I was driving to Roanoke today, and as I drove past a used car lot, I saw out of the corner of my eye a pale green 1974 Cadillac Coupe Deville on the lot. I knew I had to stop and check it out on my return trip.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Cadillac man. As best I can figure, my love affair with Cadillacs began when I was a little kid watching Ghostbusters multiple times per week. Over time, my love of the ECTO-1 — which of course began life as a 1959 Miller-Meteor ambulance/hearse Cadillac professional chassis — gradually morphed into a love of all things Cadillac. To this day, the 1959 Cadillac remains my dream car, followed by the 1967-1978 Eldorados.

Whenever I see a sweet old Cadillac, I often stop just to find out how much the owner wants for it. I don’t know why I do this. I think I’m hoping to find an owner who will say, “Yeah, this old gal runs like a top, but I gotta get rid of her, on account of she’s haunted. She’s yours if you tell me a story about a man who tried to do something that ended poorly for him but hilariously for those observing him.”

The ’74 Coupe Deville isn’t necessarily one of my favorites, but it’s still a beautiful piece of American iron that would look pretty good with me behind the steering wheel. I pulled into the parking lot of the used car dealership and struck up a conversation with the owner, a barrel-chested man of 75 who chain-smoked menthols and told me the tale of the car.

His great uncle, he said, was a bootlegger and timber man who bought it brand-new. He kept the car in his temperature-controlled garage, driving it only occasionally, until he sold it to another relative (also a bootlegger) in 1995. That relative also kept it in a temperature-controlled garage and only drove it once or twice. Every few months, he’d change the fluids, pump the brakes, and add some fuel stabilizers. His wife was a paraplegic, and one of her favorite past-times was retiring to the garage and wheeling herself around the car, waxing and buffing it to a high sheen. Then that relative died, and the barrel-chested man inherited it.

It was, quite possibly, the most pristine 1974 Coupe Deville in our universe or any parallel universes. The paint was immaculate. The interior looked untouched. 

It had 9,000 miles on the odometer.

“I’m thinking $15,000,” the owner said.

I am possessed of an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Cadillacs manufactured between 1950 and 2000, along with their Kelley Blue Book values. This was a reasonable figure.

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s about right. You probably won’t get that here, though. I expect you might be able to sell it locally for nine, maybe ten.”

He swept an arm across the Cadillac’s endless sea-foam expanse. “What would you give me for it?”

“Sir,” I said, “any honest answer I give you would be so insulting that you would want to punch me in the face.”

He then announced that his cellulitis was acting up and he needed to sit down. He folded himself into his Buick and proceeded to tell me about his career as a minor country music star, his love affair with the 1941 Ford, and also his cellulitis. This went on for perhaps twenty minutes or so.

“Sure you wouldn’t give me ten for it?” he asked, puffing a menthol Marlboro.

“If I had ten, I’d buy it,” I said.

“Almost too nice to drive, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t have a garage or anything.”

“Aw, shit,” he said. “I wouldn’t sell it to you, anyway.”

I was sitting at my desk at the newspaper when I got a phone call about the wind.

The wind, the caller said, had come down across a section of county road and blown down a building. It had happened in the early morning, the caller said, and they didn’t know anything else about it, but I should look into it.

I called up the public safety director, who confirmed that wind had taken place, and also that it had blown down a building. I then called up my guy at the National Weather Service, who is always excited to talk about freakish weather.

What it was, he said, was a microburst, or straight-line wind. What happens sometimes, he said, is that under certain atmospheric conditions, the sky will belch out a single gust of wind with the power of a tornado. He didn’t know how fast this particular wind was moving -- there was no monitoring equipment within its path of destruction -- but well over 100 miles per hour was not uncommon for these microbursts.

I asked him if this was rare.

No, not particularly, he said. It happens sometimes, often in the woods where no one knows about it. Occasionally, without any sort of warning, a tremendous blast of crushing wind just rumbles down from the sky and destroys anything in its path. It’s just one of those things.

I hopped in my car and drove out to the site.

When I got there, I discovered that the wind had caused damage on both sides of the county road. On the left side of the road, it had hit a church, blowing out a stained glass window which, according to the gentleman outside the church cleaning up the glass, cost $30,000.

It had then passed across the road and hit the garage.

It was a private garage, perhaps 40’x40’, surrounded by a cyclone fence, which was not aptly named. It had been absolutely obliterated. The fence had been ripped from the earth and tangled. The garage looked as if a C4 charge had gone off within it. Twisted corrugated steel lay in the field surrounding the garage. Only the cinderblock foundation remained. Fiberglass insulation hung from the pine trees like tinsel. Other pine trees lay on the ground, not uprooted, but snapped off at the base. A man, a boy, and a dog wandered the property, surveying the damage.

Bent go-kart frames and small engine parts littered the ground.

I struck up a conversation with the man.

This had been his garage, he said, holding the boy’s shoulders. The boy was young, no older than 9 or 10. He struggled to look unaffected in front of me, but it clearly took effort.

The garage, the man said, had been where he and his son built and tinkered on the boy’s go-karts. The boy had racing in his blood, the man said, and he hit the go-kart track almost every weekend. 

The man and the boy’s mother had separated some years before, he said, but they remained friends. In fact, he said, he considered his ex-wife’s new husband to be a great friend as well, and he, the ex, and the new husband often spent time together at the boy’s races. 

People think we’re crazy, he said, but it works for us.

They were bound by their love of the boy, who loved his go-karts, or did until God’s finger had ground them into the earth with a destroying wind.

I asked the boy if I could talk to him for a moment. He nodded.

“I’m sorry about this, young man,” I said to him. “I’m sure this has been a rough morning for you.”

The boy said he had wept all morning. He would survive, but it was hard.

“I lost my life today,” he said in a soft southern accent. “Go-karts is my life.”

I have interviewed a governor, three senators, two attorney generals, and countless doctors, lawyers, and theologians.

That remains the most profound artistic statement I have ever heard.