Licorice and the Gopher Bait

     Licorice was down in the wet grass, not the mowed stuff, the long stuff.  It was a foggy damp morning.  But he wasn’t on his back, his back legs extended, front legs bent at nearly a right angle while he twisted and wiggled like an alligator swatting flies, groaning with pleasure.

     No, he was on his side, his front feet extended past his muzzle as if in full stride, his back feet stuck out behind him, also as if in full stride.  I couldn’t hear his groan because I was astride the Ford tractor, backing towards the red barn.  Licorice lay too close to the path I was taking.  He wasn’t moving out of the way as he normally would have.

    I depressed the clutch pedal on the Ford and turned to yell, “Licorice, get out of the road!”  The words never left my mouth.  Something was wrong.  I shifted to neutral and jumped off the tractor.  When I stooped over him, I could see his eyes vibrating back and forth. 

     When I shut the tractor off, I could hear him groan.  It wasn’t the groan of ecstasy Lik would utter when he was rolling in fresh green cow poop.  It was more like the groan of Atlas struggling to shoulder the universe.

     I picked him up.  He didn’t relax or squirm to get down.  It was as if I had picked up a six-inch log two feet long.  He stayed stretched out, as if caught in full running stride.

     What could be wrong?  It didn’t take long to come up with an answer: strychnine.  The pocket gophers had been a nuisance for years, undermining Granny’s garden, tunneling down the planted row eating the planted seeds before they could even sprout.  They had even invaded the bluegrass lawn, throwing up their mounds beneath the clothesline. 

      The most effective bait for the gophers had been a poisoned wheat of some kind.  Granny ordered it from one of the many garden catalogs she got.  It came in a cardboard box about half the size of a crushproof cigarette pack.  A dozen wheat kernels into a rodent tunnel near the gopher mound assured that the fan-shaped mound would grow no more.

     At first I was skeptical of the marvelous claims made on the package, but when I found out how effective it was, I quickly used up the three boxes Granny had ordered and received in the mail.  She was able to order another batch, but a year or two later, when she wrote to the company because the stuff was no longer listed in their catalog, she got a reply stating the bait was discontinued because the active ingredient, (rotenone) was no longer available, was in fact illegal for use as a rodenticide.

      The cynics in my circle declared that any time something was effective, it was automatically outlawed.  Granules of Torodon, used to kill bindweed effectively suffered the same fate, they pointed out.  I countered that it was probably nepotism:  the local rodent population probably was related to the dirty rats that run the EPA.       

     There followed another more interesting attempt to control the pocket gophers.  The idea came from the Farm News magazine.  A fellow was advertising this mole-killer.  It consisted of a three-foot wand with a hose that connected to a propane tank.  The wand had two triggers.  One trigger released a jet of propane gas. 

      As in baiting the gophers, you had to find a tunnel in the vicinity of their telltale dirt mound.  You inserted the end of the wand into the hole and pulled the propane trigger.  After twenty or thirty seconds of propane, you released that trigger and pulled a second one which activated a battery-powered igniter similar to the one on your modern gas stove or furnace.  Boom!

      The propane exploded.  If inhaling the gas didn’t do them in, any gophers in the tunnel system when the spark hit would suffer fatal injuries from the resultant explosion.  The price for the wand and hose seemed a bit overboard, so I never ordered one. 

     In those days, the propane tank you used for your gas grill had female left-handed threads used to connect to the regulator on the grill.  It occurred to me that the acetylene hose on my torch was also left-handed.  In an idle moment, I removed the acetylene hose from the tank and tried it in the propane tank from the gas grill.  It fit perfectly.  With the largest welding tip on the torch handle, I could inject propane into a gopher tunnel.

     I had mixed results at first.  The problem was igniting the propane in the tunnel.  I didn’t have the electric sparker of the commercial wand.  When one plans destruction, ideas appear magically.  Something in my head told me I could drip a few drops of gasoline down the same hole I had used to inject the propane, drop a few more drops two or three feet away from the hole in a flammable trail, and light the gasoline.

     Sometimes that worked, and sometimes it didn’t.  The last time I used the propane method, there appeared a sizable collection of dirt mounds beneath an elm tree in the north farmyard.  I determined to rid that area of gophers.  The first two attempts, the ignited gasoline trail failed to fire the propane.  After both failures, I freshened the propane with a new 30-second charge.  The third attempt was successful.

