[Leica] The Adventures of Eric the Red, part 3

[Martin Howard <howard.390@osu.edu>]

The car had been standing unused for the past year and was pretty much
covered from bonnet to boot in pine needles.  The leather interior had odd
coloured blotches on it and smelled of mould.  The boot was filled with
unimaginable amounts of rubbish and I got the impression that the whole car
had served as a sort of outside-the-house filing cabinet for stuff that had
nowhere else to go.  At this point, I was beginning to think that Tuulikki's
scepticism may not be far off the mark.

The worst of the rubbish was cleared away from the driver's seat, and I was
given the keys.  It was out of registration, so I could only go along the
private driveway, but it had a couple of tights twists and turns at either
end, so I figured I get an opportunity to figure out how horrendously
difficult it was going to be to manoeuvre.  I was expecting a roar as 7.5 l
of V8 engine sprang into life, but it was surprisingly quiet and
well-mannered.  Of course, everything on a '77 Lincoln is power-assisted
and automatic, so it was a matter of delicately shifting it from "park" to
"drive" and giving it a touch of gas.

We glided off effortlessly.  The steering wheel required only the lightest
of touches and it pointed the massive wheels wherever you wanted them.  The
late-70's, Detroit luxury-car suspension gently rocked in response to the
unpaved road's large bumps and the V8 purred like a whole litter of
newly-fed kittens.  It was magnificent.  Buttons in the driver's side door
adjusted seat angle and height, small joysticks under the dash did the same
for the power-assisted rear-view mirrors.  The automatic transmission was
so smooth, you couldn't tell when it shifted gear.  I wasn't driving, I was
gliding, majestically, twelve inches off the ground, suspended gently on
soft, early morning fog, surrounded by 5,000 lbs of Ford's finest steel and
softest leather.  The car had been standing still for over twelve months
and now someone was exercising it for the first time.  It was though it was
gently purring "Please, take me off this island, let me roam free on the
vast interstate freeway system, show me the open road, and I will carry you
in style, comfort, and luxury to where ever you wish to go."  We were made
for each other.

The car had done only about 113,000 miles, which is low for a car of that
age, but then there aren't too many roads on Bowen Island.  Besides, park
it in the wrong direction, and each end of the car is touching the Pacific
ocean, given the island's size.  It had new front Michelin's, brakes had
been replaced about two years ago, and it had a reasonably coherent service
record.  At one point, an 80 ft pine tree had been struck by lightening and
fallen across the hood.  If you looked carefully across the hood and the
light was right, you could see three small dents where the tree had hit the
car.  The tree didn't fare as well and was shattered by the incident.  But
the piece de la resistance was the quadraphonic 8-track stereo system,
complete with about twenty 8-track tapes with everything from Elvis'
greatest hits, through Johnny Cash, to Mantiovanni.

Robin carefully sorted the contents of the car into two bags.  One small
bag for stuff to keep, one large bag for stuff to throw away.  When they
were done, his daughter took the small bag into the house, while Robin
carefully carried the large bag from the Lincoln, and placed it in the boot
of the Mercedes.  The honour of semi-mobile filing-cabinet was clearly being
passed down the ranks.

We made our way down to the local registrar and insurance agent.  A bill of
sale was made out and C$1500 changed hands.  The title transfer papers were
filled out and a ten day insurance with a C$1,000,000 liability was
obtained.  I was now the proud and slightly apprehensive owner of my first
car.  And what a first car.

Another of Tom's car-buying rules is that you should expect to spend about
half of the purchase price on initial maintenance and repairs.
   "Old cars always have some hidden problems," he said reassuringly.  So
far, I trusted Tom's ability to wiggle the massive vehicle through
Vancouver traffic far better than my own, so he was the designated driver.
We spent the afternoon getting the oil changed, and replaced various
filters.  I discovered that cars are not actually vehicles, but really
mobile repositories for various toxic fluids with exotic names and
expensive prices.  Transmission fluid, power-steering fluid, brake fluid,
anti-freeze, oil, gas, chassis lubricants, all come in odd-shaped plastic
bottles and are poured into various orifices or recepticles by men with
hairy arms and black-rimmed fingernails under strange incantations.  I was
beginning to realize that owning a car was quite a different proposition to
renting one.

