Reading: The Mouse and the Motorcycle

Moving: nope

Listening: Tea for the Tillerman

Watching: ER, like a breath of fresh air after four months of deprivation

Learning: who's reading my journal now!

26 October 2000: Stories

Two stories: How I learned not to drive a car with the idiot light on and What happened in Meagher County, Montana, and how it's really pronounced.

In May 1989, for my 21st birthday, I received my first car. I had had use of my sister's eponymous '76 Torino, the car she'd received for her eighteenth birthday--it died its protracted death in Old Lyme, with me, since she was not permitted to have it with her at BU. I had spent the previous summer in Boston, where I could have actual, nondishwashing, jobs, unlike in Old Lyme, and my parents didn't much like both of their daughters in the risky, dusky city. Over the preceding winter, when I was offered a job that would pay the princely hourly wage of $6.00 an hour, I wanted to take it, but it was in Waterford and too far for daily biking. I planned to buy a moped, which also scared the pants off my parents. My mother told me my father was "looking into" a car for me. I'm not proud: I'd rather be given a car than buy and drive a moped. That was just fine.

Enter Fugly. A 1980, standard-transmission Omni, two-tone (maroon above and tan below). Fugly Simon was her whole name. I don't remember where the Simon came from and that part of her name lapsed quickly, but there was no denying how ugly this car was and I affectionately called her Fugly. I loved that car. I had had one standard-transmission driving lesson in my mother's Omni perhaps four years before, so Fugly had a lot to teach me. I loved my car. I learned to shift quickly enough, but not so quickly that my recently ex-boyfriend didn't have an opportunity to call me Buckaroo. I hadn't had the car but for a couple of weeks before I had to have its rear struts replaced and some large chunk of its body rewelded. I loved my car, loved the freedom, paid gladly for the repairs. Also my father warned me that since it was an old car, I should check its oil faithfully.

I don't know anything about cars. I'm less inclined as time goes by to believe my father knew much about cars either, because when the Torino failed its emissions test he suggested I give it a long run--all the way from New London, say, to Westbrook where the emissions center was, maybe 25 miles--to clean it out. (This didn't work, but what did I know? I was 18 and had just earned my license. It indicates how large the acceptable radius of my driving was, anyway.) At the time, though, my father was my expert. He said check the oil weekly, and I did.

One Saturday morning I checked the oil as usual. I added a pint of oil, also as usual. I don't remember where I went that Saturday, but Sunday night when I went to a movie with a friend, the Check Oil light flashed. I ignored it: I had just checked the oil. Therefore, since I was young and had a social life that no stupid light was going to interfere with, it had to be okay. I drove to Waterford the next morning, and the light stayed on. Mmmm. So that day I asked a few of the many men I worked with and they all said I should certainly check the oil before I left that day. Okay.

So after work, in the parking lot, I popped the hood.

Oh.

I had forgotten to put the cap back on the crankcase (or whatever you call that bit where you pour in oil). Even I could see that, because if I hadn't noticed the open case, the filthiness of the oil-splattered engine could hardly have failed to escape even my notice.

A nice fellow whom I had never met before, but who was in the parking lot at the time (and did I mention I was extremely slender and hot that summer? oh yes), made a few suggestions. I had, by some blessed chance, not seized up the engine. There was still some oil in it. If I filled up the crankcase, I should be able to stagger to a garage. By this time, I had called my mother to tell her why I was late, and she, reasonably annoyed but practical in a crisis, came out. I had several quarts of oil in the hatchback (see oil, checking of, above), poured it all in, elasticked a rag around the gaping mouth, and we all three--the fellow having long since missed his ride, and did I mention how desirable I was that summer or pleased the geeky young man to be of service to me? I've forgotten his name, what a cretin I am to such a good Samaritan--got to a garage. I left Fugly there, my mother drove the man home (to his own furious mother; I could hear her yelling at him over the phone), and then she drove us home.

Home is where I had to face both my parents. The crisis was over, practicality was past, and sheer fury ruled the evening.

But anyway the car was fine. The engine had not run without oil, was not dead, and needed only to be cleaned. I still had a car.

I now put the caps back on everything. Obvious things like crankcases, gas tanks, and jugs of orange juice, the clichéd marital strife of the toothpaste tube, and less obvious things like pens. There is nothing like being yelled for four hours straight to make someone remember.