     Kawhoom! It went.  A continuous puff of dust arose along a crooked trail for about twenty feet from my intrusion into the tunnel, to near the elm tree.  The concussion of the explosion thumped the bottoms of my feet.  Fire flew out of the injection hole.  Air from the explosion brushed past my face and rattled the leaves in the tree branches above.  For a second or two, I could hear small pebbles and clods falling back into the grass and leaves around me.  A jagged crack in the earth appeared along the same line that the dust puff had taken seconds before.

     That put an end to the gophers in that colony, as no more mounds rose up.  It also ended my experiment with propaning gophers.

      Sometime after that, I discovered I could buy strychnine treated grain with a pesticide applicator’s license, which I had so that I could purchase and use Torodon, necessary for controlling bindweed and Canada thistle.  I bought a hundred pounds of treated milo.

     It was problematic, too.  It came in a paper and plastic bag like a big bag of dog food.  I stored it in the shop to keep it dry.  The mice enjoyed chewing a hole in it and sampling some of the goodies therein.  Those adventurous mice found their life expectancy reduced to hours.

     I must admit I might have helped the mice enjoy their cuisine by spreading a little of the product around in places more convenient for them, even though such practices were strictly forbidden by the product label.  It was to be used in the tunnels of burrowing rodents, only, no use on the land surface.  Any dead rodents should be buried or cremated so that preying animals such as coyotes, cats, birds,--or, dogs--wouldn’t be poisoned by consuming the rodent who had died from the bait.

      Here was poor old Licorice displaying classic strychnine poisoning symptoms.  I put Lik in the blue pickup, ran to the house to tell Granny I had to take him to the vet and off we went.

     Normally, when riding in the pickup, which he hated, Lik would nose in between the right door and the seat.  He could work himself about half a body length into that niche, leaving his tail end exposed on the floorboard.  This trip, he was on the floorboard beside the transmission hump.  He had relaxed into a limp fur ball.

     I grabbed Lik and entered the vet’s office.  Melanie was on duty.  The vet was north of town working cattle, wouldn’t be back for two or three hours.  She took a look at Lik who had turned into a log again, complete with quivering eyeballs and directed me to another vet further down the road.

      In the second vet’s office, Lik had relaxed and lay limp on the examining table while I described his symptoms and the situation with the strychnine.  (I left out the part about facilitating the mice’s dining pleasure.)  The first thing the vet did was grab Lik by the short hair just back of his black plastic nose and started pouring hydrogen peroxide down his throat.  A lot of it dribbled down onto the examining table, but Lik was lapping and swallowing, probably to keep from choking.

     Soon, Lik started retching and coughing, and then he was barfing into the flat pan the vet sat before him.  The vet put on his rubber glove and started fishing through the foamy, mucousy contents in the flat pan.  Briefly, I thought I might have to use the pan.  There were no bones in the vomit, but the vet did produce some hair, rodent hair he said.  Diagnosis confirmed. 

     Lik was treated to another round of peroxide which he again barfed up.  This time, mucous and foaming peroxide was all that came up.  Satisfied that Lik’s stomach no longer contained anything that might be harboring strychnine, the vet told me he would hook him up to an IV and be sure he had plenty of liquid to flush the poison out of his system.  I should return at 6 o’clock to pick him up.

     I was there promptly at six.  Lik was in a little 2 X 2 cage with a tube running somewhere into his left foreleg and up to a bottle suspended above his cage.  He perked up when I came in, sat up.  The vet opened the cage door, removed the IV, and placed Lik on the floor.  He came over to me and I reached down to pat him.  His tail wagged.

     Only one thing worried the vet.  With all the liquid he had been giving him, Lik hadn’t peed all day.  If he hasn’t peed by eight or so, better call him, he said.  We made our way from the surgery to the front desk.  As he made out his bill and I wrote out a check, we exchanged pleasantries.  Neither of us paid any attention to old Licorice.

     I pocketed my checkbook and got ready to gather Lik up and head for the pickup.  No Lik.  Where did he go?  The waiting room was in one corner of the building separate from the front desk.  There were three or four wooden chairs and an old couch sitting on a linoleum floor.  I looked in and saw Lik in the act of anointing one of the wooden chair legs.  From the amount of liquid on the floor, it was obvious this was not the first anointing Lik had done.  The puddle covered the main floor and threatened to expand underneath the couch.

    The vet grabbed two big towels and spread them over the floor.  “ Boy, I’m glad I already paid the bill,” I said.  “You would probably tack on a pretty large cleanup fee.”

