In January.
The only hiccup being the day they’d reached South Dakota and the locks froze. A trucker rescued Chris from her compact prison, and she’d taken away a firm understanding of the number one rule about driving in winter in the north, that being: don’t lock your car.
My aunt and uncle lived on a farm outside of Spokane. I’d gone to high school in town where I’d spent five years mocking rural-dwellers from the Inland Empire who drove to Spokane to shop. But my uncle, a high ranking GS in the BLM during the week, was a mule-breeder on the weekends, and Chris had never seen a donkey farm. We were also in desperate need of good cooking.
I don’t recall, now, why we decided to go south through Helena, instead of north down HWY 200 through Lincoln (home of the Unibomber at the time). Nor why we chose to take her car, other than for gas mileage purposes. But we did.
It was a beautiful Friday afternoon and Great Falls was ten miles in the rear view mirror when the check engine light came on, and an ominous rattling made its way through the classic rock station. We weren’t stupid. As much as we wanted to be on our way, we knew there was a chance something was terribly wrong. Maybe. So we limped to the next spot on the map—Cascade.
It was an American small town, and I don’t suppose you need any more explanation than that. It would have been as at home in Iowa or Central Oregon. Small, steep-roofed houses, grain elevators along the railroad tracks, a single main drag.
And no one at the single auto garage.
We debated continuing on, but soon found a tire store manned by three ancient men. I doubt more than one of them actually worked there. They looked exactly as you think; worn jeans, worn hats, worn faces—retired farmers.
Turned out the one mechanic in town was away at his son’s baseball game. He would be by in a while. In the meantime, they glanced sideways at the little yellow car and made remarks about how we’d let the oil run out.
“No,” Chris said. “It’s not the oil light. It’s the check engine light.”
Couldn’t be. What was an “engine light”? It was the oil light. Add some oil and you’ll be fine.
“I have two different lights,” Chris said, Southern respect fighting with her natural aversion to idiots. “It’s the check engine light. The engine started making a noise, like chattering. Then the light came on.”
The oldest, most weathered of our hosts spat onto the cracked asphalt. “It’s a Jap car. It’s just speakin’ Jap.”
Of all the liberal, hippie, free-lovers I’ve known in the great state of Oregon, it has been my experience that there are no more fiery, explosive defenders of minorities against unthinking bigots than a few select white Southern women. One being the Creature’s God-mother who, upon hearing a campsite of idiots singing the John Denver classic, “Thank God I’m a White Boy”—in earshot of Her Thai God-Baby—paced about our tents, searching the ground, and mumbling, “Gimme a good stick. I gotta whoop me some white boys.”
Chris is another of these fearless defenders. Her normally pink complexion glowed red as hot coals. Her fists clenched. Her teeth ground.
The man repeated his diagnosis in irregular intervals. I stared down the road, wondering if the men were WWII vets and searching in vain for a mechanic-looking truck to save us. Chris gave one more growl and retreated to the car to knead the steering wheel into submission.
We were there an hour. I can’t remember if the mechanic finally arrived to declare his own ignorance of foreign cars, or if we just decided we couldn’t wait any longer. But, at last, we loaded back up and hobbled the reviled car back to Great Falls.
Half an hour later, we were settled in my rig, a ’91 F-150.
We figured we could break down anywhere within a five-hundred mile radius and find help within five minutes.
Lessons learned? Don’t break down in rural Montana in an import.
And Chris doesn’t really like donkeys.
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