Driving Me Crazy #3

      One of my favorite car stories, one that doesn’t embarrass me, happened during the early part of my journey with Paul Cavanaugh, our two children and our cat from the coast of Oregon to Upstate New York. While living in Oregon, we ran a monthly Open Mic at a small restaurant in Pacific City. A few people had told us about the folk scene in Upstate New York, and one fellow even gave us his parents’ contact info in case we ever made it out there. So, we decided to move across the country … again … with two young children and our cat. But this story starts before then. It starts with the second Valiant. The one that brought us from Connecticut to Oregon. After that long trip loaded to the brim, it started wearing out.

      Although Paul and I didn’t practice any organized religion, we were very spiritual and believed in the connection of all things in the universe. We also believed in the power of our minds to change the course of things. One example of this was when we were driving down the road approaching a narrow bridge when our second Plymouth Valiant suddenly made a loud bang. The back end hit the road and bounced back up in the air. We watched as our back wheel passed us on the left side. A large logging truck was coming from the other direction. We both held our breath and concentrated on the car as we drove across that narrow bridge on three wheels with the logging truck passing us in the other lane. Once we were on the other side, we managed to pull over, retrieve the tire which had stopped in a corn field, and were even able to find the lug nuts strewn around the road. Once the wheel back on, we drove cautiously the rest of the way home, breathing a sigh of relief when we arrived. Not long after that, the car needed new brakes, which we fixed ourselves. When we were done, there was one small part left over. We took those brakes apart and put them back together multiple times and always had the same part left. We finally just shrugged and threw it in the toolbox. The car was on its way out anyway, so we started looking for another vehicle. This time we bought our own red and white VW bus and named it “Billy Orion”. We always noticed the constellation Orion on our many journeys and thought it appropriate. We bought the book “How to Keep Your Volkswagon Alive” so we could maintain it ourselves. It certainly did help us keep that bus alive. It might have been the first “for dummies” book ever written. Now that we had another vehicle, we decided to head East – literally to East Greenbush, NY where we could land in my parents’ finished basement until we settled on our own.

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       I started preparing our new home for travel. I attached edges to  the table that stuck up above the top to keep any crayons or other toys from rolling off. It already had curtains and beds. I sewed pockets into the curtains to make drinks, snacks and other necessary items for the kids easily accessible. There were still no seatbelts or car seats at that time, but I knew I didn’t want them running all over the bus, so I had things organized to keep them occupied. I got a few toys the kids had never seen, a bunch of paint with water and other activity books, play dough, books and puzzles. We played travel games and sang songs. I had also learned by then what kinds of food traveled easily. I remember thinking that I should write a book on safe and reliable travel with children because I had already done so much of it. We left in late April and planned to travel for a week. We hadn’t considered the fact that we were traveling over a few different mountain ranges in a VW bus loaded with all our possessions, two children, two adults and a cat. As we were loading up to leave, our friend Jim came by to see us off, He walked up and handed me a jar of old barn nails of varying sizes. Jim is an eccentric, artistic vagabond. He’s an amazing artist and writer. He has always lived an unusual life as we did, and I admired him greatly. He was older than us and had been around, taking his bumps along the way. As I took the nails, I looked quizzically at him. He said, “You never know what you’ll need on the road.” I nodded and put them in our toolbox, knowing that somehow, at some time, they would come in handy. I still have a couple of those nails and the original jar, in my toolbox today.
        The first leg of our journey took us southeast toward Reno, Nevada then on to Salt Lake City. We were almost at the top of the highest mountain pass we would need to cross when our bus just stopped. We could see the summit. It was so close, but we just couldn’t get there. We jumped out of the bus around to the back to look at the engine and see if we could figure out the problem. There it was, right in front of our eyes. The two pieces of the flywheel were shifting back and forth and had widened the slot that held the two pieces together. We looked at it for a while when I remembered the jar of barn nails that Jim had given me as we were leaving. We pounded a few of the largest ones in there, but it still wasn’t quite enough. Then we noticed the leftover brake part that we had thrown into the toolbox a year earlier, not long after our left rear wheel had come off our Plymouth Valiant and passed us on the left as we rode over a narrow bridge with a logging truck headed our way. Although we had worried at the time about that missing piece, the brakes worked fine, and now that old leftover brake part fit perfectly with the nails into the leftover space in the flywheel. That unique repair took us all the way to Ohio where we replaced the faulty flywheel at a Dune Buggy Shop called “Mud, Sweat and Gears.,” And where my daughter realized that chicken and dumplings from “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” were a real thing. Ah… but those and so many more, are all their own stories for another day.

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