A 2003 Toyota Matrix was my next car, when I finally could shed the unloved minivan. My divorce was underway, and what a drawn-out mess it turned into.
Negotiations broke down repeatedly, and after nearly two years we ended up going to trial. Meanwhile I went from my brother’s couch to an extended-stay hotel to a one-room apartment. When the judge ordered parenting time for me, I needed a real home, fast. My church offered me its vacant parsonage. “Pay the utilities and cut the grass, and you can stay as long as you need.”
In the middle of that chaos, I needed a foothold, and the parsonage became it. At last, bedrooms for my sons when they came over. And a yard to play in! The parsonage was on the church’s property, which it had held since the 1830s. A cemetery surrounded the church building. Maybe it’s maudlin, maybe it doesn’t respect the dead, but we loved running around in there. I have dozens of photos of the boys playing among the gravestones.
I don’t remember why anymore, but during this time my wife wanted to swap cars. She had given her beloved Corolla to our oldest, and then bought a new five-speed 2003 Toyota Matrix. I got it in the swap, and I was glad for it — and not just because it got me out of that unloved minivan. It created a small but meaningful shift in my experience with my sons. The boys always felt so far away in the much bigger Sienna, but in the Matrix, we were right there together. We talked and shared more. (By this time, our oldest was a young adult and on his own.)
We started taking vacations every other year, when it was my turn to spend Spring Break with them. The first year, money was tight; I had big lawyer bills. I economized everywhere I could so we could have a good time together.
We took what I like to call the Indiana History Tour. We went to see the Ohio River and Indiana’s first capital in the little southern Indiana town of Corydon. We also toured the Statehouse in Indianapolis and walked all the steps to the top of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. We visited the site of the Battle of Tippecanoe and saw the Indian burial mounds near Anderson. We wrapped the vacation with a trip to see Lake Michigan at Mount Baldy. The air barreling in off the lake was freezing! But we had a good time.
Meanwhile I was in therapy doing hard work on myself to make sense of everything that had happened, and to push through the childhood beliefs and behaviors that were holding me back. I was learning to set boundaries. I was learning what healthy relationships looked like. It was hard work, but necessary.
But I didn’t have my sons most of the time, and I wasn’t used to having a house to myself. I like being alone, but I had so much free time now, which only deepened my grief over the loss of my family.
I needed hobbies.
I had collected film cameras as a kid, and I started doing that again. It led to a love of photography that endures. (It’s also why I have so many photos of all of the cars from here on out in this series.) I also started a blog. Remember that I started my career as a technical writer? I learned that I loved to write. But my career had taken me back to more technical roles, and I missed writing. I started the blog to scratch that itch. I still write in that blog six days a week; you can read it here.
On weekends when I was on my own, the Matrix was got me out of the house and pointed toward someplace new — a small but steady reminder that forward motion was possible. For most of my life I’d been curious about historic roads. I grew up in South Bend, where the Lincoln Highway and Dixie Highway intersected, and I went to college in Terre Haute on the National Road, which Thomas Jefferson commissioned in 1806. What would I find if I explored them?
Here’s a photo from my very first road trip, in 2006. I was driving the National Road, also known as US 40, from Indianapolis to the Illinois state line. You can see modern US 40 on the left. On the right you can see a narrow spot where the trees part. Through that hole is an abandoned bridge that carried US 40 in the 1920s and 1930s.
Here’s the bridge. This is what happens after more than seven decades of disuse! This was such an exciting find that from this moment I was hooked on exploring the old roads.
I explored the National Road a lot for a few years. There’s a lot of it to explore — it stretches from Maryland, into Pennsylvania, through the tip of West Virginia, across Ohio and Indiana, into Illinois. For the most part, it’s now US 40 across those five states. Here’s a video of me driving the Matrix on an abandoned section of old US 40 in Illinois.
On another trip along the Illinois portion of the National Road, I accidentally backed my car off a connecting road. In the photo above, you can see an abandoned brick section of US 40 stretching out behind my beached car. A woman who lived nearby came out to help, and a passing car stopped. We all decided that the best course of action was to push my car down the hill and have me drive as fast as I could manage back up and over. With me sitting in the driver’s seat, they lifted the front of my car up enough that it slid back. I backed up on the bricks — the first driver on them in many decades — and came back up the hill fast. I felt my undercarriage scrape, but thankfully no parts came off and all was well.
