After losing a day and a whole lot of money to a mechanic in Boulder on Wednesday, we spent Thursday driving from Colorado to the tiny town of Devil's Elbow, Missouri, where Ben's Grandma and some uncles and cousins live. There were no real hiccups in the drive, accept that IT WAS REALLY LONG, STRAIGHT, AND FLAT (the boring half of Colorado, all of Kansas, and half of Missouri = 14 hours) and I got the only speeding ticket of the road trip, a $150 gift from a Kansas State Trooper.
Our radar detector worked great, make no mistake – it was complete user error. It beeped, telling us that it sensed a weak "Ka band" broadcast – one of the more common bands for radar detectors – but it beeped in an odd way, convincing me it was on a weird setting. So I tried to "fix" (fiddle) with it while driving down I-70 at 90 mph. You don't have to know me well to know that's the kind of mistake I would make. I was pressing too many buttons to notice the trooper's signal getting stronger until he was just sitting behind me with his lights on waiting for me to notice him. But worry not about my poor driving habits: you don't really have to watch the road in Kansas, as it's so straight you could tie the wheel to the door and take a nap.
---
Missouri was a whole new experience for me, and great – completely green everywhere, with a big river (called something that struck me as very southern, "the big little river" or something) meandering through town. Ben's grandma is one of the sweetest people ever, a German immigrant who fell in love with an American soldier posted in Germany after WWII, and a damn good cook. We went innertubing down the little big river at 1:00 in the morning with Ben's cousins, and got far too little sleep for Friday's drive: Missouri to Pittsburgh, which we had hoped to do in two days, would be another supposed 13 hours. It ended up taking 17.
We got a great start Friday morning, but it didn't last long. I took the first driving shift, and about five minutes into the drive it started raining substantially. I'm minding my own business at 70 mph in the right lane of the two lane highway when a big rig with Arkansas plates flies by me at about 95 mph. I don't read anything into it – we're on a downward slope and I figure he didn't want to get his brakes wet or something – until he merges into my lane, cuts me off, and promptly slows down to 65 mph. "Jerk!" I merge left and try to pass him – he merges left, cutting me off again, slowing down to 60 mph. I try again to pass him, in the right lane this time, and then again in the left – he just straddles the two lanes, and my insults quickly turn from printable to not so respectable.
Right then, I am struck with the brilliant notion that the world wouldn't be all that different if Ben and I were dead in a ditch. I egg the truck into the left lane, then drop down to third gear, accelerate behind the tractor-trailer and dart right, half in the right lane and half on the shoulder. 70 mph – 80 mph – 90 mph – at this point I have passed about 2/3 of the truck, and beginning to congratulate myself on my tricky aggressive driving. Too soon – he merges back into the right lane, which I am half in, all but running me off the road. Breaking, honking, and swearing with all my might, I am forced completely onto the shoulder as I slow down and return to my subordinate position behind the truck.
Yeah, so I thought a 10 year old compact just out of the shop could beat an 18-wheeler driven by an angry racist (we figure this was all incited by our four Obama bumper stickers) in a rainstorm. My mom calls me stubborn. I call me principled.
If only it was over: 30 seconds later, the engine loses power, not to start again for an hour and a half. After a tow from the local friendly AAA, a mechanic took a peak and finding nothing wrong, told us to try starting it up. It started, with no trouble at all, and we left Devil's Elbow for the second time, at 11:00 instead of 7:30. After traversing Missouri, Illinois, and most of Indiana, the rain gets heavy again. As we listen to Barack Obama read "The Audacity of Hope" to us (books on tape = best road trip EVER), the engine loses power again.
After putting skills of deduction to work, having a long-distance conference with my all-knowing father, and utilizing picture messaging for the second time in my life (the first time was a picture of a broken car part sent to my dad, also), we come to the conclusion that Ben's distributor is cracked, and when water gets under the hood (first spray from the racist trucker, then the heavy rain) it shorts out the electrical system that normally sends power to the spark plugs.
An hour later, the distributor has dried again, and we start the car. As I pull back onto the highway, Ben starts the book again. Barack reads the last few words of chapter five, and then says, "Chapter Six: Hope." Needless to say, after seven days that included finding out we had positions with the campaign on the other side of the country, planning a road trip, packing, driving across four states, sitting at a mechanic's for a day, driving across five more states, and getting into a fight with a big rig, it captured the moment.
---
Since Friday (we got in at 12:30 am), those words have continued to capture the moment: training was lunacy, three 10 to 12 hour days learning about Pittsburgh, community organizing, how to throw a house party, PA's voter registration policies, primary results, and a whole bunch of campaign secrets which I'm not allowed to tell you. Then they set us loose, with little to no direction.
During a break on Monday, the last day of training, I overheard another Organizing Fellow (that's my job title) ask a staffer a question about our extremely limited resources. The staffer replied, "it's a bit of a shoe-string operation right now."
The Fellow responded, "yeah, but with a borrowed shoe-string." More on that, and my first few days, later.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment