Zero MPG
Peter B. Steiger
08/14/04

The other night we had some friends from church over, Steve and
Christine, and I pointed out to Steve that my tendency towards puns
and computer programming notwithstanding, we really do meet all the
hallmarks of your typical, ahhh, "rural" family: we really do have a
mixed-breed dog that sleeps under the porch; directions to our house
really do include turning off the paved road; our growing menagerie
of pets includes chickens, and we really do have a house that's
mobile and three cars that are not.

You'll hear a lot more about Steve and Christine later, but for now
it's that last point I want to address.  I still remember seeing a
"Happy Days" episode in which Fonzie, a mechanic so cool he could
fix any car just by snapping his fingers at it, met a couple of
overprivileged, undereducated girls who brought their car in for
repairs because it just stopped working. He quizzed them about
maintenance, a word which does not exist in the language of their
world, and they giggled and said "We just fill it up with gas and
off we go!"  The Fonz was horrified that his noble mechanical
creatures could be so abused, but those girls were geniuses compared
to us.  My wife and I sometimes take weeks just to find the gas cap,
and we count it as a major technoligal achievement that we almost
always remember to fill it up before it runs out.

We also don't have a lot of money to throw into reliable cars, since
all our wealth is tied up in kids, some land outside of town, and
our brand new mobile home that would be the envy of all our
neighbors in the old trailer park.  As a result, the cars we buy
seem to be getting older and older as money becomes less abundant:
A '94 Hyundai here, an '88 Escort there, then an '86
something-or-other, a '79 Cadillac, and most recently a '76 Jeep
Wagoneer.  I figure by the time the kids are out of college we'll be
driving a Stutz Bearcat.

As you may have guessed, poor mechanical skills and cheap old cars
aren't a good mix.  We were on a first-name basis with every AAA tow
truck driver in five counties before they stopped answering our
phone calls.  We have broken countless chains, ropes, tow straps,
and dog leashes towing cars ourselves across three states, and have
alienated all of our mechanically skilled friends to the point of
one family moving to Pennsylvania to get away from us.

Currently, all three of our main vehicles are out of commission for
various reasons.  The Hyundai smells like an oil refinery when you
start it up and the rear brakes are permanently locked; the Cadillac
just this week blew a seal (whatever that means - I'm repeating the
explanation given by a friend from church who had not learned to
dodge our calls until he had to rush out and tow the Caddy out of a
construction zone before the sheriff did it for us); the Jeep made
it home after we bought it in February and has not started yet.
That's not counting the RV that hasn't started or kept running on an
entire trip since 1968 or the lawn tractor with a dead battery. With
no way to make our daily pilgrimage to Wal-Mart, we decided that the
Jeep would be the least expensive to repair and made plans to
fashion a rope out of used six-pack rings and tow it into town on
Sunday, assuming we could rent, borrow or steal a car by then.

Now let's get back to Steve and Christine.  How well do they know
us?  When a stray chicken turned up wandering around their
neighborhood in town, we were the first people the thought of
calling for help.  I told them about our latest automotive mishaps,
and a carefully timed tear down my cheek triggered the desired
response: Steve offered to come out with his truck to pull us into
town on Sunday.  On the one hand, that's only about 14 miles.  On
the other hand, the county chose this year - and I mean the entire
year - to tear up the one road going into town and leave bits of it
scattered across the surrounding farmland as part of some asphalt
redistribution program.  So at any given time there's not only our
own mile and a half of dirt road, but between three and ten
additional miles of state highway that may or may not be paved, dug
three feet into the ground, or some combination of the two.

Sylvia got a terrific weekends-only deal on a rental car, so at
least she can get to work and we can go to church on Sunday, and
today was one of her long shifts.  Mama going to work on Saturday
means the kids and I get to goof off all day and watch movies, so we
popped in a tape of the documentary travelogue _The Road To Morocco_
and settled down for an educational diversion.  Bob Hope and Bing
Crosby were insultin' a sultan and about to play pat-a-cake with the
guards when Christine called with a new plan: Christine's dad has a
MUCH bigger truck, so why not bring him out today and use dad's more
powerful F250 to do the towing job?  It was only 2PM or so, which
gave them plenty of time to finish taking me into town and back home
again in time for their romantic date this evening going out to see
_Shrek II_ (you think I'm kidding, but this is the same guy whose
truck and most of his wardrobe is designed with a Spider-Man motif,
which is probably why I get along so well with him).

