Category: The Renaissance Project

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The Renaissance Project: (1 of 4)

I’ve made the long trip from my high desert town in Mason Valley to the rugged, feral Jarbidge Mountains in the northeast corner of Nevada just twice in my life, both times in the passenger seat of my grandfather’s 1962 Ford truck, homemade plywood and metal horse trailer following behind.  The Jarbidge Mountains north of Elko were, and are, prime mule deer hunting grounds, and for a week each fall my grandfather, his off-spring, and the many others in the Venn diagram that was his life would gather for a primordial return to drinking, hunting, and cooking that was, I would only later realize, my only significant Y chromosome exposure in my otherwise XX-filled adolescent world.

The 8-hour by car/12-hour by trailer-dragging truck odyssey started early in the morning for me, even earlier if you consider the amount of time my grandfather surreptitiously put in teaching me how to saddle a horse, how to shoot a rifle, how to crack preposterously silly jokes (including one that ended in returning, while standing in an elevator, a strange woman’s skirt to her ass-crack) – all skills needed to survive a week at deer camp.

My grandfather was efficient with his words, and my memories of those long drives are monopolized by the nostalgia-inducing rattles of hand-cranked door windows, a heater that worked remarkably well on my left leg but not so much on my right, a compass glued to the dashboard, seemingly bobbing in time to the Marty Robbins and Charley Pride 8-tracks grandpa alternated in the bolted-on stereo.  We would stop for a quick breakfast at the Wig-Wam in Fernley, then drive onto a pristine I-80 pockmarked by the lonely alfalfa- and gold and copper mine-fueled economies of northern Nevada: Lovelock, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Carlin; even today, blips on an interstate causing only fleeting, sad astonishment to all those traveling between, precious home to those who know nothing else.

In Elko we would stop on Idaho Street downtown, both coming and going, but always at the base of the giant Styrofoam polar bear looming from the facade of the hundred year-old Commercial Casino, metal arrows shot from compound bows of alcohol and adrenaline-infused teens protruding from her exposed abdomen.  I remember, once, waking from the narrow bench seat of my grandfather’s truck to see that white bear directly over me, spectral, back and bottom-lit by the soft red and yellow neon lights of the casino and contrasting starkly with the cold dark of a Nevada night and the foggy haze of my sleepy fourteen year-old eyes.

Deer camp itself was, in spite of night, snow, mountains and cold, the temporally organized chaos of men who, though arriving at different times on different days, possessed that institutional knowledge inherent to habit, the end result a harmony of horses, saddles, guns, and military surplus tents and equipment of an era congruent to the man who occupied or handled it: World War II for my grandfather, Vietnam for his sons, the Korean War for those falling in-between.  Everything was durable and thick, huge cast iron stoves spewing wood smoke from heavy gauge, wax-coated canvas tents; bottomless Dutch ovens hanging over fires or warming on gas stoves; cheap beer and rot-gut whiskey flowing, oh the whiskey.  The stuff was a marvel to me.  It seemed to have no effect on my grandfather (I only later found out he had stopped drinking years prior), made one uncle talk even louder (a Marine Corps cannoneer in Vietnam, he was occupationally hard of hearing in one ear and genetically in both) and jollier, and made a great uncle frighteningly mean. I stayed away from him at night, but during the day and when sober he could be disarmingly nice.  I shot a rabbit once and he taught me to skin and clean it, showing neither impatience nor condescension with my timidity and apprehension.

Of all the characters in the annual, week long rite of passage, the Ford looms largest.  My grandfather had an aluminum Caravan Camper bolted to the bed of the truck, muted water-color western scene curtains (homemade) over the windows and door, a plywood table (homemade) bolted to one bed rail, a modified metal-spring cot bolted to the other.  Sometimes my grandfather would sit in the camper, reading old newspapers by the light of a Coleman kerosene lantern, emerging occasionally with some treasure from years gone by.  I rarely went inside any further than my arm would reach, partially out of some instinctual respect to not invade a place so obviously his, partially out of awe of the overwhelming number and variety of objects the camper would produce.

