A DIFFERENT KIND OF BORN AGAIN EXPERIENCE

Speaking of resurrections, I had a vehicle once that went through a resurrection of sorts. It was a 1960 Plymouth Valiant station wagon and of all the two dozen of so vehicles I have owned over the past forty years this one is my favorite.

As faithful as a pet dog it carried me along through my college years and into my first teaching job like a true friend with its tan exterior finish that sun, wind, rain and bird droppings had faded to the color of bad eggnog, meshed wire in the seats clearly exposed that occasionally stabbed me in the butt, and the headliner hanging in gray rags tinged with rust along the edges where it touched the metal frame seams that let water leak through. The three speed shifter on the floor could be used as an anti-theft device by easily lifting it clear from its linkage and taking it with you. But the am radio worked, the slant sided 6 cylinder engine hummed a healthy happy tune, you could fix just about anything on it with a flathead screw driver, a Phillips, a hammer, and a couple crescent wrenches or oftentimes, if there was no wrench around, a pair of pliers did the trick. It had an uncanny ability to heal itself, steer clear of hazardous situations, and finally metamorphosing into something wondrously beautiful.

Up until this time I had been driving for only about four years but had already gone through ten different cars. Each one a lesson in driving and car ownership; like learning the safe distance between your car and the bumper of the other car in front of you, or the importance of checking the engine’s oil level without relying on the red light from the dashboard, never buy a vehicle from a senior citizen who wouldn’t drive it faster than fifty mph and then take that same vehicle out on the freeway to “see what it’ll do”, never buy a car from a high school student who used it as his auto shop project, only buy a brand new vehicle when you’re reasonably sure your job and/or your marriage is secure enough to last through the extent of the loan, avoid purchasing a vehicle that burns more money in gas within the first two weeks of ownership than what you paid for it,. as hip as it may seem, an old milk truck does not make a good RV, and just because you’ve always been enamored with and always wanted to own a two door two toned shiny magnesium wheeled 1957 Chevy with a 283 cid V-8 doesn’t mean the one you buy will measure up to your ideal expectations.

The Valiant was a gift from a high school friend who found it in someone’s front yard with tall grass growing all around it and a $250 sale sign on the windshield. He was aware that I was in desperate need of another vehicle, is much more savvy in mechanical things than I am, and knew a good deal when he saw one. Back in those days I was a struggling university undergraduate with barely enough money to pay the rent and even though the prices of things were cheaper then with gasoline fluctuating between 23 and 28 cents a gallon, $250 was two months rent, or two quarter’s tuition and books, or five month’s in groceries, or twelve months in beer at 99 cents a six-pack. My friend - who married his high school sweetheart four months after graduation, fathered a beautiful daughter a few months later, worked a stable job on the production line at Boeing Aircraft - had the extra $250 and because he just knew that car was right for me he didn’t mind when I had to pay him back one sawbuck at a time whenever I could come up with the extra cash.

The wagon was very easy to drive. With so much play in the clutch it was near impossible to stall. No play in the steering. Even though the shifter lever was loose I never had trouble with the linkage or shifting. It could keep up just fine with those V-8’s in the left lane on the freeway, even uphill. Every knob, switch, or button was within easy reach which was especially first rate for a short person like me who ordinarily couldn’t drive and open the glove compartment at the same time. I drove it for six months before there was a mechanical problem.

It was the transmission. The wagon gave me plenty of warning before it completely froze up but a transmission was an awfully expensive commodity and besides, in those days car maintenance was never high on my priority list. Reverse was first to go and so I drove the next few months being very careful not to park in any situation where I’d have to back up. But even if I forgot, or someone parked in front of me, the wagon was so light I was always able to push it out of a tangle and get going forward again. Next to go was first gear and I also drove without it for a few months. All that needed to be done was a little more gas, slower on the clutch release, and ease it into a forward motion. This even worked on hills. When second gear no longer functioned I was sure this was the end. It happened on a Friday which that particular month fell very close to the first. This meant I could expect my grant money in the mail and by paying only half of each utility bill and skimping at the grocery store, I figured I had the $85 for a rebuilt transmission from the local auto wrecker. I could have saved money by going into the junk yard and removing one myself but after all that heavy greasy work, this used transmission could also be in bad shape. If that were the case the yard owner would always take it back and you could go get another one at no additional cost but that’s more messy work and you just saved the wrecker the trouble of removing a transmission he can now send out to be rebuilt and sold for $85.

