Questing: Back at Sea, part 2.

N.B. If you have not yet heard the beginning of the story, either scroll down a bit or click here: Questing, part 1

When last we heard from our intrepid adventurers, the White Whale had been captured, but nonetheless thwarted all efforts to tame it by dying a dreadful, explosive death in the middle of Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard. Rivers of electric-green Whale Blood gushed across the fresh asphalt, and a violent pother billowed towards the sky. We managed to beach the beast in the parking lot of my apartment complex.

Now, as the proud new owner of the hulking piece of metal, I was pretty much prepared to curl up in a little ball and cry myself into oblivion. The heroes of this tale, however, M & D, somehow took the explosion as a sort of dare from the beast.  A Double-Whale-Dare.
My parents, as far as I know, have never backed down from a dare in their lives. This has led to some pretty interesting scenarios, many of which involve unsafe or illegal driving practices, a lot of flesh wounds, and as far as I can reckon, my father's inability to remember the 70's with any clarity.*  So, having a crotchety minivan stick out its proverbial tongue and go *ppphhhhhhbbbbbbtttt* at these people really just made them all that much more determined to defeat it.

After some scheming, we established that the essential parts included an ignition module, and a hose splice (because the explosion was caused by the disintegration of the previous hose splice), and some antifreeze.
We went to the O'Reilly's down the road.

Long, long ago, back when I was but a wee young thing visiting one of my best friends in Portland, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting this same auto parts store.  It was the summer of 2005, and she and I had decided on a trip to the Sandy river for a nice swim.  It was a nice swim indeed, but her car (a Ford Tempo we often called "Bitch") decided to conk out in the raging heat of the Portland sun.  We got a jump from a nice Russian family who each had a flask in their back pocket and a cheap cigarette dangling from their lips, and made it back to town.¹
The problem in this case was that the wiring that connected her battery to her...whatever the wiring connects the battery to had become irreparably corroded. It oozed a mushy patina. In order to fix the issue, we had to strip back the wires and replace the connector-thingys. At the time, I knew what all of these things were called,² and walked into the auto parts store with my head held high and a clear sense of the task at hand.
I was met with a combination of sheer idiocy and unbridled condescension. The man we spoke to assumed that I could not possibly have any sense of what I was doing, probably because I was standing there all tiny and freckled in a bikini top.  The trouble was, he was denser than a bad fruitcake and could not have handled the situation on his own.
So we stood at an impasse as the man who assumed I was as dumb and feminine as I looked wrestled with his own fiery incompetence. The best friend and I finally gave up attempting to reason with the man and bought the parts we needed at Wal-Mart.³

The best friend's car was successfully repaired that weekend, but that is not the moral of that particular tangent.  Rather, it is an illustration of the delightful consistency of O'Reilly's.  Allow me to return to the Quest:

As my parents entered the O'Reilly's in search of the three simple items listed above, they too were met with interesting employees. Employee number 1, who we shall dub Cletus (as in, "the slack-jawed yokel"), was a slow talking, slow moving, and exceptionally slow thinking man with no knowledge of automobiles and a shocking lack of proficiency with the computer database in which his only real job duties lie.  He attempted several times to sell us the wrong part. Employee number 2, who seemed like a Marcy (for no reason at all), actually knew some things about cars, but was apparently so hopped up on "antibiotics" that she could not maintain a train of thought for longer than 30 seconds, and kept losing things that she had set down directly in front of her.
The entire scene was reminiscent of this display of chaos and idiocy:


At least, it would have been if either of the employees moved faster than molasses.

Eventually, it was discovered (after we bought the part), that the ignition module was in fact not needed. M & D patched up the Whale with the splice, filled all the fluids back up, and once again, it started.

And it made it home to Olympia.

So, ladies and gentlemen, the Quest for the White Whale has reached, perhaps, the end of its first stage. This means that, following some tune-ups and some test drives, the road is my oyster.  And I and the White Whale are going to eat it up.


Notes:
* One such story involves a motorcycle suspended in the bushes after flying through the air.
¹  Interestingly, the location to which we returned her vehicle was less than a mile away from the beaching-point of the whale, on the same street. Though I have spent much of my adult life in Portland, that life has largely been conducted within a 2 mile radius of that first house I visited.
²  I knew what they were called only because I'd called the heroes of today's story. Nevertheless, I knew. I was prepared.
³  And friends, the day one turns to the Wal-Mart for expertise, respect and assistance is the day one dies a little inside.

Questing: Back at Sea, part 1.

A couple of days ago I announced a delay in my efforts to revive my potential transportation method from the briny deep of its NE Portland home. This was prompted in part by the reasons I had offered, and in part by the fact that I (head P-Town Greasemonkey) and my Assistant Greasemonkey (MG, the owner of said vehicle) are not mechanical people, so when we failed at accessing the air filter (we were unscrewing the wrong bolts) and when it turned out the distributor looked like a giant metal spider that could eat our souls (this observation still seems fairly accurate), we gave up.*

Enter the heroes of today's story: my parents, M & D.¹  They swept into town in the evening in a black chariot, prepared to help in the quest for the White Whale. They arrived just in time for fresh strawberry dacquiris, as SS,² MG and I had gone berry picking, and also in time for me to regale them with an endless supply of youTube videos.

