Stranded
John was teaching at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo in the late 1960s. He and Nancy were living in a house on the out skirts of a small town called Los Osos. Someone living in Los Angeles at the time, such as myself, would have described Los Osos as "out in the sticks". Someone living in Los Osos at the time, would have described their house as out in the sticks. The house sat on the southern end of Moro Bay and was within twenty yards of the water's edge. There were a handful of other houses in the same general area, but other than the summer months, they remained vacant for the most part. We had stayed friends since meeting in college a few years before. John and Nancy had grown up in Galesburg, Illinois, current population around 30,000, or In other words, out in the sticks. They planned to go back to Illinois for a couple of weeks during the Christmas holidays and I was to stay at their place while they were away, to keep an eye on things.
It took me slightly over three and a half hours to drive up from Los Angeles. I parked on the side of the house and got comfortably settled in. On the way up, I had spotted a restaurant as I passed through what served as the main drag for Los Osos. I woke after my first night intending to drive to the restaurant for breakfast. I climbed into my car but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it started. The starter was working but the engine just wouldn't catch. It was as though it was out of gasoline but I had half a tank. This presented a real problem.
Growing up, I had developed an aversion to any and all things related to automobiles. My father was a car nut. When he wasn't working on our car, he would work on the neighbors' cars, or his friends' cars. I was enlisted as a helper which meant sitting on the ice cold, grease-stained, cement floor for hours on end, and handing to my dad the tool or the part that he needed. I never took to it. Had I given it the least amount of interest during the years of my youth, I today would know more about cars than Lee Iacocca. Coupled with my father's auto obsession, was a do-it-yourself credo left over from the depression. Never once did my father ever hire a gardener, plumber, painter, cabinet maker, paper hanger, appliance repairman, roofer, veterinarian, electrician, landscaper, carpet cleaner, chimney sweeper, tree trimmer, or God forbid a mechanic.
In 1954 at the age of ten, my father took me in his 1950 Ford pickup with a manual transmission to the drag races in San Fernando. I didn't mind going to the various car races, car shows, car museums, car movies and car accessory swap meets that my father would take me to because it did not involve us fixing a car. I actually enjoyed the drag races. In those days you could stand ten feet away from the cars as they blasted off from the starting line. I really liked the engine noise. Back then the fastest entries were called "rail jobs". There were only a few, but when they sat rumbling on the starting line, the concussion of the cylinders would pound on your chest like a kettle drum. After the final run of the day, we got into the truck and started home. When we turned onto San Fernando road, heading east, my dad was feeling his oats and decided to demonstrate a speed shift from first to second gear. This resulted in stripping several teeth from second gear and we limped home using the remaining first and third gears. Only certain surgeons work on hearts and only certain auto mechanics work on transmissions. Not fazed in the least by never having attempted it before, my father proceeded to devote the next six days to repairing the truck's transmission with me as the helper. It wasn't so much the six days as my father's way of doing things. It took the first three days to remove the transmission, disassemble it, replace the broken part, and re-assemble the transmission. It was at this point that my father noticed two tiny but quite necessary parts sitting on top of his tool box. He thought this was hysterical. My spirit was completely broken, knowing it would take another three days to do it all over again. My father was perfectly happy about this as it meant three more days doing what he liked to do.
So here I was in Los Osos with a car that wouldn't start and I wasn't going to touch it. Nor was I going to call a local mechanic since my father had bought the car and would be stricken with bell's palsy if anyone other than him worked on it. I called my friend Gerben, who amazingly agreed to drive up from Los Angeles to Los Osos, and tow me back to my father's house so he could fix the car. The one complication was that Gerben wasn't going to show up for two weeks since I had committed to manning the fort until John and Nancy returned. The issue with the car had been handled but now there was another wrinkle that needed to be worked out.
I had only enough money for the food I would need for the two weeks. The closest market that I knew of was three or four miles away. I couldn't afford a taxi cab and therefore would have to walk to the market and return carrying the groceries. I did not want to have to make the trip more than once. I thought long and hard about this dilemma. I figured I could carry two bags, one in each arm, but fifteen pounds per bag would be the limit. Ideally, whatever I managed to cart back to the house would be generally healthy food and would be something I would enjoy eating. I came very close to going with thirty pounds of Baby Ruth candy bars, but finally settled on BLTs. Protein from the bacon, starch from the bread, vitamin C from the tomato, roughage from the lettuce, and mayonnaise cause it is required on a BLT. I was certain I would never tire of BLTs even if I ate them for every meal for two weeks straight. Also my teeth would bare up much better than with the Baby Ruths. A total of thirty-nine pounds would provide nearly 2 1/2 pounds of food per day for the remaining thirteen days until Gerben showed up.
It was a long walk to the store and I began worrying that the weight of the food I had planned to buy would be more than I could carry. I had determined the quantity of each item based on the number of bacon strips, bread slices, tomato slices, lettuce leaves and mayonnaise needed to make fifty-two sandwiches, four per day. I made it to the store, purchased the goods, and then loaded up. I put a lot of the tomatoes into the front pouch of the parka I had worn and the jars of mayonnaise went into the hood held tight with the draw string and hung down from the back of my neck. The bread was making the bags too bulky so I hung some bags of bread from my belt loops on each hip. I probably stopped to rest my arms two dozen times before I finally made it back to the house.
I wasn't the least bit surprised to find that I enjoyed every one of the fifty two BLTs. Gerben arrived and we lashed the two cars together. John and Nancy were scheduled to return the next day. I cleaned up the house and locked it before we left. Gerben and I had tied the cars together so that the rear bumper of his car was actually kissing the front bumper of my car. Gerben driving his car, towed me driving my car. Once we were on the road it was soon obvious that there were fundamental laws of physics that make it essential to provide a space between the rear of the tow-er and the front of the tow-ee. Our method turned anything but a dead straightaway into a lethal experiment. I discovered quite by accident that the best way to get my car to take the same path as Gerben's car when we went around a curve was to turn my steering wheel in the opposite direction. Don't ask me why, it's just the way it works.
At the end of this harrowing, nerve-wracking, four-hour ride, we pulled up to my father's house, untied the cars, and Gerben drove off. My father came down the stairs and walked over to the car. He opened the hood, looked at the distributor cap, twisted it an inch back to where it belonged, and snapped back into place the bracket that had come loose. This took all of ten seconds, maybe less. He told me to give it a try. It started instantly.