The Used Car, Chapter 2

My wife, Carol, has an unmatched ability to cope with adversity, especially when it comes to automobiles. When I first met her, she was driving a Datsun 510 station wagon. That poor little car was, I'm sure, worn out when she got it. She did the best she could to keep the car running with the help of friends and local mechanics, but time takes its toll from all things mechanical and this car had paid more than its share into that account. All the rubber seals on the side windows had deteriorated to the point where the windows were loose it their frames and rattled constantly as you drove along. By the time that I met Carol, the car has started to develop electrical problems, which are often the hardest to diagnose, especially intermittent electrical problems. There was one nearly legendary occasion when, as she was driving over a mountain pass, the engine just stopped running. Now, this was back in the days before cell phones, so she was alone near the top of a mountain and the only way to summon help was to stand at the side of the road and wave at whichever passing motorist might drive by. Did she panic? Did she jump out of the car and starting trying to flag down a rescuer? No, not Carol. Instead, when the engine stopped, she coasted off onto the shoulder of the road, shut off the ignition and, completely convinced that if she just parked the car and waited awhile it would eventually start, proceeded to settle back in her seat and read a book. Lucky for her, two kindhearted and more mechanically savvy gentlemen from the nearby town stopped and asked her if there was a problem. Carol smiled and told them, with great conviction, that the car would start after awhile and that she would just wait. These fine gentlemen took an more pragmatic approach to the situation, raised the hood on the Datsun, proceeded to jiggle a few loose wires, got the car running and followed her down the mountain to be sure she made it to town.

Who knows whether the two gentlemen actually fixed the car, or if, instead, Carol's simple act of faith caused it to run again. I'm not willing to completely discount the power of Carol's decision that the car would be in running condition about the time that she needed it to be that way. Heck, I fixed a clothes dryer once by just touching it. Laugh, if you will, but it wasn't working before I touched it, and, yet, after I touched it, it worked quite well. I'm thoroughly convinced that there is more to this world than simply nuts and bolts and mechanical engineering. Carol, herself is living proof that there is more to driving a car than physics. I know this because she's driven cars in a condition that should have made them physically impossible to drive.

Take, for example, the incident of the brake master cylinder on her VW Beetle. Normally, when a master cylinder goes bad, it does so gradually, so that there are some warning signs of its imminent failure such as fluid leaking from the seals, or a mushy brake pedal. Not this time. Carol got in the car one evening to drive home from work and, upon application of her foot, the brake pedal went straight to the floor. Most people would have called for a tow truck or would have gotten someone to give them are ride home, but not Carol. No, she just drove home with no working brake pedal. Aside from the engine, the manual transmission and friction with the road, she had only the hand brake to use to slow and stop the car. I found out later, that not only wasn't the hand brake working properly, it wasn't even the proper part for that car. When I got home and she told me what had happened, I thought she had exaggerated the extent of the brake failure and that there must have been some pedal left in the system. In reality, I discovered that she had exactly described the problem. There are few people who would ever have attempted to do what she did, let alone have been able to do it successfully. There's obviously, more to driving cars than your mechanics and engineers have ever thought about.

My part in the story was a bit simpler, though not without some adversity. I checked over the brake system and narrowed the problem down to a faulty master cylinder. Even after I bought a new one and replaced the old one, the brakes wouldn't work. As it turned out, the part I purchased was defective and I had to do the whole job over again before I had restored the braking system to proper working order.

With all the other work I'd done on this car, I figured that, at this point, I was done with it for awhile, except for routine maintenance. I was wrong again, as wrong as I was on the day I bought this car.