It was like learning I had bad breath.I had expected that registering my car in California would take about an hour. Wrong. It took about that much time to fill out the paperwork, write a check, take a number, and wait in line in the Division of Motor Vehicles.

I wasn’t in Vermont any longer, where the mountains are green and the cars are free to be you-and-polluting-me. Alas, I get ahead of myself and ahead of my 1999 Toyota Rav4’s collision with the “smog” test.

A friendly Department of Motor Vehicles employee suggested that I drive down the street to a certified shop. The serviceman greeted me and took my car into his garage.

After a half hour he came out of the bay, looked gravely at me, and said, “This is bad, very, very bad. You are a gross polluter.”

Like an owner pointing a puppy’s nose into an accident on the living room rug, he waived the detailed report in front of me, with those dreaded words in all caps. GROSS POLLUTER.

“You need to take care of this immediately. It may not be fixable,” he said sternly.

This being California, I expected that the mechanic would have asked how I felt about it, but no, he was perfunctory and sent me away, after charging me $70.
My hopes of living a carbon-neutral life were dashed. Forget my conversation driving across North Dakota when I suggested to my partner that we avoid purchasing bottled water in favor of filtering our own from the tap. Forget my plans for aggressive recycling and erase my years of composting… I’m a carbon-monoxide-spewing machine; I visualized the trail of grimy haze I left across the country, as I drove from Vermont to California.

I imagined what my former colleagues at Vermont Law School, a leading environmental law school, would think. Did they notice when I parked next to them in the parking lot weeks earlier? Would they cluck over a cup of shared green tea, “Yes, she was a gross polluter waiting to happen. It was only a matter of time.”

Seeking sympathy, I called my mother. She pointed out, “Wow, Vermont must have been really happy to see you go.” No purchase there.

I drove and saw a dented van from the 1970s emitting gray plumes of smoke with current registration tags. I wondered, how could this car have passed an emission test, when mine did not?

Then I learned about the loopholes. My California friends filled me in. One, tired of paying reams of exhaust repair bills, purchased an older-model VW Bus, filled with memories of the early 1970s and a favored polluter status-consider it a grandfather clause for grime. He eventually drove his toxic machine back to the east coast, where no DMV seems to notice.

I set out to find a mechanic to bring me back into the environmental fold. During a phone conversation, she said, “I’m not sure I can help you out. These things can be tricky.”

Two trips to the shop later, with new oxygen sensors and a catalytic converter, the old girl passed her “smog test.” I asked for a hard copy of the results to bring back to the DMV. She said, “Oh, they’ve already been forwarded by computer.”

Yikes! I’m in a database. DMV in California monitors its “GROSS POLLUTERS,” a black list for non-green Californians. I imagined the Division of Natural Resources arresting me as I walked out of Whole Foods with a bag of organic produce and hauling me away in a Prius with “Environmental Police” emblazoned on the side.
I proudly held my new plates and thought, now the easy part.

But no. Vermont wasn’t going to let go without resistance.
I had not unpacked my tools yet, so I improvised and used a garden trowel to unscrew the bolts that hold on my license plates. The back bolts wouldn’t budge-they were rusted into the car, the result of eight winters of road salt.

The next morning, I enlisted the help of a contractor working on the house. Even with proper tools, he couldn’t make the screw move.

Two days later, I went to a garage downtown. The mechanic shook his head. Same result.

I made an appointment at my new friend’s garage.
The mechanic started working. Twenty minutes later he came in to talk to me and looked flummoxed. “I’ve only heard about this kind of rust. I need to take the back door apart to get to the license plate screws.”
Another forty minutes on the clock and he lubed, cut, scraped, mangled, and, voila, I have CA plates on the back and front of my car. The air is cleaner and my wallet is $1,000 lighter.

* * *
Ellen Swain Veen, a former public defender, worked as an assistant professor of law at Vermont Law School until she relocated to Mill Valley last July, where she drinks water from the tap and keeps her smog to herself. She is writing a novel and a book for law students with learning differences.