Now the truck is mine.  I asked for it, ostensibly as a joke in one of the many moments of twistedness as my family negotiated the transition of my grandfather’s possessions from him to us as the last years of his life unhurriedly but unmistakably crept towards him.  But I meant it, I wanted the truck, and though perhaps I wasn’t the most deserving, I think my grandfather knew I would take the obligations of owning such a thing seriously.  I drove it, on my fortieth birthday, the ninety miles from Yerington to Reno, stopping three times to bang dirt out of the choking fuel filter as the engine sputtered prior to dying, me cruising to a stop on the shoulder of a snow dusted US Route 95A.  The trip was different than all the other hundreds of times I’d driven that exact route, perhaps because I was now 40, but more likely, I suppose, because I was driving my dead grandfather’s truck and the rattling-windows brought back more than just memories of quarter-century old deer hunting trips.  Right there I used to work for a man who, upon reflection, might very well have been some sort of pedophile; here is the dirt road entrance if you want to take the back way to one-hundred-fifty-year-old Fort Churchill; after this curve in the road you’ll see the little valley where, as a kid, my grandfather would invariably point out a herd of wild horses walking amongst the sagebrush and creosote.

I left the truck in Reno at my mother’s house, directions to a long-hauler as to where to pick it up and where to drop it off.  I failed to prepare him for the verbosity that is my mom, and certainly failed to extrapolate for the fact that she would be seeing off a truck that was first her father’s and now her son’s.  And now the truck sits here, in front of my house in Tennessee, where I can sit and look at it out of my window even as I type, visualizing what it will be and hoping I don’t forget what it was.

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This is a Machine (2 of 4)

My first day with the truck is a good one: I’m woken at about 8 am on a Saturday morning by a phone call from Vince, the long-hauler who brought me the truck and whose semi is now parked on my street, the Ford already disembarked and sitting, lonely, too far off the curb but not quite in the middle of the road.  I sign paperwork for Vince, who gets back into his truck and makes his way back to I-24, where he will continue east and then south towards Atlanta.  We are now alone, the truck and I, and I am anxious.  He brings out the Animist in me.  The truck is defiant, a huge, bulbous hood, the tapered cab, that cowcatcher-ish steel grill like a lower jaw forward-thrust, it’s momentarily intimidating, and I wonder what I have gotten myself into.

I stare at the truck for a few minutes; I circle.  He looks like he has weathered the 2,100 mile trip fine.  It must, I think, be awfully confusing to spend a lifetime in front of a double-wide trailer at the end of a dirt road, only to have someone pack you up and ship you off to some unknown extended family in the middle of Tennessee.  Here he is, alone, trying to appear confident and unaffected despite all his possessions in the glove box or on the rusty passenger side floor pan.  What I mistook as aggression only moments ago I now see as uncertainty and the image of the set jaw reminds me instead of Chairy from Pee Wee’s Playhouse.  It’s time to get to work.

**********

An Army base is a self-sustained community.  Mine, Ft. Campbell, has a grocery store, several gas stations, a liquor store, a Wal-Mart type general store, houses and duplexes, and barracks for the single soldiers; a bowling alley, gyms, chapels, day care, a YMCA, softball fields, a football stadium, police and fire stations, schools, swimming pools, and a golf course.  The Army goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure Soldiers and their family members have what they need, and plenty of opportunity to take up and perfect hobbies, like woodworking, arts and crafts, or auto repair, and here is where I drive myself, the Ford sputtering and threatening stall at every stop light, this Saturday morning.  I make it to Gate 6, it’s still early, the base relatively empty due to deployments and, in all likelihood, hangovers.  I’m the only one passing through so I can keep my foot on the accelerator and the clutch slightly engaged.  My plan is to hand my ID card to the security guards, say hello, and get my card back without ever stopping.  But there are two guards – one has come over from the next lane over – and they eye the Ford.  “Nice truck” he says, but pauses between words, emphasizing, each a one-word sentence in and of itself: Nice. Truck.  A grin creeps from the corners of his mouth; he is old and white and grizzled, and wearing huge unwieldy ski gloves and I think the smarter and more appropriate picture would be him inside this truck and me outside with the gun on my hip, but here we are.  My plan to keep moving is foiled, he and his friend want to chat, and after a few words I make it out without the engine dying.

