Go West, Not-So-Young Man

It's my second full day of living in Denver. I want to try and write about my first year here. I want to write something every day about what's already shaping up as culture shock after living 40+ years in Chicago. I probably won't be able to pull that off, but anyway... so it goes.


When the car refused to start just after we’d stopped for a moment to take a photo in front of the “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign, I debated whether it was an unusual coincidence or a foreboding tragedy.

I decided to compromise and call it an unusual tragedy.

A little more than 200 miles outside of Denver, the sun battling the cold weather for dominance, we stopped the Jeep on the side of a road leading to a camping site for a photo of me standing in proximity to a large wooden sign that read “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” painted in big white letters. The sign was set back from the road up a slight dirt incline that was dotted with dead grass. Kim, who was sitting in the car, motioned for me to get closer to the sign so that she could take a photo of me with her digital camera. I declined to move closer, joking that there might be snakes hiding somewhere around here. OK, I was half joking. Yes, it was about 30 degrees outside, the sun was beginning to set and the chance of a rattler who didn’t mind the cold weather slowly inching toward me to sink its poisonous fangs into my ankle were probably remote. But I’m from Chicago and after ghost voters, Loop floods and the “mysterious” destruction of small airports in the middle of the night, I take nothing for granted. I kept close to the car, gave a couple of glances at the ground around me and waited for the shutter to click.

Back to the car, get in the driver’s seat, seatbelt fastened, put the key in the ignition, turn and…nothing. Panic didn’t immediately set in, surprisingly. Here I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a gas station, a seedy motel and an abandoned diner just behind us, a whole lot of empty Colorado in front of us and a sign mocking my arrival. So far out of my comfort zone I might as well have renamed the Jeep Wrangler the Santa Maria. But I was keeping my cool. At least for a second. I tried the key again and heard no engine revving sounds and told myself, OK, you can panic a little now.

Kim was the first to notice that although the shifter was in park, the display on the dashboard said the car was in reverse. More confusion. A genuine “What the fuck?” moment, made even more dread-inducing by the fact that my knowledge of the mechanics of a car is only slightly less than my knowledge of the Keynesian School of economics and its relationship the Rational Expectations Theory, which is to say jack shit. But I employed whatever facts about automobiles I had picked up throughout my life and ran through them in a search for possible solutions. Was the battery dead? Was there enough air in the tires? Did we have enough gas? Were the ashtrays clean? Quick, check the rear cup holders.

Needless to say, none of these possible solutions solved the problem so I decided to rely on the twin brothers of prayer and magic. Kim joined me in staring at the dashboard; she, being the logical person she is, was no doubt looking for a possible cause. I, on the other hand, was attempting mental telepathy, hoping to psychologically bond with the engine to get it to see things my way and miraculously start, to convince it to maybe speak with the transmission, since they were so close and all, to get it to cooperate and magically fall back into place. I turned the key once more and the engine told me to go fuck myself.

I mentally went through our entire trip to that point, partially trying to determine if the problem was something that had happened earlier and partially amazed at all we had gotten through to get to where we were now, sitting in a stalled vehicle 200 miles outside of Denver in the middle of nowhere with a “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign laughing at us.

The slightly hurried departure from my Chicago apartment where I ended up leaving behind my practically new platform bed (value: about $200), a slightly used leather couch and about an eighth of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. The long drive through Illinois, leaving everything I knew behind me. Driving through Iowa, not as flat as you might imagine. Driving through Nebraska, much flatter than you would imagine. Waking up to a snowstorm on Valentine’s Day in Lincoln and attempting to continue the journey; having to employ my defensive driving skills when we started skidding on black ice; being forced off the highway when state troopers closed I-80 because of apocalyptic weather conditions; holing up for a while in Shoemakers Truck Stop and Gasoline Station Museum before heading into downtown Lincoln and a Holiday Inn; monitoring weather and highway reports all morning and deciding to give it another day before trying to hit the road; waking in the morning to a blast of cold wind and setting out for I-80; passing abandoned cars and the remnants of cars; gripping the steering wheel like the bridle of a runaway horse for about 250 miles as the wind occasionally tried to push the Jeep into a Nebraska ditch; lunch at something called Carlos O’Kelly’s (no corned beef and guacamole on the menu, unfortunately…or fortunately); making the detour onto US 76 and stopping to gas up one last time in Julesburg, Colorado and then pausing to get a picture of me standing in front of that goddamned “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign…

As we sat there, surrounded by two-dimensional metal cutouts of buffalos and teepees, installed to add to a more Wild West atmosphere of the campgrounds I guess, I pondered our next move. I looked in the side view mirror and saw behind us the seedy motel, the perfect place to kill an unsuspecting traveler and leave the body to the pumas. The gas station we had just left didn’t appear to have a repair garage so fixing the car would obviously require at least one phone call and might call for an overnight stay considering the time. So if we took turns staying awake in shifts, we could probably spend the night at the Bates Motel and get the Jeep repaired in the morning. As for weapons, I had The Club in the car and my …

It was then that Kim volunteered to walk back to the gas station and call for a mechanic. I felt guilty that I hadn’t thought of that and even guiltier that I probably wasn’t about to suggest that, no, I should go. Hey, she’s the one that grew up on a farm; she was more used to being surrounded by wide-open spaces than I was. Wide-open spaces seemed more of a danger to me than the congestion of the city. In a city you could hide behind things, duck into stores to escape danger, etc. In wide-open spaces, there was nothing to do but run and hope you were faster than whatever was chasing you. Besides, someone has to protect the car and all my belongings from coyotes or wolverines or chupacabra or whatever the fuck was out there. That was the excuse I was going to tell myself every time the story of this incident came up. I watched her walk back down the road toward the gas station, probably with a little more confidence in this situation that I had. Ok, a lot more.