I pulled the one good battery shared among three vehicles back over
to the Jeep and started recharging it so I would at least have
working hazard lights going into town, but the needle had not moved
by the time Christine and her father showed up.  I still don't know
the man's name; for reasons that I'm sure make sense to their family
she called him "Squirrel" the whole time we were with them.  Maybe
it's one of those Secret Service code names ("Air Force One,
Squirrel is back in his tree.  Over!")

I usually take pride in my ability to stand around with my hands in
my pockets while smarter people do all the work, but I have to admit
I felt kind of stupid watching Squirrel crawl under the vehicles
hooking up the tow strap with ease.  He's at least 130 and has two
jobs, but I had no idea what he was doing or how to do it so all I
could do was stand and watch.  He got the Jeep backed out of its
parking space, then reconnected to pull us frontwards and off we
went down the increasingly inappropriately named Happy Jack Road.
The good news is, one of the worst sections has been completed and
we were treated to fresh, smooth pavement for several miles.  The
bad news is they made up for it later with a stretch where cars
going both directions had to come to a complete stop and take turns
being rerouted through a ditch alongside the highway.

Other than that, the trip was a surprising success and we whipped
around the driveway like experts so I could park right against the
wall by the garage doors.  I went around the corner to look for a
drop box for the keys, so I missed the conversation wherein my son
Daniel wondered aloud at whether we would get home before Sylvia
did.  Christine laughed and pointed out that it was only 4:30PM and
his mother was at work until 11:00, so they would have us back home
well before dinner.  That's probably when Daniel laughed and told
her of the many wonderful ways God has made sure we don't get bored
with our cars (I believe he called it a "jinx", but you get the
idea).

I was taking longer than expected filling out the little envelope
for my keys, so they killed the engine to wait for me.  By this time
in my story it will come as no surprise at all to learn that when I
came back and they turned the key... the truck wouldn't start.  Just
like the Jeep, in fact, it would turn over but not catch except to
idle weakly for a few seconds before sputtering to a halt.

We messed around with the truck for about an hour, roping a couple
of unsuspecting victims into our nightmare by trying to jump the
truck from their moving van.  Now it was past 5 and in Cheyenne on a
Saturday night, that means ghost town.  It's too early for the bars
to open and too late for the car dealerships and umpteen western
wear stores.  What's more, we happened to be the only two families
on the entire planet who still don't own cell phones.  So Christine
took off in search of a crack house or bar or someplace she could
use a phone while Squirrel and I opened the hood of the truck and
tried to look knowledgable in case anyone passed by.  I'm sure he
knows exactly what he's doing, of course, but again I could just
stand there like the idiot that I am and wait for him to point at
something and say "THAT's what a screwdriver looks like."  In any
case, his efforts to get more air into the carbur-whatsit failed and
the battery was nearly as dead as the one in the Jeep.

Christine came back to report that Steve was not answering at work
or at home, which was surprising because he was going to leave at
4:00 to go on their date.  We went back to an antique store that was
still open and found that all but one cab company had closed up for
the night.  That one, at least, had a station wagon with room for
the five of us - the three adults plus Daniel plus Christine and
Steve's hatchling Jared who was far less enthusiastic about this new
adventure than he had been two hours earlier.

The cab lady laughed when I asked if she was prepared with a backup
vehicle between the mechanic and Steve and Christine's house six
miles away.  She got away with it this time, but she'll learn.  We
made it to their house without any lost car or body parts, where
Christine vowed to kill Steve if it turned out he had been home the
whole time, unaware there were urgent messages on the machine. It
was Steve's lucky day, though, because he too had left numerous
messages saying that he would not be able to leave work early after
all.  Thus I am happy to report that it was Steve's fault, not mine,
that they had to call the babysitter to cancel their plans for a
night out.

Christine needed to feed Jared, so she put her father in charge of
getting me and Daniel back home.  He just moved from Nebraska a few
weeks ago and he already knows the town better than I did after
living here two years - he needed no help at all finding the turns
to our road. In fact, the whole trip back was blissfully
uneventful... except for one problem I blame entirely on Bob Hope
and Bing Crosby.  All the way into town, that song from their movie
kept repeating in my head, and all the way back I kept hearing it
again only with slightly different words: We're off on the road to
hysteria We certainly don't get aro-o-ound...