I had school that Friday and although today I can’t remember why I needed to be there I do remember that something important was going on. To my amazement the wagon got out of the drive, through the stoplight and up the biggest hill of the commute. I figured if it could get this far with only high gear to move it forward the wagon just might make it through the next twelve stoplights to the university. After I found a parking space on a slope with no obstructions in front of me I kissed the fender before heading out to class. When I returned to go home the trusty thing got me through all the lights again and safely into my driveway. The next morning though, when I tried to move it forward all the gears were gone. I replaced the transmission and it never had another problem but the wagon did have another mechanical failure. This time it was the brakes. And this time the wagon healed itself.

I mentioned the big hill near my home. It was a steep one about twelve blocks long. My road was the ninth block down from the top. At the top of this hill there was an old tavern called the Fiddler’s Inn. A small place built from logs, painted green on the outside with the wood exposed and varnished on the inside, a floor that leaned toward the sink hole left after the septic tank was removed so the building could be connected to the city sewer. It was the living room for the neighborhood beer drinkers who preferred it to their own living room at home. Built sometime in the 1920’s my Grandmother remembers my Grandfather occasionally drinking there just before the War. I often stopped there in mid afternoon on my way home from school and unless there was something more important on my agenda I always stopped on Fridays where my stay usually extended into the early morning tongue twisting cross-eyed wobble walk hours. This particular Friday was no different.

The brakes had been squishy for some time. I had already bled the line and cleaned the drums and shoes the best I could but the shoes were badly worn and I knew it. It was just another one of those “trying to save an extra five dollars a month until there’s enough money to do the job” irritants. The wagon braked for the light at the top of the hill all right but half way down when I needed to turn onto my street my foot pushed the pedal all the way to the floor. Pumping the pedal didn’t help and by the time I reached my street the wagon was going so fast and I knew it would roll over if the attempt was made to turn. There was nothing left to do but coast it out. Unfortunately three blocks past my street there was an intersection with a stoplight and although it was green I suspected it would turn by the time I was up to it. It did. During the hours of 6 a.m. and 1 a.m. the intersection is always busy. If it hadn’t been 2:30 in the morning I probably would have hit someone. But my angel was smiling on me yet again as I sailed through the light ten miles per hour over the speed limit with no other cars around. The next morning I went out to check the brakes. They were squishy as they always had been but appeared to be working just fine. I drove on them, being careful to detour through back roads with less hills, until I had enough money to grind the drums and replace the shoes.

After I got out of college my first teaching job was at a very small town of maybe fifty families pretty much dead center in the middle of New Mexico. Today I doubt there are half that many people there. In fact there are probably more of them at rest in the grave yard than there are alive in town. They hired me very close to the first day of school so I had little time to pack my things in Washington State and head south. I would have liked to borrow some money to buy a newer vehicle for the trip but had no time to do it. The Valiant was going to have to get me there. I had never traveled more than 100 miles away from home in the wagon. To travel 1500 miles made me nervous. But my nervousness proved to be unfounded.

Today the traffic along the route between Seattle and Albuquerque is much heavier than it was thirty five years ago. There are still some wide open empty spaces, especially from southeastern Idaho to the Great Salt Lake, the road between Price and Moab, Utah, or Cortez, Colorado and Shiprock, New Mexico, or even the scant twenty seven miles of road between Cline’s Corners, New Mexico on Interstate 40 south to U.S. Highway 60 can be a bit lonesome. But back then there were less trucks, cars, or RV’s and fewer freeways. Much of that route that now is freeway, used to be two paved lanes of dangerous curves or endless stretches straighter than Anita Bryant’s rigid morals for as far as you could see. Hours could pass without seeing another vehicle. What now takes less than 24 hours to drive in one shot, in 1974 took twice as long. For my German Shepherd Jessie and I the trip was three days of hard driving from sunup to dark and because we were traveling at the tail end of August when temperatures hovered around 100 degrees the Valiant overheated a many times through Utah and New Mexico. But I carried water with me and whenever that needle got a little too close to the red H, I always stopped and let her cool down for half an hour or so and this did the trick. Jessie and I got there just fine.

The name of this little New Mexican village is Encino. The school was closed 28 years ago. When I was there I taught in the elementary with three other teachers in one big classroom of about 45 students. The high school next door had about the same number of kids. None of these teachers smoked anything suspicious except the high school science teacher. The two of us became lifelong friends. His name was Stan.