     The vet laughed and assured me Lik’s mess was not the first one he had cleaned up in the waiting room.  I said that explained it.  Lik would never break his manners inside the house, as he had demonstrated by his daylong restraint in the cage.  His sniffer told him other dogs had used the waiting room for a latrine.  If they could, he could, too.  No need to worry about calling the vet because Lik couldn’t pass his water.

     At home in the back yard, Lik frolicked in the attention of the family who made a fuss over him, thankful he was okay.  He sat and took his evening meal slowly and thoughtfully, as was his wont.

     The next morning, I had to capture him to get him into the pickup.  He sat in the seat until I got in and we began to move.  Down on the floor he went and tucked his head between seat and door where he would stay until we got within a mile of the farm.  Then up he would come, back onto the seat and watch, tail wagging, until we arrived at the mailbox.  I turned off the main road, stopped, opened my door.  Across my lap he skipped, down onto good old Mother Earth, and off he would take, trying his best to beat the pickup in a race a short half mile from mailbox to farmyard.  Licorice was back.

          

      

¿Plaques?

     ¿Plaques?

     “¿Name?”  Tshirt asked as she tapped the front license plate of the automobile sitting in the mechanic’s garage.  She was our translator.

     Yes, “plaques.”  The guys all nodded, some excitedly, as they watched us.  What were these strange Yankees doing here in their garage on the main drag in the non-tourist part of town?

      We were off on an adventure.  It was 1995, our 25^th wedding anniversary.  We went to Cancun to celebrate. 

     It was Spring break, March.  That wasn’t a good choice.  Not because the natives were restless.  The detraction came from the U.S.  in the form of college students.  College students who were there to celebrate their Spring break.  Of course there were responsible students there, but they are not the ones you notice.  You notice the ones who felt being a United States citizen in Mexico gave them license to indulge in any kind of lewd behavior spurred on by over indulgence in alcohol. 

     Far from the typical story of a corrupt gendarme collecting a bribe to keep a transgressor out of jail, we saw uniformed folks patiently trying to herd drunken youths away from committing crimes or endangering themselves.  We asked one man if this was normal behavior.

      Oh yes he said.  It’s pretty much this way from February through May.  Not many families like us here during Spring Break.  Well, we could see why.  Nobody told us.  We forgot to ask.

     We didn’t come to Mexico to see drunk American college students making fools of themselves, so we boarded the bus into the old part of town where the natives lived and shopped.  We were there for mercenary purposes, too.  A liter of bottled water cost four or five dollars at the hotel.  The very same jug in the downtown supermarket was about 75 cents.

     Even here in the local market place, we saw inebriated students.  It made us ashamed to be Americans, not a comfortable feeling for a tourist.  But Bill rose to the occasion.  He said the best way to learn about a new location was go on a quest, or have a project to complete.

     Bill had this old sixties era Dodge van.  It was a dog.  Once he took New York native Joe to Denver (from Kansas) in the van.  Early on Joe had misgivings.  Joe remarked that he could look down and see the pavement passing beneath them through the rusted holes in the floorboards.

      Bill assured him all was well.  He had what his old mechanic friend deemed necessary for a successful road trip: a log chain, jumper cables, toolbox, and a gas can.  They were prepared to handle any problem, should one arise.  Bill fully expected that a problem would not arise.  He was right.  They made the trip without incident.  Joe declined any further road trips with Bill after that. 

      Bill loaned his Dodge van to favorite students at Halloween.  They painted and decorated it appropriately for the season.  Then they could chase about town hauling their friends to parties or using it to go trick-or-treating.  They rarely cleaned the van up after their holiday.  The decoration would weather off as the van sat parked on the street or in the alley.

     The van was the object of Bill’s Cancun quest.  Kansas issues only one license plate per vehicle.  Bill decided a Mexican license plate would be fitting and proper on the front of the poor old van.  On the morning of our third day, we set out on our quest. 

     We took the bus to the far east stop in town. We dismounted and started hoofing it back west.  Staying on the main drag, we could catch a bus back to the resort if we wearied of our sojourn.

      On our leaving the airport on our first day in Cancun, we changed busses near the resort area.  Tshirt stepped up and asked the driver, in Spanish, if this bus would take us to our hotel.  The bus driver eyed her and said “Yeah.”  What a disappointment!  Everyone in the resort area spoke American English.  No chance to really use her Spanish.

      Here on our quest, many of the folks we encountered knew about as much English as we knew Spanish.  Tshirt would get her chance to try speaking Spanish for real.  As the cab driver who was drafted to be our Rocinante in our Quixotic adventure said, first gesturing toward us, then to himself, “No Spanish, no English, no problem.”

