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?"
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