Huginn’s Story: The Jeep That Was Supposed to Set Us Free
by J. S. Fletcher
I used to make fun of my mom.
She had this belief, quiet but persistent, that the things around us carried something more than what we see. Not souls exactly, but something adjacent to energy, memory, presence.
She’d pick a stuffed animal up off my bedroom floor, dust it off, give it a little pat, smile, and place it gently on my bed or dresser.
She’d tell me to treat my stuffed animals nicely because “they feel things.”
And I’d roll my eyes and say:
“It’s polyester and stuffing, Mom. It’ll survive.”
That was just her thing.
Now I’m out here ready to go to war over a Jeep.
So yeah… I get it now.
She’s probably laughing at me from whatever heavenly realm she’s currently occupying, right alongside my Nana.
The Myth of the Car That Chooses You
There’s this weird, almost unspoken belief, especially in the Jeep Wrangler community, that you don’t just pick a Jeep.
It picks you.
When we found him, it felt right. Not in a dramatic, lightning-strike, movie-montage kind of way. Just… right.
Like this was the start of something.
I named him Huginn, after Odin’s raven, the one who represents thought. The one who goes out into the world and comes back with truth.
(At the time, I had no idea how on-the-nose that would end up being. Quite literally.)
This wasn’t just a vehicle.
This was supposed to be the vehicle.
The one that finally got us out.
Out of the cycle. Out of the noise. Out into something that actually felt like living.
Jeep. Trailer. Cat in my lap. Hubby at the wheel. The open road. Just us three. Figure the rest out as we go.
Simple. Honest. Ours.
At the time, it felt poetic.
Now? Not so much.
The universe had different plans.
The Research Phase (a.k.a. My Second Job)
Before any of that, this wasn’t some rushed decision.
I spent months in the research phase.
And I mean months.
Is this going to be good for us? What model makes the most sense? Two-door or four-door? What color? What year? What’s realistic for where we are right now?
You know… normal car-shopping questions.
But with Jeep Wranglers, it’s different.
Each one feels like it has its own personality.
And the owners? From what I’ve seen, they’re some of the coolest, weirdest people you’ll ever come across.
Cool… but definitely weird.
And don’t even get me started on the ducks. (If you know, you know. If you don’t… You will.)
I loved it.
Our Story (Before Everything Shifted)
Before everything changed, and before my husband was my husband, we used to be those people.
Outdoorsy. Always looking for somewhere new to hike or explore.
Random trails. Day trips upstate. Sitting for hours in Untermyer Gardens. We would find any excuse not to just sit inside.
Then life shifted…in a big way.
His story was changing, our story was changing, thanks to a lot of unforeseen circumstances. Or, as my husband puts it, “the punch we didn’t see coming.”
He moved to the city. It was a big adjustment. Tight quarters, new routines, new stress. We tried to do as many outdoor things as we could, but it wasn’t the same.
Then disaster struck again.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Like a lot of people, we changed.
Once we got past the initial shock, we adapted. We learned to navigate it.
We enjoyed the empty streets of Lower Manhattan. We walked a lot, took photos, and soaked in the strange, echoing solitude.
It felt like nature was taking back the city in real time.
Rats moved in coordinated packs like a gang from The Warriors, only-in-New-York moments that were somehow both horrifying and fascinating. It made me wonder if maybe it was time to move back upstate, where nature is at least a little more predictable.
My husband says we got a little “institutionalized,” and honestly… he’s not wrong.
Being around people started to feel like too much. A simple grocery run could be traumatizing. Our PTSD started to feel like it had its own PTSD.
On one of those grocery trips, when everyone seemed just a little more hostile than usual, we felt this deep, aching longing for a peace we weren’t sure we could ever actually have.
So, we moved.
Back to my husband’s hometown, well, close enough. We found a nice little apartment. I got a job nearby. So did he.
We still had his old truck, a 2007 Xterra, but it was on its last legs. When it finally gave up, we didn’t get another car for a long while.
In 2023, my mother passed away.
We tried to salvage that year. I started school. His health, though, wasn’t great, and outside stresses made everything feel heavier.
That’s a story for another day.
I did everything I could to make our place feel like a home.
Meanwhile, our PTSD leveled up into full-blown C-PTSD.
A lot happened in that year, the kind of stuff that, for some people, ends in divorce or a total breakdown.
But us, no. We got engaged.
We set a date for April 2024 and got married in our backyard with just a couple of friends, in front of a huge tree on the eastern corner of the property.
The year stayed kind to us… right up until the fall.
And then I think we all know what happened. Collectively.
“Adulting” felt heavier than it used to. Just existing felt harder.
It was like the pandemic all over again, or as my husband likes to call it, 2020: Season 5.
We tried to plan a late honeymoon. We applied for passports. He got his. Mine was delayed.
I could sum that experience up in one phrase: not fun. Honeymoon: delayed.
People seemed meaner. Grumpier. More entitled. Louder.
We didn’t want crowds. We didn’t want noise. We wanted space. We wanted a future. We did not want to be fuel for the ever-growing meat grinder.
So, long story short…
Huginn wasn’t just a vehicle.
He was supposed to be a new beginning.
