Yahoo Autos This Rogue Still Runs
The call came from Germany at 1 a.m. last Saturday morning: The Mercedes Classic event was canceled. Not postponed, not rescheduled, but canceled. And it was already clear why, since the Classic—a mellow three-day rally for tasty vintage Benzes—was based out of Asheville, North Carolina, where unprecedented destruction was unfolding.
I live in central North Carolina and was supposed to have driven to Asheville in a 2024 Mercedes-AMG GT63, and after this news, I thought maybe I could help by throwing my Honda generator in the back, heading west, and handing it off to a friend in Asheville. But when I asked him if I could lend a hand, he replied, "Don't come to Asheville. We're flushing toilets with buckets at the hospital." Last I'd heard from him, there was one intact road to reach the city from the east, and nobody wants it clogged with well-meaning idiots.
Getting supplies into the harder hit parts of the mountains has been, thus far, a job for helicopters. I live three hours away, and Red Cross helicopters are wearing a path in the sky over my house.
My area is mostly fine but did not escape totally unscathed. I had to borrow a neighbor's tractor to fix a washed-out road, and we lost our power for a while on Friday as the edges of Helene's wind field toyed with trees rooted in soaked soil. A friend remarked, "If that thing veered an inch over on the map, we’d be flooded." Indeed, storms put the arbitrary nature of fate foremost in your mind, especially where falling trees are concerned. Now let me tell you about the Nissan Rogue.
Over at my sister-in-law's house, a big tree split, and one part of it fell in the direction of the neighbor's house, thankfully causing minimal damage. The larger section remained standing, and the tree guys opined that it would need to come down but could be attended to by the power company, since it would fall on the power lines whenever it gave up. That turned out to be sooner rather than later, as in: an hour later.
At the 59-minute-and-30-second mark, my nephew, Keifer, pulled up to the house, parked the Rogue, got out, and headed for the front door. He plays soccer, but the school had canceled all the sports that day for safety reasons—irony alert!
He wasn't quite to the door when the rest of the tree failed. Of the three cars parked in front of the house, the Rogue took the brunt of the force, karate-chopped by thousands of pounds falling from the sky, a century's worth of kinetic energy unleashed in seconds. You can convince yourself, inside a car, that it's an impervious cocoon, a safe room of metal and air bags, but occasionally nature asserts the right to prove otherwise. You can't design for a tree.
Beneath our collective relief that Keifer didn't get stopped at a red light, or decide to finish listening to a song in his car, is a deep and foreboding awareness of how easily things can break the wrong way (in this case, literally). In fact, this is the second time in three years that Keifer has figured in a car-related twist of fate with major implications. In 2021, his mom asked if I could wait 20 minutes to give him a ride home from soccer practice after my kids finished a flag football game. I told her I couldn't do it, because I was driving a Subaru BRZ and all four seats were full. So I drove straight home, where I found my house on fire. That house is still standing, and the dog at my feet still alive, purely because I didn't want to cram Keifer into a Subaru BRZ without a seatbelt.
Now, I find that the best way to avoid dwelling on dark what-ifs is to try to find the absurdity in a given situation, and there's usually plenty to go around. So the other day I made a mock used-car ad with the Rogue, focusing on its low miles and clean wheels, without acknowledging in any way that it's utterly destroyed. After I did that, I had another ridiculous thought: What if the Rogue still runs?
So before Keifer left for school—now driving a borrowed Jeep Renegade—I parked the AMG GT near the Rogue and ran jumper cables to the battery. The Rogue's electrical system awakened in a panic, horn honking and lights flashing, like a cliché in some disaster movie (the first thing that happens when a comet hits the earth: car alarms go off). I silenced the din by pressing the unlock button on the key fob, which miraculously still worked.
Using a broomstick, Keifer reached in and shoved the brake pedal while pressing the start button—and then leapt back, because the Nissan's windshield wipers began flailing crazily across the top of the dash, out-of-control croupier sticks reaching for chips now that there was no windshield (or A-pillar, or roof) to restrain them. I grabbed a wiper and held it in place while reaching over and pulling the column stalk back to the off position. Then we tried again, and damn if the thing didn't start right up. When I pulled the remains of the windshield off the dash, CarPlay was paired and ready with a playlist entitled "Brazilian phonk music." The top of the screen read, "Good morning."
Hey, I know a metaphor when I see it. Thanks for the optimism, Rogue.
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