FLAPPING PLASTIC AND WIND-DRIVEN ORCHESTRAL INSANITY

The unspoken problem with making life easier is that it invariably makes life much more difficult.

Our 1990 Westfalia Vanagon has electrically operated windows, whereas our 75-year-old Jeeps don’t have windows at all. In fact, neither do they have doors. The advantages are tremendous - no maintenance, no expense, no troubled brows. Of course, the folks on board may get a bit chilly or damp.

But just think of the hassles avoided!

When we bought the Westy, the driver’s window was a bit sticky; sometimes it worked properly, sometimes it didn’t.

By the time we reached Rhode Island, it didn’t. Not really a huge problem, as it had decided to stay closed, and because the weather was so insufferably hot, we needed the windows shut to run the air conditioning. And a proud owner’s aside here: yes, our 1990 Westy does have fully functioning great a/c. 

Nevertheless, it is useful to have a window that will both open and close when needed. Back in the days when I first started driving, a hand-crank operated car windows - you wound it up, or you wound it down. A simple mechanical operation requiring a little bit of effort. The electrically powered window requires no such effort - just push the button, and the invisible electric genie does the work. For a while, anyway.

So in Rhode Island we visited Hans Imports in North Kingstown. Run by a gentleman named Omar, the place specializes in European cars, and they rapidly identified and fixed the problem. The sum involved was fairly considerable, but the working window was worth it. It went up and down again very nicely. Omar, who had initially seemed a little reserved, quickly warmed as he learned the details of our gallant, if not foolhardy, journey around the country in a 36-year-old vehicle, and it rapidly became apparent that he was a VW enthusiast. The proof of it was an immaculate vintage Brazilian-built VW bus in the parking lot - his daily driver.

Omar's 1974 Brazilian ... and what a beauty!

So the window was fixed and all was well with the world, and after a week or so, we bid au revoir to our Providence families and pointed the old Westy west. 

Lil' Rhody had been hotter than hot, and the national news had been full of the heat dome that had crossed the continent and had stalled for a while over New England. We were happy to think that by going west we would shortly enter cooler climes. Well, ha ha to that. Huge and vast new domes appeared, and if New York and Connecticut were hot, then Pennsylvania was hotter. Ohio even more so. Indiana was searing and Wisconsin sweltering. The old domes were replaced each day by newer, bigger and much more efficiently hotter domes, to say nothing of roasting rotundas and calescent cupolas that awaited in the wings. 

Each time we stopped for gas, we’d make a run into the gas station store to score a bag of ice for the cooler, and linger in the chillingly welcome AC of the store, watching perspiring customers enter, wiping brows and grumbling about the heat to each other, to the cashiers, to anyone in earshot.

We'd shuffle around the merchandise, aisle to aisle, attempting to find something reasonably wholesome amongst the myriad temptations on offer. Not an easy task, but as it would be around three or four hours to the next stop, there just had to be something that wasn't too poisonous. Choices made, we'd head to the cashier, delectables in hand.

Odd lot, gas station cashiers. They varied from the bored and sullen type that scanned your purchases, tallied the total and silently nodded to the credit card machine, avoiding any eye contact whatsoever, to pimply-faced kids who seemed to have no idea as to where anything was, and had to called away from their phones to grudgingly serve you. There was one unforgettable little man, with tattoos on his neck, who obviously had loose and ill-fitting dentures that he swirled around his mouth while talking, making the conversation fascinating in its abhorrence, and equally challenging as one attempted to understand just what this odd fellow was actually saying. And then there were the sweet ladies who called you 'darlin’', and sympathised about the weather. One such soul had black and blue bruises down one side of her face. She was probably in her forties, and had a tired and worn air, but a sweet and captivating smile. Cashiers in these places earn just a pittance, and you just know they are only there because there is nowhere else to go. I had vainly looked around the store in search of ice, and asked her where it might be. She pointed to a large sign that said ’ICE’, and we both laughed at my unseeing eyes.

‘Well, that’s a good place to keep it,’ I remarked and we laughed again, and I left, wondering about her face and what had happened, whether it was some hard-assed, mean and bestial partner or maybe a car wreck, and simultaneously just how it was that she was able to rise above such a sad life and laugh with a stranger.

The gas cap on the Westy is by the passenger door. We had got into the habit of annotating our gas purchases: the amount of gas bought, the price and the mileage between stops. Trump’s war had, of course, raised prices everywhere, but apart from just one place, in New Mexico, way out in the desert, where some grasping son-of-a-bitch was charging $9.99 a gallon, (we bought two gallons there, for safety’s sake, the gauge being low and the desert road long), all the prices were way below the pre-war cost of a gallon in California.

And each time we went through this ritual, the passenger window was lowered, and the details of the transaction were relayed to whoever was in the passenger seat. And with each fill-up, the window grew balkier.

By the time we hit Sioux Falls it was permanently open, and even driving with both windows open and the sliding windows on each side open, it was impossibly hot in the vehicle. Patient brown-eyed Elsa with the long pink tongue was panting in the back and Britt and I were drenched with sweat.

I am fairly mechanically inclined - owning old jeeps makes that a necessity - but was reluctant to take the door skin off to check the problem. I have worked on ‘new’ vehicles - with doors even! - and sagely knew that as I attempted to pry off the skin, I’d break something and just make the situation worse.

We found an auto-glass joint, and two eager young workers, learning of the problem and of our itinerary, set about to rectify things. Neither of them had worked on a Westfalia before, and it soon became apparent that apart from possessing the know-how to remove the skin, they were at a loss as to how to effect a repair. Unsurprising, because they couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to work, and therefore just what it was that had gone awry. The best they could do was to suggest covering the open window with duct tape, which was out of the question - no way were we going to drive a thousand miles without being able to see out of that window.  

