Lost at Sea - Part Two

A Search for Meaning

  

Mark and the Healey, Fall 1966

When a friend’s car in storage finally had to move, Mark brought it home and managed his teen-survival by escaping to our garage where he and his high-school buddies would spend their time for the next couple of years restoring a very ugly, very non-running Austin Healey 3000 MK-I that would “soon be cherry, really!” Pistons, connecting rods, and camshafts would land in one of four spider-filled corners as each new portion of the engine block was split open like a carp on the riverbank. Sections were gutted and placed to rest in the right sequence - or not - and they prayed for their salvation with the hope to finding their way back to the convertible’s beginning; the mechanical mecca of their 2.9 liter car, to purr again like it did at LeMans in 1959.

This was how the dream spunout in their heads while eating Scrumptuous cheeseburgers and hanging at the drive-in theatre watching “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” They played like teenagers late at night and away from home, and the car was still a dream remembered every morning, but that wasn’t the moving force for them. It was the refuge of the garage and its social event playing weekly that was their raison d’etre. It was better than a Wednesday night cardgame though you might have easily seen their caricatures off the sideroad parking lot as dogs around a table painted on black velvet; green plastic visors on their foreheads and wrenchs in their hands; doobies in the ashtrays. Their time as friends working on the car together was a process that would help them all slowly pull that family crap of their households out of them like a swallowed fishhook; away from the environment most damaging, away from the emotional chaos and dysfunctional alignment to their parents.

Their idea worked for awhile but the closer they got to putting pistons and cylinders back into harmonic balance, the farther away from reality a maiden-voyage fill-up at the Sinclair pump would ever become. They had the dream, but lack of cash dashed their hopes as gran prix mechanics, and their time in the garage became less time spent on the car and more on their bravado.

Gran Prix Mechanics, Fall 1966

After the second year with Mark and his friends holed up in their ashram, it was apparent to my dad that the Austin Healey wasn’t going to roll down the driveway on its own ignition and he had the heap towed and scrapped and regretfully gave Mark the fractional money returned from the sale for his college funds as a payoff. He had better things planned for the garage, like lawnmowers and rakes, and wanted the oil stains over and done with. At this point, quite the drinker in his own right, my dad hadn’t gone so far yet to check himself in to the 12-Step Program but the Healey stood as an incentive moment from a latenight confrontation illuminated under the swinging glare of a naked bulb dangling high from a single wire, each arc shifting the light and stretching the shadows of an ugly moment of ultimatums; friends scattering into the dark; fouled spark plugs kicked on the floor, and the garage door closing on the dream of a cherry car with a high-performance history for the last time.

You should know that my dad had grown up in the Great Depression where northwestern Iowa bordered South Dakota, in the midst of thousands of other Scandinavians who had staked their claims and  transplanted their farming knowledge in the 1860s onto the restless fields of 4-foot tall grasses, blackened sod, and tight little Seventh Day Adventist communities. His ancestors had founded a township in South Dakota near Big Springs and his great-grandfather, as carpenter and pastor, built the church and its graveyard on the knoll beside that still quietly covers those first settlers of that small corner of the American landscape.

My dad was without brothers or sisters and his childhood was all about work. His grandfather was a banker who had lost everything in the 1920s and went back to the dirt and muck to survive. My dad’s mother was also an only child and sang from a strict and a severe prairie hymnal, and he was bequethed the same at age four when his father died. His mother quickly remarried for survival, to a smalltown entrepreneur in Hawarden who owned a dry-cleaning business and the three worked together in the steam-filled rooms mixed with solvent to make ends meet.

He believed in a strong work ethic and freely assigned our chores but I also think he wanted us to understand that we could survive the inevitable drudgery of work and still live a fulfilling life. As the eldest male, Mark felt inequitably burdened by this dogma and with resentment held it over my head as ‘older brother ammo’ for years. After the garage repair shop was closed, my dad decorated it with his favorite lawn implements but NO power mowers until it was deemed that I was old enough to carry on the torch of turf trimming. Into our adulthood, Mark would continue to torment me with the guilt that ‘I got off light with the power-mower’, that his indentured summers were defined by Greek mythology; to forever push a rock up the hill of our 2-acre lawn by the helical blades of a push-mower and the heroic determination of his own adolescent muscle.

All behind him now. Finger Lakes, Summer 1968

First the oil paints, canvas and lessons, then the sportscar to the metalcrusher, and now, my fault, the power mower that might have given the meaning of love to his life. He could only stand by helplessly as my father bestowed upon me (obviously his favorite son) the luxury of a new and  powerful LawnBoy with razor-sharp blades and limegreen paint. Mark stood planted in one spot for the next half hour, glaring and seething as I pushed it effortlessly, trickling a gratuitous bead of sweat down my unworthy, undeserving brow over the buff green. I felt him looking on as the mower hummed smoothly over the yard like a hovercraft, row after row – then sensing his resignation – I glanced up to see his retreat into the house, back to the quiet of his black lair under the basement stairs and the comfort that was there for him.

Next … Closing in on the Gulfstream

Previous ... Part One - Casting Off