ALL JACKED UP AND TOO HEAVY TO LIFT
At the end of my summer, working in Crater Lake National Park and preaching in the campgrounds on the weekends for the United Church of Christ, I had to find a cheap way to get home. I was actually thinking of delivering the tractor section of a tractor-trailer rig from California to somewhere in the Midwest. That would probably not have been a good idea, but I did actually entertain the idea. A young man, who also worked at the Lodge, had driven out west in a 1953 Buick from Connecticut, wanted to go back there on a motorcycle and wanted to get rid of his old car. He was willing to give it to anybody for free.
The Buick’s right front tire had come off on a California highway on his trip out West and had to be welded back on which meant that it could never be changed. The compression in the engine was so bad that the only way to get it started was to get a push on a hill. He gave me the keys and signed the ownership papers over to me and dared me to drive it back to Kentucky.
Another student, who was going my way, and I got a push in front of the Lodge to start our 2600-mile trip home. We always parked on a hill and never turned off the ignition. We did have one flat tire in Wyoming, but it was miraculously on the front left, not the front right. There was so little traffic for miles and miles that we barely pulled it off the road. All you could see in all directions was tumbleweed We found a bumper jack in the trunk and started to jack up the car to change the tire. When we got to the top of the jack, we noticed that the car was still sitting on the blacktop. The car was so heavy and the bottom plate of the jack was so thin that the post, instead of lifting the car, had pierced the plate and had been driven down into the asphalt.
Panic set in! We were in the middle of nowhere, twenty miles from the small town of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. We had two trunks full of clothes and the other things we owned. No one was driving by, especially people who would pick up two rough looking young men in a broken down 1953 Buick with two trunks!
We tried our best to pull the jack post out of the asphalt and try it again, but it would not budge! Trying to pack our stuff into the trunk, if we were forced to hitchhike to the next town, I found a second jack. It was a miracle find for sure! This time it was a scissors-jack. We were able to jack-up the car, change the tire and continue our trip after having been saved by not one miracle, but two!
To this day, I have always worried about going off and leaving that bumper jack pole sticking up out of the asphalt for someone to hit, but there was absolutely nothing we could do to dislodge it, even with the car's bumper. We were forced to go off and leave it!
Somewhere in Missouri, we experienced our third miracle. We never turned off the motor unless we were on a hill where we could "pop the clutch" to get it started. We stopped at a restaurant and instead of leaving the motor running, I accidently turned it off! After we ate, we came out to the car and could not get it started. We were forced to call AAA for help that we could not afford. While we were waiting for them to show up, I tried starting it one more time. Miraculously, it started just as the AAA truck was pulling into the parking lot! We gunned it and peeled out of the parking lot without drawing attention and getting a hefty bill from the AAA truck driver!
We finally made it to Kentucky, but the car never started again no matter how many attempts I made! My only regret was that I did not store it in some barn so that it could be restored in a few years. The body, the exterior paint job, the chrome, the upholstery and interior were in perfect condition. Over the years, it completely rusted in a field beside a farmer's barn.
The Buick’s former owner, who gave me the car, showed up at the seminary on his motorcycle a few weeks after school started because he did not believe that we had made it. Obviously, he did not believe in miracles!
PS
My brother Mark was telling his friend Aubrey about my flat tire experience in Wyoming. He thought it was so funny, he did a watercolor of the scene. Notice the "jack" in the middle of the road, near the center line!
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