I had grandiose plans for the weekend. The weather was pretty ideal for sailing, winds light out of the north-northeast, which produces conditions that preclude any tacking from the mouth of the fingers exit all the way to the outlet of the Brazos Pass and back, basically a two tack day, almost all of the sailing on a broad reach. To top it off, seas offshore were placid, less than a two foot swell running, and I told the commander that Sunday might be a pretty good day to get out there.

Late last week I re-rigged the main with new jiffy reef lines and wanted to try them out in the light air, before I really needed them, so I was excited at the prospect of sailing.

Notice the use of the past tense: "was".....

On Friday, I suffered a horrendous relapse of this stupid Anthrax or whateverthehell I’ve had for the past several weeks and found myself flat on my back through Monday with general malaise, a persistent hacking cough and fever.

Wonderful.

To top it off, the drivers door inside panel of the Jeep decided to detach and slip down, prohibiting the door from closing every time it is shut, and evoking memories of a different vehicle. Bad memories. We’ll get into more of that in a minute……

I just can’t figure it out. I mean, the jeep only has 247,000 miles on it. How can things be falling apart? So the one effort I managed over the past several days was to go outside and shoot some pop rivets into the panel and hang it back on. Problem solved, good for another quarter million miles or so.

I’ve noticed as I’ve progressed into this sailing disease that terrestrial based transportation has become subordinate. In fact, it’s become almost laughably ridiculous. Whenever I stop to consider what driving really means, and who I’m out on the road with, I vow to just one day give it all up and walk.

As if that’s possible.

And this seems pretty universal with the other sailors that I know too. Not the ones that come down to their boats on the weekend clad in the latest yacht-clothing, the ones to whom a boat is another possession in the he-who-dies-with the most toys-wins game, but the hard core  cruiser-sailor types who walk around with the far away look in the eye that tells of places they have been or want to be that only their beloved boat can take them.

I have some friends, Paul and Cheryl who are right now down around Puerto Rico I think, aboard their ketch, Freedoms Hope, who for years drove decrepit old vans and cars, barely capable of starting and getting from point A to point B, Shore side transportation wasn’t a priority.

And of course, the commander drives a truck with about eighty-gazillion miles on it. Like all of us though, he has no intentions on replacing it anytime in the near future. No way….it’s just getting broken in.

In 2000 we bought a 1994 Dodge Grand Caravan for something like 7500 dollars from a used car lot. I don’t know what possessed me to buy it, but it was a blue tonk-rocket, possessed by the devil hisself….The van was a grand piece of junk, and I should’ve had my head examined for buying it in the first place, but self flagellation does not good after the fact.

We had been looking for a van for awhile. D owned a reliable Toyota Corolla and we drove it effortlessly, with no problems for hundreds of thousands of miles until some jerk insisted on backing over the hood with his F-350, crushing it like a peanut under the heel of a size 12 boot. We had a Dodge Dakota too but that’s another story.

I hate used car salesmen.

They start pushing you right away as soon as you step on the lot. Like sharks in a frenzy over fresh meat and blood, they broadside you with a smooth line of crap devised to get you to buy a worthless pile of junk vehicle so that they can ultimately get their daily commission. Lord give us this day our daily commish…..Fast talking excrement-pumps I’m sure there’s a special place in hell for them too. Maybe it’s to be doomed to forever wander the earth, going from used car lot to used car lot, possessing vehicles like the Blue Piece of Junk Dodge Caravan, a used car poltergeist, causing the poor, unsuspecting buyer years of torture and anguish.

I know better now.

The sansabelt clad, penny loafer wearing, greasebag used car salesman assured us that the vehicle was a 1995 model, and after a short test drive we decided to buy it. When we started the paperwork though, we discovered that the thing was NOT a 1995 Blue Piece of Junk van, it was a 1994 Blue Piece of Junk Van. The bank had already loaned us the money, so in order to just get on with the whole thing, I insisted that the dealership give us a bumper to bumper one year warranty.

And it was a good thing I did.

As soon as we brought the blue demon home, we started having trouble with it. First the front end started making weird noises, clattery ominous noises anytime you went over a bump, like the whole transaxle was going to fall out. We had to take it to a mechanic one cold and rainy night to have the CV joints replaced, an act that caused the dealership to gnash their teeth and threaten not to pay for. However, this didn’t make a bit of difference, the freakin’ thing just kept making more and more noise. Finally the entire transaxle disintegrated and was changed out. Then the noise finally stopped.

Soon after this, it started having random starting and idling problems and would die at intersections when the temperature was hot, not to be coaxed back to life. And when isn’t the temperature around here hot? It took around three months for the shop to figure this one out, finally replacing an obscure and inaccessible computer module, thus solving the problem. By this time I was getting pretty sick of the van, and the sleazy dealership, whose solution was to sell us another, more expensive piece of junk, so in perverted disgust I decided that we’d just keep the wicked thing. What else could I do? We were already into the first year of payments, and I figured that we were stuck with this lemon.

Then the warranty ran out.