     At our first stop, we decided we needed to know how to say “license plate” in Spanish.  Tshirt tapped the front plate on the car sitting in the garage and asked the dumbfounded mechanics, “Name? What’s it called?”  The question took a while to soak in, then in a chorus, not quite coordinated, they all brightened and said “Plaques”.  “Plaques?” we echoed.  “Si, si plaques.”  We all were excited.  We had communicated with them, they with us. 

     With Tshirt’s Spanish and our gestures, we managed to get it across that we wanted to buy an old auto license plate.  Disappointment registered on the mechanics’ faces.  No plaques to be had.  We thanked them and walked on. 

     Stopping in various garages and dealerships along the way, we figured out that there would be no old license plates lying about as there were in nearly any of our garages.  Two places stood out in our adventure.  One must have been an upscale dealership.  The floor, even the pits in the garage, were tiled with pale yellow tile.  They were spic-and-span clean, too.  Any grease that hit the floor must have been quickly mopped up.

     The last place we tried turned out to be a motorcycle shop.  No, they had no plaques, not on premises.  The owner had a salvage yard where he might have a motorcycle plate, but that wouldn’t do for Bill.  However, the proprietor did have a control handle and cable that Bill needed for one of his cycles.  It too was at the salvage yard some miles away.

      If we would come back at four o’clock, he would have the handle at the shop.  We did make a special trip and arrived back at the motorcycle shop precisely at four.  When we showed up, the owner threw his hands up in the air and his face registered shock and surprise.  He never figured these Gringoes would keep that appointment.  Off he rushed.

      We waited.  It was difficult to converse with the mechanics.  They knew no English.  They weren’t as friendly and outgoing as the boss.  We walked up and down the street.  Close by an eatery had a stack of meat that looked like a giant hornet’s nest.  It was shingled around this drum which turned over a fire.  It wasn’t quite done yet, they explained when we wanted to try some of it.

    Five o’clock came.  Still no owner.  One of the boys went out and came back with a six pack of Corona.  Shoot, we should have bought it for them.  It might have loosened them up a bit.  As it was, they stayed to themselves and shared their beer.

     We had about given up on the guy ever coming back, when he did come back.  He had the motorcycle handle complete with cable, and he had a bagful of motorcycle plates, one from each Mexican state.  He had the motorcycle part right away.  It took some time to find a plate from every Mexican state.

     We already had the plate we wanted by that time, but still, what a deal.  He asked for 50 pesos or something, which he obviously thought was way overpriced.  Bill gave him a fifty and he was overjoyed.  The mechanics laughed and nudged each other.  The boss sure had put one over on the Yankee tourist.  

      When we left the motorcycle shop earlier that morning, we wandered into an older marketplace in town.  The streets were narrow and winding.  We ran across a motorcycle cop directing traffic away from a street that was temporarily blocked for some kind of work.  On a lark, Bill told him what we were looking for. 

     At first he just shook his head.  Then he brightened.  The city-run (or state-run, maybe) impound yard would have lots of plates.  He wasn’t sure they would give us one, though.  He pulled out his business card and wrote an address on the back of it.  While he was writing, we directed a few cars away from the street he was blocking.  The drivers would give us a suspicious eye and try to turn into the street.  Then they would see the cop and divert to another route.

      With the address, we flagged down the first taxi we saw.  We showed him the address on the back of the card.  No way.  He wouldn’t take us Yankees to that part of town.  Turn the card over.  The cop sent us there.  Well, okay, reluctantly, he agreed to take us.  Soon, he was in the spirit of the quest.

       His English was better than he had first let on.  He gave us a tour of the town enroute to the outskirts where the police junkyard was. The driver assured us this was a police junkyard, not a taxi junkyard.  Taxi drivers didn't get into accidents.  We laughed.

      When we got to the yard, it was fenced, gated, and locked.  Bill approached the gate.  The cab driver honked.  Finally, a guy came to the locked gate.  It took a while for Bill to make him understand what he wanted.  The gatekeeper disappeared. 

       A crew of linemen across the road watched and wondered, joked and laughed.  I yelled at them, “Crazy Yankees!” and made the circles around my ear with my forefinger in the universal symbol for insanity.  They laughed, agreed, and continued watching.  We milled around the taxi and watched the gate. 