Stan had an A-frame down in Capitan. We took off one Friday afternoon to spend the weekend down there. Before we drove up into the Capitan Mountains where the cabin was, we stopped off at the local bar there in town. Stan had a lot of friends in Capitan. Most of them were regulars at this bar and they hadn’t seen him since he took the teaching job in Encino. Consequently we didn’t leave there until the bartender turned off the neon beer signs. On the way to the cabin we had to cross an arroyo. It had rained that day and the day before. There wasn’t any water running through but the mud was pretty deep and awfully slick. Up until then the only time I had been in New Mexico was on a hitch hiking trip. I wasn’t there long enough except to wow over all the red and yellow earth, lose myself in the deep turquoise sky, and feel the vibrant energy of a very old landscape zap through me like electric current. I knew absolutely nothing about New Mexican mud.

I’m not an extensively traveled man but I have crossed the United States three or four times and the only mud I've ever seen that compares to New Mexican mud is the red clay gumbo in Georgia. And like the stuff in Georgia this goo stacks up on anything that moves across it. Tire treads. Boot soles. It’s slick like lard at the bottom of a pie pan and if you fall in it you have to take your clothes off outside before entering the house. Otherwise you’ll be sweeping gritty dirt out for days after. Well I got down into that arroyo and the poor wagon took a nose dive and stopped dead. The tires spun and spun and spun but the mud wouldn’t let go. Finally I burnt the clutch out and because the cabin was still quite a ways off, we spent the night in the Valiant. The next morning we walked back to town and called a friend of Stan’s who drove us back to Encino so we could go to work the next day. We left the wagon in the arroyo where it would remain until we could come back the next weekend and tow it home.

Stan had a tow chain but what we really wanted was a tow bar. The idea of sitting on the end of a chain for over 100 miles didn’t sit well with either of us. The father of a student of mine, a cattle rancher, happened to have a bar so we picked it up the next Saturday morning and headed back to Capitan. The bar didn’t fit right. We attached the wide end to the Valiant bumper with no problem but because the wagon’s fender was lower than the bumper of Stan’s ’57 Chevy truck, the socket didn’t fit down full over the hitch ball. So we reinforced it by wrapping it up with the tow chain. It looked a bit ragged but felt strong enough to hold.

Again, Stan had to visit his Capitan friends before leaving so it was well after midnight before we headed out with bellies full of beer and a couple six packs. Stan and I were having a pretty good time of it cruising down the highway beneath clear October skies and a big bright moon nearly full. Now there is a mountain pass between Capitan and Carrizozo, the next town down the line. It isn’t much when compared to the mountain passes of the Colorado Rockies or California’s Sierra Nevada or even Washington’s roads over the Cascade Range but towards the top it gets steep for awhile with a few tight turns. Stan and I were laughing and sipping our cans of beer when suddenly there was a loud clunking sound. I looked back to see the Valiant unhook with the tow bar still attached throwing sparks all over the road and careening to the right and left. Sometimes inches away from the flimsy guard rail that would probably never protect the wagon from plunging headlong into the ravine. Sometimes inches away from the ditch full of boulders from the mountain slope above. Back and forth and back and forth. I feared the worst and watched the event like one would watch the fall of a parachutist who couldn’t open his chute. But the wagon came through again and came to rest in the ditch. The only damage was a dent to the front bumper. Well we knew we weren’t going to be able to use the tow bar again and resigned ourselves to a chain tow for the next 85 miles. All went well on the highway until we got to the tiny village of Duran and turned on to the 15 mile ranch road short cut to Encino. Stan continued to drive like he was on pavement which was all right for him because he wasn’t the one being dragged. But for me the ruts and holes in the dirt caused the Valiant to jump and bounce all over the place. I kept braking to slow him down and for some reason that made him mad. I guess he had had enough trouble with me and my Valiant and was just anxious to get home. Whatever his reasons, he sped up instead of slowing down. About two miles before town we hit a soft spot in the road and the wagon went into a slide, went up over the bar ditch and pulled Stan’s truck off the road with it. Now we’re in sandy sage brush ground and neither vehicle would budge. It was a long chilly walk into town at three in the morning and without Stan’s help I probably would have got there just about the time the school bell rang for the kids to go to class. As it happened we both got at least a couple hours sleep before waddling thick headed and puffy eyed into the classroom.

Twenty months later I left the Valiant in Encino to begin a new job on the Colville Indian Reservation of north central Washington State. In the interim I had purchased a truck and lost the wagon in a bet to a detestable worm of a man who taught shop at the high school. To this day it still raises my body temperature and makes me grimace when I think of it.

An excessively loud braggart and a gossip, constantly lifting his immense bulk of a belly over his oversized turquoise belt buckle or pulling up the back of his pants to keep them from falling halfway down his enormous butt cheeks, this shop teacher had been ridiculing the Valiant in public ever since I arrived in Encino. He’d say things like, “When are you going to sell me that piece of junk?” If I asked him how much, he’d say, “Oh I guess it’s worth five bucks.” It went on like that for months until I realized that, just like my friend who purchased the wagon in the first place, this slob knew a good vehicle when he saw one. It didn’t take long for me to dislike him and while visiting my old Encino superintendent years later, I found out that he didn’t like him either; characterizing him as a good for nothing fat lazy bastard.