The last step in restoring full stability to our lives was for me to buy a house. We’d been in the parsonage for a couple years and it was fine. The church’s elders even told me I didn’t have to leave. But I wanted us to live in a neighborhood where there might be other kids for my elementary-aged sons to play with. I wanted to move into their school district. And I wanted to stand fully on my own two feet.
I didn’t have any money for a down payment, but the housing bubble hadn’t burst yet and I had pristine credit. I had no trouble getting a no-money-down loan to buy this exceedingly modest house. It needed work, but I was handy enough to do it myself. After two years of instability, I finally had a place that was truly ours. The boys could decorate their rooms. We could make new traditions. We were home.
It was a happy day when my ex-wife gave me the family dogs. That’s Gracie on the left and Sugar on the right. They became my regular road-trip companions. They loved to jump in the Matrix’s wayback and ride along. Sugar passed away unexpectedly in 2009, but Gracie proved quite hardy — she died in 2013, aged 18. Right to the end, she loved to go out on the road with me.
Shortly after I got the car, it started making a slight chirping, screeching noise when I let out the clutch in first. My mechanic told me that five-speed 2003 Matrixes were starting to see their transmissions fail, and this noise was an early symptom. “There’s nothing you can do but keep driving it until it gets bad,” he said.
I got a few years out of the car like that, but it didn’t just “get bad,” it failed all at once. The boys and I loved to visit Indiana’s state parks, the one in hilly Brown County in particular. That’s where we’d gone on an August Saturday afternoon. On the way home, the transmission started to whine, pop, and grind. I wasn’t sure the car would get us home, and we had 50 miles to go. I worried about being stranded and about the repair bill. My older son asked from the back seat, “What’s going on, Dad?” I explained, and worried aloud that the car might not make it. “Don’t worry, Dad, it will.”
I don’t know how he was so confident, but he was right. The car would pop out of gear and I’d just pop it back in. By the end I had to push on the stick to keep it in gear. But along the way I felt the breeze softly touching my skin through my open window and enjoyed the long shadows the trees and cornfields cast onto the highway in the afternoon sun. As the car rolled with the highway through the old farm towns, my sons and I sang along with the CD playing. That drive home is a terrific memory — not because the car was dying, but because in that moment nothing mattered except us being together, singing, watching the shadows, trusting we’d make it home.
The repair bill is not a terrific memory: about $3,000. I also had to rent a car for several days, adding to the expense.
The boys and I made one more Spring Break trip in this Matrix. We drove out to Washington, D.C. and saw all the sights. Then the boys indulged me while we drove the National Road home. (They had their handheld video games along, so they weren’t unhappy.) I stopped frequently to make photos, documenting the trip. The photo above, from Frederick, Maryland, happened to have the Matrix in it.
A memory I hold particularly dear from the trip was entering a county in Maryland that shares my younger son’s first name. I stopped at the county line to photograph my son with the county sign. He was delighted to see his name on so many things there, such as school buses and local businesses.
Our good time ended when we entered Ohio.
It’s tricky to follow the National Road across the Ohio River from Wheeling onto Wheeling Island, then across the river’s backchannel into Bridgeport, Ohio. Right after you come off the bridge you pass under Ohio State Route 7, and then immediately there’s an intersection with a stoplight. I didn’t see that light and entered the intersection at speed, I assume on red.
Everything happened so fast, yet the events unfolded as if in slow motion. I think I saw a white car hit us, sending us spinning. I’m sure I saw a green car as it ran up and over the front right corner of the car, peeling the fender off like the lid to a can. I could see the driver steering furiously, trying in vain to keep control. When we stopped spinning, the white car had disappeared; only the green car was there with us.
My older son had a red mark on his chest where the seat belt held him snug, but other than that, none of us was hurt. My younger son sat right next to the impact but was so into his game that he didn’t know anything had happened until we were all out of the car, looking at it. When he’s into his games, the rest of the world falls away. When he saw the damage, he dissolved into tears. We sat at the curb by our car, just holding onto each other.