The self-help auto shop is just about a mile away.  I drive through the open gate, park, and walk in through one of the big open garage doors, the smell of gas and oil and other things unidentifiable to me permeating the air.  There are ten bays, four of them with hydraulic jacks to lift your vehicle off the ground, and small tool lockers at the head of each bay.  The floors and walls are clean, and because this is an Army base, and because we are a family show, I take note of the deficit of out-of-date calendars featuring moderately attractive bikini-clad girls hawking Snap-on or Rigid tools or Holley carburetors.  There is a dirty-blond, middle-aged woman behind the counter, territorial and aggressive in a way that makes it clear she is in charge, but you can tell there is compassion lurking nearby.  I tell her about my truck, rambling and inefficient and unconfident with my words and she does not even pretend to care.  “Do you need a lift?,” she asks, and I say I don’t know.

“CHUCK! DOES HE NEED A LIFT!”

Chuck, wide hips and narrow waist and belt cinched so tight that it pulls the loops on his jeans together so they are touching one another, strolls over and asks what I want to do.  I tell him I don’t know, but I that I have a ’62 Ford, it was my grandpa’s, he had it almost the whole time but bought it off a friend of his in ’64 or ’65 and I want to make it reliable and maybe make it look nice but nothing like a car show.

“What,” he drawls in an odd what I find out later to be a Virginia hillbilly accent, “is your level of knowledge?”  I’m not sure how to answer this, and I think of the doctor’s office pain chart.  Am I a zero?  Pain free, aw-shucks grin, post-coital eyes? A six, which should reflect some pretty serious pain but instead looks like I woke up an hour earlier than I wanted to?  A ten?  A reddened-face, sweaty, agonizingly teary-eyed emoticon conveying far more emotional damage that physical pain?  I wonder how to translate this into my comfort with an open-end wrench.  I’m better than my mother, for sure, who is probably damn close to zero, but I’m certainly not as good as the guy who has joined our group, he with an earring in each ear, and ponytail and goatee and name in cursive stitched onto a white patch on the pocket of his shirt, a pack of Marlboros peeking over the top.  The truth is that though I took auto shop in high school, I seem to recall spending more time trying to make out with Jeanna in the tool room than I do learning how an engine worked.

I tell Chuck I feel OK doing things on my own, but I have no idea where to start.  He has me drive the truck into one of the bays, extends the lift arms so they sit just under the frame of the truck, and raises it.  Chuck grabs a shop light, walks underneath, and begins his analysis:  Mmmm.   Yep.  Hmm.  Look at that.  He is talking to himself, or perhaps the truck, but certainly not to me, and his coos and warbles are, I think, a good sign.  Decades of desert air have apparently been good to the truck, and Chuck can’t stop telling me what great condition it is in.  He says he can tell that my grandfather took good care of it, and that I’m lucky, and that it is a prime candidate for a “frame off resto.”  I ask if this means we can make it so I can drive home without it stalling.

We lower the truck, and Chuck does something with the carburetor where he changes the fuel air mix while I just stare at the engine, one foot up on the bumper, trying to absorb as much as possible of what Chuck says and does.  I nod my head occasionally.  Other people working on their cars – there are only men here – frequently come over and stick their heads under the hood with me, staring, laconic, all of us joining in this manliest liturgical in existence surely since Henry Ford or Otto Daimler or whomever first decided to put the engine in front and put a hood over it and to make an open back end for hauling around your crap that you never really use.  Sometimes they ask me a question – “is that a 302?” and I answer with “nah, it’s a 292 Y-block” at which point I have exhausted my knowledge of my vehicle.

Chuck finishes and sends me on my way, my first task to get a new gas tank.  I spend the next weekend first removing the bench seat (the gas tank is behind it), then disconnecting fuel lines and electrical wires and rubber hoses and brass fittings and even the fuel pump and filter and the tank itself and I replace them all.  I make, in total, five trips to Auto Zone over the weekend but by the end of it I have a brand new fuel system, from tank to engine, and the truck fires up the first time I turn the ignition.  There are no leaks, and the fuel flows beautifully and clearly where before it was stunted and chunky and honey-colored.

