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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2019
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Jonathan Williams
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DailyAstorian
SEA OF
CHANGE,
CONSTANT
BLUE
Photos by Ed Hunt
Lindsay Hunt now drives the CRV we bought when she was fi rst born.
By ED HUNT
For The Astorian
G
The day after we brought the CRV home, we took it out to Fort Stevens. That is 2-month-old Lindsay looking out the back window
(with Amy’s help.)
“… WHAT WE’VE DONE, WHERE WE’VE
BEEN, THE CARS THAT WE HAVE HAD HAVE
BEEN THE FULCRUM OF OUR LIVES.”
Leon Mandel
The Hula Guy Lindsay put on the
dashboard.
Sending out graduation cards.
RAYS RIVER, Wash. —
“What are you going to do,” the
mechanic asked. “drive this thing
for 500,000 miles?”
“Probably,” I said. “I can’t
imagine ever letting it go.”
We bought the little blue Honda
CRV two months after my oldest
daughter Lindsay was
born.
Next month, she
graduates from high
school.
When my wife,
Amy, and I were mar-
ried, I was driving a
Ed Hunt
Volkswagen van and
she had inherited her
parents Volvo station wagon.
Yet, when we got around to having
kids, I was driving a two-door pickup
and she had a Honda Civic coupe.
I don’t think we are the only parents
to have that sudden moment of anxiety,
that realization that the nurses were
handing us this baby, and expecting us
to be responsible enough adults to keep
it alive for 18 years. Our perspective of
the world and its dangers, the meaning
of our lives all changed as we walked
out those hospital doors on a blue-sky
February morning.
With that hanging over us, driving
home in a two-door coupe with a three-
day-old baby strapped into her carseat
in back, each logging truck and SUV
on the road home from Astoria loomed
over us and threatened our little Honda
Civic with its precious cargo.
I poured my nervous energy into
researching small SUVs that would
sit up high and be safer on the winter
roads when we visited family in the
Columbia River Gorge.
We found a used 1997 Honda CRV
that already had 80,000 miles on it,
but the mechanic said it had been
well-maintained and we liked sitting
up higher, with the good vision of the
road it provided.
Moreover, it was much easier get-
ting the baby in and out of the car seat
in the back compared with crawling
over the seat of the two-door coupe.
When she fell asleep in her car seat,
I didn’t wake her up trying to extract
her.
That was important, because Lind-
say didn’t like going to sleep as a
baby. There was too much to see and
do. You had to keep her moving out
in the world so she could experience
new things. Movement was relaxing to
her, so we would drive the blue CRV
around the Grays River Valley with
the soundtrack to “Oh Brother, Where
Art Thou?” playing to send her off to
dreamland.
See CRV, Page B2