It was a long day sitting in a junkyard waiting to get a rental car. Thankfully the insurance adjuster declared the car a total loss on the spot. I cleaned everything out of it, removed my license plate, and said goodbye to the little red Matrix.
For many years I felt sure that the only thing my sons remembered about that trip was the crash. But then a couple of years ago, my son texted me a photograph that almost made me cry, I was so overcome. On the left below is the photo I made on that long-ago trip as we entered the county that shares my son’s name. On the right is the photo my older son texted me.
The two of them had driven together to D.C. for a gamer convention. They made a special point of following US 40 home for a while just so they could recreate this scene from 15 years before!
You never know what you do as a parent that really connects with your children. They had given me good evidence that something that mattered a lot to me really was a good memory for them.
With my red Matrix totaled, I went car shopping. I brought the boys with me. After a crash like that, choosing the next car together felt unusually important — and the boys lobbied hard for one particular car we saw. I’ll tell you what it was next time.
Thanks Jim once again for sharing memories and feelings that must be as difficult as they are cathartic to write about.
The two photos, years apart, of your son are great. I love doing things like that (finding locations of old photos and taking them again…and also revisiting the same spot repeatedly and rephotographing it). Also, the “Keep Maryland Safe and Beautiful” sign brings back memories. I don’t know if Maryland still has signs like that, but I very much recall them from growing up down there (we also lived in Frederick for a while, fwiw). I think that a greeting slogan (they had those signs on all borders, county and state) that advises people not to litter and also to drive safely is welcoming and practical; and very much what I associate with Maryland.
It’s kind of hard to realize that the Matrix is over 20 years old! Your 2003 version looks quite modern and I’d imagine (really, hope unrealistically, I guess) could be quite successfully sold today. Maybe it has enough wagon genes for me to be particularly fond of it, but they always seemed like decent little cars to me, and I suppose I still feel that way. Too bad about the transmission. My first thought upon reading your story was that $3000 wasn’t too bad an auto repair bill … but yeah, 20 years ago that was a much bigger bite than it might be today.
Exclusing collision damage (usually covered in large part by insurance anyway) I can’t think of any mechanical vehicle issue that has ever cost me anywhere close to $3000 out of pocket although I realize that if I wait long enough it’ll surely happen sooner or later (now probably sooner, right?). Even today (especially today?) that’s still a big bite to swallow and I can easily see how it might put someone off whatever brand of vehicle it occurred to for some time, if not forever. It might make for a good QOTD although bringing back that particular painful memory may not…
With everything else going on it’s getting more and more difficult to devote/expend time dealing with auto repairs myself in my garage/driveway; conversely, ensuring all vehicles are mostly covered by manufacturer warranties or new enough to not have major components failing is also expensive and of course outsourcing repairs has become very expensive as of late, seemingly more than ever. Perhaps starting another budgetary bucket simply for “the big bill” such as like what happened to Jim is advisable, however that likely needs to come from somewhere else and it’s not like there is that big a pile of unallocated funds looking for a purpose.
$3000 though is easily enough to doom many “average age” cars on the roads to the junkyard (today I mean, Jim’s car was still new enough to not be doomed). While it may make sense to fix it versus replacing with something else, there’s likely the dread of knowing that it may not be the last $3000 repair looming, especially for a car that isn’t under the regular watchful eye of a competent trusted mechanic knowledgable about that particular vehicle who can advise whether it’s time to cut bait or make the “investment”.
This repair was incredibly disappointing. My mechanic made an effort to find a remanufactured transmission but basically there were none as there weren’t many 5-speed Matrixes sold compared to the automatic. I don’t know for sure but think probably that this wasn’t the same 5 speed put in so many millions of Corollas.
It’s the same as in the Corolla. These two are essentially identical under the skin. This is (was) a very common transmission. I’m a bit surprised by that Bill too, and that was some years back.
If they lifted the Matrix, and put some aggressive gray plastic cladding on e.g., around the wheel openings, they could probably sell a car like it now.
I’d suggest they’ve already done just that. Only they call it a Corolla Cross now. Thanks for your great write ups & being open to sharing so much of your personal story through the cars!
That fills in a few details; I remember hearing about the transmission in your Matrix when we were all together in Indiana.
I am very glad to not have gone through a divorce, especially an ugly one.
