Thud.
The type of thud 3 fleshy pounds insulated in feathers makes on glass. The other three Killdeer looking winged blurs dart off above and to the side of my truck. I should have known this was to happen. I just replaced my windshield on Friday ($195). Drawing my eyes from the road I see there is just a smear of bird oil and no cracks. I think of stopping and getting the bird; its customary where I come from in the sticks. Facing back towards my clock and speedometer, I realize I cannot do this. The speedometer reads "0" and my odometer also appears to not be moving, despite the fact that I'm flying along on Road 600 just fast enough to make me wonder if I'm even in control. Fuck, fast enough to hit a poor little bird out of this temporal state of existence. Its 12:10pm on Monday and I'm suppose to guest lecture a class at UC Merced at 1pm and I know I'm still a ways off from even hitting Chowchilla on the 99. If my calculation is right, I should get to the campus just in time to change out of my storm drenched clothes, rub some eucalyptus caps on me to cover up the sweet smell of sweat I worked up this morning, and switch out to some dry footwear that doesn't smell like a disemboweled piece of carrion.
Let me put some background to the scene. On Sunday I awoke early and drove up to the Sierra Nevada Research Institute in Wawona Valley – Yosemite, where I had been given a free pass to stay since I was teaching at UCM on Monday. I was even given the key to the director's residence since he was out of town. Around the town of Awahnee I caught up to the storm that had been sitting on the Eastern horizon, backed up against the Sierras. From beneath its dark, wind-tongued clouds I looked west across the central valley – green with winter and sky blue with emptiness, and over the Diablo Range ran ragged broken looking scouts of the next storm. Above Oakhurst I floundered around in the slush, putting on snow chains and locking my hubs. Through the gates of Yosemite I went, not paying a fee after talking with the Ranger for a while and finding that he had an old friend with my last name as his first in Kansas City. Tighe means house or home in Gaelic. The park was cold with snow and I wheeled slowly over the snowy roads down into Wawona valley. I rolled up to the base of the hill where the SNRI director's residence was and after thinking twice decide to forge up the steep drive. Wawona is at 4,000ft which rarely gets snow, so I figured it was safe to put the truck up there. I had a little bit of traction slip and then a loud ping and then every rotation of my tire I can hear a chain cleaning the inside of my wheel well. I find that I've managed to break a cross strand of chain on the tire ($30). I unloaded all of my gear in to the house and was ready to hit a trail around 11am when the rain started. I put Jessica's snow shoes away and decided I could make lunch before heading out in to the wilderness. The rain kept coming. Then it stopped, the valley was silent besides a few Stellar's Jays, but then a wind like nothing I've encountered in the Sierras before ripped down from Wawona dome and with it came a deluge. A dark rift opened in the sky above and from inside I could hear over sized droplets of water penetrating snow drifts with a tssft! tsfft! Everywhere. I've never been so happy to be inside in Yosemite.
My lunch of quinoa, sea salt, sage and an expired cliff bar from the GO (the Grocery Outlet…my favorite place to buy low value food…not necessarily low quality food) filled me just enough to drag blood out of my brain and down to the little vesicles around my guts. I in turn laid upon the couch with a NewYorker and read a well written piece on Bonobos; everyone's favorite horny, maternally dominated, almost hippy-ish primate. Before I know it I'm asleep, go figure. I awake and its still raining, go figure. I take a piss and come back to the main room, its still raining, go figure. I contemplate getting back in the truck and getting out of Yosemite, before the storm gets any worse. Shit, it just started snowing, scratch the part about it getting in worse. I'm stuck here for the night if I like it or not.
The director's house is 3 stories. There is giant fireplace with inlaid stone and the whole nine yards…really its probably 3 yards by 3 yards front to back. There are a couple of bedrooms, a decent sized kitchen with a stove and a dinning table that looks out two sliding glass doors that view out onto a deck which then views out over Wawona Valley. The place also appears to have central heat, which is nicely set to 50F, just warm enough to ensure your pipes don't freeze. I figure I'm only one person and would fee like an a-hole for cranking up thermostat for just myself, so I resort to the old hot water bottle under a blanket trick. Unfortunately this trick is also really good at burning toes and well putting me to sleep. I wake up again and there is a couple inches of snow on everything. I'm have future-flashes of me sliding down roads to my doom or having to call Monica Medina at UCM and tell her that I can't give the lecture, because I'm snowed in. I make dinner and then spend the rest of night warming water bottles, having almost hallucination-vivid dreams on the couch.
6am and I realize that I'm not swimming through a barrier reef in the south pacific, because the wetness I actually feel is not my flipper bound diving booties, its my no longer warm bottle of water leaking on my toes in a 50 degree room. I glare out the window where the motion sensor has appeared to have gone on due to the flurry of snow outside. My future-flash is becoming the present. I hurry out of couch and to the window. Shit there is 6-8 inches of snow everywhere and my truck is parked way up on a steep grade drive way. It is beautiful out though, with the eerie blue of morning light before the sun and behind a heaven of clouds. Trees and everything with a horizontal line to them are holding a line of white. I imagine you could take a normal photograph and make it snowy by just adding a few pixels of white to the top of every vertical line. I take a few images to the outside world from inside, nothing fancy, just tourism.