This is a victory, I want to revel in it, so decide to take the truck for a deserved victory lap.  I make sure the truck is in gear, turn the engine off, then move to kick out the wooden blocks I have propped behind the wheels while the truck sat on my declined driveway.  The first, on the driver’s side, comes out easily, but the passenger side block takes more than a few kicks.  The weight of the truck is clearly heavy on the block, but my powers of deductive reasoning have been squashed by my joy in my first success in making it run, and my arrogance has prevented me from realizing that there’s a problem here: when I removed the bench seat, I knocked the four-wheel drive stick shift into neutral, therefore negating the usefulness of ensuring the truck was in gear in the first place, and after swinging my foot back to give the block one more kick, I realize, simultaneously with swinging my foot forward, that there is about to be nothing keeping this beast in my driveway.  The truck immediately begins rolling backwards, and I move around to the back to try to stop it.  My truck weighs almost two tons, and I unsurprisingly have no effect.  There is, I see, a car parked across the street behind me, and another coming down the road towards me.  I run around to the driver’s side, and, running backwards, open the car door, crank the bus-sized steering wheel (no power steering) clockwise, jumping into the cab at the same time and applying the brake.  I have missed the parked car behind me by a long shot, and the oncoming car passes by me without slowing down.  My heart is pounding, and I take the lesson: don’t park on declines.

**********

Replacing the fuel system successfully emboldens me to make other minor improvements, to buy new wheels and tires, to even drive the truck in to work a few days a week.  I stay in the right lane on the way in, driving the speed limit not because the truck lacks power, but because I am in no hurry.  I drive leisurely, downshifting and braking early once traffic lights come into view, occasionally leaning my entire chest against the giant steering wheel, arms crossed so my right hand is at 10, my left at 2, wind whistling through the poorly sealed vent windows.  At work, we talk about the truck.  One of my young sergeants calls it an “eyesore,” and, seeing my hurt, follows quickly with “but I don’t really know about old things.”  This same Soldier once asked me if I liked Kylie Minogue because that’s the music her mother liked.  Another, not knowing it was mine, called it a “beater,” but these are the exceptions.  The truck, I find, is smile-inducing and is gender, age, and race neutral.  The black security guards, my administrative assistant, the senior attorney in my office, who flew helicopters in Viet Nam; young Soldiers in Punisher t-shirts or wearing flat-billed hats; the ladies who walk at lunch hour, they all have a comment and a smile about the truck or a story from their own past.  It might have been their own grandfather, or their dad, or the one whose much older brother had a truck, just like this one, with a bench seat so clean and slick it would cause him to go sliding against the door every time his brother made a hard left turn, a game to both of them, a way to so clearly express your love of your little brother or your idolization of your big one without having to say it.

This, too, I share, this love without having to say it.  Every time I get into the truck, I shut the heavy door solidly, metal on metal, my concerns and worries and stressors dropping and my love and endorphins increasing, swapping levels like a canal lock.  It can sometimes seem that I deal with badness all day, every day.  If I know your name, it’s likely because you did something wrong, or someone suspects you did something wrong, or you’re probably about to do something wrong and I have to go tell someone else what they should do about it.  It is a system, and one that works, and one into which I have wholesale bought, but it can be exhausting.  But every time I get into the truck – whatever my temperament or mindset – and close the door and turn the key and hear the engine ignite, first turn, I am listening to goodness and I reconcile accordingly.

When I’m driving any other car, it is simply a vehicle, and a vehicle in the strictest sense: something to get me from here to there.  But the Ford is a machine.  It is here, generically, to make my life better, as a machine is supposed to.   But also something more, something essential and of consequence.  We turn a key and move the vehicle into drive and turn on the cruise control and the radio and the DVD player for the kids and continue to be preoccupied by things mundane and banal and low but, inexplicably, consuming.  But the truck is different.  It is simple, yet demands your attention.  I pull the choke and turn the key and can see the mechanical fuel pump pushing fuel up through the carburetor where the choke plate is minimizing the air flow but increasing the amount of fuel pulled to the engine; I listen to the idling rumble to know when to push the choke back in, letting me know that it’s okay to engage the clutch and slide the stick shift into second gear, revving the engine to get rid of that sticky pedal, heavy on the first step like a double-action pistol on the first pull, easing the clutch back out to slowly, smoothly accelerate into third gear, and then fourth, where I then rest my left arm on the door sill, steering with my left fingertips while my right rests casually on the cracked shifter knob, holding my speed with a sensitive right foot.  If I turn, I must remember to move the signal back into the center position; the soft “click-click, click-click” reminding me if I forget.

