternative lifestyles through Instagram influencers and YouTube vloggers, sailing seemed to tap into both my tendency toward a certain romantic aesthetic and my penchant for experimenting with otherWays of living.
It also opened completely new avenues of pleasure – allowing me to approach hobbies and lifestyles that previously seemed inaccessible. While pleasure vehicle often felt like a stretch to describe the car I relied on to commute to whatever job was paying my bills or whatever grocery store I was feeding myself from, pleasure boat, on the other hand, made perfect sense. Growing up on Long Island and working in some of the country’s most expensive seasonal vacation destinations showed me boating as a leisure activity for the über-wealthy.
My acquisition of Lucy offered me a chance to rewrite that script; it would become the pleasure vehicle that I used to escape a dependence on capitalist systems. I decided, partially inspired by Carolyn’s joke about the practicality of having a water-tight vehicle to sail away if collapse were to come sooner than we anticipated, that I would try to live aboard Lucy. I packed my life up once more (this time with much more discretion and specificity to the life of a live-aboard), and moved onto my sailboat for the summer. It would be my greatest adventure to date.
I worked out a way to keep my new floating home on a mooring in a wealthy beach town for just $30 for the season, where a nearby dockspace goes for upwards of $3000. I paddled myself, my dog and our rucksack of daily necessities from my floating home to shore each day so that I could go to work as a prep cook and pastry chef at a local restaurant. I would drop my dog off at a friend’s or with a sitter before work, and pick her back up after my shift. I paddled us back out before the sunset to spend the night, eating leftovers from work or snacks stowed away in the galley.
Without a real head on board due to the small size of the boat, there was also often an extra there-and-back row trip to the public restroom on shore. I found little time left between all these tasks to learn how to sail like I had hoped to, but I had certainly gained my sea legs and a sense of life at sea, even just tied up to a mooring. In so many ways, I saw life aboard the sailboat as simplified – the essentials were clearer than ever, and anything that wasn’t needed became literal extra weight to carry and maintain.
I once again had access to the simplest pleasures, catching the most beautiful sunsets from the middle of the sea and watching the birds fish right outside my cabin window. But it also became abundantly clear that living simply isn’t necessarily living easily. Giving up access to running water, refrigeration, a bed that doesn’t rock and sway through the night, depending on the wind and currents, certainly did not make living simpler. Without proper preparation, I would argue it makes living in the modern world nearly impossible.
The work of maintaining this lifestyle exposed weaknesses not only in my neck and shoulder strength (rowing 2-4 times a day against current and wind proved to be quite the workout), but also in my hypothetical dreams and whims for romanticizing what it looks like to relinquish oneself from the conveniences of modernity. I was wearing myself down, feeling the weight of loneliness in my isolation at sea and complete exhaustion from trying to meet my basic needs.
After almost a month aboard, my lack of proper preparation for this lifestyle had taken a toll on my mental health, and I reluctantly took a step back, leaving the boat behind with my failed dreams and the painful memories associated with them.
What followed was a hard pivot. I traded in the dream of living alternatively for stability, signing a lease for an apartment in Brooklyn where most of my closest friends had landed. I took some time to regroup, recuperate my losses, and return to the ever-nagging question of What am I doing with my life? In the wake of such upheaval, peace and clarity were harder to find.
Shifting my focus back towards medicine and a persistent desire to provide the work of healing to others, I once again found myself on a familiar, paved path, but this time with a whole new perspective to walk along it.
“In the pursuit of pleasure, we must be willing to try and fail, and then try again. We must be willing to work through the hard parts – the mechanical and bodily breakdowns, the repairs and the experimental treatments – with the long-term understanding of the potential for postponed, potentially posthumous pleasure. I’m starting to think that pleasure is a force that hides in everything, and I wonder what might shift if we saw it as our job to draw it out.“
A year of “normal living” gave me the opportunity to reflect from a place of security. And soon enough, I found myself dreaming again. I stopped seeing my inability to make the sailboat situation work for me as a failure. I remembered all the times I broke down in the Volvo and truly believed it was the last time.
I remembered all the frustration throughout the years, time, and money spent searching for discontinued parts and waiting for a tow. I remember the times I contemplated scrapping it completely, weighing the option of more years of potential pleasure versus immediate relief by releasing the source of my stress.
And I remembered how each time, Gert would find a solution, fix the car, and I would drive away with so much inexplicable joy for another ride in my time-traveling pleasure vehicle. I then started to remember all the times that my dad had dealt with a less-than-hopeful prognosis. I remembered when he went in for a bone marrow transplant in a last-ditch effort to slow down the cancerous cells that were taking over his body, and I thought it would be the last time I saw him.
I remembered the many nights I cried myself to sleep in fear of losing him, and the many tearful nights in the years after I did. And I remembered, too, going to visit him after that risky transplant proved to be a success. I remembered all of what followed the different treatments and operations and attempts to keep my dad alive: hair falling out, cheeks sinking in, color coming back to his face, a spring in his step again. Regaining strength, and with that, hope. News of remission. A wince. News of recurrence. Another round. Hair falling out, cheeks sinking in, coughing, retching. A breakdown of the body. Fear, stress, frustration.
But in between, a laugh, a squeeze, a smile despite it all. A glimmer in his eyes and mine. Inexplicable joy for another day. A little more pain, a little more pleasure.Looking back over my shoulder, I can see how close my most painful memories and my greatest pleasures are. In fact, I think they might be inseparable.
In the pursuit of pleasure, we must be willing to try and fail, and then try again. We must be willing to work through the hard parts – the mechanical and bodily breakdowns, the repairs and the experimental treatments – with the long-term understanding of the potential for postponed, potentially posthumous pleasure. I’m starting to think that pleasure is a force that hides in everything, and I wonder what might shift if we saw it as our job to draw it out.
There are certainly times when that’s easier to do, or even effortless – some experiences are inherently pleasurable. But at the end of the day, pleasure is never guaranteed. It isn’t something that can be promised through purchases, plans or paychecks. It doesn’t equate to ease, and it isn’t always convenient. With algorithms designed to deliver quick dopamine directly to us at any given moment, we must remember that longer-term pleasure requires sustained effort.
Like everything else, our pursuit of pleasure is a changing one, entangled with everything else that entails our experiences as living, feeling human beings. Our relationship to the pursuit of pleasure has been oddly twisted in the dominant culture, where we so often speak of guilty pleasures and equate pleasure-seeking with hedonism, which carries overtones of excess and undertones of judgment. But perhaps hedonism as we’ve come to know it has been co-opted by capitalist socioeconomic systems, forcing our pleasure to be oriented towards endless levels of consumption fueled by a ravenous drive for more, better, bigger, faster, newer. Is there anything inherently wrong about the pursuit of pleasure, so long as it does not come at the expense of other life?
Maybe, as we remember our deepest entanglement, we can reorient our internal compasses of pleasure away from the quick-dopamine releases of consumerism. Buying the newest model of luxury cars is not a sustainable source of pleasure in an entangled world. Maybe a more sustainable form of pleasure is to be found in the sometimes frustrating, often more difficult tasks of maintaining what already is.
Tending to our relationships, our basic needs, our planet, our hearts. Surely, pleasure is not a one-size-fits-all model. And we may each have distinctly different vehicles of pleasure to meet our unique desires, to pair with our pain, and to access the hidden joys in our surrounding environment.
But I’m starting to think that maybe in our deepest entanglement, there’s pleasure hidden in all of it. Maybe there is no external vehicle to find pleasure within, maybe, just maybe, we are the vehicle of pleasure.