06 August 2010
Rally Road
(The Famous Bluesmobile. Photo Socotra)
My apologies in advance; it is the anniversary of The Bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, which fits loosely into my disjointed narrative of the Pacific War.
If you did not get it by now, I am pretty sure that the monstrous imposition of hyper-technology and the deaths of all those innocents was necessary. There needed to be a way for the Japanese leadership to save face, and millions more would have died if the invasion of the Home Islands had been undertaken.
I know Terrible Turner and Iron Pants Lemay would have killed as many of them, and us, to make it happen. Apparently US Ambassador John Roos and Ban Ki- Moon appeared at the 65th anniversary ceremony as a sort of unspoken apology.
I am against nuclear weapons in principal, and in practice since I think this town will someday be put to the same torch if they are not eliminated, but I have no apologies about what Mac and his generation had to do to win the Pacific War.
I was going to write about the coup that ousted Joe Rochefort from the helm of the intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Area (ICPOA) in the midst of the most savage conflict that Asia ever witnessed. The testaments of Jasper and Eddie and the napkins from my conversations with Mac are piled all around.
We will get back to that presently, insh’allah, but the prospect of the road beckons, and this morning it will not be denied. Twenty hours behind the wheel, I expect it will take, based on Google Maps. I can normally beat their time, which is based on the posted speed limits I ignore.
(Dad’s 1959 Rambler. Photo Ann Socotra)
The Bill Socotra Rambler Rally waits in rural Indiana, not far from Route 80, but far from here. I am afraid the other words this weekend will be sporadic, mobile and filtered by The Road. My Dad can no longer appear at the rally named for him and held in honor of the quirky automobiles he designed that those lunatics in Indiana adore.
(Fetish Gremlin at Bill Socotra Rally 2009. Photo Socotra).
Fetishists, I know, but I am a car guy and I understand.
Preparation made for a day of delicate balance, combining trip preparation, business, physical activity and nature wild and raw
The whole thing was book-ended between the police car and the storm. The office is on the Metro line, or close enough, with Willow in between. I had an early meeting in Fairfax, or rather a ten o'clock that seemed early enough after crow-barring myself out of 1943, and the brilliant colors of the war plans that occupied the half century before my birth.
I-66 is a fucking mess, there is no other way to put it. The Mercedes shuddered on the alternate pavement surfaces, the precision of the vehicle protesting at the uneven surface, unable to force the surface to its Germanic will.
That is why the Bluesmobile was in the shop. I would prefer to batter the police car on the long road than the fine precision German machine.
(Fine precision vehicle at rest. Photo Socotra)
August being the month of Congressional recess and vacations, the traffic was tolerable, but subject to the whims of indifferent drivers who were multi-tasking, unfamiliar with the opportunity to make time outside the usual lock-step, and some intense individuals intent on making up the advantage made the driving tricky, since they pass on the right, rocketing up to fill the two car-lengths of distance from the bumpers of the oblivious that prudence and physics dictate.
On the way, dodging a late-model Corvette whose owner has clearly reached the age of discretion, I got a call from the expert mechanics in Falls Church that I trust. That is no small matter in the field of automotive maintenance, as I am sure you are aware. It is a field filled with charlatans and mountebanks, just like politics.
I found this particular outfit through a local car-talk radio show broadcast on WJFK. Pat Goss is the host, a somewhat irascible mechanic and entrepreneur whose standards seem high, even if he is located in Maryland.
Several years ago I was struggling with debt, two kids in college, and reinventing my own life. I had acquired the World's Fastest Production Pick-up Truck from Uncle Dick's estate and it needed mechanical help.
I had secured the services of Ty’s fine Vietnamese crew to do the sheet metal work, but needed professional help with some of the high-performance issues that only a racing garage could really provide. I e-mailed the host of the show for a recommendation, and he said "Try Curry's in Falls Church. Family owned, they do a good job."
I did, and was satisfied with their diligence and service, not to mention the one-mile walk to the Metro at West Falls Church which made the drop off and pick up of the vehicle taxi-free.
(Curry’s Performance Center, Falls Church, VA. photo Currys).
I did the checker-board jumps in my mind after they called as I was inbound to the company office in Fairfax. The $2,862.62 set of repairs was complete, and I could pick up the car at my leisure. I calculated the branches and sequels of the new information as I forced the Mercedes into traffic on the exit lane for US-50. I could drive back to the Ballston office, jump on the Metro, and walk down to Curry's to pay my tithe.
The moist smoldering heat made that problematic. The heat index was somewhere north of 100 degrees, and the prospect of hard bad thunderstorms made my cell phone jump with alerts for the afternoon. The skies were blue, though, and I got back to the office, parked the German machine deep under the building and made a brief appearance at my desk. I printed the Red Team proposal I was supposed to review and slipped it into a folder. Then I walked to the Metro and inserted myself into public transportation.
The cool dark cavern of the Ballston-Marymount University was a contrast to the sun-drenched humid pavement two hundred feet above. It was empty on the westbound platform, the other side filled with tourists clad in motley.
