Not many people own three vehicles to themselves. Fewer, even, boast of having two identical cars flanking their front yard. Robert Evans is one of those few. His white Subarus not only guard the grass patch in front of his small, white house, but they also guard a hurt he keeps inside his heart. 

            When Robert Evans talks about his life, he doesn’t say a word about himself. He talks about all the members of his family, but not about the youngest child. He describes the people he met in college, but not what he did there. He says he is what God makes him, through other people. 

            One man unexpectedly vanished during Robert’s childhood; this person’s disappearance affected how Robert dealt with the largest problems he would face in later years. Yet, this event, which was once a hindrance, transformed into a lesson for Robert, one that allowed him to see the needs of others.

 

“I was in my first year of school at Taylorsville,” Robert begins, “and the maple seeds were just beginning to come on the silver maples. It rained that day. Dad was almost late for work, and he always kissed Mom goodbye, but he didn’t do it that time. Mom had noticed he was thinking over some things. Something was on his mind.”

            What was on Dad’s mind, Robert later remarks, was the idea of getting rid of his motorcycle.

            “He took off down the road, and we always waved. I was always glad we did that.” Little Robert, his sister, Emma, and his mom smiled goodbye through their big picture window in the living room as their dad drove away. 

            “I found this right here.” Robert pulls a faded, yellowing newspaper over to his crowded tabletop. On the front page, a picture of an old-fashioned, gray motorcycle sits atop the headline: “Man Critically Hurt.” It happened just outside of Columbus, where Robert lives to this day.          

            “Mom got a call about fifteen minutes later. A gentleman here in town wasn’t wearing his glasses and pulled out in front of him. Dad hit his bumper—almost missed him—and landed on his head,” Robert says calmly. “He had a brain injury, and his right leg was just about severed. Broke his shoulder. He had so many internal injuries they didn’t know what to do. They just found a hole and started pumping in saline solution until it didn’t run red anymore.

            “His head, they said, was about the size of a pumpkin . . . you can imagine what that did to his brain. One of his eyes was about the size of an apple.”

            

Robert talks fondly about how his parents never argued. They quarreled sometimes about little things, but they loved each other deeply. His mom grew up in the hills of Tennessee, and when she came to Indiana she had no idea what a telephone was. “A lot of people laughed at her,” Robert notes, “but Dad taught her an awful lot.” He speaks of how rough both their upbringings were, but also of how they were determined to make their family different. They held themselves to high standards and studied vigorously in newspapers and magazines how to be good parents and to have a good home. The clippings they mulled over were later discovered by their son, who read them for himself. 

            Robert’s dad was a tool and die maker, an engineer of sorts. His friends said his work was perfect. Twenty years after his death, some of his work was still being used due to its impeccable quality. His hobby was using his Argus C3 camera and another movie camera. “It’s funny, I later turned to some of his old movies, his old reel movies that he had, into video. We were at Brown County on some of the swing sets, and his movie camera went from Emma on the swing set to a motorcycle . . . you know, you just see things like that.” Robert also still has his dad’s old journals, which were given to him and Emma after their dad’s death two years after the accident. It was good for them to have them, Robert says. 

            Robert has little more to say about the struggle between the crash and his dad’s death, except that his mother could not keep up with both the medical bills and two young children. “That changed our lives a lot,” Robert says solemnly. How strong his mother must have been, he thinks, in those two harsh years and the ones that followed. 

            Robert smiles when he talks about his mom. She was great with horses, he says, because she worked on a farm from her childhood to adolescence. The endearing phrase she associated with Robert’s personality was “champing at the bit,” like what horses do in frustration when they have to do a boring job but just want to eat flowers. His mom did not know what else to call it. Robert had something special, a drive, a determination to use every ounce of his creativity to do the things he wanted to do. He didn’t know what to call it himself, so Mom’s wording stuck. 