I am not so maudlin to think that life was better in 1962 when we didn’t have cruise control and in-car DVD players, I know every age has its own historical and personal challenges.  But today, in 2011, this 1962 Ford does, in fact, make life seem easier.  I have an identifiable goal, an end-state for the truck that I can envision as if it were sitting here in front of me, shiny and new.  There are little goals I need to achieve in order to reach that final one, and each step I take, each time I get the fuel gauge to work, or see the instrument panel lights flicker to life, or successfully remove the manifold exhaust, I feel relevant.  I feel connected.  The truck has a smell and feel so familiar to me now, already, that I don’t know if the nostalgia is, in fact, nostalgia, or I’ve just convinced myself of it, like a childhood event memorialized in a photograph you’ve looked at so many times you’ve confused the reality of the actual event with the picture of it, the two to never part again.

**********

I spend an hour or two cleaning the underside of the truck, fifty years of dirt and grime and oil grown solid so I can scrape it off in layers. Then new windshield wipers, new exhaust manifold gaskets, new sun visors, new hinges for the tail gate.  I end the evening sitting in the bed of the truck, a cigar in one hand and a Negro Modelo in the other, Kristian Matsson on the stereo, he about five foot seven but ambitiously calling himself The Tallest Man on Earth; he is of 2010 but sounds, appropriately, like 1962.

We are all products of our times, at least to some extent, and my grandfather was Depression Era, no doubt.   I go through the papers he has left in the glove box of his truck, the original operators manual, and old insurance documents from as far back as 1980, and an emergency blank check (number 3453) and maintenance records scrawled neatly in pencil on an amalgam of papers, a Sahara Hotel and Casino scratch pad and Consolidated Freightways receipts and even on meticulously clipped-out squares from magazine pages.  He changed the oil on August 2, 1992, and also on April 2 of some unknown year.  He packed the wheel bearings in November of 1985 and on a date unrecorded he sketched out a wiring diagram for the trailer lights.  This I will keep.

There is a drizzle slightly increasing and sunlight simultaneously dissipating behind a clouded sky.  The sunset shows amber, the sun itself absent but its nimbus prevalent.  A woman walks by with her dog, short-legged but long and heavy-bellied, him on leash but holding it in is mouth, as if it is he taking her for a walk, not the other way around.

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A Junkyard is a Social Network (3 of 4)

Humans are predictable creatures.  Even the least sedentary, those of us who thrive on surprise and impulse and passion, who cultivate an identity of impetuousness and spontaneity, travel, over time, in patterns insinuative of the loveliest childhood images you ever created on your Spirograph.  But occasionally we hiccup, or have a chance encounter, or simply stumble upon something that catches our attention, causing us to roll back the scroll wheel of our life, shift to the left or to the right, and, upon dialing back in, discover some alternate society, an association of enthusiasts whose arms welcome you unconditionally, based solely on your shared love of, for example, 1961-1966 Ford trucks.

I discover, just 1.3 miles from my house, a junkyard.  That I have spent almost two years in Tennessee not knowing this is unsurprising; that I find, the first time I visit, a completely restored 1964 Ford F100 in the parking lot, is.  The young man behind the counter, after stamping my hand and having me sign a liability waiver, tells me the truck belongs to Anthony, that he is middle-aged and that he will be wearing jeans, and a blue zip-up hoodie, with thick glasses and a thick mustache and a bowl haircut, and that if I go past the Dodge trucks, and the Chevrolet cars, I will find him walking amongst the Fords.

I pass through a giant roll-up garage door and into the gravel-and-mud lot, acres and acres of cars and trucks in varying stages of disarray and dismantle; many tireless, amputated at the ankles, but all of them precariously elevated on rusty, horizontal rims, a pointed reminder that they may never walk again; yawning hoods revealing de-toothed mouths, guts occasionally spilling out over fender wells and under doors slightly ajar.  I pass two young, rotund white teens, then a black man, my age, towing an oversized wagon equipped with oversized off-road tires and a small child, perhaps his son, pushing from behind.  At the far side of the lot I find Anthony Jenkins.  When I meet him he is crawling out from under a Lincoln Town Car, his blue zip-up hoodie wet from lying in the mud but otherwise meeting, perfectly, the attendant’s description.

