From Veeduber@aol.com  Mon Oct 16 18:53:04 1995
msgnum: msg17716
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 19:52:28 -0400
From: Veeduber_at_aol_dot_com
Subject: Getting Grendel Home, 2 of 2

The Long Run Home, conclusion.


Just across the parking lot was a pair of phone booths.  I
trudged over, intending to call my son but did not.  I would try
to reach Medford, call from there instead of awakening him. 
There was a phone book and I used the yellow pages to learn the
location of the nearest auto-parts store.  Based on the map in
the phone book and my minute knowledge of Grant's Pass, the store
was less than a mile away, all downhill.  I stowed the ruined
jack in Grendel's cargo bay and drove to the auto-parts store,
dealing with the few cars and stop lights by traveling at little
more than a walking pace.  At the store, the parking lot had some
slope to it but it wasn't too bad.  I spotted a reasonably level
space and pulled into it.  It was about a quarter past six in the
morning and a cold fog was coming up from the river.  Even the
miniscule heat from the engine was denied me by The Noise.  The
store opened at eight.  I passed the time trying to think out the
problem.  I had the feeling I'd missed a clue but I was too cold
to reason clearly.   I drank the dregs from my thermos, nibbled
on a bagle.  The traffic increased, Grendel garnering a host of
stares, most amused, some angry.

When the store opened the first thing I noticed was the smell of
fresh-brewed coffee, a convenience for their early-morning
customers.  I take my coffee black but that morning I loaded the
styrofoam cup with sugar and creamer, added a little hot coffee,
sucked down the syrupy mess while the clerks watched blank-faced,
finally inquired if they might help me.  "Floor jack?" I asked. 
Shake of the head.  But a slow point of the finger toward some
bottle jacks on a shelf, high up, in keeping with their prices. 
I bought an 8-ton model, a gallon of tranny lube.  WARM tranny
lube, having learned my lesson with the floor jack.  Ninty-weight
tranny lube is like molasses when cold.

The bottle jack was powerful but not very handy, Grendel having
no conveniently flat jacking-points.  I used blocks of wood and
lots of luck to get the brakes adjusted.  I didn't have enough
small blocks to chock the wheels and use as jacking points, had
to keep shuffling them around for each wheel, afraid to try a two
wheel lift due to the slope of the lot.  With the left rear in
the air, I built a safety stand, skivvied under, pulled the
filler plug, gave Grendel an agonizing twenty-one strokes before
she sicked-up, spat lube down my wrist and arm and shirt sleeve
as my frozen fingers fumbled to get the plug back in.

The brakes come up amazingly well.  They pulled a bit to the left
and I could feel a definite rough spot but they were good enough
to allow me to deal with the traffic.  Saturdays are busy in
Grant's Pass.

I refueled at the Chevron near the fairgrounds.  Surprisingly,
the attendant appeared sentient.  I'd now dealt with four
Oregonian gas station attendants, found seventy-five percent of
them to be idiots, not good odds for the Beaver State.  I filled
my thermos at the gas station mini-mart, had a sketchy wash in
their bathroom.  Another surprise was the Noise, less than the
night before, possibly even less than it had been during the day. 
I put it down to the cold, to a full charge of oil, to prayers
answered and incantations chanted as I pulled out of the station
and tackled the first grade on the south-bound road.  It was a
few minutes before ten.

I was traversing the Siskayou Range, a hundred miles of mountains
cut by river gorges, with I-5 soaring over the one only to plunge
back to the other.  Grendel was carrying her rated max of 1500
pounds, mostly junkyard parts I was hoping to sell for a profit
in southern California.  We walked up the grades in 3rd, tryng to
stay above 30mph but failing on a few of the longer slopes.  

In Oregon, the slowest of the slow are expected to use the
shoulder of the roadway.  Midway up one grade I came upon a car
parked in my lane, a woman standing beside it.  The woman had her
hood up and a 'Help' sign in the rear window.  I saw her well
ahead, watched dozens of cars and trucks pass her as Grendel
toiled up the grade.  I pulled around her and stopped.

She was an older woman, made a bit nervous by my rough appearance
but willing to accept my help.  Her car was a little Nissan, an
older one with the engine fore & aft instead of traverse.  Gray. 
I don't know the models but it was a two-door sedan.  She said it
had lost power and then simply stopped.  She said some lights had
come on but she couldn't remember if they came on before or after
the engine stopped.  SHE HAD BEEN THERE NEARLY AN HOUR.

