Leota Myer Hess?s Chrysler Sedan
The late Leota Myer Hess, rest in peace, got us started on our vacation from hell, though she never knew, having moved on to a better place long before the trip that had me wishing I had also moved on.
It all started the day the wife came home with ?great news.?
To myself I say ?oh boy, now what?? To her I say ?That?s great, let?s hear it.?
It turns out that one of my three mothers-in-law - the one called, affectionately of course, the ?WOO,? short for the Wizard of Oz Aunt, mostly because she was always looking for Oz but was just about never on the Yellow Brick Road ? had called with a great deal for us. The late Mrs. Hess had left a very low mileage car in her garage, and her daughter was trying to get rid of it. Because it had ? you know what is coming next ? only been driven to the grocery store and the Episcopal Church it of course really did have low miles and was in great shape. Anyway that was the story.
My mind briefly went back to the probably apocryphal story from my youth about the guy whose elderly neighbor said her late husband left him an old Chevy and it was in the garage and he could have it for $250. The Chevy turned out to be a five or ten year old Corvette Stingray (as we called them back then) and off the guy went with a you-know-what-eating grin on his face.
But of course that was some other guy, not me. The car was a mid-1980?s Chrysler four door sedan, but was otherwise so nondescript I would have no idea what the model name or number was, except for the fact that the wife reminds me it was a 1984 Le Baron. Suffice it to say that the hour of its production was not one of Chrysler?s finest.
So, we get the car, we drive it around town here and there without too much in the way of excitement, and because ? believe it or not ? it was our lowest mileage, expected to be highest reliability vehicle, at the time, we decided to drive it from Houston to Orlando to meet up with the family for vacation. Golf clubs and all. And away we went.
Being the man of the house I of course started out as the driver, then after a few hours turning it over to the lady of the house. And decided to take a nap. So far so good.
The problems began when I decided to wake up from my nap. I do so, and just out of curiosity look over at the part of the dashboard that tells one how much fuel is in the vehicle?s tank. I used to just call it the Fuel Gauge, but that must not have been clear enough for the wife, so now I use more words in full sentences for her.
So here we are in the middle of the Atchafalaya swamp ? read alligators, Cajun good (and bad) old boys and nothing else ? and the gauge is so far past E that I had to look four times to see if I was reading it right and then pinch myself to make sure I was awake. I was and I was, and calmly but forcefully yelled ?What are you doing - you are practically out of gas!? (I wanted to add something my dad would have said, like ?you brains of goat!? or ?ain?t you got no brains?? but thought better of it, a rare wise decision for me when it comes to the spousal relationship).
Just in case you don?t know about the Atchafalaya swamp, let me tell you. This is a very large river basin that would be really full of water if the Corps of Engineers was not diverting most of it to keep the Mississippi River in the state that Mark Twain would remember if he were still with us. But since the Corps is doing that, the Atchafalaya is not a river but a very large swamp that can only be crossed by a very long bridge. In fact, according to Wikipedia it is the largest swamp in the country, and the bridge that crosses it is 18.2 miles long. Trust me, though, that bridge is a lot longer when you are on it. And there is nothing on either side of that bridge but gators.
Happily, and somewhat surprisingly based on the state of the needle on the fuel gauge, we managed to get to an exit, where we stopped at the first station in sight. Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Chevron you think? Not a chance. As I recall the station?s name was something like ?Cajun Swamp Gas? and then had in lower case a second billing ?specializing in home made boudin? (you know, kind of like Rocky and Bullwinkle always had two titles to their next show ? ?Rocky?s Summer Adventure, or ?Moose on the Loose?).
We got a tankful of swamp gas. Thus avoiding gators, not to mention good and bad Cajuns, other than the one that pumped the gas for us.
The car never in its life ran right again. There is nothing more that I can say. It chugged, and it backfired, and it hesitated. It never really quite stopped completely, but I always wondered, and waited.
It was at about this time we remembered that, even though it was our highest reliability car, the Le Baron did have some problems that might have been of note for a long road trip through the hot summer south if we had remembered them before leaving. Specifically, you could not have the air conditioner on and simultaneously try to do what most of the world would recognize as accelerating, for example while entering traffic from an on-ramp, or pass a slow-moving vehicle at most any time. Although now that I think about it passing was not a problem since we were the slow-moving vehicle. In any event, our chugging and backfiring car was even more strained if we wanted to be air conditioned. Ah well, this was vacation, we did not have to be comfortable.
I took over the driving. We chugged our way to Biloxi, gambled but did not win a new car - or anything else for that matter- then got up and hesitated our way to Mobile, Alabama, which it turns out is where the WOO was born and raised, as was my second mother-in-law, the KOO. My third mother-in-law, and the one closest genetically to my wife, the FOO, was born later somewhere else, I have forgotten, or tried to anyway.
Mobile was actually fairly nice but we continued on to find Bayou Le Battre and Daphne, old haunts of the wife?s family. We did not find the old homestead from the descriptions that we were given but it was a nice neighborhood. One in which I could picture Southern Belles fanning themselves - with Bourbon on the rocks or whatever other drink they plied themselves with - in days gone by on the various verandas we drove by.
We also found the causeway that had been built in recent years to what had formerly been an island. Back in the old days Dauphin Island had been isolated, and yet another relative of my wife?s (no nicknames or abbreviations assigned to date) had been the visiting doctor to all the sailors that stopped by on the island, or resided there in their retirement. I know nothing further of that part of the family history. Which is probably for the best.