     The gatekeeper came back to the gate, and sure enough, he had an old Mexican license plate in his hand.  He unlocked and opened the gate enough to give Bill the plate.  He started to close the gate, but Bill offered him a twenty.  He opened the gate, took the twenty, looked at it, looked at Bill, looked at us, and brightened up enough to challenge the sun.  He was thrilled.  He waved the twenty towards the linemen.  They laughed and cheered him and us.  

      On the way back to the hotel, the driver took us on another route.  He showed us the section where the doctors and the lawyers lived, where the teachers lived, when he found out we were all teachers.

       Back at the hotel, the price of the taxi ride was something ridiculous, like 5 pesos.  It seems that a taxi ride anywhere in the resort area was 10 or 20 pesos, but anywhere downtown, for the natives, was like maximum of 5 pesos.  The driver wanted to charge us the native rate.  Bill gave him a ten and I gave him a ten.  He was happy and so were we.  Later, the Goodwife read that average pay for workers was less than 5 pesos per day.  No wonder we made them happy. 

      We had met a lot of people, had seen a little of the local culture, seen very little of drunken college students, had had a good time.  With our second trip to the motorcycle shop, we had had a very adventurous day.  It would be the highlight of our Cancun trip. 

    

Fixing the Wrong Problem

     For the sixth or seventh time, I carefully lowered the stool onto the flange, aligning the small holes in the base of the stool with the bolts protruding from the flange.  The first time I proceeded thus was August 22.  I had refined the technique quite a bit since then.  I learned to use a nut and a quarter inch bolt on the stool securing bolts.  That enables me to line up the stool before I mash the wax ring into the wrong place.

     Progress always begins with dissatisfaction.  Queen Eve found fig leaves too rough of texture so she cultivated silk worms.  That’s probably a myth, but it serves to make the point.  I was dissatisfied with the basement bathroom stool.  It was a contractor model, supposedly a water-saver, but most events required two flushes to do the job, so where was the saving?  It was not exactly self-cleaning, either.

     The upstairs water closets had American Standard chair height models that saved water, disposed thoroughly of their loads, and stayed pretty clean.  I researched models on the internet and found a suitable model that would match the upstairs facilities, available at Lowes for a decent price.  I bought.

     I installed.  The stool came with its own wax ring.  I followed the instructions and felt certain I had solved my problem.  The next morning, after my early-morning rest stop, I found, to my chagrin, a small pool of water on the bathroom floor.  Elementary detective work traced the source of the mimi-mini-Nile to the front of the stool base.  Hmmm.  Must have done something wrong with that wax ring.

     An extenuating factor was a missing floor flange.  Whoever installed the first stool mounted it directly to the floor, no floor flange.  That might be a factor, but it shouldn’t matter.  If it worked before, surely I could make it work here, I reasoned.  I bought a super thick wax ring and stool  reset number one happened.

     With the same results, a small stream of water which never appeared until after the third or fourth flush.  The third reset a day or two later involved using both wax rings to make a huge gasket.  It still leaked.

      Must be the lack of a floor flange, my next theory.  I bought an easy-fix floor flange that fit inside the existing pipe and required no gluing or chipping of cement or tile.  I did have to drill holes through tile and cement and use anchors and screws to secure the flange to the floor.  This time I carefully levelled the stool over the flange.

      With this fix, the stool didn’t flush as well as it had proved it could do.  (One of the reviews I read said the stool could flush a bowling ball.)  In order to be an easy fix, the flange choked things down too much, right where stool and flange meet.  But it didn’t matter whether it flushed well or not.  It still leaked.

      Every time I went to the wax ring section in Lowes, I eyed the non-wax rubber gaskets ballyhooed to replace the wax ring and work better without the sticky mess of the bees wax.  I succumbed to the hoo.  What would it hurt?

     Off came the stool for the fourth (? I’ve lost count) time.  Out came the screws, out came the easy-fix flange.  On went the new super-duper rubber gasket with four inch tail piece which went down far enough into the sewer pipe to be sure the leak wasn’t happening at the top of the pipe.  I was back to no floor flange again.

    Well, guess what, it leaked.  So maybe the rubber gasket was being driven off the stool by the powerful flush.  Off came the stool one more time.  I used wax (I had collected quite a pile of twice and thrice used wax) to prop up the rubber gasket.  Now it couldn’t shy away from the stool.  It still leaked.

     Back to Lowes for the correct UPC-certified floor flange.  It fitted over the three inch sewer pipe (could be connected to four inch pipe by using a coupling) and did not reduce the opening.  I had to carefully chip away floor tile and two inches of cement to make room for the flange to slide down to floor level.  I had to drill two new anchor holes.  Two of the former ones still lined up properly. 

