Almost
Heaven
© 2011 Tor
Pinney - All Rights Reserved
Two angels in one day;
not quite heaven,
but about as close as you're gonna' get in Nitro, West
Virginia.
|
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"Almost heaven, West
Virginia..."
-- John Denver, "Country Roads" |
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~
Great song, but I'm
pretty sure he wasn't
singing about Nitro. Nitro, West Virginia can be one lousy place to break down, especially when
you’re driving a 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon, a vintage German
vehicle that most mechanics these days won’t touch with a
10-foot pole. Still, considering I was traveling from Florida to
Montana I suppose I ought to at least give thanks that the old
girl
died in front of the only VW parts & service shop within God
knows how many hundreds of miles - not that it did me much
good.
I was in Nitro to get a
new side-view mirror for the van. A sales guy in
an auto parts store off I-70 had told me about this shop
that specialized in VW's, and
a phone call confirmed they had the part I needed. So I detoured 10 miles to get it. The part was
good, the price was right and I put it on, but when I went
to start up the van and get going, the engine
began sputtering and backfiring as if it was only running on
half its cylinders or wasn’t getting enough gas. It barely had enough power to
roll forward in 1st gear, and I had to burn the
clutch to do even that. Nothing I did made it any better,
which isn’t surprising since I’m about as proficient in auto
mechanics as I am in quantum physics.
I was, however, 30-feet
from a self-professed Volkswagen expert. Two, actually;
Keith & Keith, father and son. At first they took turns poking around
my engine in between their scheduled repair jobs and
walk-in customers, but neither of them could figure out the
problem. Then they stopped trying. Their shop was booked
solid; they were just too busy. I’d have to wait my turn –
a week, maybe more, before they could work on it, plus however long it then took to
get whatever repair parts were needed. Damn! Meanwhile, the
owner really wanted me to leave, but how could I? I was
stuck, and he was stuck with me. In the end he agreed to let
me stay in the van in a far corner of an adjacent lot until
we could figure something out.
What a bummer! I’d been
on a roll, happily heading west for the summer, momentum
built towards a new adventure in my new old VW campervan.
This sudden breakdown stopped me like an iron fist. WHAM! I
was seriously crestfallen; felt cheated, imprisoned. Hell,
I was imprisoned, broken down in a hot, dirty car lot
in the middle of nowhere, West Virginia, sandwiched in between a noisy
2-lane truck route and a noisier railroad track
with trainloads of coal rumbling
through day & night, blasting their damned whistles at the intersection a block away.
Try sleeping through THAT at 2:00 in the morning. And did I mention
it was HOT? This was a campsite from hell. It really, really
sucked.
I spent a couple of days
this way, frustrated, pissed off, distressed and depressed,
internally railing against my fate. It all seemed so…
intolerable. I actually shut my eyes tight a couple of times
hoping that when I opened them I’d find myself waking up
from a good night's sleep in some rural Interstate rest area,
ready to hit the road again, Nitro WV just a bad dream
rapidly vaporizing.
But then something
did happen that turned it all around. After suffering so much
anguish to no avail, I had a moment of clarity and that
saved me, opening the door to an amazing change in my
circumstances. Here’s what happened:
I suddenly realized I had
to accept the way it was. That's it. Sounds kind of simple-minded,
I know, but think about it. I'd been fuming and
fretting and, well, suffering for 2 days over a situation I
couldn't do anything about. How dumb is that? I had actually
just been learning about this very thing in an
Eckhart Tolle audio book, and now it seemed The Universe
was putting this student to the test. Tolle, an
enlightened intellectual and a brilliant spiritual teacher, suggests that if you
can’t change an unwanted circumstance and can’t remove
yourself from it, then the only sane thing to do is fully
accept things as they are at that moment. Well, I couldn’t
leave my current predicament – I
was living in the van for the summer and had nowhere else to
go – and I couldn’t change it - I’d tried repeatedly for the
past couple of days, bugging the overworked mechanics ad
nauseam. So I needed to accept it. That was the
key. By no longer resisting - even though I didn’t like the
situation I was in - I might at least take the pain out of it. It’s a
useful mindset and a valuable spiritual lesson, but as you’ll see it can also be much more.
When this revelation
struck me I stopped what I was doing, closed my eyes, took a
few long, deep breaths and consciously allowed it to be. This is where I am; this is how it
is. No judgment, no labeling good or bad, just a
statement of fact and my sincere acceptance of it. Then I took it a step further by
affirming my belief that all of Creation is as it should be right now and
- and this
is my own take on things, not necessarily Tolle's - that It
was taking care of me. (This notion harkens back to my
Time of Miracles.) So I surrendered
my present situation to it, or rather to the
Creator Itself, That Which Is, The Universe - call it what you like. I couldn’t
deal with it, so I admitted as much and handed it over. I
call this 'practicing the art of surrender.' I've had some
astonishing experiences with it over the years and I was about
to have another one.
