The Joy Begins When the Wrench Stops Turning

Yesterday, while changing spark plugs on our 2006 Honda, I said to no one in particular, “I hate this!” I had dropped a magnetic tool that lifts plugs out of the deep wells in the engine’s head. The tool clattered into the inky depths of the engine compartment, to lodge itself about 1" beyond my reach. Even with the car on the lift, it took me 30 minutes to get the magnet as well as the tool that tried to retrieve it, after I dropped that too. 

Yet would I do it again? Or call some guy?

I would do it again myself in a heartbeat. Here’s why.

I look forward to reading Matthew Crawford’s book Why We Drive. I met him a few times and talked mechanic-talk when his wife Beth worked at my university. Our philosophy about being gearheads and DIYers is similar. I think he has a Distributist bent, as I do. We seem to both disdain US corporate capitalism, where billionaires own most things and pay the least, as well as communist ideals of "workers controlling the means of production," which so often means a different elite concentrates ownership of capital while duping those workers. As I currently understand Distributism, we all ARE the means of production. In an ideal world of this economic model, we'd all build our own cars or have 100 co-ops doing this to achieve an economy of scale. We'd grow our own food and build our own houses. We'd do a lot by barter.

Think Amish with more tech, though the Amish I've met are very savvy capitalists.

But back to DIY work. Matt enjoys working on vehicles more than I do. That said, we share a passion for knowing our machines. Modern vehicles are fiendishly complex, designed to force us back to the dealership’s overpriced service department. Yet there exists a sweet spot between the Model A Ford's knuckle-busting simplicity, with its concurrent lack of safety and environmental features, and today's computers on wheels. For most of these vehicles from the 1940s-early 2000s, most wrench-turners can do routine repairs and service at home with the help of the parts store and YouTube.  

When I'm done and things work well, I then enjoy the result. My passion to do more gets rekindled.

Yes, I have the enormous advantage of a full tool kit and an automotive lift. But I didn't start that way, when Uncle Carlyle and I first changed the oil on my original 1974 Buick Apollo: we used ramps, a catch pan, shop rags, and a small set of wrenches.  Today, oil-changes are easy for me and often I have them finished in 15 minutes. I feel great satisfaction, too, knowing I used the best components for less than a quick-lube shop would charge me for hasty work and bargain-grade lubricant.

You may have a vehicle that is very complex; these are modern vehicles that I've yet to have break on me, though my wife's 2017 Mini has a control panel that terrifies me. It's a $9500 fix, but for now, it is under warranty. For these complex cars and trucks, feature-creep that means every system on a vehicle gets monitored by sensors and subject to proprietary software that costs thousands of dollars, if a company will even share it (not all states have right-to-repair laws). In consequence, a clerk at Advance Auto, while selling me a battery for a car, told me they no longer can help with most vehicles after the 2013 or 14 model year; they have to be taken to a dealership to have the computer reset.

That's far beyond my skills, though I can read and reset Check-Engine codes with a 20-buck OBD II scanner and my smart phone. We do what we can, but overall, I'd still purchase the most minimalist technology I can to avoid the expenses of dealer-mandated service.

I want to invite each of you reading to this fix something instead of saying "call some guy!" My old man, whose tool kit consisted of a claw hammer and a 16D nail, would say that constantly when his two tools could not fix something. I refused to comply with his orders regarding repairs. After my Uncle showed me how to change my own oil, dad told me to have "some guy" at an auto shop check after me. I told him "hell no."

Now I want to start a handyman service called "Some Guy Repairs." Our motto: Call Some Guy Right Now!

You may well break the item you try to fix the first time. You might get it half-way right. You may lose parts. But as a colleague at work always reminds me, "don't let perfect be the enemy of good."

Start with a simple item; I don't recommend you trying to repair a home HVAC system or your car's brakes, but you might fix the cord on an electric fan or figure out how to change your own tire, so you can take the flat to the shop instead of having the vehicle towed.

You will end up with dirty hands but a sense of accomplishment.

Rock and Sun: Desert Solitaire at Age 61

 

When did I first run into Edward Abbey? My 20s, certainly: a dangerous age to make his acquaintance. Had life gone in a different direction, I might have blundered out into the desert and died there. Lots of young men get tempted to do stupid things after reading certain authors.