Just about that time, the sliding door started to fall off at certain times when you opened it up. The track had rotted out the back end, allowing the front roller on the door to fall through sending the big heavy bastard slamming into the ground. Then the rear hatch gas struts broke off, and the rear door wouldn’t open anymore. And then, I got so mad at the thing one day, that I slammed the drivers door hard, the hinges broke off jamming it in the door hole, never to be opened again.

Perhaps the most excruciating experience was the serpentine drive belt. It’s a belt about ten feet in circumference that snakes sinuously around nine pulleys and accessories, driving everything including the water pump, flywheel, alternator, power steering pump, air conditioning compressor, smog control pump and other things that run with indistinct and occult operations, keeping them all alive and functioning. Around about half its path there is little room to even get a finger wedged between the pulleys and radiator. And it took a freakin’ schematic to even begin to figure out which pulleys it went over, and which pulleys it went under. If that belt ever comes off, God help you, the vehicle has about ten minutes before everything shuts down.

Whenever water splashed up from below, the serpentine drive belt would fly off, leaving you just enough time to find the nearest parking lot, or hopefully the nearest taller-mechanico to charge you ten bucks to put it back on. Because if you had to put it back on yourself…..what a giant nightmare.

We lost the serpentine belt no less than a dozen times over the course of our wretched ownership of the Blue Piece of Junk Van. The most memorable occasion was on the way to Brownsville when an unexpected, sudden turd-floater came pouring down. Immediately and without warning we found ourselves driving through water up to the doors on the tonk-rocket. I was praying and cursing at the same time, creeping slowly, hoping to find a place to pull over till the rain stopped and the water receded and dried up a bit when POW-THUD! The belt disengaged. No power steering, no nothing, just a limited amount of time to find a place to pull over. We finally found a spot in the parking lot of a “Dollar General” store on Boca Chica, which had become an island, and I set about the task of reinstalling the belt. After about an hour or so, with black grease all the way to my elbows, and everyone around me now well educated in new and unusual curse words and phrases, I finally managed to get the evil belt back on the pulleys and somehow we managed to clear out of there, miraculously making it home where I promptly passed out on the sofa with a beer in greasy hand, still mumbling vague and phantom curse at the Blue Piece of Junk Van.

One day I went to open the hood to check the oil (something I recommend doing annually) and the hood latch handle pulled off, the wire just broke, right at the root. So now I had to open up the hood with a pair of needle nosed pliers and a screwdriver, applied just so between the grill and the hood.

Another time, the muffler fell off, and so I wired it back up with a piece of a coat hanger till I could get home and TIG weld the bracket. Soon the interior began to fall apart too, with random pieces of the dashboard coming loose to ultimately be lost in the vortex of items and other parts, tubes, hoses and belts all abandoned inside. I had fixed many problems, TIG welded the broken door track so that it now somewhat worked, and even got a broomstick of the proper length to hold up the rear hatch, because it was impossible to remove the broken pneumatic struts without further damaging the hatch. But every time I chased one problem down, two more would rear their ugly heads. The air conditioner quit, the jump seat broke off, the rear quarter panel fell off…..it was a litany of never ending breakdowns and breakoffs. The most recent was the sliding door, a problem which had reincarnated itself in a slightly different form, again. Although it now stayed on track, it had developed a penchant for tripping the latch, causing it to not shut properly. Each time it pulled this trick, I had to use a screwdriver to pop the latch back open, gently re-shutting the door, holding my breath until I heard the faint telltale click that indicated the door was properly secured.

The final straw came when Kelani broke her arm and we were rushing her to the hospital. At the emergency room I swung the sliding door open and D hurried her inside. Sure enough, when I went to close the door there in the emergency room unloading zone, the thing wouldn’t latch. In frustration, I pried up the lock mechanism and rammed it shut.

The door stuck in place as if welded, never to be opened again.

We finally paid off the Blue Piece of Junk Dodge Grand Caravan van, and by then I figured we’d have a helluva time selling it, and probably wouldn’t get more than about a hundred dollars trade in value on it, so perversely, I decided to drive the sh!t out of it until it died, and then maybe just push it unceremoniously into the bay. It certainly didn’t deserve a proper burial.

So, for the remainder of the time we owned the Blue Piece of Junk van we all had to pile in and out the passenger door, a sight I imagine was a bit more than amusing to most folks. I could just hear their comments. “Hey Elvira…didja see those hillbillies in that blue Piece of Junk van? They all got out of the passenger door! What a piece of sh!t.”

By now, the van had decided that it simply wouldn’t just die, no it decided that instead it would just fall apart till nothing was left. That’s when we decided to buy the jeep and I thankfully parked the Blue Piece of Junk van, hoping it would just rot away. Soon the tires were flat and the van was covered in a fine haze of salt spray and sand out in front of our beach house. Periodically I would start it up, air up the tires and drive around hoping it would die in front of some rich yuppies house, where I would strip off all of the ID and let it become someone else’s problem.

No such luck.

We finally sold the Blue Piece of Junk van for something like 500 bucks. We told the guy all of the problems, but he wanted it anyway, and I sure was glad to see the thing go.

I did hold my breath though as he was driving off. The sky was heavy with low clouds, and the first sprinkles of rain were spitting from the steely grey skies. I hoped the he wouldn’t hit any puddles on the causeway.