Forcing an Old Car West

I spent the spring preparing the car for my western trek. As I related in an earlier post I even had my mechanic friend work on my brakes, which proved to be a mistake. Let that be a lesson to us all. If you want something done right, you do it yourself, and don’t shirk your responsibilities. Finally, after brake work, replacing the wiper motor with a thirty-five dollar junkyard one, and then a new-to-me throttle body, which made a minimal difference in my idling, I shrugged off the rest of the car’s remaining problems and started the drive to Montreal.

If I have known, perhaps, the problems that awaited, I would have done more, or done what I did differently, but with the naiveté of someone who cannot see the future, I let the car wind through the hills along the St John River in New Brunswick, and before long I was travelling along the south of the island and looking for my bridge to the city.

Once I was in the city, problems began to appear. The temperature was thirty degrees, so my car, trapped in traffic in construction while I endeavoured to find my friend’s place, was less than happy. When it began to overheat I drove with the heater on full—a standard method of dragging heat out of the engine—and fought with the idling. Even with the new throttle body, the idle, while seemingly fine, still reverted to running rough if the car sat for any length of time at a light. It was rough enough that I was revving the engine and popping the clutch in order to keep it moving in the traffic. It didn’t help that I was in an area of the city I didn’t know and that the streets were mangled from the construction. Finally I found my friend’s place, parked around the corner and was able to relax.

So strange that I’d been up early to close the cabin shutters and turn off the power, and then I waded the creek before I started the car and backed from the yard, and now I was in Montreal, one of Canada’s largest cities. I felt a little like I had skipped several evolutionary stages of development, a newt crawling onto a rock and that could suddenly fly, or like I’d gone from industrialization straight to the mayhem of the internet age.

We went for walks and out to dinner, met with her friend and watched favourite videos on YouTube. It would have been very mellow, if I wasn’t staring—mentally at least—right into the face of taking the car into Ottawa and then Toronto, hoping it could be managed in some fashion that meant I wouldn’t destroy it trying to negotiate our cities.

About Barry Pomeroy

I had an English teacher in high school many years ago who talked about writing as something that people do, rather than something that died with Shakespeare. I began writing soon after, maudlin poetry followed by short prose pieces, but finally, after years of academic training, I learned something about the magic of the manipulated word.
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