My 1999 Mercedes-Benz SLK 230 Kompressor — Back to Top-Down Living (Part 2)

Some cars become attached to periods of life so deeply that it becomes impossible to think about one without immediately remembering the other. That pretty much sums up how I feel about the Mercedes SLK I owned around the time I met Courtney. What started as a fun little roadster quickly became the backdrop to one of the happiest and most emotionally overwhelming chapters of my life. Looking back now, years later, it’s clear the SLK was never really the center of the story—it was simply there for the moment my life changed forever.

In September of 2013, life had settled into a predictable routine—work, church, and more work. I kept myself busy, maybe a little too busy. During the week it was my job at TLC, and on weekends I would stack as many computer jobs as I could. It wasn’t unusual to have four or five different machines sitting around the house waiting to be worked on. It filled the time, but it also made something pretty clear. I was missing something.

Looking back, I can see that some of those frequent car purchases were probably me trying to fill that gap. New cars are fun. They give you something to focus on. But they’re not a substitute for much else. The truth was, I didn’t have a lot going on socially. Outside of work, church, and small group, my world was fairly small. One of the few connections I had kept from my time at the school district was my friend Randy from the TSD9 tech department. We would meet up for lunch a couple of times a month, and somewhere along the way, he decided it was his mission to find me a girlfriend.

Around that time, a new kindergarten teacher had just moved to town to start her first job out of college. Randy had been in her classroom a few times helping get her ActivBoard working, and apparently, he had also been talking me up. One day, he happened to be in her classroom right before we were supposed to meet for lunch and asked me to pick him up at the school instead. That should have been my first warning.

When I got there, Randy met me and immediately pushed me toward the staff room to meet her. I walked in—and it was full. Not just full, but full of people I knew from my years working there. And, apparently, they all knew why I was there. I made my way around the room, awkwardly chatting with each person, turning progressively more red with every step. Eventually, I got to her. I knew it had to be her; a retired teacher I knew well sat next to her and kept saying, “I’m here helping Courtney. Have you met Courtney?”

I finally looked at her—also clearly a little red—and said, “So… you’re Courtney.” She confirmed, and we talked for a minute. I think I invited her to church that Sunday. The whole thing was painfully awkward, and when Randy and I left for lunch, I’m pretty sure my face stayed red the entire time.

That Sunday, I saw her again at church. She was there with a friend, and we talked for a few minutes. Afterward, I worked up the courage to send her a friend request on Facebook. She accepted it pretty quickly, and we started messaging back and forth. Eventually, I got up the nerve to ask her out on a date, and she said yes.

The next weekend, I picked her up from her apartment—in the Volt—and we drove out to the beach in Oceanside. We walked along the beach, got caught in a rainstorm, and then went to dinner at a little restaurant out there. It wasn’t anything elaborate, but it felt easy in a way I hadn’t really experienced before. And just like that, we were off.

A couple of dates later, we became “Facebook official.”

We fell fast and hard. Before long, we were spending most of our waking time together, and weekends turned into a series of little adventures, often with the top down in the SLK. Even though I had lived on the Oregon Coast most of my life, I was suddenly seeing it differently—new places, new stops, and familiar places that somehow felt new again.

One weekend we headed north, stopping at Hug Point before continuing on to Astoria. We climbed the Astoria Column and threw those little wooden planes out over the edge, watching them drift down toward the trees below. At some point, we decided to drive across the Astoria-Megler Bridge—something we absolutely didn’t need to do. The bridge goes into Washington, and we had no real reason to be there. We did it purely for the adventure.

That didn’t make it any less terrifying. I’ve never liked bridges, and that one didn’t help. It felt endless, high, and just a little too exposed. I white-knuckled my way across it, trying to play it cool while she probably wondered what my deal was. Once we made it across, we turned around, headed back into Astoria, and wandered through town, even stopping by the Goonies’ house before making our way home.

Another weekend, we took the SLK down to Lincoln City. It was cold enough that there were still flurries in the air, but that didn’t stop us—we dropped the top anyway. Heat up, seats on full blast, a little bit of snow drifting around us… it didn’t make a lot of sense, but it felt right.

My mom said I was twitterpated.

She wasn’t wrong.

It didn’t take long—maybe a couple of months, maybe even less—for me to realize that she was the one. By December, I had already ordered an engagement ring. The plan was simple: I was going to propose on January 5th, our three-month anniversary of becoming Facebook official.

Then, on January 4th, everything changed.

Courtney had also started getting to know my family, and she really wanted to spend more time with my nieces and nephew. She came up with the idea of taking my sister Amy’s kids, Abby and Westin, to the Newport Aquarium that Saturday. It sounded simple—just a fun day with the kids, something easy and light.