     Now it was a standard, code-approved installation.  It still leaked.  It was beginning to occur to me that something must be wrong with the stool itself.  “Beginning” is a stretch.  I had inspected for cracks in previous installations, but I never saw anything that looked suspicious.  By now, the malfunctioning appurtenance was becoming the only possibility.

      I had tried to pinpoint the leak in previous attempts by rolling up squares of toilet paper to cigarette size and taping them on the floor in various places and even inside the stool cowling.  Two problems arose.  The squares taped to the stool cowling remained dry.  The ones taped to the floor pretty much got wet because the water spread in all directions.

     One more time I pulled the stool.  I used silicone on top of the rubber gasket and on the stool base at the right point.  I let it set overnight so the silicone could cure.  It still leaked.   

     I called on Lowes.  I really didn’t want to go through American Standard’s warranty process.  The return desk clerk looked at my receipt (this was October, the recipt date was August 22) and said I was within the 90-day period stated on the back of the sales slip.  Return the stool for a refund or replacement model.

      One last time I removed the stool.  One of the rolled-up toilet paper squares had fallen off the stool and landed in front of the “wax ring” and was still dry.  Aha!  The leak was not at the wax ring.  I began to hope.

     This time I disassembled the stool after removing it.  Lurking in the back of my mind was still the thought I had done something wrong.  (It’s the Lutheran conscience.)  What if I brought a new stool back, installed it, and it leaked?

     I hauled the stool up the steps and out into the back yard.  I propped it up on a bucket and a step stool.  While I was at Lowes, I had checked out the test plugs.  The only one that worked was thirty bucks.  My conscience didn’t feel that bad.

     A Styrofoam cup the right size worked to plug the stool outlet.  It wasn’t water tight, but it held well enough for my purpose.  I filled the bowl with water until it was dripping around the improvised plug.  Sure enough, there was a slow drip coming from the front of the stool.  Real slow. 

     I tried to look up the stool skirt to see the source of the leak.  I couldn’t get a good look.  Mirror and flashlight weren’t much help.  The drip was there pretty slow.  To simulate a flush, I grabbed a plunger.  I couldn’t really give it a good plunge due to the stool’s precarious balance on the bucket.  I had to hold the Styrofoam cup with one hand and operate the plunger with the other.  But I got enough pressure to step up the drip considerably.

       My frustration reached its end.  I cleaned and dried the stool (taking a dirty stool to Lowes would be akin to going to the emergency room in dirty underwear).  I turned it over in the bright sunlight and here is what I saw.

 

     There is a crack right where the apron meets the bowl.  It’s hard to see.  If I hadn’t already been to Lowes to check on the return, I would probably have got out the JB Weld and tried to fix the crack.  I wasn’t ready for another failure.  Into the back of the pickup went the stool, tank, seat, bolts, etc. 

      I didn’t get too many funny looks while I rolled the cart with stool parts spread out on it across the parking lot and into the return desk.  I presented my receipt and my case.  I was prepared to explain my testing to prove the stool was defective to the clerk who was not the same as the one I visited with earlier that morning.  But it wasn’t necessary.

     She asked me if I wanted refund or replacement.  I said I wanted the same product that didn’t leak.  She asked if I minded going to get the new toilet.  I said “no” and set off to find a person in the plumbing department.  A young guy got the heavy box off the shelf, put it on a cart, took it to the return desk. 

    The clerk verified the number with the young guy.  I didn’t have to rerun my credit card or anything.  She said “okay” and he said to get my vehicle to the loading zone and he would meet me there.  Which he did.  He loaded the box into the pickup for me, and off I went.

     One more time I installed a stool.  I used the silicone on the rubber gasket.  I let it dry overnight.  Still not ready for another failure.  With trepidation I hooked up the water line and flushed. 

     No water on the floor!  Three days later still no water on the floor after regular use.  I still look every time I use it.  I’m beginning to believe I fixed it at last.     I would like to say this the only time I have spent a significant amount of time fixing the wrong problem, but alas! it’s not true.  It's only the most recent example.

      

                   

      

'55 Chevy

     At 4:08 p.m., it roared to life.  It roared because what was left of the leprous muffler had scraped itself off on the cement threshold of the barn as it crossed over, ending thirty years of captivity in that barn.

     This time it was different.  It wasn’t my hand turning the ignition switch to the right to activate the starter.  The starter drug down a couple of times.  Release the switch, then try again.  On the third try, it took off.  The unmuffled roar challenged the south wind and rose above it.