I think more of disaster on the train than I used to, but cope with the prospect of sudden dismemberment by minimizing my reliance on it. The two-stop journey from Ballston was filled with mystery. If trains only come along every twenty minutes, why did the train suddenly brake, as if there was traffic ahead on the tracks and then creep along for a mile?
No matter. I decided to call the shop and demand a ride. The business day was unraveling anyway, and if I was going to pay the equivalent of a paycheck to the repairs, what the hell, they could give me a ride.
The brightly-colored courtesy car was waiting when I emerged from the station. The service driver was a bright young man and we discussed hydration issues on a day like this. When we arrived at the shop, I conducted my business with Vernon, the manager who I trust. I accepted the debt, and the Bluesmobile was brought round with the driver and passenger-side windows down to exhaust the sun's heat.
I fired up the V-8, eager to jump the checker to the next square. I drove down the hill to the main drag. Route 7 is a mess in Falls Church, which is a redundant observation. It is a mess all over. The bail-out money of the Federal Government has disproportionately fallen on us here in the National Capital Region, and every already over-burdened road is torn up and patrolled by battalions of red-vested men, some hydrated and languid and many of them citizens.
I punched the buttons to raise the windows as I swerved out into the neutral turn lane to force my way into traffic. The driver's side came up nicely, and the a/c was blasting after having commissioned the replacement of an orifice somewhere on the unit located on the top right side of the engine. The passenger's side window remained adamantly down.
I crept a couple blocks, fiddling with the button. No dice. I swerved off 7 and into a motel lot that will shortly be something else. I threw the shift into park and leaned across the vast seat, stretching my torso to its limit, and tried the button over there.
No motion, inanimate.
Goddamn. Clearly, a trip to Indiana with the window down was out of the question. I sat for a moment in the sultry heat and re-calibrated my morning. Damn. Back to Curry's.
More mechanical mystery ensued, but I was gratified as always with the attention I received, even as I strode past newly arrived customers to demand immediate service.
They had two technicians on the scene immediately, and I waited at the end of the desk until they returned, flipping with irritation through the Falls Church local paper. The low-income housing project had finally been killed by the NIMBYs, a project I have tracked only through the course of automotive and dental interventions, since Doctor Ron's office is just down the road, and I have spent more thousands of dollars with him than with Currys.
"Works fine," said the technicians with an eerie dual echo, "Probably an intermittent problem."
I nodded and felt like a fool. Of course it is intermittent. I know how to press a button. I should have shut down the car and re-started. Could the window have bound itself in the heat? Could it be in the process of failing, but refused to quit before it required me to make another checker-hop multi-modal trip to The Falls?
Whatever.
I offered my profuse thanks, embarrassment, and a roar back onto Route 7, adrenaline coursing as I crept along the 25-mile speed limit on the broad boulevard they enforce like Nazis. Then into the lot at Big Pink. The skies were clear, though something big and black was moving in from the West. I could get sun and swim if I did it immediately. I checked and answered the office mail on the Blackberry and stripped off my clothes and jumped into my suit. I padded down to the pool deck, where Joanna the Polish lifeguard was positively delighted with the prospect of the bad weather that would set her free from duty early.
When I plunged into the water, the coolness of the previous evening remained to shock my nerves. I swam over to the edge, put on the ballcap that suspends the waterproof iPod container and started Chapter 45 of the novel "Kraakin."
It is a thoroughly surreal story that popped up on the Book Club list, and it may have been an unwise choice, due to length and complexity. It is China Mieville's seventh novel, and probably his most barking mad book to date.
Audio books in the pool have been my life this pool season, marrying wet aerobic activity with intense mental acuity that makes me forget I am doing anything at all.
The sun and the words lulled me into some other zone, and it was not until my hour was nearly up that I noticed the sky darkening to the west. The last seconds ticked off. I calculated my next jump on the checkerboard of the afternoon. I had reviewed the proposal on the Metro and in the waiting area of Curry's. I had comments aplenty, but the question was where I was going to make them. Red Team conference call about the OSD proposal at four; racing in tandem with a Thunderstorm Warning, according to the red text on my cell phone, was almost here.
I threw on my suit again, thinking I might ride the bike over, but realized it fits only in the Bluesmobile, not the Mercedes, unless I drove with the top down. With what was coming, that would be unwise. A Red Top cab would take twenty minutes to arrive, and if I hustled, I could walk back to the office before then. That is what I did, and the first drops began to come down, and the wind began to rise as the nasty black thunderheads sucked our breath into the stratosphere.
I was firing up the computer when the first booming of the cloud artillery commenced, reverberating through the thick plate glass of the window. My office darkened and then lit with the violent flares of lightning.
The company network stayed up, and the digital call went pretty well, except for the periodic failures of outlying stations due to the intense electromagnetic activity. I sighed with the fact that I accepted an obligation to generate words in neat insertions to the text, and the sweat in my shirt dryed in the air conditioned chill.
As I typed into the night, looking down periodically at the wet pavement and confused drivers on the streets of Ballston, I wondered about several things.
One of them was about what happened in 1943, in preparation for what happened in 1945, exactly 65 years ago. The others I will think about on the road to Indiana in the Bluesmobile.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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