First, choose your partner wisely. Then, work hard on the relationship.
I failed at step 1. This made step 2 1,000% more difficult.
Your Matrix sounded like a great ride to pull you into a better phase of life.
Like Jeff and Jim, I’m now recalling what my biggest auto repair bills have been…then again, I’ve had a bunch of sub-$3000 cars in my life, so it was easy to just sell them off.
Long ago a friend of my now late father-in-law visited. He was from Colorado, heading back home in his Matrix. The friend loved to travel the US solo and he had some phenomenal number of miles on that Matrix. And I think it was red, also.
This Matrix made it to 90,000 miles before it met its demise. You’ll see next week how many miles one can get from a Matrix.
Are those bullet holes in the Garrett County sign ?
Look more like rock chips to me.
Wonderful road trip stories so thanks for sharing. Reading about your transmission issue I got chills. It was about X-Mass Eve, 1983 (I think), and my partner and self were driving from NYC to his parents home in PA. I was driving my 1976 Eldo conv., and the transmission went bang and then nothing. Pulled to the side of the road. The two of us, and one small white fluffy dog, and a trunk full of gifts. It was mid-afternoon, cold, and I walked about 1/2 mile to a biker bar in the middle of nowhere. Called AAA on a payphone, walked back to the car, totally under dressed for the cold. Within the hour a tow truck driver showed up with his wife and child with him. No room for us in his truck, would not tow us sitting in the car, so we were left on the side of the road. The two of us city boys and small white fluffy dog walked back to the biker bar (the little dog was wearing his holiday sweater). Payphone again, called partners parents and it took over an hour for them to pick us up, just before the bar was closing early. The tow driver and his connected shop was closed for days before we could pick up our holiday gifts. They wanted about $5000 in cash to fix the transmission in about two weeks and the car was not even worth that much, plus they indicated I was going to have to pay a daily storage fee for the time the car had been locked up when they had been closed for the holiday. Called AAA and started a complaint, rented a car & back to NYC. It took almost a month before I got my car back, repaired for about $1800. Thank goodness for AAA. They arranged to have the car moved to another shop closer to NYC, negotiated the the repair, covered my car rental, and best of all revoked the AAA status of the tow driver and his shop. All & all the X-Mass Eve saga took a month to resolve but a good memory remains. On a cold holiday night, at a rural middle of nowhere PA biker bar, the two city boys from NYC, with a small white fluffy dog wearing a holiday festive sweater, driving a Cadillac, were treated very nicely. We received a number of free rounds of Irish Coffee and even some grilled hamburger for our little dog.
Wow, what a shakedown they tried on you. Bastards. Yay for the bikers though.
A very heartwarming ending. Having been born in MD and living there for my first 50 years, during which time all 3 of our children were born and mainly grew up in rural Carroll Co, only about 25 miles from Frederick, we have a myriad of wonderful memories of that great state. Garrett is out in the Western part of the state, in the small MD part of Appalachia, near Deep Creek Lake and quite different than most of the state. Sounds like a fun road trip except for the last part. The Toyota Matrix and the Pontiac Vibe were/are great little cars.
It was fun to watch Maryland change as we moved west across it.
I enjoyed reading the stories of your trips in this car. As a geography enthusiast, I definitely get the appeal of historic roads, and I love your road trips.
I like the pictures of your son with “his” county sign. Several years ago, my wife and I visited the one town in the US that has our last name (in North Dakota) and took pictures of us all over town. There’s one (largely abandoned) town in Iowa that carries my older daughter’s name, and I’d still like to drive there some day and get her picture at the town limits sign. And also, since my kids are teens now, I’ve been able to “recreate” several pictures I took of them when younger, and it’s always amusing – so I like what your son did there too.
I looked up the intersection in Ohio where you had the wreck, and can definitely see how a driver unfamiliar with the road would miss seeing the light. Between the limited visibility and the shadows created by the overpass, that’s a horrible design, and they should really have the kind of warning saying “RED SIGNAL AHEAD” on the approach there. Sad end to a car that served you well.
These were great cars. I knew several people who had them (or Pontiac Vibes) – and they lasted a long time for everyone.
