Repair

My stepfather fancied himself a revolutionary. Che Guevara posters, old stories about the SDS, Irish music. In the days before the Berlin wall fell, he wore a big Soviet watch and organized Wobblies when there were no Wobblies to organize. Mention the election in Chile´ or union corruption and you could be in for an angry shouting match whether you agreed with him or not. I once worked him into a lather by pointing out that Marx and Engels were never workers, that their sympathy for the working class was born from the luxury of philosophizing and not the callouses of hard work. The angrier he got, the more I exaggerated their wealth. He could be fun like that.

He came to Monterey a bum, sleeping under the wharf and drunk. That he had gotten sober was a blessing and a curse. He had never gotten around to imagining how a revolutionary drunk might live when he was no longer drunk. No longer homeless, no longer romantically marginal. He did not want to live in the suburbs, have a real job, or wear a suit but sobriety and a relationship seemed to demand of him a change in things.

It was when it came to vehicles that this conflict was most obvious and eventually comical. Ray was a sucker for anything under $1000 especially if it had the kind of character he was looking for. As far as I could tell, character meant either not running or not running well enough that it could ever be mistaken for a practical, apathetic yuppy car. Revolutionaries drove MGs whose fuel pump cut out on left hand turns, Lincoln Continentals the size of small boats, VW vans with perpetually self-destructing engines, Ford Pintos wrested from the tow truck as the cops were scraping them off the street for impoundment.

When he and I and my mom first moved in together, Ray took it upon himself to teach me the fine art of carburetor rebuilding. It was his way of establishing a connection between us; we would rebuild the carburetor of the Yamaha motorcycle rusting in the driveway and I would have it to use. There were two problems: I did not want a vehicle and Ray did not actually know much about rebuilding carburetors.

I have since built and rebuilt many different engines and have never learned to love carburetors. All those small parts—jets and Venturi bowls, dashpots, convoluted passageways. For awhile though, I could do a California rebuild on a Subaru carburetor in about ten minutes. A California rebuild involves revving the engine very high then jamming the air intake with the heel of a hand or the surface of a rubber mallet and letting the resultant intense vacuum suck out any gunk in the passageways of the carb. Then I would remove the accelerator pump, a small piston that increased fuel flow under heavy load, and flex its rubber skirt to get a better seal.

But that was not the sort of future I saw for myself at sixteen, watching Ray mumble and fuss over a table full of jets and coffee cans. It did not help that Ray's method of working on mechanical things involved lots of confusion and frustrating outbursts. The fact was that, though he was a very good carpenter, he was not much of a mechanic.

You could tell by his hands, which were scarred and stumpy, battered and almost mesmerizing in the their paw-like bluntness. They were not hands meant to handle delicate things, as Ray was not someone good with anything delicate. Still I see now that he was trying to share something that became important to me, the skill to tune and fix, tinker with the little things upon which our physical existence depends. Long after the dogmatic leftist politics left me, this is something that stuck. We live in a world of carburetors and three tab roofing, LED screens blown fuses, rototillers and welded things. To get one's hands dirty is to dissipate the dependence upon abstractions, to take responsibility for our physical selves. I did not realize this then.

On a brutally cold eastern Oregon autumn, during which I was probably about 24, the sky was grey with threat of snow but the air was knife-like, the roads covered with icy crust, the roadside vegetation drifted over. The kind of days when the cows bunch along the fence line for the hay truck and the diesel lines of tractors and trucks freeze up with fuel that has not yet been winterized. I was living then out of the back of an 84 Subaru, a durable, economical car with enough traction to get around in the woods without breaking the wallet at the pump. There were a good number of years where I could measure my possessions in multiples of Subaru loads, usually one or one and a half. The half consisting of books and skis stored in friends' garages and basements.

It was the end of the season for working in the woods, and leaving the mountains ahead of the first snow storm my Subaru had refused to start. It was in the driveway of a cabin I had access to and, after cranking and cranking to no avail, it was too cold to even open the hood so I went back in and started a fire. The next day I had it towed the 30 or so miles to the garage in John Day where the mechanic looked at it with undisguised confusion. A week later I returned for it and managed to drive to the other side of town before it died again, taking my $150 with it.

My friend Larry came down from The Dalles with his truck, and we hauled the Subaru there on a trailer over endless miles of whitescaped earth. There was a mechanic then named Bob who had worked on Subarus since they were first imported. We towed my car to his shop and told him what was wrong. He opened the hood, removed the distributor cap, threw it in the trash with a comment about crappy aftermarket parts. Five minutes later I was on my way.

It was at that moment that I understood to live cheaply and with little margin in the boonies, I was going to have to rethink my relationship with cars. I was going to have to not ever let this sort of thing repeat itself, no matter what I might think of automobiles in the abstract.

I think back on when I did not care to know how to rebuild carburetors, nail up siding, install a garbage disposal and I remember that I was 16. I wanted to write poems and hike for months at a time, own very little. I wanted to live a life of the mind, to have few complicated things requiring complicated repair. It was a good idea, but if I were to be a monk I would be the kind put to work making sandals and robes for my brethren. Whatever there would be to analyze and repair, obsess over in that kind of work would occupy me no less than teasing out the electrical problems in my truck. Either way I still write poetry.

When little else in life makes sense to me, I install windows, build ethanol stills, repack wheel bearing grease. Do things with my hands. My left middle finger is misshapen from the day I grabbed a still spinning wood carving blade on an angle grinder. My left thumb has a long scar from when, at five, I tried to saw a board at my friend Elliot's with a hand saw. My right eye socket is dented from the curvature of a driveline that fell on it. There are too many other little scars from screwdriver mishaps and bashed knuckles to count.

A year or so after the distributor incident with my Subaru, I rebuilt the engine from top to bottom with a Leatherman tool, a handful of crappy sockets, a borrowed torque wrench. The Subaru 1800 engine has an unusual. horizontally-opposed design, with two symmetrical halves to its block. At the crucial point of reconstruction, the halves must be joined with a very delicate attention to torque. Just a bit too much, and the engine will seize and die the first time it is cranked. Just a bit too much and the crankshaft will knock around and bash holes into everything. The difference between too much and too little was explained to me by my machinist. He said that I needed to torque the bolts just so that I could feel the crankshaft seize for one quarter turn before the internal friction heated everything into place.

I got it right, but only after realizing that the torque figures in the manual were incorrect. It was the little motion of turning the shaft, letting it get into muscle memory the way the machinist had shown me, that prevented a huge disaster. I wrote the manual producer a letter explaining their error. I had learned to think, at least briefly, in thousandths of an inch. 150,000 miles later that car still lives on the streets in Bend.

I heard recently that Ray is drinking again, shooting dope, left town for Florida. I hope these are just rumors, but if not I hope that whatever he drove down south actually got him there. Perhaps it is a diminution, or a conceit, but these small things I can do with my own hands are also my politics. They are my way of cutting the world down to size, of being useful to family and friends, of increasing my own sovereignty. I think he would understand that by now.