     The new owner smiled, waved, shifted the Hurst Mystery shifter into first gear, released the clutch and he was off.  It was a reunion of sorts.  The new owner had driven the car when he was a teen and his buddies had revamped the car. 

     “Revamped” meant replacing the column three-speed shifter with the Hurst conversion.  They installed a rear end lift kit with chrome brackets that raised the back end of the car and made it look like it was going downhill permanently.  Two chrome bugles channeled the exhaust over the rear axle and terminated about a foot or so before reaching the back bumper.      

      Only one of the bugles ported the exhaust.  The other was a dummy.  Those chrome bugles would be the first thing the car would shed during our ownership.  The dummy left with a rough bump on some highway somewhere.  The real one rusted out and had to be replaced with a real tail pipe.           

     The rear wheels were chrome.  The chrome wheels were relegated to the trunk sometime in the early eighties when I was still driving it as my second car.  One of them functioned as the spare.  Now as it left the yard, one chrome wheel served as the right front wheel.  It was the only tire that refused to hold air when the resurrection process began this summer.

 

     The sixties revamping included covering the car with a coat of sky blue paint.  We concluded as we conducted the obligatory presale inspection that the car was probably originally two-toned with a white top.  When we raised the trunk lid, the drain channel running around the trunk perimeter was still original white.

     We were probably the fourth owner.  None of us knew the first owner.  The revampers were probably the second owner.  The third owner was a young lady from Genoa.  She bought it from the revampers who moved on to a GTO.  The young lady wanted to get married, needed the money, didn’t need the car because her intended had a car.

    It was 1969.  The Goodwife, who wasn’t that yet, was entering her final year of “Normal” school.  To complete her degree, she must do her student teaching.  Her appointment was in the Greater Denver area.  She would need some way of commuting to and from her “job.”

     She was looking at all kinds of used cars, like MG’s and Volkswagen beetles.  I knew this car was available, and I preferred it because if I was going to be responsible for maintenance and upkeep, I was much more familiar with the Chevy.  At the time I was driving my skunk, a black four-door 55 Chevy with white top.

      Her father okayed the car deal, but he remonstrated with her long distance over the phone from Hawaii (expensive call) when he found out she had bought a Chevy.  “Why didn’t you buy a Volkswagen?” he asked.  “It would have better resale value.”

       “Yes, but it has a better resale value now, too.  I couldn’t buy a Volkswagen.  Too expensive,” she explained.  She paid $250 for the Chevy.

      When we got married a few months later, it was our only car.  The old skunk bumped out a rod as I returned to my Kansas job after attending her graduation in Greeley and meeting her family for the first time.  Our wedding was a week after her graduation.

      It was replaced as the primary mode of transportation in August of that year when we bought a new 1970 Ford pickup in Montrose while on an end-of-summer camping trip.  After that, the Goodwife drove the new pickup and I used the ’55 to drive to work and to the golf course and airport. 

      We actually had it sold once in 1971, for the original $250.  But the kid backed out of the deal at the last minute.  It stayed on until 1979 when it was demoted to third place by the acquisition of the Molly McBride Dodge.

      It was rarely used for a couple of years.  Then in 1981, I was commuting to Goodland to attend Vo Tech school.  The price of gas went up to over a dollar.  The Dodge and the Ford both got about 14 or 15 miles per gallon of gas.  The Chev could do nearly twenty on the road.

     I had this propane conversion kit that had been installed initially on the skunk when I first started teaching.  In those olden days, I could fill the propane tank for $3 and go about 250 miles on that. 

      When the skunk died, Dad sold it for $50.  Before the guy towed it off, I pulled the propane equipment. Later, I would install it on the 70 Ford pickup.  The tank wasn’t big enough (22 gallons) for that application.  The pickup would only go a hundred miles or so on a tankful.  Plus I experienced fuel pump problems when I ran it on propane.

      In 1981 when the price of gas went over a dollar, propane was still going for 70 cents.  It wasn’ too hard to convert the blue 55 to propane, since I had all the stuff.  It cut down the expense for my Goodland commute considerably.

      At first, I filled at the Coop in Goodland about every other day.  After a while, they said they wouldn’t fill it unless I put access hoses to the outside of the car.  I opened the trunk and hooked their hose directly to the propane tank.  Against safety regulations, they said.  The truth was it was too big of a pain for the propane guy to mess with two or three times a week.

      I found a local propane dealer who set up a 300 gallon tank near his bulk tanks.  I could fill from it and have him fill the main tank as needed.  It was a much better deal.       