I sat there in the car and, other than the sound of the occasional truck or auto passing by the highway just in front of me, heard nothing. No car horns honking at drivers who were slow to react to the green light, no buses rumbling to a stop at the corner, no voices in the alley yelling for TJ to come down and open the door because they didn’t have a key, no police sirens signaling the end to yet another urban dispute. Just the wind rustling through dried grass and an empty western sky stretching out behind me. If a longhorn walked by at that moment I probably wouldn’t have been surprised.

It was then that it hit me: I was in The West, the one I had read about in books and had seen in old movies and the occasional cigarette ad. OK, no, this wasn’t THE WEST, with horses kicking up dust as they delivered shipments of sorghum, molasses and them fancy toilet waters from Back East, and clapboard towns where the barber also treated your pyrosis. But it was “west”, more west than I had been in before. I’d been to Tucson and El Paso before, but visiting Tucson and El Paso is not the same as actually living there, I figured. This was (personally) uncharted territory, more foreign to me than Peotone or Sturtevant, Wisconsin. I felt like a pioneer. A pioneer with an iPhone that currently had a limited signal, but a pioneer nonetheless.

A truck pulled up behind me and Kim got out accompanied by a mechanic who looked like, well, a mechanic. Dark blue work pants and jacket, both slightly stained with grease from repairing a ’53 Chevy Camero with a 5.3 hemi engine and an overhead cam shaft (OK, no, I don’t know if any of that is possible). Slightly overweight with a mechanic’s moustache. Yeah, you could look at him and tell that he would know what was wrong.

I explained the situation to him as best as I could, and to make it appear I wasn’t a complete idiot, I threw in some automotive terms like “key” and “turn” and “won’t start”. He looked at the car for a moment (was he using mental telepathy?), sat in the driver’s seat, fiddled with a few things inside, then got out and slid under the car. I was going to make some snide comment to Kim about how we were lucky that the Jeep had such a high ground clearance when the slightly overweight mechanic popped back out from under the car and issued his diagnosis.

“Yeah, your transmission linkage is missing,” he explained.

“Ah, the linkage,” I said knowingly. He wasn’t buying it.

“Yeah, the thing that connects the shifter to the transmission…It musta fell off or something. Strangest thing. It’s not broken or anything, it’s just not there. I’ve seen it on Fords before. First time I’ve seen it on a Jeep.”

Of course. The first time. Now. My car. In front of the “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign.

You could change the gear manually, he explained, but to do that you’d have to be under the car. And to even get the car started, you have to get underneath, flip a lever to park, start the car, and then flip it to drive. It was a procedure in which even I could see the danger. Our slightly overweight mechanic suddenly became super daredevil mechanic. He slid back underneath the car and instructed me to keep my foot on the brake, lest I start the car and immediately crush his ample midsection.

“You got your foot on the break?” came a muffled voice from underneath the car.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“You sure?”

“Yup, I’m sure.”

He yelled at Kim, “Does he have his foot on the brake?” Apparently he either didn’t trust me or had little confidence I knew what a brake pedal looked like.

I shifted my legs so that she could see my foot on the brake. “Yup, his foot’s on the brake.”

“OK, start the car.” I turned the key and the engine sprang to life. Daredevil mechanic guy slid out from underneath the car, wiped his hands on his pants and began to explain the situation. “Ok, because the linkage is missing, you can’t shift it into reverse, unless you get under the car again. Turn it off and let me show you.” I shut the car down, got out and slid under the car with daredevil mechanic guy.

“See this lever here?” he asked, pointing to…something.

“Yeah,” I lied. The entire area was a confusing canvas of imposing metal with just a hint of rust.

“OK, this position is park,” he said, flicking some lever with his finger, “this is neutral, this is reverse and this is drive.”

This began to sound important. I imagined a scenario where we’d have to go in reverse for some reason and I wouldn’t be able to do so and there we’d be, face to face with a mountain lion and unable to back away. “Show me that again,” I said, this time trying to pay attention.

Thirty-five dollars later, we were back on the road and headed further into the West, driving through an undulating landscape and past clusters of cows (wait…herds, right?) that stood around and chewed weeds nonchalantly and looked at me as if to say, “Are you sure you should be here?”

I ignored them. What did they know, they were just cows. We kept driving, determined not to go into reverse, staring into the setting sun and squinting my way into Denver.