Not just ours, mine.
He would be the car I finally learned to drive in. The car my husband would teach me in. My first real taste of freedom.
My first car. My first Jeep.
And for me?
That made him more than important.
That made him personal.
The Turn
Maybe that’s why I noticed it so quickly.
When something matters that much to you, you don’t just see it. You feel when something’s off.
At first, it was small.
The check engine light came on the morning after delivery.
The kind of thing you almost brush off because you don’t want to ruin the moment. You don’t want it to become the nightmare you’ll later realize it already is.
Then came the smells.
Burnt oil. Coolant. That faint but very real whiff of gas.
That’s when the thought crept in:
Something’s not right.
Within less than 24 hours of having him, really, within the first fourteen, everything started to stack up.
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Little details that didn’t line up with what we were told. What we test drove. What we thought we inspected that same day.
Individually? You could rationalize it.
Wear and tear. Annoying, but fixable. No big deal.
But when it goes from a smell… …to miles on the odometer that make no sense… …to visible corrosion…
That’s not nothing.
That’s a pattern.
And it was enough to make me pause.
It felt like Huginn was trying to tell us something.
And once you pause… You start looking.
Not casually.
Not “let me just check really quick.”
No.
This was different.
This was the kind of look where your brain is already connecting the dots before you’re ready to.
We took him to a local mechanic, someone who didn’t know us and had no reason to sugarcoat anything, for a quick once-over.
He didn’t pass it.
He couldn’t pass it.
Not like that.
No mechanic in their right mind would.
At that point, the issues weren’t small anymore.
The mileage? Off. Not slightly off, really off. Way off.
Codes started popping up:
• Engine misfires
• SKIM system issues
• Oil pressure warnings
And that was just the beginning.
It got so much worse.
Looking Underneath
There’s a difference between glancing under a vehicle…
…and actually, seeing it.
My husband got down in the dirt, under Huginn.
And there it was.
The whole story.
What should’ve looked solid… didn’t. What should’ve felt reassuring… didn’t.
This wasn’t normal wear. Not aging. Not use.
This was something deeper.
Something wrong.
Very wrong.
He looked like he’d been sitting half-submerged in the ocean for years. Less like a Jeep and more like a rusted anchor pulled from the bottom of the sea.
The corrosion was so bad that if you needed to take off the rotors or almost anything else, you’d need a blowtorch.
There was a crack in the frame. Massive corrosion. Rust.
It wasn’t subtle.
It wasn’t cosmetic.
It was everywhere it shouldn’t have been.
On the outside, he looked fine, better than fine. Nice color. Solid presence. A Rubicon.
None of that was there when we went for a test drive. None.
He was supposed to be my Rubicon. My way out of the shell I’d been living in for years.
The realization hit immediately.
That drop in your chest. That moment where reality lands before your brain can catch up.
I was heartbroken.
I went from confusion… to anger… to something else entirely.
Protective.
Like a full-on mama bear ready to storm a castle.
Which, yes, I realize sounds dramatic.
But in that moment?
It didn’t feel dramatic.
It felt necessary.
Something More Than Metal
Here’s the part I never thought I’d admit:
Maybe my mom wasn’t as “out there” as I thought.
Standing there, really looking at Huginn, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t just a thing.
Not just metal, bolts, parts, and numbers on a piece of paper.
There was something else there.
A presence. A story. Something that had been through more than we were told.
So we looked deeper.
Because nothing was as it should’ve been.
Nothing added up. Nothing made sense. The CARFAX certainly didn’t.
There’s a moment where your brain tries to protect you:
Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe it just looks worse than it is.
Nope.
Reality doesn’t ease in.
It hits.
Like a freight train.
No. Look again.
It’s worse.
So much worse.
In that moment, it didn’t feel philosophical.
It felt real.
It hurt.
Because something about Huginn didn’t feel random. It felt like he had a history that wasn’t being told. Like, there was something embedded in him that didn’t match the version we were being sold.
It seemed like Huginn had never been given a real chance. Never a chance to be a Jeep doing Jeep things, off-roading, rock crawling in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah.
Instead, it felt like he’d been bought for show, then tossed aside when he wasn’t getting the attention or getting the girls. Just a thing. Then, maybe, used for something more sinister.
And yeah, maybe that sounds a little out there.
A few years ago, I would’ve rolled my eyes at myself the same way I used to roll them at my mom.
But now?
Now I’m not so quick to dismiss it.
I remember listening to Einar Selvik of Wardruna talk about animism, the idea that everything around us carries its own kind of life. Not life as we usually understand it, but life as frequency, as energy, as memory. A reminder that nothing is ever merely what it appears to be.
Maybe everything does carry something. Maybe everything has a kind of frequency.
Maybe Huginn, my Jeep, our Jeep, carries his own kind of life.
And maybe, just maybe…
Huginn has one too.
Maybe that’s exactly why I couldn’t ignore what I saw.
The Beginning of the Fight
So… this is the beginning.
Just Part One of the story.
The start of this whole saga.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned already, it’s this:
Sometimes the thing that was supposed to set you free is the very thing that shows you how trapped you really were.
The rest is where the fight begins.
