{"id":49466,"date":"2013-03-28T11:36:18","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T15:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=49466"},"modified":"2013-03-29T13:35:26","modified_gmt":"2013-03-29T17:35:26","slug":"car-trouble-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/28\/car-trouble-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Car Trouble, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Blacksheep1\"<\/a>Read part 1 here<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

I owned a car that I couldn\u2019t drive.<\/p>\n

After the \u201cPossession at Devil\u2019s Bridge,\u201d as we\u2019d started calling it, Phil had parked the Mini alongside my cottage before roaring back to campus in her reliable yellow Renault. The following morning I went out and stood beside it, wondering what to do next. Any car\u2019s speedometer cable could snap, but not just any car\u2019s cable would have so profound a sense of timing as to do it at midnight, atop Devil\u2019s Bridge, on its first outing with a new owner.<\/p>\n

Appropriately enough, the Mini and I were in Wales: home of Arthur and Merlin, breeding ground of the fabulous. In one of the old Welsh wondertales, black sheep that cross a magical river turn white, and white sheep turn black. The Mini\u2019s color remained mushroom grey, but something similar, if more subtle, had happened as it crossed the Mynach. On the far side of the river the Mini had been cheap, utilitarian transportation; on my side, it had already become a character in a story. In Tender is the Night<\/i>, F. Scott Fitzgerald says we all have a heroic period in our lives. The Mini came into mine just as one of these phases was beginning (I don\u2019t see why we can\u2019t have more than one), and promptly took its place in the pantheon of memory.<\/p>\n

My next-door neighbor appeared and found me stroking my fingers through beads of dew on its roof. <\/p>\n

\u201cAre you going to put a little bowl of oil out for it, then, and a chew toy?\u201d she asked in a strong, rhythmic Welsh accent.<\/p>\n

\u201cVery funny,\u201d I said curtly, at the same time wondering what I was <\/i>going to do. Phil had offered to teach me to drive a stick shift, and so had another postgrad named Michael. Phil was firm and decisive; with her there\u2019d be a right way to shift and a wrong one. Michael was more philosophical: he\u2019d want me to know why <\/i>I was shifting. I opted for both.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is going to be fun,\u201d said Michael, theatrically rubbing his hands together. Michael was an artist, though he didn\u2019t look like one. He had a professorial rumple to his clothes, and a wonderful way of drawing from the inside out, as if his eye went straight to the heart of his subject, and he drew its soul before its outline. Souls, for Michael, were of dark and intricate design, with spiky edges and all the knobs and knots showing. I respected his talent and was glad he didn\u2019t tuck in his shirt.<\/p>\n

I got into the driver\u2019s seat and gripped the steering wheel. The stick shift shaft was tall and spindly; it looked fragile enough to break. Because I knew nothing at all about manual shifting, the black bulb atop the shaft didn\u2019t feel any more alien in my left hand than it would have my right.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll right now, the choke, that\u2019s the first thing,\u201d said Phil, who\u2019d taken the passenger seat.<\/p>\n

Michael, in the back, gripped his neck with both hands and made noises as if he were being garroted.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d I countered firmly, alarmed at not finding Michael where I\u2019d expected him, and wanting to avoid the choke at all costs. \u201cLet\u2019s start with the rearview mirror. Where\u2019s Michael?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m right bloody \u2019ere,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you\u2019re behind the driver\u2019s seat, so why am I not seeing you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Phil sighed. \u201cYou\u2019re in <\/i>the driver\u2019s seat. Michael\u2019s behind me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh. Hmm.\u201d This left-and-right thing was going to be trickier than I thought. Little did I realize that from this day forward, I would never again be able to blithely use the terms \u201cleft\u201d and \u201cright\u201d as directional signals. My age of vocabularic innocence was over.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cWhich way?\u201d someone asks me nowadays. And instead of answering, say, \u201cTurn right and go up the hill,\u201d my brain shifts into neutral and stalls. I know the answer, but I can\u2019t convey it. I must now rely on vast motions of my upper body and arms, combined with the phrase, \u201cThat way,\u201d to indicate what I mean. It turns out that \u201cleft\u201d and \u201cright\u201d\u2014seeming absolutes\u2014have only contextual meanings. Growing up in the States, \u201cright\u201d doesn\u2019t simply indicate a direction—it means the side of the road on which you drive; the simple turn, made without crossing traffic; the slowest lane of the highway; safety, in a sense. But from the moment I sat in the Mini with Phil and Michael, these definitions all deserted \u201cright\u201d in favor of \u201cleft.\u201d The meanings blended and the words muddied in my mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll right,\u201d said Phil, taking charge. \u201cWe\u2019ll leave off the choke for now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead she made me depress the clutch and put the stick shift through its paces: first, second, third, fourth gear. There was no fifth.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cWell done!\u201d Michael clapped.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not so hard,\u201d I ventured.<\/p>\n