Last Saturday my mother again and remorselessly brought up the subject of alcoholism and yammered about how she grew up in it and married into it and how my sister's and my lives have been indeliby affected by alcohol, ya ya ya. (Whereas my perspective is so much healthier--we're all messed up, but we're also all adults and it's past time for some of us to stop blaming our parents for our personalities and take responsibility for ourselves, pot, kettle, proceed.) I told her, in the limited time I was willing to deal with this tedious topic that she never progresses on, how odd I find it to remember so little of that aspect of my childhood. The same sort of things that happened when my sister was 9, that she remembers, happened again when I was 11, and I don't remember them. I don't remember alcohol specifically. I remember yelling and hatred and malice. I told her of the two incidents of drunkenness that I do remember from my earlier childhood.

Writing about my stupidity with the crankcase cap has made me remember a third: Once when I fell down the stairs, my father was home (implied: I fell down the stairs often and my father wasn't home a lot). He caught up with me at the bottom of the uncarpeted wooden stairs and shook my by the shoulders--I must remember this because he almost never touched us--my sister or me--for good or ill--hurting me a lot more in the shaking than I had been in my fall and yelled and yelled and yelled. My memory-impression is that I--my fall--interrupted an argument they were having. The upshot of the yelling was that I was to hold onto the banisters all the time from then on always did I hear him?

And I did. My nine-year-old's scamper down any flight of stairs slowed to a halting, timid descent. My motivation as far as my parents was concerned was not love or respect or common decency or obedience but fear. In middle school sometime, I learned that my father's insistence that I hold the banister was wrong. Architecturally speaking, banisters are vertical supports that hold a railing up. I had been trying to recapture my hopping, careless approach to stairs, and somehow already having become a prescriptivist and realizing his mistake helped.

But I still put caps on.

Story 2:

In the summer of 1997, RDC and I went to Glacier National Park. There are lots of stories here and what happened in Meagher County is not one of the more amusing ones.

More amusing is that

  • He dropped off Blake, packed the car, and picked me up from work, and we drove from 4:00 pm to 2:00 pm. Our first stop was two hours later, just over the Wyoming line. I shucked off my dress, realized I had to pee, and did so with overalls on. Stupid. It is much more subtle to pee at roadside from within a big dress than working around overalls.
  • Leaving I-80 at Rawlins to head NW, we passed a town with a population of 3. There was a sign by the side of the road: Middle of Nowhere (note: not its real name) Wyoming, population 3. If they hadn't had to employ a sign-maker, the population would be 2.
  • Then there was our determination to get all the way to Grand Teton, outside of which there was No Room at Any Inn. We decided to camp and turned off what might be called a "main" road to a side road with alleged campsites. The side "road" was nonesuch; the campsites, if they were campsites, were full; but we didn't really consider them campsites since the vehicles pulled to either side of the road looked like trucks Okies might have abandoned as they headed for California and left to rot for 60 years. Thoroughly spooked, we returned to the main road grateful not to have been molested, found a campground, decided we'd be out of there way too early in the morning to be ticketed or yelled at for not being in a site, and I moaned and [foreshadowing] grizzled [/foreshadowing] about pitching the tent so we slept in the car. The Terrapin, this was, a 1996 Toyota Tercel. Since I'm shorter, can sleep through almost anything, and am generally less pissy about less-than-ideal conditions than he, I took the driver's side with pedals and steering wheel. Behind the seat was the cooler, which couldn't be out of the car because of bears (as if the toothpaste-tube-grade aluminum of the car would have been any protection to a determined grizzly), but the seat still should have tilted somewhat. It did not.
  • I dozed from 2:00 to 5:00 and then watched the sun rise against a mountain, which didn't suck. In the morning, in daylight, I discovered the reason the cooler wouldn't shove back was the box of cassettes behind it--inaccessible to the deejay passenger while the vehicle was in motion, inexplicably not under the passenger seat where it belonged. This was the first and last time I let him pack the car.
  • This is why I was almost dizzy with weariness as we passed through the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone the next day. Seeing the sun come up over the Tetons was worth going that route instead of the interstate route and would have been even more worthwhile if I'd been awake. Yellowstone staggered me somewhat more awake, but not very. I made a quick list in my journal, three columns of the 50 states in alphabetical order because that's what I do, and during that one-day quick drive-through marked off all but seven states--Hawaii, three southern states, and three New English states. I bet if I had looked more in Old Faithful's parking lot I would have found the remaining continental six.
  • Grizzly. The size of a grand piano, right in front of us in Glacier.
  • Grizzlies. A sow and her twin cubs, feeding 50 feet off the road as we left Glacier and barely photographed, as we had decided the night before, since we were leaving, not to buy more film.