The next day, they got to work on the Whale while I finished up my very last day as an employee of the community college.

They got it to start within 10 minutes of my departure.

My incompetence notwithstanding, I was thrilled to know the beast lived. Upon returning to my folks, both ascribed the major problem to the air-filter (which, if you'll kindly remember, MG and I did try to get at), and we went about the process of signing the title into my name so we could drive it off into the sunset.

And so we went, with me driving down 39th Ave towards my home.  All was going splendidly, although my adaptive capabilities were somewhat lacking: having only ever driven one manual transmission, Sexy Sadie, my shifting was labored.  This seemed to be causing stalling, and I was worried D would come to believe that his only daughter was a failure as a driver. Turns out it wasn't me.  The Whale died, mid intersection, in a quiet and simpering death.  I lost power steering, which made shoving the thing into the gas station parking lot in the rain sort of unpleasant.

As I sat in that parking lot contemplating how I could make use of the state's existing Lemon Law to get out of this potential ownership problem (the problem in my mind was that I very much want MG to get his due for what had always been a fine machine, and so wouldn't want to Lemon Law him), M & D reveal the following juicy tidbit:
They never replaced the distributor cap and rotor, even though we had purchased a new one that very morning.
After a rainy but quick replacement, we were off again, this time with D in the driver's seat.  This is because I am prone to panic in dire driving situations and was already shaken by having stopped dead in an intersection.

I have developed a series of highly intricate artist's renderings to demonstrate how the rest of the story goes.
For about 15 blocks, D and I drove along in peace, all smiles and puppies:

Note the smiles.  The puppies were frolicking in a field somewhere.

Soon, however, we started going uphill, and had the added problem of being trapped behind a TriMet bus.³ I started to get nervous, and D started to get angry:

What you can't see are our tightly clenched fists, or the bus driver 

laughing like a Murphy's Law Demon from the depths.

Then, as we sat behind the bus, the Whale stalled. Angry, D got ready to push, but I suggested we start it up again. It started, and D revs the engine in an attempt to keep it alive.  Meanwhile, a TriMet employee strolled by and informed us casually that the bus "ain't going anywhur fer a while."  This caused D to rev the engine more, which led to this:

The engine ceased to be, as engines with smoke billowing forth often are wont to do, but the ordeal wasn't quite over:

Before we knew it, the newly-paved SE 39th Avenue (properly Cesar Estrada Chavez Boulevard, these days) was flooding with the cloying aroma and supernatural greenness of antifreeze. The bus, of course, had not moved. 

Passengers from surrounding cars helped us to push the beast into my parking lot, which was luckily a mere few hundred yards away.

There is quite a bit more to the story, but we'll leave off here for now.  Stay tuned for the next exciting installment, in which our heroes continually strive to rein in the power of the White Whale.

Notes:
* Not all the way, of course; just on our future careers as mechanics for outmoded automobile technology.  We did the opposite of giving up on life by buying picnic foods and lying in the sun post-failure.
¹ In a funny twist of fate (not funny ha-ha, or even funny awkward. Possibly not funny at all) my parents initials align with their titles, and so designating them here is very easy.
² A heretofore unmentioned character; you can trust him, though.
³ It should be stated that Portland's bus system is wonderful, provided you don't ever have to be around them in a car of your own. They make unscheduled stops, drive slowly, sit at stops for 5-10 minutes at a time, and have little to no awareness of surrounding traffic.

Navigatin' like Magellan.

So, the Pequod has been momentarily beached and deterred from the quest for the White Whale by end-of-term concerns like paper grading and laying in the sun (to counteract the horrors of paper grading).  I plan on resuming the journey soon, of course, because times are getting short.

In the meantime, however, I have continued thinking about possible routes for the trek (once I have the Whale in order).  It seems only appropriate to share a few of the options under consideration.

Option A: Google Says--The first comes directly from Google Maps, whose eternal concern is getting me from A to B as quickly as possible:

This route is economical, but takes me through a great deal of previously trodden land.  For instance, since I've experienced Chicago in the dead heat of late summer, I know that I could probably stand to avoid it. If I'm going to be drenched in sweat and afraid for my life, I'd rather it be in a new place I've never seen before.

Option B: Friend Says-- Another friend from grad school who has also trekked cross country, MR, suggested that taking a southern route in the summer would be...unpleasant.  He offered this as an alternative:

This route is similarly economical, and bypasses the dirty sauna that is a Chicago summer. The trouble with this path is twofold, however: first, I have traveled cross country by train (which I recommend heartily if you are ever alone and in need of four days of solid catharsis, but not at all otherwise), and have thus taken this particular Montana-Dakota-Minnesota-Wisconsin path twice. Second, a good portion of the trek isn't even in America, which sort of detracts from the "Great American Road Trip" ideal.

"But Ali," you say, "Canada is America too."

