2009: The Triumphant Exit South

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The following events occured in Feb. 2009, and served as the genesis of my multi-month exile in Georgia.

Currently, I am traveling about in a different vehicle, a relatively modern Honda Civic.
The bad news: It's no Porsche
The good news: It's no Porsche
***

I hadn’t expected to write about this. I bought the wrong car. It broke. I became marooned in the Deep South. Unfortunate, but uneventful.

I was quite proud of my purchase, a 1979 Porsche 924. Although I could barely get it out of the dealership parking lot, it was a rush of excitement. The test drive was my first true experience with a manual transmission, other than some rough attempts with my uncle’s motorcycle. I took it the car to a mechanic for a pre-purchase inspection, and though it needed some attention, things seemed to be in serviceable condition. And then came the negotiation, the first time I had bargained for such a large purchase. I bought it for less than half of the sticker price. In fact, I had lowered my original offer after the first mechanical inspection. This was just after New Years, and I couldn’t have imagined many others interested in such a vehicle fishtailing over the snow.

I even found a mechanic in Janesville who’s worked with many old Porsches and had reasonable rates. The day I dropped my car off for repairs, in fact, there was a 60’s Porsche 911 being restored form a rusty demise.

The day I left town, the car recently fixed, I could not get it to start. It was 5 degrees F, cold even by Wisconsin averages. A jump start from a friend and a bit of idling got me rolling.

Along for the ride was a guy headed to Little Rock to visit family. He was a smoker, so I had him roll down the window on his side. And then one time, it became stuck. It was unusually cold that day, and it did not take long for the chill to creep in. And we subsequently discovered that my heater no longer worked. After a few hours of frozen travel, we stopped at an auto parts store to search for plastic, or at the very least cardboard, something to cover the window to provide a bit of relief.

On a whim, I smacked the driver’s side door. This must have pushed the electrical window contacts close enough, as the window rolled up with ease.

Curiously, the window did not malfunction at all for the next week around Memphis. In fact, I drove around town with no problem, and even had the occasion to take the removable top off, and cruise about. The streets of downtown Memphis are moderately hilly, and it seemed nearly each intersection sat on an incline. With other cars consistently tailing my ass, I quickly developed a finesse of clutch control.

The drive from Memphis to Georgia was quite smooth, and significantly more pleasant that the below freezing jaunt the week before. Since I left Memphis in the early evening, my planned day trip turned into an overnighter.

I was headed to Athens, GA for a few weeks to visit Justin, a friend from Madison who recently moved away. Since my goal was Florida, this was more or less along the way.

Somewhere in Alabama, the highway abruptly ends, and one is left with little indication on how to resume east. After re-treading the same few miles for twenty minutes, I leapt out of the car to relieve myself. The midnight air was a bit cool, but the joy of urination negated it.

With the sole shop in this random town closed, I had little sense of where to head, and drove straight onto a rural road, in the thick darkness. My headlights were of little use, beyond faintly hinting at the yellow dividing line of the road. Fortunately, I came across some highway signs and I found myself back on the path to Georgia

I pulled off to a few inconspicuous parking lots through the night, netting a cumulative four hours of sleep.

At sunrise, I rejoined the highway, groggy though I reasoned I'd be alert enough to drive. About forty miles outside of Atlanta, the car began to vibrate heavily. At first I attributed this to the quirks of a thirty-year old vehicle, but the noise intensified. The shifter was oscillating wildly in my hand, and I finally recognized the need to pull over.

As I straddled the shoulder of the road, the suspension amplifying each ridge of the shoulder, I heard a loud metallic clang and immediately lost all power from the engine. It was as if it disengaged from the rest of the vehicle.

It turns out that I threw a rod, which I learned is one of the worst things to happen to an engine. I had the car towed to a shop in Atlanta, and then needed to find a way to Athens, seventy miles away.

Not to mention finding some way of moving the contents of the car, which included a 100 watt Sunn guitar amp.