The radiator appeared dry.  The oil was off the stick.  The
engine was still very warm to the touch.  I had two quarts of 30W
oil.  It took them both before showing on the stick, just above
the one-quart-low mark.  I poured my coffee into the radiator.  I
had a 20 ounce Pepsi but no water in Grendel.  With a mental
shrug, I fed the Pepsi to her radiator.   I told the old lady
that I thought the thing had just over-heated.  She readily
agreed, saying it had been running hot lately.  When I told her
to start the engine it fired right up, settled down to a nice
idle.  She said it seemed quieter.  I told her I would be along
in a few minutes, for her to stop if she had trouble, but to get
to water with all reasonable speed.  She was folding up her
'Help' sign, nodding, anxious to be off, said no word of thanks. 
She passed me as I trudged back to Grendel.  I never saw her
again.

Grendel continued to make an assortment of dreadful noises.  I
oiled her twice during the sixty miles between Grant's Pass and
the California border, each time imagining the fresh oil made her
less noisy.  Seven ounces the first time, only five the second,
hardly worth the trouble.  I was averaging a bit less than 30 mph
but reaching California provided an enormous boost to my spirits. 
I was born in San Francisco; I was back in my home state and that
was good enough for now.  The first bit of road after crossing
the stateline was some of the worst I'd encountered but it got
better and I knew there were occasional road-side phones in
California -- rare in both Oregon and Washington, and that the
California Highway Patrol actual did a pretty good job of
patrollng the highways.  I had crossed Washington and Oregon
without seeing a single police car.  I saw three within minutes
of arriving in California.  I waved at the two that passed me. 
One waved back.  Fifty-fifty ain't too bad.  Better than
Oregonian gas station attendants.


The Noise was definitely getting louder.  I was running a bare 40
mph, stopping to refill the tranny about once an hour.  But I
wasn't using much lube.  It was very confusing.  Then came The
Big Bang.

It happened in Weed, where I stopped to buy more tranny lube. 
There wasn't any positive reason to buy more, I still had most of
a frozen gallon and some remained in one of the two quarts I'd
bought in Grant's Pass, the parts-store not having any gallon
jugs of the stuff, looking at me as if I were mad when I asked. 
Tranny lube in GALLONS?  

There's all kinds of luck besides good and bad, my stop at Weed
falling somewhere in that gray area in between the two.  I crept
off the freeway, stopped at the NAPA parts place, got Larry to
sell me a gallon of 90W.  Beside the display was a rack of lube
pumps that had a barbed fitting on the filler hose, allowing you
to lock the thing in the filler hole and not pump half the lube
down your arm.  I bought one.  Outside, Grendel started
reluctantly, a first for her.  The engine had been the only
reliable part of the vehicle, the one thing I could take entirely
for granted since it was my own creation.  I pulled up at the
towns only stop light, waited for a logging truck to make the
turn, started through the intersection when there was an
incredible racket from the engine room, an enorumous BANG!... and
the red light came on.  Fan belt.  But not like any fan belt I'd
ever heard.

It was like a revelation from God.  Before I got Grendel to a
vacant lot just beside the car wash, Understanding washed over
me.  The Noise wasn't coming from the tranny, it had been coming
from the alternator.  Or the fan pulley.  Or some damn thing. 
But not the tranny.  When I rolled out of the motel in the pre-
dawn nearly eight hours before, THERE HAD BEEN NO NOISE.  The
tranny had been rotating but not the engine, since I didn't pop
the clutch until we were doing a few miles an hour.  The leak had
made me so sure the noise was coming from the tranny, and my own
faith in my skills made me so confident in the engine, that I
failed to interpret what Grendel had been telling me.  

Sitting in that narrow but marvelously convenient vacant lot, I
cried.  I'm not sure why, I just couldn't help it.  Water came
out of my eyes and my chin wouldn't keep still and I was so damn
mad at myself... yet relieved, too.  It's still pretty mixed up
in my mind.  I've never let things get out of hand like that
before and it took several minutes for me to calm down, climb out
and assess the damage.