When we stopped by Amy’s house to pick them up, though, it was clear right away that something wasn’t right. Amy was on edge. Her husband, Josh—my brother-in-law—should have been home from work about half an hour earlier. He was a paramedic and had been on duty up in Wheeler, and he was driving his 1997 Chevy Cavalier coupe back home when he hit a patch of ice coming around a sharp corner in Garibaldi. The car fishtailed, swung into oncoming traffic, and was T-boned on the passenger side by an F-150 going about 40 miles an hour.

Amy got a phone call and stepped into another room. When she came back out, she looked pale in a way I hadn’t seen before. She pulled me aside and quietly told me what had happened. Josh was in critical condition. She was heading to the hospital, but she didn’t want the kids to know anything yet—not until she knew more. She asked if we could still take them to Newport and give them a good day.

Courtney hadn’t heard any of this. We loaded the kids into the Volt, doing our best to keep things feeling normal. As we pulled away, she could tell something was wrong. I couldn’t say it out loud—the kids were in the car—so I typed it into my phone and showed her: “Josh in car accident. Bad.” Somewhere along the drive, I had her take over—her first time driving the Volt—so I could try to keep up with the flood of messages coming in from family. The whole drive felt surreal. We were heading to the aquarium with two excited kids in the back seat, while my phone kept lighting up with updates none of us wanted to read.

And somehow, we still managed to give them a good day.

Courtney was incredible. She stayed present with Abby and Westin, made sure they had fun, and carried the emotional weight of the situation in a way I just couldn’t at that moment. Every time I had to step away to take a call or process what was happening, she was right there, steady and calm. If I hadn’t already known she was the one, that would have sealed it. Even now, as I sit here writing this—twelve years later—I can feel tears of love and gratitude welling up just thinking about how she handled that day.

The next day, we went for a hike out to a beach. It was quiet and simple, just the two of us. The ring I had ordered hadn’t arrived yet, but it didn’t matter. I asked her anyway.

She said yes immediately.

Just like that, we were engaged.

Josh had been LifeFlighted to Portland. He would spend about a month in the hospital and would live with the effects of a traumatic brain injury for the rest of his life. It was a heavy time for our family, and one that changed how all of us thought about a lot of things—including the cars we drove.

In the weeks that followed, there was a bit of a shuffle. Amy moved out of her 2004 Pontiac Vibe and into a safer, more substantial 2009 Saturn Vue Hybrid that my dad and I tracked down. Cami upgraded from her high-mileage 2000 Volvo S40 into my dad’s 2007 Volvo S80, and my dad replaced it with a 2010 Mercedes C300. Seeing what had happened made everyone think a little differently about safety.

And then there was Courtney.

She was still driving her first car, a 2002 Chevrolet Prizm—a Toyota Corolla by any other name. It was reliable, but it didn’t have side airbags, and after everything that had happened, I didn’t want her in it anymore.

So I gave her the SLK.

It might not have made perfect sense on paper, but it felt right. It was solid, well-built, and had the safety features that mattered. Thick doors. Side airbags Mercedes-Benz engineering.  We sold the Prizm and put the money toward the honeymoon.

Not long after that, we planned to celebrate Valentine’s Day—our first and only one as an engaged couple before the wedding—with a dinner in Portland. Courtney and her mom were flying out the next day to meet her sister’s new baby in North Dakota, so it felt like a good chance to carve out some time together before things got busy again.

We took the Volt over Highway 6, and somewhere along the way there was a loud bang. Immediately, the dashboard lit up with warnings—a tire had no pressure, and, oddly, it was also telling me the windshield washer fluid was empty. I had hit something in the road that blew out the tire and ruptured the washer fluid reservoir. We pulled over. The Volt didn’t have a spare, just an inflation kit. I stood outside while Courtney read through the manual, walking me through the steps as foam started spraying into the tire. There was no cell service, and it was starting to feel like we were a long way from anywhere.

Then she read the next step.

“Step 6: Pray for a miracle.”

So we did.

And about twenty seconds later, my dad and his wife pulled up behind us.

I’m not exaggerating.

We ended up leaving the Volt there and riding back with them. Instead of the dinner we had planned, Courtney and I found ourselves at Panera, which somehow became the setting for our one and only Valentine’s Day as an unmarried couple. It wasn’t what we had planned, but it was still great.

The next day, the Volt was towed back to Tillamook, where Les Schwab was actually able to repair the tire.

Before the wedding, we also took one more big trip together. Over the Fourth of July, we drove the SLK out to North Dakota so I could meet her sister and brother in law and the new baby. It was another great road trip, the kind the car seemed made for, and it gave me a chance to get to know more of her family before everything became official.

A few days before our August wedding, though, the SLK had one more story to add. Courtney was in Portland taking care of last-minute wedding details when a Dodge Ram backed into it in a mall parking lot, crunching the fender pretty good. She called me in tears, upset about the damage. I told her it wasn’t a big deal. Cars can be fixed. She mattered more than the car.

Still, it meant the SLK was out of commission—and it had been our plan for the wedding car.

So the Volt stepped in.

In early August of 2014, I married my best friend.