The first thing that
happened there in Nitro was I instantly felt better. This
huge weight of helpless impotence I’d been carrying around
simply lifted. That alone was worth the price of admission,
and I can honestly say that if I'd had to tough it out where
I was for another week or two I'd have been OK with it. Not
thrilled, but OK.
But I guess I'd learned
the lesson sufficiently and didn't have to stay after
school, because literally about a minute later this battered
old VW van happened by with a young, long-haired hippie
at the wheel. I was standing by my van’s open engine
compartment still adjusting to my new & improved state of mind
when I noticed him. Some part of me recognized the kid as a
kindred spirit (I was a long-haired hippie when I was his
age - hell, I still am) and his van as a sister ship, so I
half smiled & waved without giving it much thought. To my
surprise he pulled over, jumped out and walked right up to me.
“Havin’ problems,” he
drawled, leaning over to inspect the engine? I told him what
was wrong. “Hmmm, maybe I can
help. This is what I do.
Vanagons. I know these things inside out," he continued
without a pause. "Ain’t nothin’
about ‘em I ain’t fixed a hundred times. Got my first VW bus
when I was 16 and been messing with ‘em ever since. I ain’t
braggin’, but I probably know Volkswagen vans better’n anyone
within 3 states of here. Pretty amazing I found you, though.
My place is waaay out in the country, up a mountain. I
hardly ever come into Nitro. Can't stand the place. Haven't
been here in months. Just came for a part Keith happens to
have in stock. Yep, you just got lucky, man. Hey, we oughta'
replace these fuel lines on general principle. Damned if
some of 'em don't look original...” During this nonstop monolog,
he was poking at various engine parts, wiggling hoses,
prodding wire connections. “Well, this air intake boot is at
least part of the problem,” he announced, bending back the
old rubber hose to reveal a
large, open
split in its belly. “It's supposed to hold vacuum, you know. I can’t believe you made it this
far with this thing. Definitely gotta’ replace it.”
I was speechless. Two
professional Volkswagen mechanics hadn’t been able to figure
out what’s wrong with my van after 2 days of intermittent fiddling, and
here this tie-dyed hippie kid comes along and in about 2
minutes flat solved the problem, or least made a good
start. And the
timing of his arrival was not lost on me, either, coming so
immediately in the wake of my surrender. That's how it works
sometimes. Yep, this guy was my angel of mercy, all right, provided by
The
Universe Itself, and I was smiling for the first time since
I’d hit Nitro. Now all I had to do was kick back and go with
the flow.
Matt – that was his name
- rummaged around in his cluttered work truck and came up
with a matching part, but it was old and badly worn. Keith &
Son’s didn’t have one in inventory, either, so Matt got on
his cell phone. A couple of calls later he’d found what
we needed and off we sped to his buddy’s house 12 miles
away, up a country road named Sugar Creek Drive.
Matt's friend, Jay, was a
master mechanic and another old-Vanagon aficionado. That
made two of them in this one little corner of West Virginia;
four if you count Keith & Keith. What are the odds?
I've been to large cities that didn't have a single person
could work on these things, let alone come up with parts. I didn’t
know it yet, but Jay was going to be the other half of my
salvation, my second angel. That’s two in one day. I felt like I’d died and
gone to heaven. Well, almost heaven.
Jay sold us a spare air
intake boot he had for $20, a fraction of the cost new, and
it was soon installed in my van back in Nitro. The engine
ran better, but it still lost power under load. Matt
replaced most of the fuel system. The engine still coughed
and stalled. Not to be
beaten, he worked on it late into the night - testing,
tuning, fussing, muttering – determined to lick the problem
no matter how elusive.
It was pushing midnight by the time he quit and he had pretty much narrowed it down
to a dirty, probably rusted fuel tank with a clogged,
inaccessible internal filter. The next morning he was back
at it. Jay showed up and after a
series of experiments, agreed with Matt’s diagnosis. The
tank had to be replaced. Matt
whipped out his cell phone again, logged onto the Internet, and in
a matter of minutes had ordered a new gas tank plus a bunch
of other stuff from a specialty outfit in California, which
I paid for (plus a 3-day expedited delivery charge) with a
credit card.
Now I had 3 days to wait (or so
we thought – it turned out to be 5) until the parts
arrived. Keith Sr. had been patient and even helpful
throughout all this, but he really wanted my van off his car
lot, and so did I. So when Jay offered me a place in his
driveway up on Sugar Creek Drive, I jumped at it. We rigged
a temporary bypass for the fuel line and off we went, the
van running pretty well with the jury rig.