Thanking them for their time and effort, for which they emphatically declined any payment - oh, humanity, how decent and kind thou art - we pulled up at an auto parts store and purchased a ‘Temporary Window Repair Kit’ which was a big sheet of plastic and some double-sided sticky tape. To make this work as effectively as possible, it is important to stretch the plastic as tight as possible while one fastens the sticky tape. As with most tasks attempted for the first time, it was not as easy as anticipated. The tautness was not taut enough, and the sticky tape ridiculously thin. It was certainly sticky, though, and stuck to the plastic at the slightest touch - invariably in the wrong place - and stuck to our fingers just at that moment one was going to stick it someplace else.

Ultimately the opening was covered and transparent. We set off, smiles on our faces, with the ac blasting. 

Before we even reached the outskirts of town, the thinness of the tape proved its uselessness. Gloomily, we stopped at a hardware store and bought blue painter's tape, figuring it would do the least harm to the vans' finish. And just in case, we grabbed a roll of duct tape, and slathered the edges of the plastic with both, on the inside and outside of the door, and, whoop-de-doo, it did the trick. 

So now we could run the ac, and travel in comfort. 

Except we couldn’t. 

At the Volcanic State Park, attempting to save the paintwork by using blue painter's tape. We soon switched to heavy-duty sticky duct tape.

Once the speed went above thirty miles an hour, the noise from the wind-whipped plastic was tremendous. I, being of a certain age, wear hearing aids. I'm not completely deaf, but my hearing is certainly improved by using them. Much of hearing loss is the inability to hear the higher end of the spectrum, and the hearing aids do boost the treble. Sadly, the wind noise tended to be mainly in that range, so the obvious thing to do was to remove them. It made the noise a degree less than intolerable, a smidgeon below insufferable. It was not unendurable simply because we just had to endure it - we would not be able to make it home otherwise.

Obviously, we took turns in driving, and when Britt drove, and I sat in the passenger seat, I became fixated by the sound. You have to understand, conversation was extremely difficult at any speed over thirty and completely impossible after fifty. To communicate, we had to shout at the top of our voices. A complete waste of time trying to listen to the radio - podcasts and music were now just a distant memory.

The varying sounds of the wind were compulsory listening. No changing the station, no lowering the volume, no fiddling with the EQ. Just that fucking roar. There was a particular tone that dominated; it had a pushing and pulsating pitch, not just verging on vibrato but of course, the very real and physical embodiment of vibrato, because that is just what it was - vibrating plastic. We were traveling in a vibramatic vanagon - one with much weirder vibes than your average vanagon. That dominant tone, the key, if you will, reminded me of my dear friend Doug James, baritone saxman extraordinaire, whom I had listened to for countless years. Doug has a way of entering an uptempo jump tune with a certain controlled ferocity, a kind of out-of-the-gate imprimatur of what he is going to explore in the coming solo. It's like he's winding up, and setting the scene for a swinging and melodic release. And so I am sitting there in the passenger seat, my ear inches away from the flapping plastic and hearing Doug start a solo. Now he plays a bari, which is a much lower register than our wind-driven window, but the intensity of the attack was similar, but the bloody solo goes nowhere because unlike Doug, the real flesh-and-blood Doug, it is all attack. No release, no melody, no mood - just an intense first bar. Over and over, I tried to find an arrangement in this zephyr of a cacophonous tempest, tried to make some sense of the gusts and blasts, to create a symphony out of this hurricane, but twas not to be. Oh, to be sure, coming to a stop sign, the Westy would slow and that terrible gale would subside to winsome wiffets, a soft slough, a gentle waft, but even then with this change in dynamics, the orchestra made no sense, and in a moment we’d be further on up the road, the speed increasing and Doug would be making his entrances again, over and over, and the entire mad nor’easter blew harder and harder. Mile after mile, hour after hour, the unrelenting sound, augmented by the occasional tympani of the tires upon differing road surfaces, the passing whoosh of big trucks displacing cubic yards of air in a rushing second, was simultaneously hypnotic one moment and jarringly awakening the next.

No dreaming in the passenger seat ... only wide-awake aural hallucinations.

And all the while helplessly conscious of this mendacious mistral, the passenger had to keep a hand on the duct tape, which constantly lifted and slid, threatening to let go at any moment and disappear behind us, gone, way back down the road with our priceless out-of-tune and out-of-time orchestra. And with it, any hopes of running the ac, as the heat never seemed to diminish, no matter that we were in Montana and Wyoming. They sure looked sorta northy on the map, but the temps were most definitely extremely southy, no matter the latitude.

This green and pleasant land

It was around this time, when traveling through Montana, that very state that had initially piqued Britt’s interest and become the trigger and focus destination for this entire vagabondage, we concluded that we had already seen a vast amount of the fantastic scenic beauty that the continental United States had to offer, and that what was on offer now was super intense American heat and very very noisy American wind. 

Old Faithful at Yellowstone

Enough was enough … time to head home to balmy California climes. It took a few days, and Yellowstone and Lake Tahoe were happily on the way home, and of course we did make those stops and smiled and drank wine in crazily beautiful campsites, all set out like they were some kind of staged damn-the-expenses-ads for Beautiful California.

And then, a measly hundred or so miles later, we were back in Oakland where we had started, eight weeks and a day earlier,

Arriving at our house, we pulled off the road, cut the motor, and the infernal wind ceased. We looked at each other and grinned.

Peace.

Elsa put her nose to Van Gogh's window, wagged her tail and let out a little appreciative bark.

Home again.

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I can't finish this story without a tip of the hat to Doug James, whose music can be heard on some streaming device or other, or even better, on a CD, which can be purchased from Duke Robillard's excellent online store at https://dukerobillard.com/store.html