The alternator pulley had eaten the Woodruff key and ground a
nice noisy burr into the nose of the alternator.  The bearing was
intact and the shaft still firm but that sonofabitch had to have
been grinding away for at least seven hundred miles, ever since I
installed the alternator on the engine at Shelton under less than
ideal conditions.  When I dismantled the engine for the trip
north I put the Woodruff key and the spacer into a baggy, packing
it with the other small parts in a white cardboard box, where I
found it waiting when I put the engine back together.  But there
was no evidence of the spacer.  I'd mounted the pulley without
the spacer.  The noise and the worry and the fear had all been
the product of my own hands.

The past is prolog.  I'd screwed up.  To unscrew things I would
have to perform the Hat Trick.  This particular Hat Trick was to
locate a Volkswagen alternator pulley in Weed, California on a
Saturday afternoon in October.  I hiked back to the NAPA store
and braced Larry with the problem.  He wasn't hopeful.  He knew
of only one wrecking yard that had Volkswagens and it was some
distance out of town.  He gave me involved directions: Back onto
the freeway to the next off-ramp, under the freeway to the end of
the road, hang a right to the fork, then a left, then watch for
the sign: Black Butte Auto Dismantling.  Couldn't miss it.  Oh,
the last part of that was unpaved roads, out through the pines. 
It sounded chillingly like Shelton.

I bought a spare fan belt -- I had one but expected to ruin it
doing what I had to do, which was jam the pulley onto the shaft
with a wedge of bailing wire in the bore and tighten everything
down after greasing the hub to let it spin in the burr it had
already created.  I shrieked my way onto the freeway, accelerated
to about twenty, threw in the clutch and coasted, engine off. 
Did that twice to reach the off-ramp.  It was called Mountain
View, the mountain in view being Mount Shasta, the view being
more than magnificent.  I barely noticed.

Black Butte Auto Dismantling looked like something run by the
Joad family, eerily like the situation in Shelton, even to the
name of the man:  Eric.

"No, ain't got nothing like that.  I sells every Volkswagen
generator I get my hands on, pulley and all.  Regulators, too." 
But he didn't mind if I looked around.  I grabbed a 21mm wrench,
a screwdriver and began hiking, the wrecking yard covering more
than ten acres.

It held only six Volkswagens.  In one, I found a blower with the
armature of  a 12v generator attached, but no pulley.  I also
found a new Bosch voltage regular under the front seat and a pair
of nearly new needle-nosed pliers.  Then I found a 1965 bus
complete except for glass and front axles, right down to the 6v
generator on the engine.  And the pulley.  I removed it, laughing
like a fool.  The shaft diameter is the same as on the
alternator.  But I stopped laughing when I couldn't get the inner
flange of the pulley free of the shaft.  I hiked back to find
Eric and beg the use of a puller, offering up the things I'd
discovered to show my good intentions.  He wouldn't let me use
his puller but he drove over to the bus and prepared to remove
the pulley himself.  As he set up the puller I gave him a sketchy
outline of my activities over the past month, hoping to impress
the importance of my need.  He ended up listening spellbound, his
hands still.  When I finished my tale he popped the pulley off,
firing the Woodruff key into space, where it now orbits the
planet Logon.  But there was another Woodruff key.  On the fan-
end of the generator shaft.  And I'd just lugged one of those up
to the office.  He gave me the puller with a shake of his head,
saying "Good luck."  He knew the contents of his yard, had known
of the armature but didn't think the rusty hub would come free. 
And he was pretty sure the 6v pulley wouldn't fit a 12v
alternator.  I didn't dispute his opinion, thankful for his trust
in allowing me to use the puller.

Looming over us was Mount Shasta, a remarkably beautiful example
of a shield volcano, it's upper slopes rosy in the afternoon
light, glaciers and permanent snow fields mantling its heights. 
It isn't as impressive as Hood, Rainier or the caldera of Mount
St. Helens, but it is somehow a more imminent peak, more
personal.  I can't explain why, it was just the feeling I had as
I hiked back toward the office with a nearly complete pulley in
one hand, the preious puller in the other.  I walked right into
the path of the junkyard dog, a chained bitch.  She made a rush
at me that I wasn't even aware of, my gaze glued on the mountain,
wondering why the colors seemed to change as I watched.  When I
failed to leap aside, the dog stopped, sat down perplexed.  Then
I realized what I'd done, leapt aside and she made another lunge,
brought up by the limit of her chain.  Two women who saw the
incident thought it very funny.  Piney woods, junkyards, guys
named Eric.  Even junkyard dogs.  When I got to Grendel it was
all I could do to climb inside, sit shaking, spilling tobacco all
over myself as I tried to fill my pipe.  I felt the weight of the
mountain against my back, pushing me south.

