Bill said, “We gotta get out of here.”
My kid brother had worked on an oil rig off the coast of Scotland, bummed around Southeast Asia, ate monkey in Bangkok, and in Mexico sold his car illegally then scrambled home dodging the federales. It just made sense that when I got a cartooning job in Pittsburgh, he’d drive across country, in tornado season, from Seattle with me and Fauntleroy the Dog.
(Above: Fauntleroy the Dog with Fiat and Cooler in Nebraska or Iowa. Artist’s pretty accurate depiction, except the Fiat was pale grey.)
My pregnant wife had already flown with our toddler son to her parents’ home in Maryland.
Flying from Pittsburgh to San Francisco in January I again stared at our country creeping along below and stretching into infinity — plains, mountainous lunar landscape, houses, a hamlet, a lake, crop circles, and shiny and colorful shards and pools about which I have no idea.
It had been a million times as vast in a 1972 Fiat sedan, stick shift but no AC, no FM, no cruise control.
Bill and I left early Thursday morning and sped through dusty eastern Oregon and southern Idaho, and pulled in for the night at a rest stop outside Ogden, Utah. Ogden in June turns frigid at night, so we pulled up stakes. Or tried to.
Rurururur. The Fiat wouldn’t start.
Rurururururur. Our neighbors stirred in an RV.
Rururururururururururur. Now the camper’s awake. That's when Bill said time to scoot. I pushed the car down the exit lane, he popped the clutch and we headed for Wyoming.
When we reached the Little America truck stop the Fiat was wheezing.
In high school I’d bought a 1951 Chevy and soon blew out a rod. My new dad, who’d five years earlier, taken the place of my biological dad had bailed out when I was a baby, said, “I told you to keep oil in it.” I said I had, which, of course, was a lie.
I jacked it up and soon had a pile of nuts, bolts and parts of engine in one big pile on the cement. They sat there until my uncle told him, “Come on, let’s go fix it. He relented, and they reassembled the engine in three hours.
That was the closest I’ve come to working on engines — or any part of a car. My biggest foray into engine repair is opening the hood.
Anyway, my brother Bill figured the thin mountain air was playing hell with the carburetor. Nope, the battery was low. We got pancakes at the Little America truck stop while the Fiat got recharged.
As we rolled into Nebraska, the landscape flattened out under low, black roiling clouds. After we got gas and back on the interstate, the radio interrupted its staticky music with chimes: Bing bong. More staticky music. Bing bong. The clouds were tinged with green. Bing bong. The wind picked up.
The announcer warned us to watch for tornadoes.
(Better)
Tornadoes? They were not on the itinerary.
Bill said, “Now what?” I didn’t know. Do we head into the wind and back to the gas station? Can we outrun a funnel cloud? Do we grab Fauntleroy, abandon ship and dive into a culvert.
We started looking for culverts. And funnel clouds. Bing bong. There’s a ditch --
The Fiat conked out.
We opened the hood, this time hoping to flag down a ride, except western Nebraska had hunkered down in its basement. An eastbound trucker pulled up, and said, “Hop in, I’ll take you back to the gas station.” I climbed into the cab while Bill stayed with the dog, the car and the ditch.
The cab felt familiar. My stepdad had been a long-haul trucker, and I’d ridden a couple times with him. His 18-wheeler was named “The Yankee Express” but should have been called “Hell On Wheels.” He hauled plywood out of Arcata, California; grain from eastern Washington and heavy equipment to Canada’s Yukon long before “Ice Road Truckers” with their CBs and comfy sleepers.
He hauled concrete slabs that make up Seattle’s Space Needle.
After he died, our family sifted through his Navy foot locker. Among the mementos was a stack of traffic tickets issued by cops all over the west. One California Highway Patrolman had written as part of his citation: “Had to tie operator to a bush.”
In Nebraska, the eastbound trucker asked where we were going. I told him and asked if he ever worried about tornadoes. “Nah,” he said. “Now Pennsylvania … there’s a nasty grade outside Confluence.”
He turned his rig around and drove me back to the gas station, then blasted east. We got a tow and a battery charge, then hightailed it -- bing bong -- a short distance to a motel in Ogallala where we drank a six-pack of beer and watched an NBA playoff game in which the Boston Celtics beat the Phoenix Suns in triple-overtime.
Those twisters never touched down, but when checking out, I told the desk clerk I could never live in a place with tornadoes. She said, “You’re from Seattle — I’d never live in a place with earthquakes.”
Driving through the Great Plains, miles then more miles of flatland, with hot air blowing in through the front windows, turns soporific. At times, Bill’s eyelids got heavy and so did mine. We had to pay attention to the road and each other.
Several years later, driving home through the night from Portland, Maine, after having gotten off the ferry from Nova Scotia, my family asleep and nothing on the radio except Bible shouters, I had fight off sleep. At 3 a.m., no one is on the road, including the cops. Even the semis are hunkered down like huge animals. Some scraggly crazy will pull up in a lime-green Plymouth Duster and blow us away because he felt like it.
On a clear Saturday evening, amid the cornfields of eastern Iowa, the Fiat died again.
While we waited for the gas station’s mechanic to return, we grabbed a burger at its cafe. He arrived, glanced at us and the car and its engine, tinkered with a tractor, then said, “That ain’t a Datsun, is it?” No, it’s a Fiat. “I don’t work on no Datsuns.”
He also didn’t work on no Fiats. He said we’d have to wait until Monday when the Fiat dealership in Des Moines opened. Where do we stay, we asked. He didn’t know.
“Wait a minute,” Bill said, tugging at the fan belt. It was as loose as an old rope. The mechanic didn’t have fan belts for Fiats but Bill scanned the row of GM fan belts hanging along the garage wall and said, “Try that one.”
The mechanic looked at Bill as if he’d suggested we crash at his place for the weekend, but put on the belt. The Fiat started up and a day later we reached my in-laws' home in the hills of western Maryland.
Like the lament in TV's "Lone Ranger," I didn’t get the trucker’s name.
Two Men & a Dog
I wish you would write a whole book about this trip! There is so much I like about this story. I laughed out loud picturing your step dad tied to a bush by the state police! Loved it.