14 June: Dreamt of my old Chevy truck

Dreamt last night of my old truck. We were in Mexico, a bunch of us, the truck rigged out as a camper, the way I had it, but bigger. And like the way I had it, I couldn’t start it. And when I finally did, it was running on about four cylinders, and there we were on the edge of some half finished Mexican freeway. I had to go downhill to build up speed so I was driving over all the construction gear and the unfinished forms and jumping curbs and dry washes but I actually got the Blue Hulk moving.

It was like that time leaving Santa Cruz with all my worldly possessions in the back and it quits right in the middle of the freeway just out of town where the highway starts going uphill. Lots of traffic.

It was an old telephone company truck, a 1957 six cylinder Chevrolet, lots of room under the hood and tons of metal on the back: ladder rack, all those cool tool and equipment cabinets that I had built into a camper with drop-down bunk beds and a kitchen and a mini rock-testing lab for prospecting and a mini library and of course lots of tools.

There hadn’t always been tools. I hadn’t always known what tools were. If I’d been in a Gary Larson cartoon I’d have been depicted as a cow or a Neanderthal sticking a wrench into my ear like a Q-tip. But I’d had to learn. And tools were something I’d come to love.

I can’t remember what I did there in the middle of the freeway to get that hulking piece of shit moving again, but I know it only took me about ten minutes. There was water in the oil so maybe the head gasket was blown or maybe the head was cracked and for sure I didn’t fix that. Maybe I just cleaned the spark plugs and that was enough. I’m sure I had to clean the battery terminals to get it started again and somehow I managed to nurse it two hundred miles home to my cabin where it sits to this day with trees and brush grown up all around it.

And I recall that the Chevy wasn’t the only of my several vehicles that would break down in the middle of the freeway. And that breaking down on the highway was a common enough occurrence that I always had my tools right there and that after it happened enough times I could always figure out exactly what it was that was wrong.

That truck took the prize for ugliness, though. Somehow I was blissfully immune to it all. I’d rolled the truck years before in an accident. That had ripped open all the seams of the metal utility cabinets on the back and bent the frame and ripped apart half the camper. So I had bandaged it.

I mean I hammered the metal parts as close together as I could get them, and then figured I’d fix it like a surfboard, with cloth and resin. I didn’t actually have fiberglass cloth, but I had some heavy cotton cloth that had been somebody’s drapes or curtains or something and I patched it up and I mean it looked TERRIBLE but TERRIBLE—layers of cloth and resin over the seams and corners. I never sanded and I never painted. Cops would pull me over just to see if I was for real–human and not an escapee from some colony for biological experiments.

Dreamt last night of my old truck.

That made me think of fixing things and how fixing things can awaken those first stirrings of inner confidence that go along with mechanical competence. Or any kind of competence, as long as it’s an ordinary competence.
*****
From my journal, 1972:
Dirt Road Mechanics

Working on cars:
Box-end wrench,
Hex head stuck.
Cursing, knuckles barked,
Blood on grease.

Clang of steel, lying
On back, hair dirty,
Face gritty–
Cheater pipe on ratchet,
Wondering
If socket might break.

Working on trucks:
Transmission.
Knocking the countershaft out
Of the gear box:
Washers, gears, roller bearings
All falling out at once
Onto the dirt.
Look up again to eye the weather.

Trouble-shooting.  Trying
To figure them out, somehow
Keep them rolling.