On the road ag ... no, wait .. yeh - no ... huh .. better call a mechanic (or: The Damn Temperature Gauge; or: An ode to Matt, Sam and Bob)

My Ford is still a piece of crap.

A piece of crap that's paid off and is cheap to insure. That has to count for something.

And it overheated (again) today, this time on the Wheatland (populated) end of Wyoming Highway 34. Thinking I'd just wait for it to cool off, I thanked and waved on several kind souls who stopped to see what they could do and to shake their heads gravely when I told them my car had overheated. Really, though, for an overheated car, waiting is all you can do, and while company is nice sometimes while you're waiting, this just wasn't a situation where I wanted to spend an hour kicking the ragweed and chatting about how overheated my car was.

And everyone just wanted to throw my stuff in their car and get me to Laramie, which was appreciated, but not what I wanted to do. I wanted to get my piece of crap Ford back to Laramie with me, and I knew time and antifreeze and water was what it would take to accomplish that.

Then I was rescued.

Not by a knight in shining armor on a white steed, but by Matt in Carharts and driving a white truck. Matt took me back to Wheatland, where I got coolant and a mechanic's number, dropped me off at my now-cooled car and gave me his number just in case, "cuz I'm gonna be in this area all day." (Matt works for USDA, collecting grasshoppers. I'm serious.) Matt also said he keeps his golf clubs with him for the times when his truck breaks down, so at least he has something to do. I don't golf, but I guess it's something to consider. There's still a bit of unused space in my trunk.

And then Sam stopped to help, which was good, because suddenly I was a weenie who couldn't twist off her radiator cap, and neither could Sam, but his mega-wrench-thingie could, and ... my radiator was full. Fans were working. And I was perplexed.

Called Mechanic Bob, who gave me directions to just north of Wheatland, just south of BFE, Wyoming. Actually, with the approaching typhoon, it was very pretty scenery. Black skies and impending doom have a way of making the prairie look gorgeous ...

Mechanic Bob couldn't find anything wrong and just sagely nodded his head when I said something about the heater only ever putting out very cold air, and then he said something about a "heating coil," which sounds expensive and like something that can wait for October. Or November. I'm tough, and I have a lot of coats.

The heater comes into play because Mechanic Bob was the fourth person to recommend running my defrost on full-blast full heat to "draw the heat off" my engine. I can picture that. Makes sense to me. I have a communications degree, and word pictures like "draw the heat off your engine" sound very appealing.

Somewhere in there was a deluge during which one of Mechanic Bob's little dogs hovered very near me while I perched on an overturned bucket in the doorway of his garage trying to read Harry Potter (I don't own golf clubs yet), deafened by the rain on his tin roof. Lots of lightning and thunder .... and then I found out that I'd left all my car windows down, and Mechanic Bob had left them that way.

Mechanic Bob sent me on my way with his no-charge blessing and his advice that I run the defrost on heat (which is actually quite cold - are you confused yet? It gets better).

Twenty miles into the canyon (where there is no cell reception and horror movies could likely be plotted), I began climbing a particularly swearable hill, and my temperature needle began its ascent into particularly swearable territory.

I began talkin' to Jesus about my car. I also began to be acutely aware of how I can feel my blood pressure rising and how my body temperature increases when I'm angry, because I felt very warm and pressurized during that time.

When the needle had reached near the tippy-top of the gauge and I had decided that my car was either going to spontaneously combust or just vaporlock and leave me to chat with the antelope and rattlesnakes for another hour or so, I decided to try something potentially stupid: I turned off the defrost. I know how to hand a vaporlocked car; I was a little less prepared for the combustion scenario, but my theory was this: If my heater is blowing cold air in the middle of summer, maybe my car thinks I'm really running the AC, and it's working itself (and me) into a dither.

And I was right (communications degrees rock!). Defrost off. Needle back into safe territory.

Awesome.

I was only 2½ hours late for work.