            There was one thing Robert’s mom could not help him with, however. Once Robert left for college, he was faced with an issue about which he had little experience or wisdom: the confusing female gender, which was an incomprehensible wonder he had no father to ask about. 

            The first to try to catch his eye was Ada Kim from Japan. “It’s funny, things you realize later on. Ada really liked me,” Robert laughs. “I just didn’t get it. I didn’t know!” At one point, Ada arranged a surprise birthday party for him and for once, he says, “It was all about me. No one had ever done that. It’s funny, the expectations that you have for yourself, sometimes they’re low enough that it blinds you to what is possible.” After just one year of knowing her, however, Ada went away, leaving nothing behind but a picture of herself in traditional Japanese dress. “I look at that picture, even nowadays, and am just absolutely stunned by the kind of person that she was. I have no idea why she liked me,” Robert laughs again, “but she did.” He downplays her liking for him by saying he thinks she wasn’t exclusive. Her roommate, Hannah, had found her kissing “one of the other guys.” She was gone, though, so it did not matter.

            Next came Nancy. “She didn’t belong there,” Robert says solemnly. “She was ‘class.’” Their school was rural, Quaker. She was different. They used to walk from the main building to the library together, her firing questions at him one after the other while he scrambled to keep up with answers. Nancy would have these long, pensive pauses, and that is when Robert realized she wanted something more than their school had to offer. One day, she waited for Robert outside his history class with a message he didn’t want to hear. He calls this “the biggest surprise of his life.” “She came right up to me and hugged me and just . . . kissed me!” he remarks. “Then she looked at me . . . with big, soulful eyes, and said, ‘Robert, I’m leaving.’” She disappeared to a college in New York that weekend. Robert was again left before he could attempt to act on her feelings for him. “It hurt me, because I knew there was something in her that resonated with me, and it was more than me just being a guy. It had to do with the kind of person that she was and what her choices were,” he remembers. But, he was glad for her to go, because she was seeking out a place that would challenge her, and keep her from champing at the bit like he always seemed to do. 

            The women Robert wanted to stay were the ones that went away. The one he wants most to stop bothering him won’t leave him alone. Midway through our conversation, Robert is interrupted by the shrill sound of the telephone on his wall going haywire. He lifts the receiver and puts it back down again, sighing, “I’ve got a neighbor down the road who calls me all the time.” When I ask, “About what?” he replies, somewhat sheepishly and with a hint of laughter, “She wants to be my wife.” He’s had to “lay it on the line” several times with her, trying to ward her off, but has yet to succeed. “She’s convinced she can make it happen. Whatever. Okay.” He continues with his story.

 

The one special woman, the one he most wanted to remain by his side, whom he gave his name, was the person who drove him to purchase two Subaru’s. 

            Robert was once married to Dena, but it was a long time ago. It remains a memory full of distress and confusion for this fifty-five year old man. He doesn’t go into the details of what caused that first tear that eventually ripped the two completely apart; he instead recounts the horror following the event.

            “Our marriage just absolutely exploded,” he whispers. “What was the happiest day of my life ended up being one of the worst days of my life as well. It threatened to wreck me as a person. I had been reading a lot of different things trying to understand relationships more, trying to understand what happened between Dena and me. Why in the world did two people who loved each other as much as we did come to such a terrible misunderstanding that threatened to take her out in terms of her anxiety and health? Why in the world would you have to dissolve a marriage in order to save someone’s life and save a family?” He slaps his hands to his knees, remembering the frustration and hurt. “That just seems like the most ridiculous thing that ever could be. After we talked some years later she actually told me I had done the right thing [when we divorced], but it seemed to me at the time the wrong thing, cause when I said vows . . .” He trails off. When he said them, he meant them.

            A little while after the only woman who stuck around decided to leave as well, Robert went to an overlook in Brown County, grasping the book The Language of Love in his hands. He prayed to God under a crisp November sky. He was on his own at that point: Dena was gone and his family was away in the Carolinas.