I introduce myself to Anthony and, mentioning his truck, tell him about mine.  Anthony says he has seen it – “a friend told me there was a blue long bed four-wheel drive around town, but I didn’t believe him!” – and we begin a question and answer session dominated by simple questions and inadequate answers; Anthony initially speaking to me in a language that may as well have been Urdu, but quickly dumbing it down to Restoration 101, walking me over to an engine, showing me exactly which four screws to undo, and how to take a straw to the interior of the carburetor to assist with stalls; or how to take steel wool to the stainless steel emblems, making them shine like new; or which wire to cut and where to attach it to make sure the brake lights work.  Anthony gives me his phone number and tells me about his buddy who had seen my truck, a retired soldier with whom Anthony is thinking about starting a club, “not really a car club but something where we can meet and just take a drive, maybe the next town over and grab some lunch.”

And here is where I find my social network: Anthony, the former Nissan mechanic who took an early retirement in order to open his own, at-home auto restoration business, dispensing free wisdom to me on the side; Mitch, the retired First Sergeant, generous with both his time and parts and with the “sirs” not because I am an officer, but because he might be the politest, friendliest guy I know; Gary, a retired bridge-welder whom I meet after Mitch gives me a phone number to a guy who gives me a phone number to another guy who does not have the part I’m looking for but directs me over farm roads and up a hill to two big white garages where I meet three men, one holding a Busch Light tall-boy, wearing dirty sweats, a mesh cap and a red plaid flannel shirt, with a veiny, bulbous nose to match and what must be years of chin and upper-lip hair growth and who gives me more directions, this time by toeing the ground with the outsole of his boot.  He too sends me up the road, where I knock on Gary’s door, unannounced, telling him the gentlemen at the two big white garages thought he “might be able to help me fix my cracked exhaust manifold, though someone else suggested I just put on some headers and get rid of the crossover pipe” – I barely know what I am talking about – but Gary rolls his eyes dismissively, contemptuously at the mention of “headers” and says leave it here, I’ll fix it for you no problem.  He calls me back later and says he’ll be out-of-town, but that he’s left the manifold in the apartment above his garage, just knock on the door and Uncle Fester will get it for you.  I have, fortunately, spent enough time in the South to know better than to automatically dismiss this as some Southern-sticks tomfoolery, and I retrieve my manifold a few days later from a white-bearded, slipper-wearing, pants unzipped and unbuttoned Uncle Fester.

*********************

I work on the truck a little at a time, though I have taken to pouring over truck-parts magazines, and Ford websites, and eBay and craigslist, and even to driving four hours, trailer in tow, to a Birmingham salvage yard in search of a hood but finding, to my bemusement, assimilation: with my filthy Carhartts, finger-smudged hat brim, and dirty t-shirt, sleeves rolled up, and but for my significantly smaller waistline and lack of a mullet, I am indistinguishable.  I have also, I think, begun to feel like maybe, perhaps, learning how an engine works and trying to make it look like it looked 50 years ago is a pretty damn important thing to do.  There are, certainly, moments of pause: removing the camper, where my grandfather spent so much time; purchasing a new seat cover, switching from brown to blue; throwing away the ragged, disintegrating mud flaps. Even cleaning the grime from the clouded, grungy grill causes me to stop, half-way done, and look: the grill shines, beautiful and new, one side what it was and one side what it will be.

On a Saturday it is cold and overcast and reflective, and my mood matches.  I take the truck for a drive, turning right out of my neighborhood and then right again at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, March is MISSION Madness, down a road I have never been down before.  Long and narrow, it is closer to an extended driveway than a road, nameless; no signs, no center stripe, no shoulder stripe and no shoulder anyway – the fields of corn and soy, just inches out of the ground, grow right up the road itself; a gray overcast sky turning the fields a verdant Playdough green.  A country road, in a country truck, in a part of the country that is, without a doubt, country.  For forty-five minutes I drive, passing just one other automobile, another truck, and we wave, simultaneous fingers lifted off the steering wheel but palm remaining in contact.  A radio-less car on a country road is a recipe for thought, and I realize I have been here almost two full years; that my people, my Captains and Sergeants I admire so much, are almost done with their year in Afghanistan; that I have been in this profession just short of eighteen years.  I decide to drive until I am lost, up to the point where I think I may be, in fact, lost, and remember that my gas gauge is stuck on one-quarter tank.  I see grain silos vaguely familiar, set just off the road, amongst a pond and gently sloping hills peppered with black dairy cows and the stumps of trees cut down long ago.  I wave to a stationary farm dog because it seems like the right thing to do.  I wonder what comes next.  Do I strap on a back pack and walk across Nevada or move to Africa and run an orphanage or drive a 1962 Ford F100 from one side of Canada to the other?  Another right turn, another long, flat gray asphalt road, another soot-crusted tobacco barn next to another generational red brick or white clapboard house; a child’s red umbrella, opened, in a uniformly green and untrampled field; a one-horse Mennonite carriage, red safety triangle the only concession to progress.  I want to go home to get my camera, but I know it won’t look the same when I return.

