Just Push It On Over

Cars have gotten much bigger in the past decade than they have been at any time in the past.  Compared to cars from the 1970s and 1980s, decades when cars, and American cars in particular, were seen as bloated and large, it is obvious that cars these days are much larger if they are parked side by side.  Interestingly, if they are not parked side by side most people would still assume that the older cars were larger.

Why are cars so much larger these days?  And what does that have to do with a tale I have to tell?  Excellent questions.  I'll answer the easier one first and sum it up with a single word answer.  "Safety".  Crumple zones, airbags, not just in the steering wheel and dash but in the pillars and roof and even in the seats themselves, and of course all the new gear and gadgets that are in new cars all take up much room.  Car designers have somehow managed to trick the eye and make large cars look sleek and smaller than the cars of the past, while in fact being considerably larger.

If you do a direct comparison of a modern car, let's say a Chevy Impala, to a comparable model of car from the 1970s, say a Chevy Impala (that was an easy choice), you will find some startling stats.  Let's start with the one element where the 1970s cars were undeniably huge, and that is the length.  The 1975 Impala wins this, with a length of 222 inches, while a 2018 Impala is only 201 inches.  If you were a mob boss, you really could store an entire family in the trunk.  In every other way, however, the modern Impala is a larger car, 84 inches wide compared to only 79 inches wide in 1975; and 59 inches tall compared to 54 inches tall in 1975.

But surely, you say, the 1950s cars were larger.  Or, maybe not.  A 1957 Chevy Bel Air (the 1950s car), was only 200 inches long and 74 inches wide.  It was tall...  still not as tall as its modern equivalent, but within an inch.

So, I flipped a car.

That was an abrupt segue.  I ran out of things to say about Chevy's.

The car I flipped was, not at all coincidentally, a Chevy Impala.  It was a 1975, and quite a large vehicle.  The way I flipped it was amusing, and somewhat humiliating, as it was perhaps the slowest a car has ever flipped.

I was driving with a couple friends going no particular place, just going.  I was driving too fast for the road, and too fast for the car, and this was not at all unusual for me.  As I approached a sharp turn I realized that I simply was not going to make it.  I had too much speed and too much weight and I was going to run off the road.

I ran off the road.

It wasn't a surprise.  I did say I knew it was going to happen.

I did manage to slow way down, with the nose of the car diving as only 1970s automobile suspension would allow, and so instead of sliding off the road and into whatever trees or field or other random bit of the landscape awaited, only the right hand tires fell off of the pavement.

Due to some geometrical vagaries, or simply karma poking fun at me, the right hand tires dug into the dirt off the side of the road and the very slight momentum remaining caused the car to lift its left hand side into the air.  This resulted in even more weight on the right hand side, causing the tires to dig down into the soft dirt on the shoulder and thus, in seemingly slow motion, the car flipped onto its side.

I was suspended from my seat belt.  The guys in the back seat were in a pile on the passenger side door.  This was an odd position to be in, and one I had no clue how to get out of.

After turning off the car, I unbuckled my seat belt and fell to the passenger side of the car.  I probably should have warned my buddy in the passenger seat that I was about to do this, but thinking clearly and making good decisions was not what got me into this predicament, so why start now?

It is at this point that those measurements that bored you at the beginning of this story become relevant.  I am five feet, nine inches tall.  That is 69 inches.  Which is 10 inches shorter than the width of a 1975 Impala.  No problem, right?  I can just lift my arms, and I'm easily a foot and a half taller in reach.  The doors on a 1975 Impala, however, are considerably longer than a foot, and considerably heavier than I had the leverage to open from that odd position.

Using the seats as a sort of ladder, and with a friend helping hold the door open by using the steering wheel as a seat, I was able to climb out of the car.  Dave could also get out.  Joe and Billy, too short, were stuck inside.

Walking around the car I realized that the situation might not be completely horrible.  In fact, I should be able to just push it on over.  Positioning myself with my back against the roof of the car, legs bent, I started to try to push the car over.  There was some heaving, some ho'ing.  There was some rocking.

There was too much rocking!

The car shifted closer to tipping over onto the roof.  This was pretty much the complete opposite of what I was trying to accomplish.

The soil on the shoulder had a nearly sand-like consistency, very loose and soft.  I was pushing myself into the dirt more than I was pushing the car, and I was seriously concerned that the car was about to push me all the way into the dirt.  I decided that side of the car was not where I wanted to be.

Moving over to the other side of the car, where I had an excellent view of the exhaust pipes and all the other stuff that resides on the underside of a car, I contemplated my predicament.

I had a solution.  Maybe.  I just needed some rope.  Did I have any rope?  Why would I have rope?

I yelled in to my friends in the car asking if there was anything that looked like rope.  There was not.  Who carries rope in their car?

But, four guys in jeans...  that's four belts.  That's a rope.

There were actually six belts.  Dave had an odd fashion sense and wore multiple belts because, well, nobody knew.  Probably not even Dave.

Taking all of the belts and doing whatever it took to link them into one long strand, I looped one end of my makeshift rope through the front driver's side wheel of the car.  I wrapped the other end around my hand, and then twisted to brace it around my shoulder as I leaned away from the car.