     Until 1985 I used the Chev for a work truck.  I had the pickup, but the problem with it, I had to be continually moving tools in and out, lacking a cover for the bed.  I could keep a few tools locked in the trunk of the car, out of the weather, and it was still more economical.

     In 1985 when we moved to Colorado, the Chevy was a superfluous expense we could no longer afford.  Into the red barn it went, still equipped to run on propane.  There it sat until 2015.  The tires were all flat.  I had managed to keep the mice out of it until a couple of years ago.  They got in and made a mess. 

     A neighbor “kid” knew we had this old car collection.  I think he must have been a piano student who snooped around when it wasn’t his turn at the piano.  He always wanted to buy the 1960 Pontiac rusting away in the current bushes.  As I didn’t own the Pontiac, we never could make a deal.

      Then he found out his dad had a history with the ’55 Chev.  His dad was a good friend of the revampers.  The quest was on.  Dan struck a deal with the Goodwife.  It was during the rainy wet Spring of 2015 when all the farmers were idled by the rain and mud.  The car would be a birthday present for his dad.  It was my obligation to get the car out of the red barn where it could be trailered to its new home.      

      The coming-out effort began during the wet weather during harvest.   Brother Harry ferried the air bubble back and forth from air compressor to car.  Remarkably, all the tires except the right front one inflated and stayed inflated.

     After removing the worst of the mice nests and droppings with the shop vac,  I worked on getting the engine to run.  I had to remove the propane conversion from the top of the carburetor.  There was no propane left in the tank. 

     The electric fuel pump worked, for a while.  It pumped some pretty rotten stuff at first.  Adding a a couple of gallons of fresh gas didn’t get immediate results.  Harvest beckoned and the project was abandoned temporarily.  The battery had to go back into the Ford tractor that ran the auger.

      Sometime after harvest, I returned to the project.  I had to replace a leaky fuel line or two when the electric pump shoved the new gas up to the carburetor.  By trickling a few drops of gas into the carburetor throat, I got it to start and run, roughly for a few minutes.  The dust flew, the blue smoke wafted.  I was dialing Brother Harry so he could hear it roar.  Before the phone connection was made, the engine stopped running.

     It was a lengthy process to determine the fuel pump had ceased working.  I replaced filter, added gas, before taking the fuel pump off and determining it was shot.  Some weeks later, I finally put a new pump on it, but not until I had tried a couple of times to repair the old one.

      With the new pump, it fired up and ran, eventually fairly smoothly after it warmed up.  A more thorough vacuuming followed.  All the stuff was out of the way.  Time to try backing out of thirty year old ruts. 

       The car started, but depressing the clutch pedal produced no results.  I couldn’t get the transmission into reverse, or any other gear.  The clutch plate was rusted to the flywheel.

      Out came the battery and back into the Ford tractor it went.  With the tractor, I pulled the Chevy out of its tracks.

     Then around I went and hooked to the front and the Chevy saw the sunlight for the first time in thirty years.  Out in the open, I reinstalled the battery, put the car into first gear and tried the starter.  Reluctantly the starter pulled the engine and the car.  The engine fired and we were off.  I made two or three big circles around the farmyard, pushing the clutch pedal down, releasing, down again. 

      Finally, the clutch plate left the flywheel and I could shift gears.  Not too fast, the brakes were not working.  Oh well, I thought.  We can get it on a trailer now, with a winch.  Time for one more cleaning.  This time, I gave it a bath.  Some of the thirty years of dust was kind of oily, from tractor exhaust?

       Well, there it was, ready to go.  I eased it into the garage and there it sat for a couple of weeks until the deal could be consummated.  Wet weather again.  Dan called.  Did I think they could limp the car to their place?  Their trailer wasn’t exactly made to haul cars.

    “The brakes don’t work, Dan.”  He decided to try it.

     So Dan and his father showed up on a windy cold early October afternoon.  I jacked the car up, one corner at a time.  While Dan operated the brake pedal, I opened up the rusty bleeder valves and bled all four brakes.  They worked!

     I fired it up and backed out of the garage.  Fifteen minutes later, Dad drove the 1955 Chev known as the Patti Wagon into the sunset.

  “Don’t wreck it!” Dan hollered as his Dad eased out on the clutch.  I laughed.  How many times had his dad told him the same thing?

      The new owners promise to keep us up on the progress of the restoration.  I look forward to the new old car.  While I am sad to see it go, I am relieved that someone else has charge of its care from here on.