The Details
Newsletter 2026-06-26
Not to get too detailed, but practically everything I own needs to be detailed. My minivan is more sand than vehicle. We don’t have to worry about going back to the beach because we took most of it home with us. I now know which kids wash behind their ears and which don’t. Likewise, it’s time to detail the pigs. The whole herd could use a good hoof trimming, but our foster pig, Onyx, is in especially dire need. He’s due for his annual hoof and tusk appointment while he’s also blowing his coat, balding faster than even the most unfortunate of middle aged men. He could be the before picture for a Rogaine ad for pigs. While the hair will fall out on its own, I need to hire a professional to knock him out and handle the rest. He’s not going to sit still while someone clips off the ends of his longest teeth. Now is a particularly important time for him to look his best: I might have found his forever home. To seal the deal, I want him to look presentable and well cared for. Nobody wants to adopt a mangy swamp pig. Well, I probably would, assuming he got along with my other pigs, but that would be a deal breaker for my wife. Like a car that gets restored to mint condition before going up for sale, I want Onyx to be detailed to look his best. If I mess this up, the van and pig might remain irremediable messes forever, just like me.
Lola was asking for the van to be detailed weeks before we went to the beach. It was in a sad state when we began our summer road trips. If you look hard enough (actually, you don’t have to look very hard at all), you can find bits of candy canes from Christmas, Tootsie Rolls from last Halloween, and crushed goldfish from when the kids were toddlers. That last one was especially impressive since I didn’t even have this van back then. They must have saved some of the mess from the old van and brought it with them. The only time the van was vacuumed out, it cost $15,000. That’s what my insurance company paid. The repair place threw in a free vacuuming when they replaced my roof and hood after a severe hail storm. It cost me the $500 deductible, which wasn’t exactly cheap. Frighteningly, it wasn’t that far above market rate, either. Looking around online, getting a minivan detailed today costs close to $300. If the detailer saw all the sand in there before giving a quote, that number would easily double. If you factor in any pig hair that might have been stuck to our clothes and carried into the van, it would be cheaper to buy a new van and start over. I’m sure we could keep it clean for a week or two, or until the kids rode in it for the first time, whichever came first.
The amount of effort it would take to clean out my van justifies the exorbitant price. Detailing it was originally considered one of the Twelve Labors of Hercules, but it was cut from the list for being too difficult. It was replaced with the much easier task of slaying the hydra. Given the amount of angst I feel about the inside of my van, which only my own family sees, you’d think I’d be just as concerned about the van’s exterior. Nothing could be further from the truth. I view washing the outside of my van to be the height of futility. It lives outdoors. I don’t have a garage. My daily driver won’t spend a single second of its existence protected by a roof. When it rains, the outside of my van is clean. When it doesn’t, my van develops a layer of dust that serves as natural camouflage. After a particularly dry month, you could send that thing to war in the desert and no one would see it coming. My father-in-law used to wash the outside of my vehicles when we’d visit his house. He’d use the finest waxes and the softest microfiber towels to show me how it could be done. It was part of his broader campaign to shame me into being a responsible adult. His lessons never stuck. Now, he fixes my house to keep it from falling down, but he leaves the outside of my van as dirty as nature made it. He knows a lost cause when he sees one, even if he doesn’t always see it because of that desert camouflage.
My upcoming mission won’t make the inside of my van any cleaner. With luck, I’ll soon be delivering Onyx to a new home.
