I always thought it was funny that my father is an auto body technician and I know jack shit about cars. If you know me at all, you know that I don’t even know how to drive. I mean, I could fake it but I’m perpetually stuck with my temporary ID. Just have been lazy as shit these last six years in trying to get my actual ID, and besides… Kent (and Greencastle before it) are small towns. Only reason why I am mentioning that I have absolutely no expertise when it comes to cars is because most of the time I am in a car, it is a piece of shit beater that I’m halfway expecting to break down at any given second.

I mean, my buddies have less money than I do, and have to get by with what they can get by with, so I’ve always dreaded the time when we are broken down on the side of the road and none of us have any clue on how to fix a problem. My experiences have been comical; I still remember a trip back to DePauw with Alyson when I didn’t even know how to pop a hood (that they have little latch thingies that one needs to pop to open the thing) and we rode the car until it overheated. Needless to say, I know a little tiny tiny tiny bit about cars; my dad tries to teach me some stuff, and I try to pay some attention.

Thursday I was picked to be navigator by one of my buddies to help eir go up to Berea, Ohio. It is a suburb of Cleveland, about 40 miles away. The trip took thirty minutes, tops; we clocked eighty most of the way there. We started smelling something funky when we were in town, something rubbery but something that could be one of a thousand different road smells. We weren’t very concerned, and pressed on. We finally got up to the school where my friend’s s.o. (significant other) was at, and started to drive back to the s.o.’s trailer park. The smell grew to the point where both the driver and eir s.o. felt sick, so we pulled in to a Daily Queen.

I popped the hood at the Dairy Queen, and checked the various dipsticks (oil, transmission fluid), and didn’t notice anything rock. Of course, I was an idiot and forgot to wipe off the dipsticks, but I did notice a small leak from the van. Checked out the color of the fluid and got o n the phone to my father, and ey said that it was likely transmission fluid. The smell progressively got worse, but something strange started up. Smoke was coming out of where I thought the left front wheel would be, not up and over the hood where I would assume that the smoke would be coming from if it was a problem with the transmission.

With some hope that the problem was only the transmission, the driver and eir s.o. elected to go to the local Wal-Mart, with us smoking all along the way. We decided to take a longer time in Wal-Mart to allow the van to cool off, and grabbed a thing of transmission fluid and a funnel before leaving the store. Popped the hood open again, and I tried my best to put enough transmission fluid in the van. I spelled a little bit on the hoses and other shit around the hole, so I told the couple that there probably would be more smoking as the excess fluid burnt off.

Since the mall was just literally across the street, we pulled in and fucked around there for a while. The mall was large and useless; the only thing that even captured my interest was an arcade, which was useless in its own right. The arcade was like a number of arcades throughout the United States, with only a handful of machines left. However, this arcade was special because they had actually INCREASED the cost per play of each of the games. While I can understand DDR and machines of that ilk costing $1 (I’ve seen them for up to $1.50), there is really little sense in marking up a Ms. Pac-Man machine up from .25 to .50. We fucked around the mall for a little bit longer (the couple stayed in Spencer’s for about a half hour fucking around in the sex toy section), and finally got back into the van to go home. Things seemed to be turning out well; there was nothing in the way of a leak underneath the van. The smoke started up soon after and was a little more intense, so we stopped by a Subway and I cracked the hood again.

There were still no leaks, everything was still in working order under the hood. I called my dad up and ran through each conceivable part that could be smoking, and nothing checked out. I closed the hood back up and we started trying to go home again. This time, things were working out well; we got through five or so miles before we smelled anything. We thought that we would be able to get home to the Kent area without a problem. We were wrong.

Berea (and where the s.o. was from, Olmsted Falls), is a place that is tremendously built up. Mile after mile of strip malls and stores await the eager consumer, and if we were to break down or stop there, there would have been no problems. However, the van was able to make it onto the Ohio Turnpike (I-80). We were pretty much desensitized to having individuals look and point at the van by this point, but we had our first case of someone rolling down the window and asking us if we knew that there was something wrong with the van. We just thought they meant that there was a large amount of smoke coming from the van, which we knew about already. We got on the road finally, and the driver kicked things back up to around 80.

After a few minutes of this increased speed, a new noise started up. It sounded like something slapping against the side of the van. I thought it was one of the plastic panels that came off. Just to be safe, we pull over on the side of the road (I-80 is a major highway and we had pulled off on the median, well before the “emergency parking” zone that was still over a half-mile away. I had the driver pop the hood again, and there was still nothing in the way of a problem. I went and checked the side of the van, and there was still nothing. Remembering that the smoke was issuing from the wheel area, I decided to look at the tire.

The hubcap was warmer than the rest of them, but my father said that they were supposed to be warm to the touch. I got on my hands and knees, with big-rigs whizzing past me, and looked up above the tire. The shock and strut had broken free and started grinding against the wheel. Over 1 inch of rubber was taken off, the shock and struck was completely broke, and the break lines were cut from the debris flying back from the strut rubbing against the tire. Long story short, we would have been fucked if the tire had popped. The traffic was too heavy and I don’t think that the driver was experienced enough to be able to keep control of the van. Couple that with the fact that there was a ditch on the side of the road and I would have to say that we had a good chance of seriously getting fucked up. The one thing I can remember is that like the last two or so miles that we were driving I was trying to find a seat belt. Don’t call it premonition; I just was rightfully wary of the fact that the van was going 80 with an unknown problem.

So I’ve rattled on for a good thousand words just telling this story. What point is there to it? Pretty much, education in fields is nice. Try to pick up what knowledge you can, even if it doesn’t seem important to you at all right now. I half-assed paid attention my father and actually learned a little bit to try to diagnose the problems that we were having in the van. Doesn’t mean that the problem will be immediately fixed, but who knows? I try to stick some knowledge into each issue of the magazine, and this issue is no exception.

Breaking our reliance on the Wal-Marts and McDonalds of the world is preceded by having the information to fix a car, grow your own food, sew a patch on a pair of pants, and the like. School’s shat on (for many good reasons), but you can pick up a good bit of knowledge here or there. Parents can suck when they ground you or tell you you can’t have friends over to drink, but chances are that they’ve learn a few things in their lifetimes. If you know anything that other people might be helped out by knowing (how to create paper, or do a wastewater recollection basin, or fix a bike), figure out a way to tell more people. Make a blog about it, write for a zine (we are always taking submissions), or teach a class at a local venue.

[JMcQ]