Leaving Things on Top of the Car

Lauren and I developed the bad habit of leaving things on top of the car. We would race to the garage in a rush with packages in our hands. We couldn’t get into the car with our hands full, so we would put the packages on the car roof. Then we would open the car doors, climb inside, and drive off. Unfortunately, whatever we had been carrying remained on the roof. At least at first.

We were invited to dinner at a friend’s house, and Lauren made a salad. Lauren’s salads were special. They were elaborate, containing not just lettuce and a slice of cucumber, but a variety of less common vegetables like pea pods and peppers of all colors. The salads were often garnished with sliced almonds and mandarin orange segments. They had homemade dressing, not goop from a jar, but a recipe carefully and lovingly mixed, and artfully placed. These were attractive, tasty salads, not the ones that sat uneaten on the table because there were still servings of pasta with marinara sauce available. These were salads that you wanted to eat as a first choice instead of as a filler. Lauren would put the bowl containing her artistic salad on the car roof and we would drive off forgetting it was there. The salad ended up tossed, but not in the recommended way.

On our trip to England, we decided to go see the Humber Bridge, England’s longest span suspension bridge. Well, that’s not completely accurate. I decided that we wanted to go see the Humber Bridge, and Lauren went along with the decision. We had a deal in which I got to see all the English bridges as long as she got to go see the Queen and the non-engineering tourist attractions, whatever those were. The Humber Bridge is currently number four on the list of longest bridge spans, but at the time of our visit, it was the world’s longest span. The bridge is a bit off the beaten track, in an area where there were no castles, Victorian things to see, or guards being changed. We drove south from Scotland, admiring the sleek British motorways and the tunnel under the river at Newcastle Upon Tyne. Well, that’s not completely accurate either. I admired all the sleek motorways and the tunnel, and Lauren counted the minutes until we arrived back in London to go see the Queen.

The Humber Bridge is spectacular, but its setting is not all that impressive as large bridges go (Fig. 1; http://www.maythorp.worldonline.co.uk/picnicpics/humberbridge.gif). It crosses a wide, flat river estuary. The surrounding terrain does not feature deep canyons or narrow passages requiring heroic, leaping bridge spans like the more dramatic suspension bridge sites of the Golden Gate or the Narrows in New York. Just looking at the river, it’s not obvious why a huge suspension span was needed there. The terrain is so flat that the river, although very wide, cannot be very deep. A beam bridge with more modest spans probably would have worked. But someone decided to build the gargantuan span, it was impressive, and I was ready with my camera. I took dozens of shots: the approaches from the north, driving on the bridge (slowly), and the usual background shots that we have on many of our trips to other bridges, with me standing on the shore and proudly pointing to the towers and span.

After spending an hour or so at the bridge, our next stop was the town of Boston, another not-as-prominent tourist destination, unless you’re from the American version of Boston. We got into the car, drove on the wrong side of the road again, and a few miles down the road, I heard a “thunk.” We didn’t think anything about it at the time, but when we made it to British Boston, the camera was gone. Yes, I had left it on the roof. To this day, all I have from our Humber Bridge visit is a tourist brochure. The photo shots of me and the bridge went off-road somewhere between Kingston Upon Hull and Boston.

Not all of our car roof adventures have ended in splattered cameras and salads. Sometimes things placed on the roof have miraculously stayed on the roof. Not long after our return to the United States it got cold in Boston (the American version). A nor’easter roared up the coast and dumped a foot of snow on my driveway. I spent an hour shoveling but it was still icy and the slope needed some sand. I had a few sacks of sand ready, but they were tightly bound. I couldn’t pry them open, so I used the hedge clippers to open the sacks. Then I placed the clippers on top of the station wagon as I spread the sand. By now, you can probably see where this story is going. Once the driveway was clear, Lauren took the car out for a ride on I-95. Drivers frantically waved and gestured to her. Lauren was perplexed—the drivers seemed to be unusually friendly that day, and Massachusetts drivers are not known for being friendly, or for being able to drive for that matter. Amazingly, when she returned home, the hedge clippers were still on the car roof where I had left them.

Leaving things on the car roof can provide a spectacle for pedestrians, so it was only a matter of time before someone tried to cash in. Fig. 2 shows an advertising campaign featuring a premeditated car roof placement (http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@NO1/71100997/). A cup of coffee was deliberately attached to the roof, and a gentleman drove around San Francisco pretending to be oblivious to it. Onlookers frantically waved to the driver to let him know that he had left a cup of coffee on the roof. The driver knew, of course, and the onlookers were subtly (or not so subtly) exposed to the brand name. After all of that excitement, they probably all needed to go to the coffee shop to relax. Hopefully, the excitement resulted only in frayed nerves and not road accidents.

