1981 Puegot 504 Diesel
Wagon (Kind of Runs)
$2000 (Pending)
The 504 diesel Peugeot was a remarkably horrible car, briefly for sale in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. If you are looking for an absolute disaster that requires nonstop maintenance, spews foul-smelling dark exhaust, and whose diesel engine is so loud it’s hard to talk over, this is the car for you. A rarer specimen in the Northwest, but a staple on par with the Saab, it belonged to the kind of person who lived in Edmonds, whose landscaping consisted of an old, rotting rowboat on a pile of rocks with a few tepid flowers growing out of its side. Such a person was my Uncle Ted, who, in reality, was my grandmother’s second husband. I’m still not sure why we called him Uncle Ted, but he is also responsible for the jar of matches for sale here. A salt and pepper grey-mustached alcoholic fond of turtlenecks with plaid pants, tan trench coats, and Greek sailors’ caps, he was a man of many interests and projects, which were all in some state of being far from finished. It was this very man who bought me my first camera at a thrift store, back when thrift stores were just piles of random things laid out in an old warehouse under moss-covered skylights on a dirty cement floor. The camera didn’t work, but that was beside the point. As an eight-year-old, I didn’t need it to work. As Uncle Ted would say, what I needed was to learn how to see. A late-night phone call from a bar informing us of Uncle Ted’s imminent arrival via boat, sometime between noon and nine, or the rattling of the 505 diesel engine on the street, signaling that my sister and I were about to be abducted and forced into pressing apples to make juice (why would anyone buy apple juice if you could make it?), was always a sign that the world was more obtuse, more magical, and more beautifully unpredictable than the routine. In today’s binary world of ones and zeros, where every moment is accounted for and the God of Technology promises the answers to all, the 1981 504 diesel Peugeot represents the magic of the unknown. It is a portal to curiosity and possibility, and a testament to the idea that life is the journey, not the destination. Wake up! Get off the phone, grab the binoculars, and head down to the water, because Uncle Ted is coming sometime between noon and nine.