We'd known at the time of purchase that there was a leak of some kind in
the coolant system, which is just a fancy name for the absolute mess of
rubber tubing that runs from the radiator, through the engine block, and
somehow back again.  Robin had assured us that it was probably just a worn
hose, but Tom was taking into account the fact that Robin was a real-estate
salesman, and so we took it to the local radiator repair guy he knew.  It
turned out to be a missing bolt that held the water pump to the engine
block: someone had not been able to refit a rusted bolt, and simply just
left it empty instead.  Perhaps not the best of strategies, since that
ensures that you will not get sufficient pressure on the gasket and water
can creep into the socket and turn it a nice, rusty, reddish-brown colour.
We left the car there overnight, while the engine was pulled apart, gaskets
replaced, a new bolt found, and the whole thing was put back together.

In the meantime, we put together a rudimentary toolkit (more for
psychological comfort than actual practical use), including a Haynes repair
manual which I have subsequently discovered must be the single most useless
piece of printed information ever produced.  It almost, but not quite,
tells you precisely what you need to know, but manages to omit the very
last crucial pieces of information you need to actually discern the
location of a part, identity of a component, or step in a procedure.  The
result is that it leaves you with a feeling that you are too stupid to
understand it, and therefore to own a car, and tremendously more annoyed
and frustrated than you were before you consulted the damn thing.  I now
have absolute, total, and complete empathy with anyone who is unfamiliar
with computers who has ever tried to read a computer manual.  I am also
convinced that Haynes works in collaboration with mechanics to get them
more business: even the simplest jobs are described in a manner that makes
them seem insurmountably complicated and each step is littered with
italicized warning text hinting at the disasterous consequences that can
result if you don't do everything exactly right.  Which, of course, given
the utter uselessness of the manual, is virtually guaranteed.  At about 1.5
inches thick, it's not even much use as a pillow when sleeping in the back
seat.

When we returned the following day, we were informed of a small leak in the
top, left corner of the radiator, which prevented the flushing of the
system we had planned.  Instead, we bought a couple of bottles of sealant
that made the water looked like a decent tall double latte once they had
disolved, which supposedly was going to take care of it.  The coolant
temperature guage sender unit that is mounted on the engine block was
defective and, apparently, a very difficult item to locate.  So, I was
going to have to keep an eye on the level of the radiator fluid, manually,
so to say, in order to avoid the engine overheating.

Sometime through all of this, we were joined by Chris Cameron.  Chris is a
friend of Tom's and an outstanding black-and-white photographer in the
classic photojournalistic style that once made (and kept) Magnum great.
He'd recently been to Cuba on a couple of trips, taking pictures of the
jazz musicians and we were invited to look at these over coffee at the
Espresso Head cafe.  When I see stuff like Chris' pictures, I don't know
whether to take it as a challenge, or just give up photography and take up
finger-painting instead.  Increadible stuff.  If there are any wealthy art
patrons among my readers, please take Chris under your wing and sponsor
this guy!

Chris, of course, had heard of the Lincoln.  In fact, it turned out, just
about everyone Tom knew also knew about the Lincoln and the mad Englishman
living in Ohio who'd decided to travel to Canada, buy a 23 year old car
that had been standing still for a year, and drive it the 2,700 miles back
over five days to Columbus.  I fully expect to overhear stories of this
madness in pubs ten years from now, when they have undergone a decade of
telling and retelling and become part of modern mythology and folklore.  We
drove over to Chris' apartment, armed with every toxic cleaning product we
could find at Canadian Tire and set to work.  A couple of hours scrubbing
later, the interior looked like something you wouldn't actually mind coming
into physical contact with.  Meanwhile, Tom had mounted the aforementioned
15mm lens on his camera and took pictures of the car from every conceivable
angle to try and convey the sheer amount of real-estate it took up.

- -- 
Martin Howard                     | Hardware will break.  Software comes
Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU       | broken.
email: howard.390@osu.edu         |                 -- Unknown
www: http://mvhoward.i.am/        +---------------------------------------