Time capsule on wheels drives owner's imagination
Houston Chronicle, March 2003
By William Dylan Powell

I own something you don't - a time capsule. It's an actual time capsule: a container preserving mementos and minutiae seen as representative of our times. They give future generations the gift of time travel. Who hasn't fantasized about going back in time?

Historically, such endeavors dating back to antiquity have required months of elaborate preparation. Mine is a more plebeian pursuit, the result of a day trip to Galveston.

One summer afternoon, squinting up from my beach towel - my flip-flops a makeshift pillow - I saw a handsome, old-fashioned sailboat. Wanting a closer look, I tiptoed across the scorching sand to where I'd parked and unlocked the trunk of my car to fetch some binoculars. The trunk was like an oven, baking a casserole of overflowing objects. I dug around, snatched the brown leather case, looked back toward the boat and slammed the trunk with enthusiasm.

That was the last time the trunk of my car has been opened - more than six years ago. The lock froze like an Idaho Christmas. I spent hours trying to break in, employing liquid graphite, WD-40, sewing-machine oil and several lubricating expletives. I even tried removing the back seat, only to find it bolted from the inside.

Most car trunks contain a spare tire, a jack, road flares maybe. Not mine. I had recently moved and, what's worse, had gotten past the point of moving neat, taped boxes labeled BOOKS or DISHES. I'd been left with a random collection of smaller items: coat hangers, an iron, a bottle of scotch, a book titled The Bible of Karate: Bubishi, several back issues of the New Yorker and bags of old credit-card bills. I'm not sure what else is in there, exactly. But it brimmed with belongings worth moving.

Months passed. I had the dealership cut a new key. Still no luck. A few more months, and again it was summer. Finally I requested an estimate to drill out the lock and replace it. Two hundred dollars! Convinced I could fix it myself on the cheap, I left the dealership indignantly. Winter again.

By now I was infamous. At parties I was introduced as the guy with the time capsule. Men asked me why I didn't try various repairs - none of which I understood. I own precisely three tools, one of which is a corkscrew.

Women wondered why I didn't just shell out the $200. My parents, thinking I had fallen on hard times, kindly offered to pay for the repair.

But by now it had been a few years, and something had changed. I was no longer just a guy badly in need of a drill; I was an amateur historical archivist.

I remember my sixth-grade history teacher starting the school year with a questionnaire asking things such as: "Whom do you most admire?" and "What's your favorite possession?" He repeated the exercise at the end of the year, giving us back our original answers to compare. Young eyes gawked and cringed in the contrast in their lives only a year, but seemingly lifetimes, ago. That was the first time I realized history was not a fairy tale but the story of real people - people like me. It was also the first time I recall ever thinking objectively about my life.

Since then, history has both enlightened and enriched my life. And this unlikely event was my chance to give back. I decided never to sell the car, used cars having little value anyway. I'm putting it in my will, registered as an official time capsule. The logistics are still a little fuzzy, but the paperwork is in play.

The first registered time capsule was the Crypt of Civilization in Atlanta. Sealed in May 1940, it's to be opened in May 8113. It's not the trunk of a car but a swimming-pool-size chamber holding everything from Lincoln Logs to more than 640,000 pages of microfilm. It even contains an instruction book for learning English.

My biggest challenge will be keeping my mobile memorabilia from being lost over the years. Even before records were kept of such projects, there was a long history of starting and losing posterity's possessions. In 1793, George Washington laid the original cornerstone for the U.S. Capitol, placing memorabilia inside for posterity; over the centuries, renovations and reconstruction governed its disappearance. In 1907, an English music company embedded operatic gramophone recordings into the foundation of its building, but they were stolen during renovation in the '60s.

And in a secret ceremony in 1983, the cast of M*A*S*H buried a cache of props in the studio parking lot. The lot shrank over the years, and the cache is speculated to be somewhere under the Hollywood Marriott.

I'll have to be careful where I park.

But for now, this scrapbook of scrap metal is still on the road, throwing our imaginations into overdrive and fueling wild speculation as to its contents.

I may have lost some scotch, a few books and who knows what else. But I've found a new opportunity to appreciate the mystery of time and give future generations the chance to discover something about our world.

We are history.

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