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The Church Invisible (4 of 4)

A spring day in Tucson: the sun beats down, already, the heat magnified or diminished by the absence of humidity, I can never figure out which. On a mid-morning  run with a friend and the air hangs heavy, with heat, with smells of a morning-after detoxification, with my own history.  Biennial trips to this town are conducive to foolish sentimentalism, particularly if one already tends that direction, and much of me is here in Tucson.  Almost all of me is of the desert.[1]  Here for, some would say, an overdue wedding (though nothing good in the desert happens quickly), we run on a Mesquite and Willow Acacia-lined path along the Rillito, a sanded wash that lately, due to groundwater pumping and population and a depleted Tucson Basin aquifer, only very occasionally answers to River; scattering in front of us Harris’s Antelope squirrels and Lesser Earless lizards, brave until we are right on top them and then sprinting away, blindingly quick and beautiful in a devilish sort of way.  The desert, it seems to me, despite its desolation and acerbity and extortive leanings, is accommodative and prone to potential.

Example: the wash.  Heavily vegetated and waiting for liquid fulfillment, patiently, it bides its time as a temporary reprieve for anything with legs, or wings, non-discriminatory; and there, on the banks, the presently vacant City of Fun, Inc. carnival, octopus arms and mallet-ended fulcrums and tea-cupped turntables dormant but for one man hosing down a tractor-trailer; fleeting, precarious joy in abeyance only until the sun goes down when it will then come to life, iridescent with light, and the momentary absence of worry; with the sparkled pubescent longing to steal a moment alone, if for only a flash, at the top of the Ferris wheel or in the darkened back corner of the House of Horrors; here, continuing on the path, the Cactus Wrens and Vireos and Abert’s Towhees calling safely from the spiked confines of the ocotillo and acacia.  They can leave – they do have wings – but they do not.  Something keeps them here, something in this non-judgmental desert that lets you, if you can stand it, be who you are and stay as long as you want; it is addictive, it becomes home in a way that is either incapable of or beyond description – that somethingness Edward Abbey reduced to, well, “something”: there is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand and how beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have.[2]

The desert, though it can be a trap, an inert ambush lying passively in wait, where it will, if you let it, consume you, leaving you parched and cracked-lipped if you are lucky, starched-white boned if you are not; is also a preservative, sanguinity and resilience rewarded by people or things (a fifty-year old truck) from the past, the discovery striking in you a flint of something, nostalgia or love or a rumination on destiny, if such a thing exists.  Surely this truck doesn’t have one, it has neither destiny nor free will, it has no choice in its fate but there is something, a sum of parts or energy or personality or history.  The arid, high desert has preserved the truck, and memory may preserve emotions, but there is always something more, something frequently both frustratingly and gloriously invisible and unexplainable in its potential.

This church invisible has converted me, and I have self-imposed a deadline of the first week of July to finish the truck.  I work relentlessly.  I have done all I can do with it in my own garage, and for the last several weeks it has occupied a spot in Anthony’s workshop, where I can use both his tools and his expertise.  I go there on weekends, a coffee in one hand and an offering in the other, a twelve-pack of lemonade or a bottle of Fast Orange hand cleaner, something to karmically defray both the kindness Anthony has shown me and the experience I am taking.  Today we remove the bed, crisscrossing nylon webbing from alternate corners of the truck and then raising it using Anthony’s homemade hydraulic lift, setting it back down on a wheeled-cart where Anthony will tend to it later. We set to work, Anthony surgeon to my lumberjack, he cuts, removes, copies, welds, grinds and paints the multiple rusted-out spots on the truck, leaving not a trace of his graft and simultaneously allowing me to keep my grandfather’s truck almost entirely in the original.[3]