So. The actual story. Meagher County. We left Glacier by way of the bears, drove east to visit a BIA museum in Browning, and decided to take a blue highway instead of the interstates for a while. Route 89 led from Browning through Great Falls to White Sulphur Springs and onward to Livngston, where the earth flattens out again and we had no reason not to pick up I-90. We stopped in White Sulphur Springs for supper, at the one restaurant. The only thing without meat was a grilled cheese sandwich, and I ordered that. RDC had pork loin and lumpy mashed potatoes. We looked through the real estate ads at the back of the paper and I learned the price difference between land on the grid and off the grid. Then we left White Sulphur Springs.

Or tried.

The road was all torn up. It was unpaved, but it wasn't unpaved the way roads that are meant to be unpaved are dirt. No, its surface had been ripped up, but kind of left in place, and potholed and ditched and washboarded and generally hideous. We were driving a Tercel loaded to the gunwales with camping stuff. Easterners, we figured the ripped-up road would last a mile or so and then we'd be back to smooth country driving.

More than twenty miles later, we passed from Meagher County into Park County and at that point, at that many-miles-later point, the road became a road again. Ooof. We had gone along figuring this lack of road couldn't continue too much farther, and then we pushed on yet farther thinking that it would certainly end soon and backtracking would only double how much we had to endure. Twenty-plus miles at ten to twenty miles an hour. It was an adventure!

They didn't surface their roads, but at least they put up signs so you would know, in future, what county to avoid. "Meagher County," we laughed, after it was all over. "No wonder they can't afford good roads."

A few weeks later on CNN, RDC saw a report on the distribution of fallout over North America following the atomic bomb tests conducted in the southwest. Fallout is concentrated just where you wouldn't want it to be, in dairy states like Indiana and Wisconsin and in beef states like Montana. The single county in this country with the highest concentration of radiation fallout is, of course, Meagher County in Montana. CNN pronounced it "Meer," like the space station.

"Atomic bomb fallout!" we exclaimed, home safe in Denver. "No wonder their roads decay and they can't make a grilled cheese sandwich."

I then told this traumatic story at work, and Minne, who is not from Minnesota but from Montana, said that CNN and we were both wrong and that county is pronounced "Marr." Stupid potato eaters.

So. Dayville, Connecticut = unincorporated Meagher County, Montana. Sister towns.

Speaking of grilled cheese sandwiches and the making of, which I wasn't but at least mentioned a few paragraphs back. At TJZ's wedding, MCB noticed my earrings, which were the goddess earrings I wear almost every day, my favorite pair. He complimented them and asked if they were the work of some particular designer whose name I forget. I chortled. "No, actually, I got them at Kathy John's." Both SEM and MCB were suddenly struck by a gastrointestinal disorder.

JHRDM couldn't come to my bridal shower but had offered to do my hair and make-up, a suggestion I happily accepted. One evening that spring in a shower-substitute, she and RRP and I played with hair and make-up. Then it was almost 10:00 and we needed ice cream. So we scampered out to Kathy John's. In addition to good grilled cheese sandwiches (if you don't mind lots of grease and tobacco smoke) and ice cream, it sells novelties like earrings and rubber stamps. Like a Denny's with a gift shop. There I found the earrings. Except none of us had enough cash. Was this is the dark Land Before Debit Cards? As late as the spring of 1995? It was. How frightening. So I went back to that wretched place the next morning, cash in hand, to buy them. And now they're my favorites and I wear them almost every day that I wear contacts and they're from Kathy John's.

---

And ha! Whenever the idiot light goes on in the car, it's supposed to be recorded in the car's computer system. (It has a computer? or memory of some form?) Cassidy needed an oil change and routine maintenance anyway and given the light, RDC brought it to a Subaru dealer. There is no record of its having lit. None. Cassidy's gaslighting me.

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Last modified 4 November 2000

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