            “I was sitting there, in my truck, trying to pray, and I heard these geese (I thought). I really wanted to have some peace and quiet and didn’t want to hear a bunch of geesehonking. They were making such racket. I just tried to concentrate and I couldn’t, so I said, ‘Okay.’” Robert pauses, then continues in a different tone, “While I don’t feel like the Lord speaks to me directly necessarily, sometimes things happen and they’re just so coincidental and so focused that you knowthat the Holy Spirit is about to grab you by the throat, and that’s what happened.” 

            He stepped out of his truck, and making his way around the fender he found himself in the midst of more Sandhill cranes than he had ever seen. An entire flock of white-feathered, spellbinding creatures.

            Those birds meant a lot to him in that moment, he explains. Sandhill cranes would always fly back and forth across the Platt River near his home, riding the air currents before a storm. They used those storm currents to fly, and Robert realized what God was trying to say to him. The birds used storms, what would be considered the “rough” things in life, for their advantage. A storm was not a time to stop and rest. It was a time to keep flying ahead.  

            “[God] was saying, ‘You’re going to be alright.’ He was using them in a way to encourage me that I really needed. I broke down and cried. It was an important evening to feel loved by the Lord.”

            Robert eventually left the Sandhill cranes in search of good meal. On the way, he happened to drive by a used car shop and in the lot was a Subaru. He was familiar with their impressive specifications, and loved driving stick shift because of the control he felt with the car. Robert wondered, “Am I going to take the Lord at face value in this too?” Unsure and still torn up inside, he decided to dine at a local Brown County restaurant where there was only one other occupied table. As he began to eat, a woman from the other table walked up. 

            “Robert, is that you?” 

            It was Ellen Rolland, a good friend he hadn’t seen since his first year in college. “You’ve had a hard day, haven’t you? You’re not going to eat by yourself tonight,” she said warmly, inviting him to their table. Robert sat and ate with Ellen, her husband, and their friends. They had a wonderful conversation, catching up on news of the couple’s kids and remembering the things they used to do together. Then another familiar face, Linda from church, came in, gave Robert an enthusiastic wave, and began to talk to his waitress, Jenna. All of a sudden Jenna turned to Robert and exclaimed, “You know her? She’s my mother!”

            Robert recalls, “It was just a really sweet, sweet evening of people supporting me and the Lord supporting me through those people, to help me understand.” God was telling Robert, “‘You may not have people close to you right now, the family you tried to have and tried to be something to may have been taken away from you, and you may not have your dad to talk to about things that you really want to talk to him about, but . . . I’ll be your dad.’” Robert chokes up. 

 

He began the drive home that night and came upon the used car lot once more. “I said to myself, ‘Robert, you would be a complete fool if you did not call those people and just pay for the car.’ So, that’s what I did. That was the first Subaru.”

            He came to love the car so much, due to its reliability and usefulness, that when the next opportunity presented itself, Robert went all the way up to Chicago to buy another one. He purchased a one-way ticket because he knew before even seeing the car he would be driving back with it that day. “I knew it was everything I wanted,” he says. “There was something wrong with the window, but I could fix that.”

            The Subarus were to Robert something he couldn’t find in Ada, Nancy, or Dena. Even though parts of them were broken, he could fix them. Even though they had a lot of mileage on them, they have lasted to this day, loyally guarding his home and his heart.

The most significant purpose about the cars in Robert’s mind, however, is that they grant him the opportunities to share new memories and see new wonders and “feed the hearts” of the people he drives in them, so they can find themselves and God. He has driven Carson, Emily, Emma, Madeline, Mark, and Jason. They’ve experienced harvest festivals, historical places, great escapes, and God’s grace. 

            “One of the things I decided to do was to involve other people in my searches for things, to help them with their search. Some are more special. Some have more of that ‘champing at the bit’ than others. Madeline was certainly that, you were that, and Carson is also that.” 

            He says he does it for people, and he does it for God.

            “And that’s why I have two Subarus.”

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