I, alternatively, am the antithesis, methodically breaking rusty bolts, crudely spray painting smaller parts, oafishly grinding away at the frame with a steel wire wheel.  It is here, I decide, my grandfather’s truck becomes mine, decades of Nevada dirt and rust and mouse turds and Cottonwood leaves falling from places that haven’t seen the light of day in almost fifty years, my grandfather no doubt wondering what in the world it is I am doing expending so much time and energy scrubbing half-century old leaf springs.  He was a man who spent a life time making something, using his hands, concluding each day with a visual confirmation that his toil had amounted to something identifiable, even if it were grading a stretch of road or irrigating an alfalfa field or shoeing a horse or front-end loading buckets of dirt from one place to another, and I wonder if perhaps he, over his lifetime, had become desensitized to the emphatic corporeal nature of what I feel only after working on my truck; this thing I encounter after seeing my reflection in a hand-shined stainless steel grill, or in grinding away the rust from the frame to reveal a stamped FORD emblem, unchanged over the lifetime of the company; or in hearing the basso, diaphragmatic WHUMP of the laden door closing soundly against the metal cab.

There is a shameless self-satisfaction I find at the end of these days, a mute self-aggrandizing I proudly display in the grease and paint on my one pair of Carhartts; the dirt in my fingernails an unmistakable sign that I worked, the progress on the truck visible to anyone who looked at it in the morning and then again in the late afternoon.  I become obsessive, my need for organization and aggregation and order manifesting in the urge to remove one more bolt, or clean one more part, or paint one more piece, and I find myself unable to distinguish between a need to finish the truck or to extend my time restoring it.  The truck, the desert, the end of my time in Tennessee, the preparation for yet another move, this reconnection, albeit temporary, have all made me pensive and introspective.

But now the truck is finished, and it is beautiful.  The oxidized powder-blue has been replaced by the original, Baffin Blue, contrasted by a two-tone of Corinthian white on the hood, a band along the top of the bed, and in the interior.  All the rubber is new, the clouded stainless steel burnished, the bench seat reupholstered, gearshifts and heater box painted.  Anthony has patched the floor pans and corrected all the imperfections accumulated over a lifetime of camping, deer hunting, and pulling horse trailers through creosoted, dusty roads at the whims of a transplanted New Jersey Irishman and his brood.

Anthony assures me there is no other truck in existence like this one, and my instinct is to respond of course there isn’t, but then I realize he is speaking about its appearance, the fact it is four-wheel drive and has the original tailgate and an aftermarket diamond plate rear bumper and brush guard attached to the frame through a customized grill.  Because this thinly veiled posit that a 1962 Ford F100 is somehow metaphorical, well.  That’s just silly.

 

[1]Sand gets everywhere, even in veins.  Another blood line: Nicola Hage, a blue-eyed five foot ten inch Syrian, left modern-day Lebanon sometime in the early 1900’s with fifty dollars in his pocket, in search of a brother and the idea of America on his brain.  He made his way first to Turkey and then to Le Havre, France, where on November 12th 1910 the twenty-one year old paid second-class stowage on the S.S. Chicago to New York City, watched his name entered into the Ellis Island registry ten days later, and then headed west, eventually finding himself in el Triunfo, Baja California Sur, a silver mining boomtown 3,500 miles from New York and 9,000 from his home. What drives a man to go to such trouble, such great lengths, passing by so much opportunity and wonder and novelty existing between there and here? What continued to push him west? Was it a condemnation; a serial reminder of repeated failures, of loves lost or stabbing epithets or miscommunications? Was it simply a thirst for adventure? A woman? Or was it a collective; the potential only men like him could see in the precious metal nimbus setting daily behind mountains that seemed to only get bigger as he headed west, a beckoning Tantalus drawing in a man who chose only to follow the sun. I want my great-grandfather to have found his brother and whatever else he was looking for. I want to picture him in el Triunfo with silver in his pockets, a Mexican woman on his arm so achingly beautiful it made his heart clench, the grainy dirt under his leather boots familiar, assuaging whatever homesickness he had for the deserts of his middle-east, a nirvanic look on his face when he learned enough Spanish to translate the name of his new town, his face turning up to the warming sun as the word slipped quietly from his lips: “Triumph. Goddam right.”

[2] Or, “what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not?” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

[3] Though I purchased a used hood and two fenders from a tooth-deficient man in southern Tennessee, Anthony used them only to patch the original parts, and the truck remains essentially 100% in the original.