I trust you all lived through the Fourth of July this year. If you didn’t, you probably won’t be reading this column In the last couple of days I’ve been noticing complaints by neighbors about the high gas prices in Illinois, which always have been the highest in the Midwest. That got me thinking back to some days of yore. My mind is there most of the time anyway, so it wasn’t much of a stretch.
If you read my last entry in The Voice, I regaled you with a story of my Route 66 road trip with a couple of young guy-type friends and how one of them and I climbed down into the meteor crater in Arizona. Continuing west on our journey with dreams of mass quantities of surfer girls waiting at the end of our route, we passed into a localized gas war waged virtually in the middle of nowhere along 66. I watched the prices get lower and lower at each station, and when I reached one where the gas was 12.9 cents per gallon, I figured that’s it, time to fill ‘er up. I felt good about my purchase and myself until a few miles up where another station was selling gas for 10.9 cents per gallon. Stupid! I told myself. You should have waited. You could have saved 30 cents on that full tank!
Somewhere in the midst of the California desert area, we were blissfully zipping along in our rolling sauna at about 75 miles per hour. Auto air conditioning was still pretty much a luxury extra in those days, mostly found in high-end cars or Good Humor trucks, not lowly Chevys. As we cruised up a gentle hill and around a bend through a mountain pass, an 18-wheeler just ahead was crawling up the incline. I hit the brakes. Old 66 was a two-lane and before I could think about passing the smoke-belching beast, my nice new Chevy began to sputter, then die. I coasted over the crest of the hill and rolled to the side of the highway. Death was caused by the dreaded carburetor vapor lock. I took a look at the thermometer on my sun visor: 114° F. Thank goodness it was dry heat (that’s a joke, by the way). My sissy friend, the one who hadn’t crawled down into the meteor crater, began screaming hysterically that we were all going to die, which would drastically affect our ability to make it with surfer girls.
After slapping him out of hysterics I popped the hood. My other, non-hysterical friend, used cool water from our thermos jug to soak a rag and wrap it around the carb. Then it was sit and wait for it to cool. It was eerie out there in the middle of nowhere, without a sound. No birds, no wind, no other critters, no Golden Arches; just heat waves rising off the baked sand and clay. After about a half-hour and the last of our water, I cranked the engine and it started, which was lucky for us because not a single car, truck, Gila monster, or Wile E. Coyote had passed us by the whole time.
We continued on our westward quest, fortunately spared from becoming buzzard bait, which I didn’t feel would impress the surfer girls on the beaches of Santa Monica. Maybe they’d be impressed by my cheap gas experience.