No. No it is not. I am not out for the "Great Continental Road Trip". I am interested in tearing up this great country of ours, not crossing borders or needing passports.  I'm lazy.  Also, in Canada, I imagine it is less kosher to holler "Amurrrrrrca!" while holding a corn dog in one hand and a Miller High Life in the other.

Option C: Technology Says-- This next option was calculated using that nifty website mentioned previously in this here chronicle: gasbuddy.com.

The route chosen here represents the lowest gas rates in the nation (Oregon and Idaho excepted).  It also makes a rather aesthetically pleasing smiley face across the land, and hits some elements of the plains-states and the south heretofore unexamined by our hero.  The downfall of this particular choice lies in the month of travel. Though I said above that I would rather be in a new sweatbox than one in which I'd already spent time, I would also like to not die of West Nile because of a stray mosquito bite in some swampland.*

Option D: Limited Experience Says-- An extension of the gas map idea is to drop south and see most of the states I've never seen before:

I like this one because it takes me through much uncharted territory and could finally clear up the whole New Mexico-Arizona problem I have (which one is which? Why aren't they just one state? Does everyone live in adobe huts or condos?). I could also sing "Oklahoma!", check out Austin's music scene, eat beignets in the French quarter, and stop by my former roommate's home in Georgia. Downsides include even more extreme heat (though maybe most of it would be dry heat?) and potentially getting eaten by an alligator.

Option E: Disregard for my alleged carbon footprint says-- DOWN WITH FOSSIL FUELS.

This route does everything!  It covers almost all the states, would kill the White Whale (maybe also a rental car), and makes an awesome zig-zag pattern on the map. Downsides include...well, look at it. It really only exists because I got out of hand in MSPaint.

These are all, of course, purely hypothetical. Much will depend on the weather, my copilot's proclivities (no one wants a cranky copilot in the car for 4-5 days), and whether or not the Whale ever gets into splashing form; a rental car will likely be used for the shortest period possible for economic reasons.  Also, anyone who suggests a particularly awesome sightseeing adventure will probably pique my interest greatly. I like giant rubber-band balls and corn mazes (maizes: ha!), and also places where I can buy taffy from barrels.

Now that I've thought about this, it's time to return to the Portland sunshine, which finally hit town in earnest this weekend.  Sum-sum-summertime, here we go.




Notes:
* I neither think that the south is all swampland nor that West Nile is still a major epidemic.  I'm pretty with the times, usually.

The Quest for The White Whale

As you may remember, my original plan was to rent a car for the purpose of moving my things from point A to point B; a reasonable, if expensive, plan if ever there was one.

Plans change, however, and now you can think of me as Ahab (or call me Ishmael), for I am on a quest for a white whale:


You can tell she's a serious lady because she's wearing a trench coat.

There's a little bit of back-story to be had here. I have a friend, MG, with whom I traveled the halls of Portland State University; post graduation, we both got hired by the same Community College, and suddenly his lack of transportation became an issue. He thusly inherited a monster of a vehicle that had been in his family since his youth, and which had made the trek from Florida to Portland many years ago. The monster?

A White 1993 Ford Aerostar Extended Cab, with a Manual Transmission (now the above commercial makes a great deal more sense to you, I'm certain).

We promptly started calling the thing the "White Whale", because it is enormous and draws a lot of attention to itself.* Being pretentious English majors might have had an additional influence on the name-choice.

Now, the White Whale had been a reliable companion to MG until just before spring term started, when it conked out rather suddenly. Rather than investigate very deeply, MG decided it was time to buy a car of his own choosing --preferably one that achieved more than 5MPG in the city.  He settled on a little Hyundai, and the White Whale settled into place outside MG's NE Portland Apartment.

The crux of the story happens here, so don't change the channel just yet, folks.  The new plan, the revised plan, the improved plan, is to fix the White Whale, buy it from my dear friend, and load the thing for my journey.

The first potential culprit in the demise of the beast is a clogged fuel filter.  MG and I acquired a new one of those this past weekend, and prepped for surgery:

The tools of the trade, in the jaws of the beast. (And other cliches)

I prepped myself by putting on protective wear:

Then, we got to business: MG read the instructions and handed me things, and my tiny little self acted as surgeon:

After much careful maneuvering, and a lot of gasoline pouring into a coffee canister, we were ready to make the transplant happen:

The offending organ. Also, me looking like a filthy hobo.


MG and I were ultimately successful in making the switch happen, and no one lost any limbs or blew anything up,¹ so there was a great deal of pride and self-satisfaction in the air as we cleaned up our jetsam.

Unfortunately, I am still as Ahab.  The transplant didn't fix the problem, and we have to move on to the next possibility. However: nothing can diminish the glory of our quest, nor our determination to complete it.

If the Whale lives, I shall have it.




Notes:
* Also, I believe it ate a man's leg once, but that's just hearsay.
¹ It should be known that, since MG and I are academics (and academics in the Humanities), explosions and personal injury were a distinct possibility. We should probably have received some sort of medal for not dying.
² Our flotsam refused to be included in the proceedings.