Junkyard Find: 1983 Mercury Lynx L Wagon

Thinking about my old wagon got me poking around and I found this post on another site by one Andrew T. “My experience with the Tracer goes a long time back. My family bought a slightly-used wagon in 1990 that evidently originated as an unnamed Ford executive’s company car. It replaced a 1983 Ford Escort with a peculiar tendency to stall at inopportune moments (such as crowded freeway on-ramps), and whose brakes had once failed on us outright. The Tracer had air conditioning. It had a radio that worked. It had four doors, so no forcing kids to crawl over the front seats to get in. It had velour trim that felt like a lap of luxury compared to the Escort’s blue striped cloth. It never stalled. It never left us stranded. It wasn’t perfect (the interior knobs and levers had a tendency to break off after several years of UV exposure, and the road noise and vibration got unnerving around 60 mph), but compared to what came before, it was 100% better in every way. But, the car refused to die. Fast-forward a decade and a half. The Tracer has outlived the Escort by a factor of two, and lasted longer than we originally believed imaginable. The car’s been more or less willed into my hands, but the title is still held by another family member and I don’t have permission to do all the work on it that I want. Fitting my 6’4″ frame inside is a bit of a challenge, since the seat only rolls back so far and the steering wheel doesn’t tilt: I wind up making do by wrapping my knees around the steering wheel and lodging at the clutch and brake pedals with my toes. The whole thing is filthy inside and out from deferred maintenance, deferred car washes, and a bad seal in the engine bay. And, I’m regularly navigating some narrow hairpin roads in West Virginia in January. The January weather in this area usually straddles the freezing point: Ice comes and goes without warning, and sometimes without making itself known. The number of days in a winter with snow and ice on the road are dwarfed by the number of days where the roads are clear as can be, so almost no one bothers with snow tires. Many of these roads are deserted, and it’s tempting to go a bit faster on them than may be prudent. Put 2, 2, and 2 together, and… I turned the wheel, and the Tracer followed…sort of. There was black ice on the bend. I understeered, and next thing I knew I was barreling towards the left side of the road with nary a second to react. Now, deserted rural roads in this area often aren’t built with curbs or guard rails…so I careened off the pavement, through some brush, and down a 12-foot embankment, eventually ending up in a shallow creek. The car was on its side. The engine was still on (how’s that for reliability?), the heater was still on, the radio was still on, but there was no way I was going anywhere in it. I was dazed and saddened by the experience, but belted in and completely unhurt. The Tracer was pulled out later in the day. It was covered in battle scars. The left front fender was crushed in, and there was a nasty crease in the roof from where the Tracer had come to rest against a tree. I had figured it was forever ruined (and I was ashamed to drive it in public after that)…yet it still ran like a top as if nothing had happened. We kept it as a second car for five full years after the catastrophe. It eventually became someone else’s around-town driver in WV, and it just might still be on the road today…”