I was glad to learn that we’re not the only ones leaving things on the car roof. Just about anything that can be left on a car roof, has been left on the roof. The list includes a case of CD’s, a pizza (extra cheese), a PC (his wife’s), a laptop (his brother’s), and orchestra sheet music. The gentleman who left the music on his car reported it to the conductor, a version of having the dog eat your homework, orchestra-edition. The conductor had an even better story. One time, the conductor left his violin on top the car and unfortunately drove off, only to see the expensive instrument shattering on the expressway (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=382938). When I asked my friends about their car roof episodes, they eagerly (with some embarrassment) embellished the list. Additions included all sorts of food as well as car keys and pocketbooks.

Leaving inanimate objects on top of the car is of concern. If the object is an infant, the concerns are magnified. A review of the literature suggests that cases of leaving car seats on the roof, with the baby in it, have not actually occurred and are really examples of “urban legends” (http://www.snopes.com/autos/mishaps/babyroof.asp). But as horrific as it sounds, it seems plausible for such a tragedy to happen. While the car seat on the roof may be a tall tail, there are many documented cases each year of parents forgetfully leaving children locked in the car. Sadly, some of these stories do not end well when the windows are rolled up and the cars overheat in the summer.

It is possible to deliberately leave things on top of the car by using a roof rack. Sometimes when the kids were younger and misbehaving, I would threaten that they would have to ride on the roof. This worked up to a point. Then the kids decided that it would be fun to ride on the roof, and I had to come up with a different threat.

For transporting things besides kids, roof storage containers are available to double your trunk space. These are aerodynamically shaped and designed to stay on the roof, unlike salad bowls or baby car seats. To get Dan’s stuff home from college, I borrowed a roof container from a friend. The container had a futuristic pod shape, like Mr. Spock’s coffin in the movie where Mr. Spock dies (but before the one where he comes back to life). I was impressed with how well the pod was engineered. It easily attached to the car roof, and it was framed in such a way with its spring latch device that you could stuff a lot of material into it and still get it closed. We took advantage of that feature. On the way back from Maryland, we filled the pod with several week’s worth of Dan’s unwashed laundry. Once back home in Massachusetts, while unloading the car, I opened the latch and the roof pod burst open, spewing its formerly compressed contents into the air. For a minute, it was raining boxer shorts.

It’s commendable to try to get the most out of your vehicle space, but at a certain point, stuff on the roof is too much stuff. The vertical outer limits of vehicle space are tested in early fall every year in Boston. This is the period when college students return to their apartments and dorm rooms. They arrive in overloaded vans and trucks. Some Boston area highways are well known, at least to the natives, for limited overhead clearance, including the Memorial Drive underpass in front of MIT and the Storrow Drive bridges. These highways were built well before current standards for minimum vertical clearance. In the case of Memorial Drive, there are only 10 feet or so from the road to the bottom of the bridge beam, a bit less than the recommended minimum of 14 to 17 feet by bridge design standards (AASHTO 2004, A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets, 5th Ed). This underpass and similarly restricted ones are posted with ominous warning signs and physical chain barriers to alert truck drivers to the approaching obstacle. But even with the warning signs and barriers, the vertical limitations are not so well known to the college students, and one or two trucks get stuck each fall (http://andrewteman.org/blog/2007/09/01/truck-stuck-on-storrow-drive/). Some offices run pools to guess the date of the first van wedging.

Over the years, we have gotten better, leaving fewer things on the roof. At the same time, it seems the technology is starting to catch up to our foible. All sorts of alert mechanisms are available in new cars and sport utility vehicles. Now you can get a service to open your car doors remotely when you lock the keys inside. You can also talk to newer model vehicles, asking the car to play a song or for the location of the nearest Chinese restaurant. In one recent TV commercial, hapless pedestrians attempt to talk to numerous inanimate objects. One woman commands a building door to open, but it doesn’t and she walks face-first into the glass. After running into other unresponsive, inanimate objects, finally she gets to her car. The car is sympathetic to her plight, and the door opens and the radio plays when she requests it. By then, the woman probably has a black eye and several bruises. But at least her car is listening.

It’s only a matter of time before someone figures out how to put sensors on the roof to warn distracted drivers. After the next snow storm, I’ll leave the hedge clippers on the roof, and the car’s warning device will blare: “Alert! Alert! You’ve left the hedge clippers on top again, you moron!” With our new protection device active, we will again become blissfully forgetful, and we’ll do it without consequences. We’ll go to our friends for dinner, and Lauren’s salads will end up tossed on the dining room table and not on the Interstate.