You can’t pretend to live in the pre-digital world. There are too many reminders – your phone chiming with a text from your wife, the vague thought in the back of your head that your 10lb CD folder doesn’t have that album from your Spotify favorites, the sign at the deli in the middle of nowhere asking you to tag them in your Instagram post…
That said, you can choose to turn down the digital noise. For a few hours, maybe even a few days, you can go and “find yourself” without the self-medication that’s popular if not necessary between 5PM and 9AM on weekdays. And what better way to do it than with an old car you don’t quite trust.
Of course, “old” is relative. In the year 2025, most NPC drivers think a ten-year-old car is long in the tooth. At twenty years old you’ll have trouble remembering what was around (Toyota Echo, anyone?). At thirty years you’re squinting into the murky mire of popular history, picturing Nicolas Cage discharging his firearm into the airbag of some yellow wedge (hint: it wasn’t his). At forty years you’re at the threshold of cars that are new enough that they function like normal transportation, but old enough that their function is directly dependent on your care and feeding. Such is the case with my entry for this year’s Tour De Del, my Toyota Corolla GT-S.
Admittedly, the Corolla was not the oldest car there (it was technically a lil’ too new), but it’s old enough for me to get away from the digital noise of today. No keyless entry, an analog dash, and even a non-functioning stereo. It’s also just kinda…junky. Some of that is definitely from time and lack of use prior to my ownership, but a good amount of it is just from being an ‘80s car. Again, that whole threshold thing. The twin-cam, 16-valve, ~7,600RPM 4AG was actually one of the most advanced engines of its day, but the car it’s sitting in has a solid rear axle and a body structure made of crushed cardboard. It drives like a car from the 1970s in large part because the underpinnings aren’t too different from its predecessors from that decade. But I digress.
At 9AM on a Saturday in Barstow, I pulled my old-but-not-oldest car into the lot across from California’s oldest Del Taco. Hosted by Barnes & Co. and Hypertrash Magazine, the Tour De Del Rally is, in their words “an adventure through the glorious backroads of California…a two-day reset from the daily grind” and “a tool to clear your head and to remember what the simple pleasures of existing on this rock are.” Ironically it was my digital looking from afar, seeing friends run previous iterations of this rally via IG, that inspired my joining this year, but the kit we were all handed before departing told me I was where I wanted to be. We were encouraged to do the whole first day without touching our cell phones, in their place we received the day’s route sheet, a paper map (just in case…) and, maybe most important for this writeup, a disposable camera.
It’s a digital disposable, to be clear, but when you think about it the experience of those Fujifilm Quicksnaps I burned through in high school was less about the film or disposable aspects, and more the adventure. The adventure of being present in the moment, taking your snap, and then seeing what you created some later day or week or month. You would do your best to frame the shot, but the continuous editing and curation (and self-induced anxiety) we do today with our phone cameras or DSLRs isn’t there. The camera isn’t disposable, the distraction is. You take your photo, you dispose of the concern about the photo’s aesthetic quality, and you move on.
Which is what I did for most of the weekend. The DSLR I dragged along to take photos spent a lot of time in the passenger seat. It was easier to point the disposable at something worth remembering and not have the break in focus from the moment that’s endemic to shooting with a “nice” camera. The vastness of the central valley, the beauty of the Sierras, the joy in seeing a couple dozen other car folk taking in the same experience stayed intact. And while these photos aren’t going to win any awards, they do more than enough to surface the memories attached to their genesis.
As mentioned, that was the entire point of the rally. When the dopamine hit of social media scrolling, the oppressive convenience of modern cars, the interminable self-censoring triggered by cameras with digital screens, when all of that is out of the picture, you’re able to disconnect from the noise, to resurface the why of getting up and doing anything.
I can’t pretend that this is feasible most days, or that this is some cure all for the current state of human interaction. But I do think it’s pointed in the right direction, and in more ways than I can put into words.
For a better description of the weekend’s activities you’ll have to pick up the next issue of Hypertrash Magazine. In the meantime, here’s the rest of the photos from that digital disposable in all their unedited, devil-may-care glory.
