Thank you, Harry!

Dear reader, the object above is a tiny piece of lead (shown far larger than actual size) called a "crankshaft key" or "flywheel key" (or to some a Woodruff Key!) for a push lawn-mower. The little part sacrifices itself when when mower hits an unmovable object: rock, stump, Godzilla's little toe. It shears in half, along its longest dimension, to keep the mower from bending internally and breaking permanently.

Now why on Earth am I talking about such a thing? 

It's the first DIY job on a motor I ever did, with the encouragement of Harry Delolian, our neighbor. He was the son of Armenians who had fled the genocide in the Ottoman Empire and he was one of the most resourceful human beings I've ever known. Harry kept both a giant Ham-Radio antenna and the fuselage of a single-engine airplane in his tiny yard, which earned him weirdo points with adults and cool points with 1970s kids.

Harry showed me how to fix our very expensive Toro mower, my dad's pride. I'd used it to cut a neighbor's grass, as I did for several folks in order to earn model-airplane money. Dad was livid when I "broke" the mower, because dad, for all his great qualities, was no DIYer. To him a tool box consisted of a pair of slip-jaw pliers, a claw hammer, and one 16D nail about 4" long. Plus lots of cussing and sweating. If those items would not fix something, it was time to "call some guy."

Dad was ready to load the Toro into the Pontiac's trunk but Harry waved that off. "Joey," he said to me, "go to Lorraine Hardware and buy a crankshaft key for a Toro." As I walked down the street I kept saying "crankshaft key," so I would not look the fool in front of the serious and slightly judgemental men at that emporium of all things holy and perfect. I preferred (and still do) a hardware store to a church, since I think God meant for us to fix things, as part of some inscrutable and larger plan, not sit around with people we don't know well while singing poorly.

In any case and for under a dollar, I soon had the part. Harry pulled the top cover off our mower, thus ushering me into a realm of metallic mysteries. He talked me through every bit of the work, something he'd probably yell at kids in boot camp (he was an Army DI who had served in The Battle of the Bulge and as a Recon Scout in Korea).  The tiny part dropped right into place, and as soon as the Toro was screwed back together, it started and ran as well as new.

I thought of Harry the other day when I broke the crankshaft/flywheel key on our 13-year-old Craftsman self-propelled. When the mower would not start, I knew right away what I had done and said "thanks, Harry!" Two YouTube videos later, I knew how to find my mower's engine number and how to change the key. But it was Harry's hand that guided me. Amazon, not Lorraine (long and sadly closed) supplied the Briggs and Stratton key (I ordered 2, because things happen). Price now? $2.49 each. But imagine the cost of taking a mower to the shop.

The old Craftsman fired up on the first pull. That it still runs after 13 seasons is also testimony to Harry's annual reminders to change oil, swap spark plugs, clean air filter, sharpen blades, and keep the deck clean above and below.

Now don't you want to go fix something? Don't be like another neighbor who filled the gas tank with the motor oil supplied with the new mower (of course not reading the owner's manual). That new mower never, ever ran right.

 So fix something instead of breaking it!

It's God's tractorpunk plan for you. See you in the yard on Sunday.

Of Desert Rats and Deep Time

Winter and now Spring flee before my calendar. Concurrently, my posts here have been a bit thin on the ground, as thin as trees in the high deserts of northern Arizona. 

We have been there for a short visit, one that somehow seems longer. I would love for time to always pass in this manner. My wife and I have a theory that when we travel, time slows down. We do not go fast enough for time-dilation to occur, except psychologically.

I also have a particular theory about this vacation. The desert itself has something to do with our altered sense of time’s passage. Without driving all that far in a rented Mustang convertible (highly recommended) we have seen many varied arid and semi-arid landscapes in just a few days. Save for the scarcity of water, one might not expect such diversity in the same state. We visited the Granite Dells near Prescott, the scrubby and arid grasslands around Williams, the magnificent rock temples of the Grand Canyon, the primordial landscape of Petrified Forest National Park, the Ponderosa Pine-Forest above Flagstaff, the red-rock coffee-pots, broken arrows, and Snoopy Rock (kinda-sorta) of Sedona.