Nearly 40 years later, nearly the same age as Abbey when he passed, I found myself in his neck of the desert, the place he most felt at home. In Prescott Arizona's Old Sage Bookshop, a copy of Desert Solitaire appeared. My wife spotted it, thank God, because I'd given my old paperback away and had been hankering to read the book again while we were in the West. I wanted to see if Abbey could cast his spell on me a second time.

The essays in the 1968 book, set during Abbey's time as a ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 50s, opened up for me in a way they'd never earlier. Partly I've lived a lot more, and partly I have become familiar with authors Abbey notes well, from Joyce to Chuang-Tzu. The man Abbey, at least his younger, angry self who did this writing, did not escape my censure so easily. He was in his late 20s and early 30s when he did this writing, and he comes off as a bit of womanizing misanthrope, a guy we might call a Doomer today, eager to see technological civilization collapse. Easy to claim that at such an unripe age, I thought; one broken ankle and your post-collapse adventures would end forever. The naive enthusiasm and egotism that leads him to get trapped in a side-canyon that nearly kills him remind me of the antics of the Beats; they too have sent more than a few young men to their dooms. I'm looking at you, Chris McCandless and Timothy Treadwell.

Yet Abbey redeems himself, in the prose he crafts and in his ultimate, hard-earned humility. His epiphanies of being so small in so vast and uncaring a landscape make an older reader nod in recognition, something a selfish 20-something could never do.

And the writing! Kerouac would never type a sentence like this:

Turning Plato and Hegel on their heads I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

The beautiful indifference of wild nature, moving according to its own calendar, redeems Abbey and his essays, published in the rebellious year of 68. Time does that; petroglyphs from 700 years ago look permanent, until one grapples with the deep-time of a 600-million-year-old vista where the artists put down their marks. As Abbey learns these truths, he's at his best when confronting a stubborn rattlesnake or when the side-canyon temporarily defeats him and he breaks down crying, facing starvation, then mummification, in a spot he cannot escape. Nature repeatedly slaps him silly, and he learns from the harsh lessons. Kerouac and Neal Cassady never learned; Kerouac died a sad drunk, and the same year as Abbey published the  book, Cassady's body was found beside a railroad track in Mexico, dead from exposure following a party. Neither Beat made it out of their 40s. They had raced across the desert in a car they drove to pieces, saying they were "digging" it but really only digging the sound of their own unceasing voices. They should have shut up for a while and listened to their friend Gary Snyder. Or Abbey.

Conversely, Abbey spends a lot of time in this book being quiet. After all, he's alone for much of it. To whom is he going to speak? A Prickly Pear?

If you do not know Abbey's fiction, save them and start here first, but read with care if you are still young or impressionable. The book spawned a cult following for many reasons, some good. Abbey and the writers he knew and influenced, like Terry Tempest Williams, in turn changed the nation's ideas about the sanctity of untouched wilderness. Even as what he called "industrial tourism" thrives, we rarely hear any longer calls to dam the Grand Canyon or run paved roads into every remaining tract of wilderness. The Park Service is not perfect, but it stands a little closer now than in the late 50s to Abbey's vision in its "leave no trace" philosophy. Tourism helps to fund preservation.

Perhaps I'm overly charitable in a time when a new and global threat to civilization has arisen. The pressures on us grow every year with additional gigatons of carbon dioxide. We might end up, in a few centuries, with little more to show for our folly than postmodern petroglyphs beside drowned coastal cities. 

I would like to leave a better world to the bright and eager young people I teach. Their children will hate and curse our selfishness and laziness, as bitterly as Abbey did at  his bleakest moments.

I am uncertain if I will read Desert Solitaire again. I don't have another 40 years, but one other fact remains clear. The past 40 mark how far I have come from the angry young man who, like young Abbey, felt it best for a rotten and rapacious civilization to fall.

Now I want us to make it. Not for my short-lived self, for a human nation sure to fall some day, or even for an undying God. I'm a Deist and know now in my bones that God, who blessed us with this lovely world, does not meddle. I learned that from Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. We are free to wreck or thrive. God made chaos and put evil inside us too. Get behind me, Satan, you sham, you lie. Loser in the basement, you don't exist, but we have hell enough in each of us to make a hell right here.

Why keep hoping we'll endure and do better? Hope makes one happy. Even if it is all just rock and sunlight, we have others around us. Human contact is sacred, too, in whatever time each of us has.