And I leaned with all the leverage I could put into a lean.  I knew better than to let up, as if the car rocked the other direction it would likely tip on over to the roof.  My buddies still in the car laid (standing up) in the floorboards to make sure their weight would work to our benefit and not against it.  The car started to slowly tilt back toward the road and right-side-uppedness.  I felt like superman!

"Hold on, I'm slipping!"

Dave?  Dave!

Adrenaline is a powerful drug.  I had just realized that Dave was on the other side of the car pushing.  The exact same place I realized I did not want to be if the car fell the wrong way.  I found more strength.  I found more leverage.  The car fell onto its wheels.  Dave was not smashed flat.

There was no damage to the car.  None.  The passenger side mirror, an expected casualty, was fine.  The dirt on the side of the road was so soft and the speed of the tip over was so slow that the car was cushioned by the dirt rather than damaged by it.

We all put our belts back on.  Dave put all three of his belts back on.  And we headed on in our wandering and aimless journey.

lt Still Runs?

Sometimes automotive technology can be surprisingly robust.  I have heard said that "a Chevrolet will run longer on its last five cylinders than other cars will run on all eight."  I have seen some old Chevys sputtering around that seem to support that statement.

I have a story to tell about my own hard to kill vehicle.  It was a 1976 AMC Hornet.  It was tan and it was ugly.  If you were not alive to see these in the wild it is hard to explain how ugly they were, so, in classic fashion, here are my thousand words of description.



Please understand, that picture is of a nice one.  Mine was not nearly so nice.

One day, in a rainstorm, I found myself driving down an old country road out in the middle of nowhere.  I don't remember why I was in the middle of nowhere, or I probably wouldn't remember it as "the middle of nowhere".  I had a couple passengers, including my brother.  It was a nasty day, and a muddy, nasty road.

There was a clank and a clunk, and the engine died.  Out in the middle of nowhere.  In the rain.  Wonderful.

I get out and look under the hood and, yes, there is an engine there.  That is probably what made the clank and the clunk.  I didn't see anything actually wrong with the engine, so I decided to see if I could get it restarted.

It fired right up.  It sounded like it was trying to eat itself, but it fired right up.  At that point I knew the engine was a goner, so my main goal became just getting back to civilization.

With it clanking and clunking and vibrating the whole car in the process, I coaxed the car on down the muddy road through the downpouring rain just hoping it would hold together long enough to get to a phone and thus get some help, or at least a ride in a car that wasn't about to die.

After a few miles, and because life has a sense of humor, I got stuck in the mud.  Wonderful.  My brother got out to push to try to get the car out of its predicament, while I revved it to try to get a bite of traction.  My brother was not nearly as amused as I was by the result of the tires spinning in the mud with him behind the vehicle.

Just as the car, clanking and clunking and vibrating, started to get free from the mud, it made a new sound.  This was more of a "ka-thunk".  And it made it more than once.  In fact, for every clank and clunk it now added a ka-thunk.

Free of the mud pits, I once again looked under the hood to make sure the engine was still there.  It was, and it still looked fine.  It sounded spectacularly bad, but it was still running.  So, back in the car and on our way.  Clank, clunk, ka-thunk.

Another couple of miles down the road, starting to feel like we might actually make it to somewhere we could get help, the car introduced a unique wiggle to its repertoire.  A literal wiggle.  The car was now doing much more than vibrating, it was literally gyrating.  Clank, clunk, ka-thunk.

And then...  BANG!

That didn't sound good.  When I stopped the engine sputtered and died.  I got out to once again look under the hood and pretend I knew something useful.  Surprisingly, this time I did know something useful.  There wasn't supposed to be a hole in the engine.  There was a hole in the engine.  It seemed that this was where our journey was going to end.

I got back into the car, wet and frustrated, and out of sheer habit turned the key.  The car started.

With a hole in the engine, the car started!

I wasn't going to waste this opportunity, and so dropped it into drive and took off down the road.  The clank, clunk, ka-thunk had now been replaced by a rhythmic and terrifying clank, bang.  A cloud of smoke was left along our path.  This trip was not likely to last long.

After a few minutes and a few miles, with the car trying to shake itself apart the whole way, there was another loud bang.  I didn't even slow down.  In fact, I floored it.  I knew that we were only about two miles away from a gas station with a telephone, and I was not in any mood to finish that trip walking in the rain.

New noises, even more horrifying than before, rattled out from under the hood.  Clank, bang, rattle, grind, bang, bang, bang.  The car was rocking from side to side so hard that I could barely keep it on the road.  I tried to push even harder on the gas pedal, but I had it pressed to the floor already.

And there, visible in the near distance through the pouring down rain, was a Sunoco sign.  As I pulled in under the cover over the gas pumps the old guy manning the station came out to find out what was causing such a horrendous racket.  The look on his face as I turned off the car and got out is one I will never forget.  His words, a mastery of understatement, "Having car problems?"

I popped the hood and along with the old guy surveyed the damage.  There were two holes in the engine, and a dent that looked like it might have become a hole if there were a little bit more momentum involved.  The engine was mangled, smelled like burnt rubber, was smoking out of the holes, and the engine bay was covered in dripping oil.

With a low whistle the old guy once again demonstrated his mastery of language.  "It still runs?"