We’ve all seen television shows (80’s detective shows in particular) or movies where someone was barreling down a winding road, repeatedly stepping on the brake pedal only to have the car keep going. After near misses with oncoming traffic and narrow escapes from skidding off the road at the edges of hairpin curves, the driver somehow has the presence of mind to maneuver the car up the first embankment that conveniently comes along and then jerk the steering wheel hard in one direction or the other, causing the car to spin out and settle in a cloud of dust.
The same thing happened to me this weekend…minus the high rate of speed, winding road, driving up the dirt embankment to stop the car, and Magnum P.I. (man-crush – as noted in my Jibber Jabber section) to tell me the brake line had been cut in an attempt to keep me from being able to testify against the island’s most notorious drug kingpin.
Okay, fine. So I was only on a two-lane road with no oncoming traffic and going less than fifteen miles-per-hour, but the brakes really did fail in a similar manner causing me to repeatedly mash the pedal to the floor. Nevertheless, it scared the crap out of me – especially since I had three twelve-year-old girls in the car, who by all accounts, think I'm pretty awesome. I would have hated to have driven the car into a row of bushes, thus causing them to rethink their position. Thankfully I am in fact awesome and had the situation on lockdown. And because the streets were desolate and we weren’t going very fast, the situation was never out of control. But that didn’t keep my mind from playing a lightning round of ‘what if’ against itself.
Deciding not to push our luck any further, I ditched the Mustang in the first vacant spot I could find where she’d be safe from the public and we’d be safe from her. I phoned my wife to inform her that the four of us were going to need a ride home. Like, preferably sooner rather than later.
The realization that we’d have to fit six people in a Nissan Xtera that barely had room for five posed a slight problem, but after doing some simple math and choosing of straws, I closed the rear hatch on my wife as she was contorting her body to fit in the space currently occupied by a tricycle, a bag of clothes to be taken to Goodwill, and whatever odds and ends that managed to find their way into the vehicle but never out of it.
“Girls,” she said as I climbed into the driver’s seat, “who’s going to do this when you get your drivers’ licenses?” Probably not the best thing to ask when trying to deter three preteens from doing the same thing at some point down the road.
“Not me,” they replied in unison. Liars.
“Good. It’s not safe. I shouldn’t even be doing it,” my wife finished. Her speech delivery lacked a little something in the convincing department. It's a wonder our children aren't delinquents.
“Well I won’t be able to,” Kacie quipped. “My Mustang has a trunk.” Crap, I might have spoken too soon.
On the drive home I contemplated my next move. Having the brakes worked on was already at the top of our to-do-list, but we’d hoped that a simple bleed or adjustment would suffice until the time came when we could convert the front drums to disc brakes. With the recent developments, I knew that major surgery was probably going to have to be performed because whatever caused the brakes to bail on us was more than just bad shoes or drums. From what I’d read online during my pre-purchase research, the Mustang was either going to need a new master cylinder, brake lines, or all of the above.
We made several calls to some local automotive shops to see if we could bring the car in for a diagnosis so that I could order parts, but with the holiday weekend, they were either closed or busy and wouldn’t be able to get to us until Tuesday. Knowing that we couldn’t leave the car abandoned at its current location, we made arrangements to have her towed back to our apartment. Spencer from Spencer’s Towing (no relation) in The Colony took special care in getting our jalopy up on his flatbed, calming any fears that we had about having it towed.
Fast forward two days to a gorgeous Labor Day where the weather is absolutely perfect for driving a classic car around town with the windows down. This is the type of day these cars were made for. Trust me, they were. I read so on Wikipedia.
But are we? Nope.
Do we want to be? Yep.
Can we? Negatory.
Why is that, you ask? Because apparently our classic car has a mind of its own and has seemingly turned into the overbearing boss of an Indonesian shoe factory/sweatshop. “Keep going! No stopping unless I say so! You want a what? I don’t care what you want. There are NO BREAKS!” Or brakes in our case…
Brakes are a good thing. This reminds me of the time I was learning to drive. I was so afraid of driving that I rode the brakes the whole time I was going down the road. Your Uncle Clyde told me to lay off the brakes. I took him literally. The next time mom and I were driving, I took a corner on two wheels. The road was gravel. After all, he had told me to lay off the brakes! Lesson learned. I now appreciate the value of brakes!
ReplyDelete