My new host was in his
mid-30’s, tall, long-haired and independent. We
quickly became pals. That night he had a few friends over
for a 3-guitar jam session in his yard. We all talked
and drank beer and serenaded the stars while lightening bugs
swarmed in the trees, sparkling like Christmas
decorations. A few feet away my home sweet campervan sat
beneath a great, sprawling shade tree. What a change from
downtown Nitro!
The next morning Jay
invited me to tag along with him to a local motorcycle sales
& repair place to see a buddy of his.
We marched right through the dealership showroom, past the Authorized Personnel Only sign
and into the mechanic's shop in the back. Jay and I sat on
wood stools while his friend, the head mechanic, fussed with an old Harley
engine. There we 'set a spell,' surrounded by tool benches
and half-dissembled motorcycles, sipping coffee in paper
cups and shootin' the breeze. Well, they shot the breeze. I
mostly just listened, not always understanding their
terminology or their dialect but enjoying the setting, like a
scene in a documentary about a little-known American
sub-culture. It was kind of cool just being there while they
rambled on about friends and family and local events and
motorcycle parts.
That afternoon Jay went
to work. He’s a freelance auto insurance inspector with a
good reputation and plenty of corporate clients. Whenever he
was gone I enjoyed the quiet tranquility of his driveway,
keeping busy with van chores, reading and writing. Jay
loaned me a wifi antenna he had laying around so I was able
to pick up the marginal signal from his house and get online
inside my van. He also opened his garage shop to me,
inviting me to use his tools as needed, an uncommonly generous
thing for any mechanic to do. The guy was a
giver, plain and natural. When he wasn’t off inspecting
wrecked cars, he helped me with a dozen assorted repairs and
improvements to my van. I had it made in the shade on Sugar
Creek Drive, and it just kept getting better..
The next afternoon Jay
suggested we drive into Charleston for an outdoor music
concert. What a blast! We ate at the food stands, checked
out the pretty women and rocked to an incredibly good
calypso-style band in the city’s elegant amphitheater on the
banks of the Elk River. Caribbean music in downtown Charleston, West
Virginia. Who’d ‘a thought?
During the subsequent
days I was there, Jay kept me entertained with all kinds of
down home
activities: beer and pool at the local country bar, hotdogs
from a popular roadside take-out (they eat them covered
with chili & coleslaw in those parts), chatting
with the old timers in some guy's garage, zooming around the local
rivers and fishing the streams in Jay’s speedboat, eating
breakfast at the local hotspot, cheap & good, where everybody
knows everyone else. Amazing how much there is to do out in
the country. And because I was with a home-grown local boy I
was automatically accepted everywhere we went, allowing
me to see and experience this warm West Virginia culture and
lifestyle in ways an outsider never could. This
accidental
detour on my way out west had become a happy highlight of
my summer road trip.
The day before my repair
parts arrived, a Sunday, we drove one of Jay’s father’s
collector cars, a beautifully refurbished 1966 Oldsmobile,
to a homespun car show way out in the sticks. (His dad drove
his mint ’56 T-bird.) The easy-going friendliness
of the people there, the free, help-yourself hotdogs & ice
cream, the lovingly restored antique automobiles these folks
brought to share and show off, all made for an outstanding
afternoon. That little corner of America may be economically
depressed, but these hard-working people are rich in other
ways and live a good life.
When we got home from the
show Jay pulled a pair of 4-wheelers, ATV's (all terrain
vehicles), out of the garage and we took off on a long, wild
ride through the forested hills that flanked his home, all
200 acres of it his daddy's land. We raced up impossible
inclines, startled a few deer, identified some wild herbs that
grow in the woods, and wound up at a secluded
pond just uphill from his house. We dug up a couple of worms, pushed a little John-boat off the bank,
and went fishin' to the sound of the bullfrogs croaking - just like Mayberry RFD!
UPS finally showed up with
my parts. Matt came down to Jay’s house and the two of them
installed the new fuel tank and other stuff we’d ordered
right there in the driveway. Still the van ran rough, so
they kept at it, tuning, testing, theorizing, trying out
different fixes until Matt finally solved the last problem
by swapping the computer box that governs the fuel flow for
one he had laying around in his cluttered truck. By the time
they wrapped things up it was 2:00 AM. When I asked Matt
what I owed him, he named a figure so ridiculously low I
gave him an extra hundred bucks and still got the deal of the
century considering all the hours he’d put into fixing my
van.
I almost hated leaving
Sugar Creek Drive the next morning. What had started out a
total nightmare in Nitro had turned into an amazing
adventure, and I’d made a two new friends to boot.
Incredible what a little surrender will get you.
It seems I need to be
reminded from time to time that resisting the way things
are, the Now, as Tolle calls it, invariably creates
suffering. If you don't like the situation, change it if you can. If you can’t,
then remove yourself from it. And if you can’t do either of
those things, then accept the way it is at that moment and
surrender yourself to The Universe that created it. Then see
what happens.
~ End ~
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