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For the love of Jeep

6 min read
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Liz Rogers/Observer-Reporter

Kathy Swihart finds “Jeep love” 365 days a year.

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Liz Rogers/Observer-Reporter

Kathy Swihart takes advantage of an unseasonably warm February day to take the top off her Jeep Wrangler.

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Liz Rogers/Observer-Reporter

Kathy Swihart’s Freedom Edition Wrangler pays tribute to the military members of her family, including her father, “Lewie,” for whom the Jeep is named.

Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but Jeeps are what get Kathy Swihart’s motor revving.

So much so that she parlayed her husband’s longstanding promise of a diamond into one.

“Ray had always told me the year that I was turning 50 and we were married 20 years, I could get a diamond, any kind of diamond – whatever I wanted,” she said.

But the only gem Kathy longed for was of the four-wheel-drive variety.

An unseasonably warm and sunny February day presented the ideal opportunity for the Washington woman to share her passion for her ride and the outdoors.

Rolling back the soft top on “Lewie” – her silver Oscar Mike Freedom Edition named after her late father – she explained the half-dozen or so decals on the hood and doors as an homage to family members who served in the military.

“My dad was Army, Army infantryman,” she said, “and his favorite color was silver. ‘Lewie’ is right across the hood, so as I’m driving I can see that. And I’m not afraid to tell you when I pulled that (decal) back off, knowing it was named after my dad, I got a little teary-eyed seeing his name on there.”

Walking around the Jeep, she points to the side step attached to the driver’s-side door and limb risers stretching from hood to roof, intended to brush branches off the vehicle while driving off-road.

“When you buy a Wrangler, you’re buying a canvas, just like a painter gets a canvas,” she explains. “You just start adding and building. That’s why people are on a first-name basis with the FedEx guys because they’re always getting parts.”

Her deliveryman’s name? Ben.

She grins and suggests going for a ride.

“You don’t mind the roof being off, do you?” she asks, steering the vehicle out of the parking lot onto South Main Street in Washington’s downtown.

Almost immediately, we’re met by another Wrangler, and Kathy lifts her hand from the wheel to wave to the passing vehicle, whose driver returns the gesture.

“That’s the Jeep wave,” she says, explaining the brotherhood that is Jeep owners. There is a hierarchy to the wave, and the general rule is new Jeeps wave first, out of respect for the elder models.

“There’s a saying: ‘It’s a Jeep thing, you wouldn’t understand,'” she says a little later. “It really is. It’s a passion. You either get it or you don’t.”

The woman who makes her living styling hair at Hair & There in Washington recognizes the irony in her shoulder-length hair whipping in the wind as the topless Jeep picks up speed.

“Jeep hair, don’t care,” she says with a laugh.

While her daughter and two grandchildren don’t share her affinity for the Jeep life – her daughter is a “mini-van kind of girl” – they do enjoy accompanying her on runs.

“There’s nothing like it – 365 days of the year,” she said. “If it’s raining, you want to go through the mud puddle. If it’s snowing, you want to go off exploring in the snow because the Jeeps don’t get stuck. In the summertime, you got the top off, and you go for that drive. You got that time in the sun with the wind, and you can smell the environment, and you can feel the environment. It really does get in your blood.”

She caught the bug early, when she was just 10 years old.

“My dad’s best friend had an old Willys,” she recalled. “He’d bring it out in the summertime, and he and my dad would go to the pond and go fishing. I have wanted one ever since.”

It wasn’t until she was just shy of her 50th birthday that she got her first Jeep: a black, two-door soft-top Wrangler JK she nicknamed “Bleep” – short for “black Jeep.”

“Or,” she added with a chuckle, “for when Ray was holding on and I had to bleep him out! I had that Jeep for five years, and it really beat Ray up as the passenger.”

She rolls up her shirt sleeve to reveal a colorful tattoo on her forearm of a Jeep under a palm tree with a cruise ship in the background.

“This is a wanderlust tattoo,” she says. “If you know me at all, you know that I like to travel, and jeeping is my passion. So I designed this.”

Now 56, Kathy has found camaraderie in the Jeep community and joined groups where she could share her love of the Jeep lifestyle with other enthusiasts. She started her own group, “It’s a Jeep Thing,” which now numbers 68 members and includes only friends and family members, all of whom are current or previous Wrangler owners.

Beside off-roading, the group is civic-minded, too, and last week held its sixth Pet Run, collecting and delivering supplies to local animal rescue groups. The group also has hosted suicide awareness tours, inviting other Jeep groups on a long ride through the country with a stop to hear a mental health professional speak.

“We did have a few people reach out, and we did save a couple of lives,” she added.

“The Jeep thing is a real passion and a real hobby, but there are also a lot of benefits out there,” she said. “These Jeep groups are like bike groups where they do good in the community also.”

Kathy also belonged to a Jeep Emergency Response Team, and once used her vehicle to rescue a man trapped in a building surrounded by rising floodwater. She had to drop out of the group, however, when time constraints prevented her from participating in mandatory training.

On rare occasion, she will relinquish the wheel to Ray, but her husband prefers riding shotgun.

“I think part of it is he’s afraid I’ll hurt him if he hurts it,” she said. “Part of it is he’s a truck guy, and I’m a Jeep girl.”

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