The cold kicks in my calculative part of the brain. I estimate it will take me 3.5 hours to get to Merced and if I'm right I probably have 2-3 hours worth of shoveling to do. I slip on my already soaked running shoes and grab the flat edge shovel laying under the house. I begin shoveling and after about an hour I find I'm getting no where fast. I walk down the hill and locate a snow shovel in front of a neighbor's house and since it looks like someone is awake I knock on the door. Mark, the boyfriend of Susan who is working at the SNRI loans me the shovel. 30 minutes into using the shovel, I bust the handle not to mention a sweat. The rest of the shoveling is done with what left of the shovel, which is equivalent to digging a hole in the ground with a folded up card table. I throw another 1 and half hours at clearing the steep drive way that claimed my chains yesterday and figure that if I don't get on the road now I won't have a chance of making the lecture. I give Mark back the busted shovel and tells me he was actually borrowing it from one of the other neighbors. I offer to pay for it, but he refuses. He looks at the drive, which I'm hoping to repel in vehicle and has a wince of concern in his eye. I tell him my situation and we try to logistisize if my chains should go on the front to provide more front friction and directability to the vehicle or if they should be on the back so as to ass scoot the thing down the hill. We conclude that both of us have always seen chains on the back for rear-drive vehicles and that maybe logic should just be over looked this time. He offers to help me and I ask what he could do, he kind of looks at me with a smile that says he doesn't know, but it's the neighborly thing to say. I tell him that it would be great if he could just look away if I slide down the hill and take out a cottage that would make me feel better. I hike bike up the drive and plop myself in the cab. I slowly maneuver my way down the drive with less slips than going up and all the cottages at the base are still standing. Luckily at the end of the road where it meets the main road its been plowed. I make my way out of the park, nice and slow on top of what I assume is a road, but its hard to tell with all that snow and ice in the way. Luckily the plow has made five to six feet tall bumper lanes out of the road, so if I get a little sloppy I'll just plow back into the lane.
All is going fine, besides sweating profusely and sweating even more profusely every time I see a CHP go by in the other direction. The vehicle I'm driving hasn't been registered in California and well come to thing of it, it hasn't been registered in Montana for a while either. I've got the truck in 4WD with chains on the back and I'm wondering if this condition is going to last the 16 miles out the Southern Gate all the way to Oakhurst when all of a sudden I start to get these weird click noises every 4 seconds or so and then blam! I look in my rear view and there are scraps of metal laying in the street. I look at my dashboard and my odometer and my speedometer appear to not be working. I give the vehicle a little gas and the engine seems fine and I could hear the transmission work through the gears. I know only what I need to know about my vehicle and most of that need to know knowledge has come from fixing other items as they've stopped to work. For instance Tony Collins and I replaced my belt tensioner in October or so, prior to that I didn't even know the truck had a belt tensioner. Being optimistic I figured that the metal hunks behind me were my odometer/speedometer and I could probably do without them. With all the snow and ice on the road I felt I would put myself in more peril to go back and collect them, so I just cruised on. Once the snow let up I took the vehicle out of 4WD and took my chains off. In Oakhurst there was still snow on the land, but not on the roads. I dropped down on Road 603 and 600 through the foothills, their oak trees oddly covered with snow. I drove at unknown speeds for unknown numbers of miles and then on a straight away on road 600:
Thud.
Dead bird.
After pulling off the freeway in Merced is when I first begin to suspect that my odometer/speedometer is not the full story of what has gone missing from my truck. Everytime I slow down to a near stop there is the sound of beer bottles made of metal banging around behind the cab of the truck and it seems that I just don't have the power I usually have from a dead stop. I reach campus, take the second exit to the dirt road that winds around the back to where the science and engineering faculty parking is. There is a sign on the one of the spots "Reserved for Damon Tighe." I pull in and pop out on to my belly. I look up and see a view I've never seen before. I can see right into the connection between my drive chain and my transfer case. Fuck, I'm missing part of transfer case. Oh and I still have my odometer, its hanging out by a few wires, basically a red cog bored in the center of a piece of metal that appears to have liberated itself from the transfer case. I walk onto the bizarre campus; 4 story modern looking buildings sitting outside of Merced in the middle of acres of preserved land. Total isolation. I look out between the bridge of two buildings, my eyes scanning south and no man made objects appear, no houses, no powerlines, no orchards, just green slightly bobbing-rolling low hills, and above them sit wide clouds filtering gray rain down upon the land like what you would seen in Kansas or Eastern Colorado.