Now this good for nothing fat lazy bastard was also the assistant basketball coach, the only competitive high school sport available to Encino girls and boys. A basketball game was a major social event in town and the booster bus for away games was always filled to capacity. As assistant coach he naturally spent a lot of time with the head coach and on the coach’s birthday he rounded up three other teachers, myself and Stan included, to help celebrate the event. Celebration meant drinking and in order to do that without drawing attention to ourselves we had to go to a bar outside Encino. The closest ones away from home were in the village of Vaughn, fifteen miles east.

Unlike Encino with its one bar, Vaughn had about half a dozen and the ass. coach wanted to hit as many as he could. Even though it was a weeknight we stayed out until closing. Before heading back the big boy bought a case to go, and we ended up at my house drinking until the wee hours of the morning . Around four he asked me if I would like to trade the Valiant for a pool table. He told me up front it wasn’t a full sized pool table, of course, It was for kids to play on but it wasn’t a flimsy toy either, weighing about forty pounds. I told him I didn’t want to trade but he persisted and the more I drank the more his persistence grew into a serious irritant until I shouted, “Walk home then. Carry it back. And I’ll trade.” I didn’t think he’d do it. He was drunker than any of us, the least steady on his feet, and with all that bulk around his middle I was certain he’d have a hard enough time just getting home, let alone bringing back a forty pound mini-pool table. But he did and plopped the thing right down in the middle of my kitchen. Red faced and scowling, I threw the key at him and growled through my teeth, “Get the hell out of here.” I guess that was the clue that signaled the birthday celebration was over because they all left. The next morning five minutes before the last bell called the kids in I was jerked awake by the superintendent who shouted angrily, “Are you going to go to work?” I said I’d be there in five minutes and he stormed out. When I got to school I found out he had to go around and wake everyone who had partied the night before and we did make it to work except the party host. When the superintendent got to his bed he gave a loud groan and rolled over onto his side like a beached walrus.

A week or two later I asked the walrus what he had done with the wagon since I hadn’t seen it parked in his yard for a couple days. With his typical smart ass swagger he said he sold it to the salvage man who owned the local Conoco station. There could be no doubt then that the Valiant was going to end its days by being sold one piece at a time. I stared at him with furrowed brow, muttered some filthy epithet, and walked away. It was mighty upsetting to think the station wagon would end up parked next to a bunch of rusting cars with parts missing in some gas station wrecking yard. But it wasn’t long afterwards that the school custodian, Justo, told me he had purchased it for $100 and turned it into a saw. He tried to describe it to me but when I couldn’t get a clear picture of what he was talking about he said he’d drive it over to my house that afternoon and show me.

Besides his day job as the school custodian, Justo was the local firewood cutter. He’d spend his spring, summer, and fall afternoons and weekends out in the woods gathering and cutting up dead and down cedar and piňon for the locals whose primary heat came from a blazing woodstove. This was just about everyone in town including many of those who used gas or electric but still had a wood stove somewhere in the house for back-up heat. He did all this cutting and gathering the conventional way with a maul and a chainsaw so I was confused trying to figure out how he could make a saw out of a station wagon. When he arrived that afternoon I was so amazed I had to pick my gaping jaw up off the ground. With a welding torch Justo had cut off the entire body from just forward of the dome light all the way back to the rear bumper and had taken out the back seat. He welded some brackets about thirty inches apart to the hatch where the rear tire goes and resting on those brackets was a 1½ “ steel bar that reached and extended beyond both rear tires. On the left end of the bar was a solid rubber cylinder that rested against and in front of the left tire. The right end of the bar also rested in front of the right tire and extended beyond it about ten inches. On the end he had welded a thirty six inch circular saw. When Justo jacked up the back end and engaged the transmission, the tires turned the bar and the bar turned the saw. The higher the gear the faster the saw turned. I was so elated I laughed long and loud, was giddy with gratitude, and the cigarette stained teeth behind my lips accented my grinning mouth into a cheesy three quarter moon. When he drove off with his hand waving I clapped my hands at the sight of that beautiful Valiant humming down the road with a circular saw whirring and whining a happy tune. There ought to be a grand hymn to that tune sung by good old cars somewhere on a peaceful parking lot in the sky where someday after I leave this tired body behind I can go to recline again in the driver’s seat of that faithful old 1960 Valiant station wagon.