The Vegematic Tank

I'm reporting from the third floor of a renovated barn a mile outside of Eatonville, WA, where I have taken up residence since the first of July. I would be catching a little more sleep in anticipation of working the night shift tonight [at Rainier School in Buckley, WA] except for the sound of a neighbor repeatedly cranking over the starter of an internal combustion engine for the better part of the last hour. The car probably hasn't got a whisper of a chance of starting, but the driver has failed that intelligence test and will be torturing the rest of us for an indefinite period of time.

The subject came up at work the other night of how, sometime in the early 1980's I came to be driving a 1960's push-button automatic transmission Plymouth Belvedere with no reverse gear. [I heard the other day that car was nicknamed the "Vegematic", after a popular blender.] I will proceed to relate this story.

My former husband drove a 1965 Plymouth Barracuda with the aquarium window in the back, cream-colored with fading red dragons painted on either flank, three speed manual transmission with an 8000 horsepower engine. I drove it, if you can call it that, with various levels of success.

Side story: when I was seventeen or eighteen and still had a learner's permit, I rode with a Baha'i named Karl from Pullman, WA to a conference in Vancouver, BC in a blue Jaguar. I was not impressed with the name Jaguar; it meant nothing to me, which is probably just as well. About the midpoint of Snoqualmie Pass, Karl passed the driving on to me, although how he slept as I crawled across the pass, pushing it to 50 mph, trucks roaring around me, is beyond me. I white-knuckled it for about an hour, until my nerves could take no more, and lurched to a stop at last. He asked why I didn't use the clutch? "What's a clutch?"

So I tentatively set out one day between Hayden Lake, Idaho and Pullman, WA in my husband's Barracuda, without much more knowledge on board, and dropped in on my brother's house outside Colfax, Washington and similarly lurched to a stop. My brother, it turned out, was not home. So I spent some time getting over my nervous state from driving, socialized with his half-Australian Shepherd, Brownie, for awhile, and decided to leave.

Start the car, engage first gear and slip the clutch . . . no forward motion. Hmm. I repeated this about twenty or thirty times, not gaining any ground, until I gave up in defeat. About this time my brother arrives home, so I explain the problem. He asks me, "did you take off the emergency brake?" "Oh." So now I start up the car, drive about fifty feet, and it stops forward motion and gently drifts backwards towards the ditch . . . I had, of course, burned out the clutch.

Phone call to my husband at home, who spent $100 of hard-earned money on this Plymouth Belvedere push-button automatic with no reverse gear [I figured the reverse was shot when someone tried to engage reverse at an inappropriate time], drove down and towed the Barracuda home.

Thus followed the first of a number of transmission overhauls on the Barracuda. My husband figured that as long as he was in there replacing the clutch, he could do the transmission as well. [The transmission and drive shaft assembly always looked to me like a giant pod from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."] Over the next few years he redid the transmission to four speeds, sometimes on the floor and sometimes on the steering column, and once ended up with the gearbox reversed so the shifting pattern was the opposite from the original "H" pattern, and decided to live with it like that.  I doubt it improved my driving skills any.

I sure would have fun in a Barracuda now.