Day 14.

Day 14. I’ve got nothing.

Actual footage of my brain.

Although… this picture reminds me of the time my folks hauled us kids out West for a family road trip. My youngest brother and I were pretty young and our functional knowledge of tumbleweeds was limited to cartoons and old westerns. (“BON-ZANA!” as my little brother would say.) We didn’t realize tumbleweeds were an actual thing, and not some artistic license dreamed up by a broody cinematographer. As I recall, we even brought a couple of tumbleweeds home at the end of our trip. The trunk of my dad’s old Chrysler was a roomy place.

I think that was the same trip that we had some unfortunate car troubles. When you traveled on Petzold road trips in Dad’s 1968 New Yorker, you kind of expected that there’d be a breakdown at some point. (I vaguely recall abandoning the old AC condenser along the side of a state highway somewhere in the Arizona desert. Those were the days!)

Imagine, if you will, driving along a dark mountainous highway. I think we were in Oregon. We hit a rock… which punctured the oil pan… which rendered us stranded. There were six of us – my folks and four kids. Two of us were small, less than ten years old. My older brothers were well into their teens, more man than child. Not too many people willing or able to help a party of that size/stature, no matter how cute I looked standing at the side of the road clutching my threadbare stuffed animal*. Thankfully a local rancher eventually took pity on us and hauled us to town in the back of his (mostly empty, save the, um… remnants) cattle hauler.

Teddy. On second thought, he may have added to the “half dozen ax-murderers on the side of the road” vibes we were probably giving off.

As I recall, Dad hitched a ride back up to the car the next day (I seem to recollect that there was use of my brother’s skateboard in Dad’s travels back up the mountain, but I’m 99% sure that’s just my brain embellishing the tale) with extra oil that he poured in as needed to nurse the car back to town. Parts were challenging to come by in those days, and as memory serves**, his stopgap fix to limp us to the next town with an available replacement oil pan involved a borrowed garage space & loaner tools, and a chunk of leather belt that Dad riveted to the bottom of the pan to slow the leak. He was kind of MacGyver before MacGyver was even a thing.

Anyhow, be well and be gentle with yourselves.

*Harriet says Teddy looks like he’s close to death.

**Full disclosure: My memory is Swiss cheese. I honestly have no clue whether this happened as I remember or whether it is simply Petzold Family Lore.