I returned to that site in 2011 to finally clinch the National Road across Ohio, and was quite angry to find that my missing that light was entirely reasonable given the need to be familiar with the intersection to successfully navigate it.
A long-term favouite of mine. They were very popular in Southern Ontario, and there are still lots of them, although you would think they were only sold in silver. This red suits it much better. Vibes are also popular, and they seem to be mostly a dark red. There is a house we often pass that has a silver Matrix and a red Vibe.
Down here Vibes didn’t keep their value like Matrixes — I came close to buying a Vibe at one point. Something wasn’t quite right with the front end, and the dealer wouldn’t address it, so I walked. I liked the Vibe’s styling slightly better.
The Matrix is a car I would have strongly considered but for it being introduced and withdrawn outside my admittedly long car shopping window…think it came out in 2003 and withdrawn in 2009, but I bought my Golf in 2000 and still own it.
However, I did get to drive one, but it’s associated with sad memories. My last grandparent (Grandmother) died in 2004, we live 1700 miles away and I flew in for the funeral, as did my youngest sister (who lived in a different state as well). I rented a car I can’t recall, but my sister rented a Matrix…and knowing I liked hatchbacks (was the Matrix a hatchback or wagon?) she let me drive it around while we were in town. We didn’t know it, but she probably already the ovarian cancer she would eventually die from in 2008 at age 37.
Sorry your car was in the accident that totalled it. I don’t know what I’d replace my Golf with should it happen to me; I’m pretty picky and the only car that comes closest is a Mazda 3 hatchback and even then have written off trying to get any car as a manual (no longer interested in sporty cars at my age). I really like engine braking, not that I’m that big on shifting myself, but I have owned manuals only since 1981. The 3 has a conventional automatic, large normally aspirated 4 (I don’t want a turbo and am a bit of a luddite) and want cloth upholstery, so it’d be the base model for me. Guess I could get a Corolla hatchback but not too big on the CVT. If I could find a Matrix in good shape, I’d strongly consider it. I should have bought another Golf by 2014 but I wasn’t paying attention to what was being withdrawn at the time.
I own a manual now, a 24 Jetta GLI. It’s a ton of fun.
As I look back, the Matrix was a fine practical car that swallowed an enormous amount of stuff. But its driving dynamics were unremarkable.
My brother’s 2005 Red Matrix, an exact replica of this one ……. maxxed out the odometer at 299,999 2 years ago.
Still going strong.
Outstanding!
I realize I’m late to this, but this was beautifully, movingly written. The Matrix happens to be both a central and peripheral character to the story. And yes, I agree – learning to set boundaries is hard. I’ve also learned that it gets easier with time and practice. Bravo.
Thank you so much for saying this, Joseph.
I assume there were reasons you got custody of your sons, but they’re none of our business. When I was 6, my child psychiatrist (whom I’d been seeing for a year) told my father that he’d have to divorce my mentally ill mother for my well-being. She went quietly and didn’t contest the divorce.
I wouldn’t have expected a Toyota to develop that sort of transmission problem, even at high mileage. If it were my Matrix, I’d be disappointed and think twice about buying another Toyota.
I can’t get a very good view of the license plate, but I did an online search for “colleges in Terre Haute, Indiana,” and I assume you went to Rose-Hulman. A mechanical engineer I worked with some years ago was a Rose-Hulman alumna.
You may have grown up in South Bend, but I assume it was when Studebaker was long gone.
I think the two photos of your son Garrett entering his namesake county are cool, even if they don’t resonate for me the way they do for you. I see the state of Maryland hasn’t gotten any more tolerant of littering.
I actually lost custody of my sons. I was a hot mess coming out of that marriage pressure cooker and was under psychiatric care. Also there was strong acrimony between us. The judge took one look at that and said, “I’m not putting the kids into a potentially explosive shared-custody situation.”
What I got was slightly-above-guidelines parenting time. The boys came over Monday evening, Wednesday overnight, every other weekend, and half the summer.
Getting the wife’s car in a contentious divorce could have made for a terrible emotional experience with that car, so it is good to read how you made it your own and moved forward with it and the rest of your life.
I still like these, though they have gotten thin.
Two things helped: the Matrix was a pragmatic choice for her rather than a “dream car” one, and it had a stick.