I turned the engine on, but what had just been easy eluded me now. I pushed with all my might, but couldn\u2019t get the stick to move into second. We stalled.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would\u2019ve helped if you\u2019d pressed down the clutch.\u201d Phil noted this with mild interest, as if she were identifying a passing bird.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh.\u201d We tried again; stalled again. Like everyone who\u2019s ever learned to drive a manual-transmission car—well, almost everyone; I\u2019m sure there are clutch geniuses out there—I obsessed about the m\u00e9nage a trois between my left foot, my right foot, and the hand that worked the shift. I\u2019m not a multitasker by nature, so it wasn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n

Finally I got up to third gear and took the Mini over a little rise in the lane. As I turned the corner\u2014I was feeling pretty good, I was feeling a little proud, it was going all right\u2014a low-slung, dark green Rover came barreling down the lane in my direction. I yelled something out of Phil\u2019s deep, Anglo-Saxon past and pulled off the road into a shallow ditch. No one said anything.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre these people nuts? That guy was going waaay too fast!\u201d I was steaming with righteous indignation.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cTrue,\u201d Phil agreed. \u201cBut do you realize you pulled over to the right, not the left?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought I was going to me maker.\u201d Michael fell against the back seat and dramatically wiped his brow.<\/p>\n

I contemplated this, and decided it was the road\u2019s fault. It wasn\u2019t quite a single-lane track. Wales has plenty of those: thin veins of macadam about the width of a parking space, bullied on either side by tall hedgerows. If you meet another car, one of you has to back up until you come to a passing niche, which is a little aneurysm in the road surface. The track I was on was slightly wider. Nonetheless, because of the low frequency of cars, most people tended to drive in the middle, encouraging the illusion of a one-way track. This false confidence, coupled with an utter lack of road signs, had stripped me of any clues whatsoever that I should stay on the left.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever mind!\u201d Phil spoke with finality. \u201cLet\u2019s try it again, from the top.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hours dragged on. After about the fourth or fifth time the car stalled I decided to name it Gimli, after the irritable dwarf in The Lord of the Rings<\/i>. That seemed about right.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to say that once named, Gimli and I were able to communicate perfectly, and I eased him into gear and we drove westward to the sea for sunset. That didn\u2019t quite happen. It took days for me to stop shifting with my brain and let my hand and feet do the work. Once that happened, I did become worthy of Gimli\u2019s steering wheel, and learned to hug the lefthand side of the road. I began to enjoy myself. And that\u2019s when the trouble started.<\/p>\n

There is a visceral sexiness to driving in a place like Wales that\u2019s all but lost in America. Our big open spaces and razor-straight roads don\u2019t generate the kind of rhythmic togetherness you develop with a car on switchback lanes. Someone once said that if you ironed the hills out of Wales it would be the size of Texas. That may be true, but as far as I know there\u2019s no iron big enough, and so Wales remains a corrugated land filled with green inclines and angles, precipitating down into valleys and up slopes into the sky. Roads rise, fall, and, more than anything else, curl.<\/p>\n

