I’m getting tired of that feeling you get when you realize
you could have died, but didn’t. Instead, you’re standing there unharmed and
everything is fine. Until you start shaking all over and crying.
We all know those moments where life changes in an instant.
A death is announced, fire takes a house, a relationship is laid bare. In those
cases, there is usually something concrete to point to and say, “That hurt me.”
But the moment when you recognize you just avoided a catastrophic loss or messy
death is harder to pin down. No harm was done, so why get upset?
To be specific, a probably fiery death in an out-of-control car
being pinballed by other vehicles on Highway 4 is very far down on my list of
acceptable ways to die. I just know I would not have been graceful about it. I
would have been frightened, upset, and very, very angry. As it happens, I
dodged that particular bullet (for now).
As it happens, I have an older car that is very easily
stolen and, as it happens, I have not been able to afford the major work it needs
to be safe to drive for more than short distances. I considered going car-free
the last time it was stolen, but then it was returned relatively unharmed. I
was caught: pour money into fixing up a car that could be stolen at any time?
Get rid of it until I could save up money and locate a good used car?
I had planned for the possibility of losing the car by purchasing
a bike and commuting equipment so I could always get to work no matter what
happened to the car. Financing all that was a campaign in itself, since I had
been living below poverty level for several years and had only just gotten a
job that would allow me to pay bills and start to plan for a future again.
I opted to keep the car for the time being. I bought some
devices that would make it a bit more challenging to steal and asked my
mechanic to install a kill switch. A kill switch is supposed to be a toggle
switch hidden somewhere; it has to be toggled on in order to start the car. My
mechanic wanted to hide the switch in the glove box, but I knew from all the
times my car had been broken into that the glove box is the first place they rifle,
so I asked him to put it somewhere else.
When I picked up the car, I saw he had installed a large and
obvious toggle switch on the driver side dash panel. At first it worked fine,
apart from being large and obvious and therefore sort of useless. It was also
sort of in the way of my legs when I went to get out of the driver seat, and I bumped
against it several times before I learned to avoid it.
At first, I would toggle the switch off whenever I parked,
but after a couple months I noticed it wouldn’t always toggle back on when I
wanted to drive. At that point I had redundant security systems anyway, so I
just left the switch toggled on. At some point after that, I began to have
trouble starting my car at all. This wasn’t anything unusual, since I had been
deferring necessary maintenance for years and was used to things going wrong.
But I did notice this new problem seemed directly related to the kill switch,
even when I wasn’t using it to toggle off the power system.
Nevertheless, I kept on driving, fueled by a mixture of hope
and reality checks. My automotive maintenance checklist at this point consisted
of the following points:
·
Do I still have a car? (Visual check at curbside)
·
Will it start? (Ignition check)
·
Whatever. I have a bike.
Incidentally, it was during this time that the job I had
recently accepted specifically because it was local - even though it was in a
kind of dangerous and shitty location – announced I would now be required to work
at a location requiring a 50-mile car commute.
Today was the day I was finally going to take the car in to
the shop for the some of the big-ticket work it needed. I had been saving for
months, a few hundred dollars at a time. (Weird thing about me: I’m working on
paying down debt, not taking on new ones). There was the usual trouble starting
the car, but I got it going and aimed it toward work. I had planned a complicated
car-car-bike-bike-car commute between home, work and the shop. My bike was hanging
out of the trunk and I was checking the tie-down carefully in my rearview
mirror.
A short way out from home on the main drag, all my dash needles
dipped, rose, then went dead. I realized my engine had turned off, as in
completely off. No steering, no brakes, nothing. One level of my brain was,
what happens now? That whole stream of events played out. I knew I had to get
out of traffic and park along the curb in a safe place. Amazingly, there was no
traffic – very unusual – and I was able to steer out of the leftmost lane of a
two-lane road into a safe place at the curb. At this point, it was just
momentum of the car and steering by force that got me there.
Once at the curb, I was able to start the car again. Like a
goddam idiot, I then proceeded to continue driving to work. The back part of my
brain was still running scenarios, though, and started to shout down my
cerebral cortex, which just wanted to be at work on time. “DO YOU REALLY THINK
THIS IS A GOOD IDEA, SUE?” I heard it yelling. “YOU ARE IGNORING A SIGNIFICANT MALFUNCTION
OF YOUR CAR THAT EVEN THOSE DUDES IN THE CORTEX CAN SEE COULD EASILY BE DEADLY.”
At that point, I decided to drive directly to the shop and
turned down a side street to retrace my steps in that direction. I would just
have to be late to work. Gasp! The car lost power several more times as I drove
slowly and carefully, and then it just wouldn’t start at all. I was able to
drift to a safe parking space along a curb in front of a house. I dialed AAA
and said, “I’m going to need a tow.”
A very large flatbed truck out of Alameda, some distance
away from Richmond, turned up in under half an hour – well under the predicted
time. The driver set about winching my car up onto his truck. I called my
mechanic and told him what had happened. This was not the repair we were going
to do today. This was a job he did that went bad. He said he would make it all
right and he was on his way to the shop now.
It was early enough that when we arrived there no other
vehicles were parked on the normally busy street in front of the shop. The
driver rolled my car, still completely dead in the water, off his truck and set
it along the curb. The other businesses along 23rd Street were starting
to open. A homeless guy had been sleeping in a recessed shop doorway nearby and
was just getting up. The marine overcast was loosening in the wind and the sun
was starting to hit the pavement and buildings enough to warm the morning up.
I got my bike out of the back of the car and started to
transfer stuff into the pannier so I could ride to work after delivering keys and
car to my mechanic. Homeless doorway guy had started packing his stuff up at the
same time. I could see that he had his packing down to a science and was moving
everything to the curb in an unhurried, methodical fashion. I looked at my car.
He had his things, I realized, and I had my things. We all have things. This
car was my thing; I was standing where I was because of it, just like homeless
guy was carefully moving his stuff around. We all have things and because we
have them we have to take care of them. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t
have to worry about them. But as long as we have them, we have to take care of
them.
Does that make any sense?
I stood there next to my car and my bicycle as the morning
sun slowly warmed up the sidewalk.
Homeless guy helpfully said to me, “They usually open up around eight.” I
couldn’t tell his age or ethnicity very exactly, just that his face had some
beard stubble and seemed relaxed and relatively at peace. I told him I had
already talked to the shop owner and thanked him for his concern.
My mechanic arrived about 15 minutes later. I basically just
gave him the keys to my car and rode off to work on my bike. I told him I
didn’t necessarily need the car back by the end of the day. I felt like I could
use a little vacation from taking care of my thing.