So we drive across the causeway and visit a very nice island. Not much to do there, though, and since we were going east, to Florida, we could not efficiently go back across the causeway. So we went to the ferry dock and waited for the next ferry to load up and take us to shore.
We get loaded onto the ferry and start the 30 or 45 minutes trip east across the bay. Sounds good, right?
However, just as a very short segue, it should be known that my wife and I, on a date long long ago in a place far far away but not forgotten, had been shipwrecked in Galveston Bay after an afternoon squall came up and pushed our sailboat over onto a shoal island, breaking a number of parts, thus making the boat un-sail-able and forcing us to be evacuated by Coast Guard helicopter. All of which went quite well under the circumstances, thank you very much, but an event that has made us very aware of squall lines coming from the distance across bodies of water.
Which was what was happening as we took the ferry east. We knew what was about to happen, as did the captain no doubt, and I have to give the him credit ? he almost made it.
Almost. The squall came directly at us, creating waves, and winds, and longshore currents as it bore down on us that made the ferry move every which way but towards the dock. It should have been easy to get to that dock too ? it had two extended piers on each side flaring out to create sort of a funnel-type receptacle for the ferry to enter and tie up to the dock. Easy in theory.
For awhile the captain did not even try. He did the ferry equivalent of treading water in the middle of the bay waiting for the aforementioned winds, waves, and currents to abate.
Those of us on the ferry made an interesting group. The pedestrians had been on the deck in their summer floral shirts and shifts, looking forward to landing and whatever they had planned to do in port. Half of the automotive passengers were also on deck, the other half in their cars napping or whatever.
But after the rocking and rolling began, all the pedestrians disappeared ? not overboard I assume ? and all the automotive passengers got into their cars, praying or whatever was their own particular bent.
Funny how one?s mind works in such moments. I can swim, I said to myself, what if we sink, will I be the lone survivor, making it to shore safely but with great difficulty? The momentary local hero/survivor everyone feels sorry for? An opportunity to start life anew?
No not really. My mind never went there. Just thought I would get you started.
The captain tries landing number one. We put on the afterburners and try to head straight for the dock. The current pushes us to the flared pier on the right however and a retreat was deemed in order.
We wait, as did the refugees in Casablanca (?And there they wait, and wait, and wait??).
Landing number two. This time we head to the flared pier on the left. Retreat number two.
Landing number three was successful. We did not wait to see how many people kneeled and kissed the ground. Off we went as fast as our backfiring vehicle would take us.
I cannot remember if this was the trip where the forty-ish year old man was asked if he had an AARP discount card. Probably trying to block that out.
Eventually we get half-way across the Florida panhandle, on a fine, sunny Florida afternoon when a noise starts to come from the left side of the car. Low at first, but increasing with time. Now what?
BOOM. Yes, a tire. Blown-out to be exact. Happily we manage to follow the recommended course of action and safely get to the side of the road where we start the unpacking of the car to get to the spare tire.
So there we are ? golf clubs and who knows what else unpacked on the side of the road, a woman standing next to all that junk with an umbrella to protect her delicate complexion from Florida?s summer sun, and me on my knees next to the car ? of course the blowout was on the side of the car facing the road and not on the safer passenger side ? trying to get the tire changed.
I get the lugnuts loosened just a bit, jack the car up high enough to change the tire, and get the bad tire off the axle. All per plan.
But wait there is more. A large, fast moving truck with a trailer in tow blows by at who knows what speed. What one might expect on a highway, you say?
Ah yes, perhaps, but what one might not expect is the aerodynamic pressure created by that truck vibrating the car enough to blow the jack out from under the car ? of course at just the moment when the bad tire was off the axle but the good one not on the axle, thus leaving the car the opportunity to have that same axle make contact with the pavement.
Which is exactly what happened. Holy Cow Batman. You remember that you-know-what-eating grin from a few scenes of this saga ago? Not exactly the emotional state I was in at that moment.
Very very happily for me all of this occurred at a moment when I did not have my hands under the car, or on the jack, or in fact anywhere near the place where the axle contacted the pavement. So some good comes out of all this.
So there we are, in the middle of who knows where in Florida, with a blown-out tire, a jack not under the car, a tire not on the car, a women with an umbrella, and a set of golf clubs with no golf course in sight.
A really happy ending would be that a good guy stops by with all the tools to get the car back on the jack and we move on to our vacation.
But remember we did not win anything at the gambling house in Biloxi. So not a really happy ending, at least as to this episode of our saga.
Somehow I did manage to get the jack where it was supposed to be and the tire where it was supposed to be, and we nursed our way into Tallahassee (Go Seminoles!) to a tire shop to get ripped off for a spare. And vacation did finally continue. We did make it to Orlando, we did find a golf course, and we did not really have much of an adventure on the way back. Thankfully.
Postscript:
Months, perhaps years later, our mechanic, after an afternoon of searching, found a hose back somewhere in the impossible to find reaches of that particular Chrysler that had a small hole in it. He said that was why the car had not run very well in long time.
I am not convinced. More satisfying to blame it on the swamp gas and my wife.
Respectfully Submitted,
Steve Koch ( pronounced ?Cook?), 713-530-3383 Cell
and
Kathy Koch, 281-352-8555 Cell, in case you want confirmation of the truth of this saga.