Driving a car, you curl with them. You lean into an upward bend, down-shift, work the wheel as you and the car pull together into the curve, straining as one in an economic arc, only to whip round and do the same thing in reverse as the road ahead spins in the opposite direction. It\u2019s a tight, sensuous pact between you and the machine; the car hugs the road and you hug its wheel in the daily, muscular feat of getting from point A to point B.<\/p>\n

Driving Gimli made me feel as if I were a kid back at the go-kart track in Harwichport, on Cape Cod. Which isn\u2019t surprising: he wasn\u2019t much bigger than a go-kart, and his wheels were similarly positioned, flung conspicuously to the extreme corners of his body. They gripped the macadam like claws. Actually, it was no fluke that Gimli evoked go-kart memories. I\u2019ve since discovered that Minis were famous for their go-kart–like feel. Sir Alec Issigonis, the Greek-British engineer who created the Mini for the British Motors Corporation in 1957, designed a radically new kind of suspension made of rubber cones instead of springs. These original Minis, produced from 1959–64, were stiff and gave a bumpy ride, but the combination of rigidity and a wide wheel base made for sporty, ground-hugging handling that earned the Mini dear the hearts of many. After 1964, a new suspension was introduced to create a softer ride; die-hards were devastated. Gimli was built in 1967, but still felt like a derby winner to me.<\/p>\n

The drawback of driving a go-kart with a roof and windows is that the whole point of go-karts is to go-fast<\/i>. (Before speed, a word first about the windows: Issigonis opted to install windows that slid back and forth, as opposed to rolling up and down, in order to create storage pockets in the Mini\u2019s door panels. Had the windows functioned vertically like those in other cars, the window-winding mechanism would have taken up the space of Issigonis\u2019 storage area. The story goes\u2014perhaps apocryphally, perhaps not\u2014that the pockets were carefully measured to fit the width of a bottle of Gordon\u2019s gin.)<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t just want to drive from point A to point B in Wales: I wanted to drive there fast. Being unburdened by a speedometer, I never knew precisely how fast Gimli and I were actually going. From the testimony of others, I can say with confidence that we were not moving slowly. My friends prayed I\u2019d get a ticket and learn my lesson before I crashed. Neither came to pass, though I was stopped by a cop once alongside a sheep pasture for driving with a rusted headlight rim. He demanded to know the registration number. I told him it was \u201cSUK-something,\u201d and watched him flush with anger, content and protected in the knowledge that thanks to Gimli, I\u2019d simply told the truth.<\/p>\n

That was the thing about Gimli: he and I were a team. I brought him youth, speed, and sunglasses, and he, through his rust, wonky petrol pump, and retread tires (Phil was right: they were <\/i>retreads), showed me that real glamour has nothing to do with sports cars. Had I been driving a Porsche, I\u2019d have confidently expected to make it up the big hill at Llandewi Brefi\u2014the one that miraculously sprouted beneath St. David, so they say, the better for the assembled throng to hear his sermon. I expected to climb the hill in Gimli, too; I shouldn\u2019t have\u2014not with four passengers, three of whom had to get out and push. But it never occurred to me that Gimli couldn\u2019t do anything a Porsche could do. So we tried everything.<\/p>\n

If glamour means \u201cthe attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing or special,\u201d then the thrill of being young in a beautiful new place lent Gimli all the associative glamour I ever craved. He was my key in the lock of the Welsh landscape. With every turn I learned something, went somewhere new\u2014even if his own lock was stuck fast with rust.<\/p>\n

Pamela Petro is the author of Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World in Welsh<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read part 1 here. I owned a car that I couldn\u2019t drive. After the \u201cPossession at Devil\u2019s Bridge,\u201d as we\u2019d started calling it, Phil had parked the Mini alongside my cottage before roaring back to campus in her reliable yellow Renault. The following morning I went out and stood beside it, wondering what to do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[10484,10485,123,7138,2455],"class_list":["post-49466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-cars","tag-gimli","tag-travel","tag-uk","tag-wales"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCar Trouble, Part 2 by Pamela Petro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 28, 2013 \u2013 Read part 1 here. I owned a car that I couldn\u2019t drive. 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