Truck Stop Rescue
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So we had been sitting around Ron and Diane’s pool with Arlene’s cousin Mira, Diane’s sister, all afternoon, having a generally great time splashing and laughing at the wild turkeys under the bird feeder. Ron sells industrial pumps. Diane is an expert seamstress and has a couple of grandkids in Kansas. Mira teaches early childhood education at Jamestown Community College and has been up to Iqaluit, Baffin Island, twice to help set up a joint program with a college there. Ask her, “Have you killed your first caribou?”
After supper we headed back to Aunt Lee's house on Grand Island. Just about as we got on I-90, our car started making some terrible grinding noises. It sounded serious, and the engine temperature started rising precipitously. I got off at the next exit (Cheektowaga sounds familiar), and was delighted to see a huge truck stop, with lots of gas and diesel pumps, a restaurant, a convenience store, shower facilities... It was about 10 PM at this point, and the mechanics had just gone off duty. We were beginning to worry. The next day we were supposed to be selling our rubber stamps, specially designed for the occasion, at a weavers’ convention in Niagara Falls. That was the whole excuse for the trip from Boston anyway, though seeing Lee, Mira, and Diane might have been the real reason. Was there any hope of getting someone to look at our car at that hour? Well, said the cashier at the restaurant, there was a friend of hers who might come over to check it out. She made a phone call, and we moved our car off the truck stop proper, under a light in the adjoining mall parking lot. We started figuring what our backup plans were. We could stay in the motel across the street, find a U-Haul van in the morning to get the stamps to the convention...
In twenty minutes a van showed up. It looked about as old as our Stanza wagon, itself 11 years and over 100,000 miles at the time. The guy who jumped out was a freelance mechanic who was accustomed to working on trucks wherever they happened to have broken down. Now, I don’t know if this is what you consider your generally confidence-inspiring mechanic or not:
It’s not that this fellow had a tattoo. He was tattooed everywhere you could see. People would have paid P.T. Barnum for a look at him. The more I think about it, the more I think I expect someone with that much body art to know his way around motors -- some with two wheels under them, some with four, some with eighteen -- backwards and forwards. We didn't have a lot of alternative, and watched anxiously as this fellow got a big jack out of his van, lifted up our Stanza, and crawled underneath (without putting out his cigarette). He had no doubt that he’d get us back on the road, but did have several uncomplimentary things to say about the amount of space there is to work under Japanese car hoods and about the people at the dealership who had done the last repair on the car as he pulled out a shredded belt, removed two other belts so he could put a new one on, and put it all back together. As it was becoming obvious that we were going to be under way again, I started wondering how I would pay him. He didn't look like a business that took credit cards. He packed up his van, wiped off his hands, and said, “Give me $20. I don’t do this to get rich.” I looked in my wallet, found a twenty and a ten, and said, “Here’s thirty. You still won’t be rich.”
By the way, the weavers loved our stamps. The trip turned out to be a business success as well as a good visit.