Following some recent misadventures I’d rather not go into, I find myself with a new addition to my personal fleet, a silver 2006 Jeep Liberty, which, if you don’t know, is a smaller four-door SUV roughly the same size as my old ’89 Bronco II. I got it for a real steal, too — in fact, when I made my counteroffer to the asking price, the dealer asked if I was sure about that amount, if I didn’t maybe want to go even lower. He was that eager to move the thing off his lot. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. While the vehicle is mechanically sound, or at least my dad was able to make it that way with only minimal effort, and the body and paint are in decent shape, the tires were as bald as Patrick Stewart and the interior…

My god, the interior.

I have never seen — or smelled — a vehicle that was such a filthy sty. This Jeep is thirteen years old, right? I have a hunch it’s never been cleaned in all that time. Ever. And judging from the evidence, the previous owner had kids and a dog. There was dog hair everywhere. There were stains on every seat, and on the backs of the front seats, and even on the headliner. Large stains. Brown stains that I really hope were coffee or chocolate and not some other brown substance. How the hell do you get a three-foot-tall stain on the back of the driver’s seat, anyway? I can only surmise that someone’s adorable little shit, er, offspring threw a large soda against mom or dad’s seat, and it never got cleaned up. Nothing ever got cleaned up, from the look of things. And did I mention the smell? It was unbelievable. A heavy, yeasty, organic funk like middle-schoolers’ gym socks, fried onions and spoiled milk. And indeed, I found a crusty white substance under one seat that I believe was spilt milk. I also found pretzels, popcorn, nuts, a whole granola bar (sans wrapper), a toy cellphone, a bunch of those colored glass pebbles that you use in fishtanks or decorative centerpieces, fifty-eight cents in loose coins, and about half-a-can’s worth of crushed Pringles. The map pocket on the driver’s door yielded a number of fossilized french fries. Oh, and there were straw wrappers everywhere. I mean everywhere. The previous owner must’ve just blown them off the straw while the windows were down and let them land where they may. But really, the big problem was the stink.

Look, I get it. I know parenting is hard, and I know that it’s not easy to keep clean when there are little kids and animals around. Accidents happen. Spills happen. And sometimes you can’t immediately take care of them because you’re on the road, in motion, places to be and all. But for hell’s sake, you can’t take ten minutes when you arrive at your destination to sponge things up? Seriously, did this person have no pride? If not pride, how about an instinct for self-preservation? I mean… how could you just sit in that filth day after day without doing something about it? The thought of what this person’s house might look like…

Ugh. Perhaps it’s best not to think about how other people live.

In any event, I spent my four-day Thanksgiving weekend cleaning the shit out of this thing… perhaps literally. I still don’t know what that brown stuff in the cracks of the seats was, and I really don’t want to. In the end, the seats remain badly stained — cheap seat covers from WallyWorld solved that problem — but the smell is thankfully gone and now I have a (hopefully) reliable vehicle to use on snow days instead of my Mustang.

One final thought: I’m not really one of those people who names all my cars, but in this case, an appellation jumped into my head while I was cleaning that so perfect, so fitting, I don’t see how I can not use it. So from this point forward, my new Jeep shall be known as… the tauntaun.

Because it’s a silver snow beast that smells awful on the inside…