I've always lived in the midwest. Every car I've ever owned has been a car from the midwest, and has been driven in the midwest.

The salt from the road is driven by car tires into a briny mist that coats everything. It blocks vision through windows. It accumulates in chunks that can be kicked (like mud also can, except corrosive). It wicks its way into tiny crevices and betwixt layers and infects every part of the car that can be infected, and once there it rots everything that it can rot.

And I don't mean just the bodywork; that part has been getting better with improved processes and paint.

But stamped control arms often rust away while the ball joints and bushings are still in good form. Electrical connections rot. Frames and frame-like components often have scaly holes in them. Every exposed engine part corrodes; uncoated steel turns black, red, or brown; galvanized and aluminum parts turn white and kind of fuzzy (and stuck). Our junkyards are full of rusted-out hulks of cars with drivetrains that still work properly, even if they're ugly.

Fixing things when they break is tedious and time-consuming, and the most-sane approach to any repair on a car that's more than a few years old is to go into it with an expectation everything that doesn't crumble from rust is instead frozen with rust.

The work itself unilaterally causes a person a learn new facets of their verbal and mechanical vocabulary that they never even knew possible, and is arduous in ways that would test the emotional stamina of a Buddhist monk.

With enough cleaning and care (and just rinsing things off by driving in the rain), a car that is from the midwest can be largely saved. Getting rid of all of the salt slows the process down very dramatically.

But a car that is regularly driven in the midwestern winter is in the midst of a fairly quick process of being returned to the earth.

It's just a fact that is plain and that we live with every day. We do work to prevent it; on a warm-ish day in January, cars will line up around the block to get into a car wash and have a chance to dry out before ice freezes every orifice closed.

But it's not fear, I don't think. Just as we accept the sun coming up every day and disappearing over the opposite horizon every night, we accept the rot as something that will inevitably consume the most expensive machine that we own and that this will happen on a schedule that we play very little part in controlling.