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It was a crossover before crossovers were cool.

Since the Honda Civic is now celebrating its official 50th birthday (in Japan), today's Junkyard Treasure must be an interesting discarded Civic. Here's a rare one: a 1988 Wagovan five-door that doesn't have the very popular all-wheel-drive option, found in a yard between Denver and Cheyenne recently.

During the 1980s and into the 1990s, American car buyers had many choices for Japanese hatchbacks or wagons with raised rooflines and available all-wheel drive. Make such a vehicle look angrier and more truck-like, add a bit more suspension height, and you have a 21st-century crossover SUV. The Toyota Tercel AWD wagon was the best-selling one of the bunch, but Mitsubishi and Nissan sold quite a few as well. The Honda version was known as the Shuttle in its homeland and proved very popular there.

On our shores, Honda of America vacillated between calling this vehicle a Civic Wagon and a Civic Wagovan (Toyota got some menacing communications from Volkswagen's trademark attorneys for trying to call the TownAce the Van Wagon here, due to the similarity to the Vanagon name, but Honda didn't seem to get any heat from Wolfsburg over the similar name). Whatever you called it, this style of tall Civic wagon was available as a version of the third-generation (1984-1987) and fourth-generation (1988-1991) Civic in the United States.

Honda kept selling this generation of Civic wagon in Japan through 1996, but later Civic-based wagons split off from the Civic family tree and became Orthias over there. In the United States, Civic wagons were available from the 1974 through 1991 model years. If you wanted a new Honda wagon here after that, it had to be an Accord.

Because this is a front-wheel-drive Wagovan, it has the 1.5-liter engine with 92 hp. The all-wheel-drive version got a 1.6-liter with 105 horses and a six-speed manual transmission (actually a five-speed with an extra super-low granny gear for snow and mud). Here in Colorado, nearly every Wagovan I see has all-wheel drive.

Honda went to six-digit odometers here in 1982, and I've found some very high-mileage 1980s Honda products in the boneyards over the years—181,965 miles isn't so impressive for a Civic of this era, but it's respectable.

The biggest weak point of these cars was their susceptibility to corrosion. This one didn't look bad underneath, but there's some rust-through around the wheelwells.