I meet with Monica briefly to tell here I need time to clean myself up. We meet in SE 154 and I give my lecture on how to sequence a genome using Sanger, 454, and Solexa technologies. I give a little scouting report on new DNA sequencing technologies and field questions. It's a bit like last year; a grad student has questions, 1 undergrad has lots of questions and Monica has a couple of questions. Its not exactly a rousing discussion, but some of the students appear to be getting something out of it. From watching the students and being one of them (grown up in the public school systems of rural California) I can understand their dispositions. It actually reminds me a little bit of DLSNC up in Portland, where some kids care to be there, but a good portion are wondering why they are there at all. UCM is having problems recruiting and keeping students. The minimum grade point to get in is in the low 2's. It's a great school if you really want to focus on your academics, because the access to professors is great and there really aren't many things to distract you from your studies. The campus isn't even in town and if it was I still think there wouldn't be that much to distract student's from their studies. The quick access to Yosemite is nice, but all in all the school just needs time to grow and to find its own stride.
After the lecture I get in the truck and get about 2 blocks off campus before I realize I'm no longer making it out of 2nd gear or at least as far as power goes. I pull of the road and try to manually go through 1st and 2nd on the automatic transmission. Shit I'm getting nothing and being on the side of the road with an unregistered vehicle, well its not ideal. I shut her down a couple of times and give her a couple of tries and finally she catches back into 2nd gear with the power and all. I drive her back onto campus and then head up to Monica's office to see if I can borrow the phone. Shini (grad student) and Chris (postdoc) help me find a mechanic and a towing service. The truck gets towed for $30 all the way across town. Dwight, the tow truck operator is having a hell of a day. He's already got one vehicle on his truck bed when he picks mine up and then on the way to the mechanic he stops by a guy's house to show him that he's full and will be back for his two vehicles a little later. I tell Dwight what I'm hearing and he makes some speculations. When we get to the mechanic he pops out and looks and gives me that grin of "your not going to want to hear this, but…" He tells me he had a buddy with a 4WD Ranger that the transfer case went out on and well it was a lot. I talk with the Louie the guy running the shop and he says he can get me an estimate on it tomorrow. I call back to the lab and Shini has arranged for me to crash and his place and luckily enough Chris is scheduled to go to Berkeley on Tuesday, so I catch a ride with him in the morning. I call the mechanic once I get to work on Tuesday and he says its going to cost $1700 to fix it. I tell him go for it and then 20 minutes later come to my senses and say, "No I'm going to scrap it." Blue book on my truck is around $2500 and well putting more than 70% of the worth into the truck just doesn't make financial sense. Louie tells me I need to get the truck off his lot then if he isn't going to be able to fix it. Jessica is nice enough to give me her roller skate car for the Wednesday and I go collect all of my items out of my truck and end up selling it to one of the guys at the mechanic shop for $300.
On the drive back I start thinking what owning a vehicle actually costs…especially since I just replaced the window on Friday and had my tires balanced, an oil change and new ball-bearings put in on Saturday. I don't drive that often anyway…in fact in the past 4 months I've driven the truck 5 times. So just for the math fun of it:
Initial investment, buying the truck in 2003 = $5000
Yearly insurance on the truck = $1000 x 5 years = $5000
Registration (if I had it c..$200/year x 5 years = $1000
Gas cost ~ $100/mo x 5 years (x 12months/year) = $6000
Oil change $50/3 mo x 5 years (x 12months/year) = $1000
Other (brakes = $400, window = $200, ball bearings =$300, new tires = $500) = $1400
Monthly parking = $75 x 4 years (x 12 m.. $3600
So grand total cost over 5 years = $23000
Daily cost of having the truck = $23000/(5 years x 365 days) = $12.60
Cost per mile of owning truck = $23000/75,000 miles = $0.31 per mile
I BART and bike to work everyday at $3.10 per direction, $6.20 per day, so right there I'm saving $6.40 per day. At the end of a month that is $192, which is enough for me to rent a car on weekend when I would like to go somewhere.
When I had originally run the above calculation in my head on the way back to the bay area in J's little Geo I though the cost was closer to $30 per day and the savings seemed a little larger. It still however seems worth it to try going vehicle less for a while from a financial point of view.
As Adam Thacher told me on Wednesday, an era has ended with that truck…the good scandalous times of living outside the law. Other noteworthy stats on the truck
Number of times talked law officers out of tickets = 4
Number of traffic violati.. 1 for speeding in Portland (Terwilliger curve on I5)
Number of parking tickets = 1 (Donald Sells)
Number of nights spent sleeping in vehicle = 50 (rough estimate)
Number of nights I've heard wolves while sleeping in vehicle = 2
Number of times woken up in back by law officer = 3
Number of times I've been asked not to sleep in vehicle in work parking lot = 4
Number of times down to Candy Rock = 11
Number of times it hauled everything I own = 2
Number of times slid off road and was happy 4WD could get me out = 2
Number of drives over 10 hours straight = 11
Number of full sheep skins that have resided in bed = 1
Number of wine glasses in bed of vehicle = 2 in a steel case…for emergencies
Number of bourbon flasks legally kept in vehicle = 1 (open containers ok it MT)
Number of Gold pans in truck at all times = 2
Number of months I lived out of my truck = 3
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