I loved the Western desert the first time I saw it, outside Phoenix, going on 25 years ago. At that point, I was a young writing teacher with big ideas about a technological revolution in the classroom, at the annual meeting of the CCCC in Phoenix. Now I approach retirement having slowed, marveling at the haste and earnestness of that younger self. The revolution occurred and computing is ubiquitous. Students still struggle to make the transition to writing academic prose, albeit with more distractions and new sources of dopamine addiction. Sometimes the Internet, so wild a frontier in 97, seems a desert and not a majestic one.

Now where did a quarter-century fly off to?

This post cannot answer that, but in an odd manner, returning to the desert did.

We have met decidedly eccentric Arizonans who live under a vast sky with ravens, jackrabbits, Bighorn sheep (saw one!), elk, rattlesnakes, and coyotes. They (human and animal) know something the rest of us don’t. Arizona’s “desert rats” share some inside joke about how one lives in harmony in an unforgiving but majestic place, under all that sky.

Could I learn how to be in on their joke? I doubt it; I do not have enough decades left on this rock. Soon enough I was looking forward to going home, humidity and all. By the time we got to Sedona, our last stop, my favorite place was the Ace Hardware. I was looking forward to working in the garden and seeing the place we live. Something in me changed, and I didn't feel the "further" urge on my wanderlust 20s.

What did I learn? Watching how other visitors react interests me a great deal. Silence, often. Now past (thank God) a stage in my life where I condemned what Edward Abbey called “industrial tourists,” I instead enjoy talking to all sorts of folks on holiday. Even if their idea of paradise is a packaged resort somewhere, I get a window into their world.

Reactions to deserts particularly prove educational. Nan and I chase ghosts of Puebloan cultures while others rush through ancient homelands, pulling 40’ long RVs into fast-food places. I admit, their choices no longer disgust me, as they once did. I don’t even mind a McDonald’s cheeseburger from time to time, mostly for nostalgic reasons. Out of my own discomfort about time passing, I feel some empathy for those who want the security of hauling every conceivable item from home along. The desert unnerves me, just beyond the town limits. Night falls so fast and utterly. But it also draws me like a magnet. Was it Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom who told someone that he liked the Spanish Meseta because he thought that was what he looked like, inside?

The flat expanses between Flagstaff and Winslow (where you can indeed stand on a corner) might be an excuse to put the pedal down on I-40, since old 66 is gone, the ghost of the Mother Road buried under the new superslab. Yet even that open and ostensibly monotonous landscape holds old tales, even old civilizations.

Like the vanished swamps that became the Petrified Forest, the Pueblo ruins of the Sinaguan people teach lessons about time that can terrify or comfort. The night after visiting The Petrified Forest, where I actually had two mild bouts of vertigo because of the altitude as well as the distortion of distances, I could not go to sleep. I thought I was about to stop breathing. The vista of 230 million years of history makes one less than a speck on top of a speck.

Luckily, some saline spray to open desert-dry nostrils restored me.

At Walnut Canyon, one of the Park Service’s final sign boards notes how the Hopi and Navajo believe that “migration is not abandonment.” When life changed the Sinaguan people moved on. A theory holds that they merged with other local tribes, and some current traditions reach back, many centuries, to those old and sacred pueblos.

Compared to the mineralized tree-trunks two hours away, the Sinaguan people were here yesterday. One day something happened. We know a drought sizzled for five years, and dry-land farming cannot survive that. A Hopi man I met described his corn, beans, and squash farming. His photos revealed a very canny way to irrigate from saved water in the monsoon season and from snowfall.His son is working to teach young Hopi how to garden as their ancestors did, to insure food that is healthy and shares a spiritual connection to their ancestors.

That mission, not purported vortexes of energy above Sedona’s T-Shirt shops and celebrity mansions, sticks most with me. The Permian rock that looms above the town will see the Earth’s next Ice Age. We won’t likely be here then.

That continuity of growing food and remembering one’s ancestors may be all we can ask for.  Maybe, all we need.

Get busy with that.