The puller, a hammer and a liberal dose of Liquid Wrench won me
the Woodruff key but the keyway in the alternator shaft was
buggered all to hell and the keyway in the 6v pulley was notched;
it wouldn't accept the key.  My Swiss files were somewhere under
the load.  I dug them out.  My emery paper was in a box full of
tail light fixtures.  I dug IT out.  Then came the fun of
machining my abused alternator's shaft back into something close
to a circle and filing the pulley's keyway to accept the key. 
The sun slid down the sky and they'd already told me they would
close a bit early, it being a Saturday and all.  

I got the alternator's shaft to accept the pulley.  Then I got
the alternator's keyway to accept the key by swaging hammered
wafers of bailing wire into the buggered part of the moon-shaped
keyway slot, leaving the Woodruff key verticle.  I put it
together three times, the final assembly with a dose of high
powered Sleeve Retainer, thoughtfully included in the shipment of
front wheel cylinders by my friend Roland Wilhelmy two weeks
before and unused until now.  The belt I installed was the spare
I'd purchased at the NAPA store in Weed, the last thirty-five and
a half inch belt he had on hand, the short run to the junkyard
having trashed my spare belt.  By three fifteen I was done, the
engine ran, The Noise had vanished.  The ladies allowed me to use
the bathroom in the office to clean up.  I made a proper job of
it, thanked them sincerely.  They were sun-burned, happily
splitting stove wood, covering it with a ragged blue tarp. 
Winter had already touched the highlands.

Eric would not accept payment, saying my finding the regulator
and his mislaid needle-nosed pliers was more than payment enough. 
Something went wrong with my throat and I was forced to turn
away, giving him only a curt nod of thanks.  As I stumbled toward
Grendel he called out, "Good luck, fella."  I felt I'd already
had some.

I allowed Grendel to find her own way down the stony dirty road,
refueled at the Mountain View Chevron station, refilled my
thermos with good coffee, that morning's fill now somewhere in
Oregon cooling a thankless Nissan.  I won my way over the last
pass and came down from the hills, the engine running quiet and
strong, a faint whine from the tranny but no other symptoms of
note.  The clutch was good, the brakes better, the heater now a
definite blast, unneeded in the warmth of the valley, dealt with
by open windows and a working overhead ventilator.  A woman in a
late model Vanagon overhauled me.  I waved as she passed, an
automatic thing.  She waved back, a first for the trip.  I took
it as a good omen.

I ran down the track of the sun, watched it set beyond the
Coastal Range, stopped to buy a pair of spare fan belts in
Redding about six pm, kept rolling Grendel south, stopping every
two hours to pump in more lubricant, backing up on the kerbing at
the rest stops to gain enough room to squeeze under Grendel's
belly, do the deadly deed, washing up in the cold-water basin of
the rest stop bathroom.

Night found Grendel's headlights wanting; I'd adjusted them too
far toward the shoulder, another error of caution.  But they were
bright enough and the moon was supposed to rise about ten thirty. 
When it didn't I felt I was in a different world.  I'm well
attuned to the phases of the moon, the way some people can always
point toward the north.  The moon has been a faithful companion
on many a night flight and voyage.  It should have been there but
it wasn't and I found the lack profoundly disturbing, made worse
by my inability to understand. When a lemon-wedge of moon rose
over the mountains about eleven fifteen I realized the Grendel
Affair had cost me an entire day somewhere, perhaps when I'd been
ill with pneumonia.

I continued south thorugh the soft California night, my world
governed by three dials.  The speedometer was immobile on 45, the
fuel gauge a glacial creep, my watch a languid semaphore.  Every
two hours I would stop to top up the tranny.  At Woodland I
refueled.  At 1:35 am I arrived at my son's home having taken
seventeen hours to travel the 454 miles between Grant's Pass and
Modesto.  

Home is still four hundred miles to the south and there is no
doubt I will drive Grendel there, as I set out to do more than a
month ago.  It's a do-able thing.

-Bob