Team Driving

The first car I owned was a Ford Ranger.  There was nothing fancy about the vehicle, which one might say about many cars, but this truck literally had no options.  It had a radio and a heater.  The radio was seriously just a radio, no cassette, no CD, just an AM/FM radio.  The heater did have a dial with blue and red as if to suggest you could select the temperature of the air coming out of the vents, but the temperature of the air was controlled more by engine temperature than the position of the dial.  With a cold engine the air blew cold, with a hot engine the air blew hot or melt the sun hot.  In just the right atmospheric conditions, one could manipulate the dial in such a way to make the air temperature comfortable.  Though occupants were probably still not truly comfortable.

Inevitably, no matter what the outside or inside temperature, driver and passenger(s) alike would eventually become sticky, sweaty and gross wherever skin or clothes touched the slick, flat, vinyl bench seat.  This was not, in fact, the worst part of this seat.  While uncomfortable, the seat presented a far larger problem for the person in the passenger seat.  This truck was so basic in its trim, that Ford had declined to even include a grab handle anywhere for the passenger to latch onto for cornering.  When driving became spirited, a passenger could claw at the door, try to wedge against the dash, or, the most common approach, resign themselves to be flopped about the passenger seat, kept from tangling with the steering wheel only by the locking seat belt that would start ratcheting them tighter against the smooth, slick vinyl their sweat was accumulating against.  This flopping was really only a problem with two occupants. 

When three people went for a ride in the cab, there was no flopping.  The cab might have been five feet wide, but having slept in the cab on multiple occasions, I would guess that a better estimate of the dimensions of the cab would be an L, four feet wide, three feet tall and three feet long.  Three was, without a doubt, a crowd.  More could be accommodated, on a river trip I once had four in the cab, and eleven in the bed with  three boats and enough PFDs, paddles, and helmets for the crew.  Clown car antics were not well suited for long drives though, so three people could wedge in for drives to the local crag, or across New Mexico.

On one of these drives, it was discovered that everyone was far more comfortable if the person in the middle "seat," straddled the stick shift, one foot on the driver's side, on on the passenger's.  When Heidi or Corinne would ride in the middle this was no problem, as their leg made a nice armrest for me, and the intrusion upon their personal space was not the biggest issue.  They were both also small, put three people my size in the cab, and it was tighter.  Put three men abreast in the truck, and second and fourth could be uncomfortable shifts.  I could drive without these two gears, but with a full house and a four-cylinder engine, it made for rough shifting with lots of revs and slow acceleration.

At some point someone came up with a solution.  The person in the middle would do the shifting!  It seemed so obvious.  The driver would say shift up or down (usually obvious to the copilot), and they would shift when the clutch was depressed.  Eventually, this method evolved into the person in the middle also working the gas.  It was team driving, and it worked with anyone familiar with driving a clutch.  Driver and co-driver had to communicate when to clutch.  It also took a couple of practice shifts to get used to the rate each person applied the gas and let out the clutch, but you would be driving along smoothly soon enough.

One night, driving home from climbing at Spook Canyon, Travis, Egypt and I were engaged in this driving style.  We realized that the person on the far right had no job, which seemed not in the spirit of team driving. Far from any of the controls there was only one job that this person could perform, navigator.

At some point growing up, probably after watching Sneakers, my father told my brother and I that in college, they let their blind friend drive on the back roads of Pullman.  They would give their friend clock directions to turn the steering wheel, and he would drive the car.  The navigator in the Ranger would have a boring job, as we all knew the way, unless we took a lesson from my father's antics, and the driver were blind.

None of us were blind, so, the driver closed their eyes, and had control of the steering, clutch and brake.  The co-driver had the shifting and accelerator.  The navigator gave steering, and, most importantly, braking directions.  We took turns at the various roles.

We started, as I recall, with me driving, Egypt shifting, and Travis navigating.  To my memory, Travis was not suited to navigation, as the more impending the doom, the less instruction, and more giggling he did.  I recall opening my eyes to a fit of laughter, and Egypt's expletives, headed directly for a 30 inch drop into an arroyo.  This may have been the motivation for rotating roles.

I think I was shifting and Egypt was navigating when the next issue was encountered.  The steering on a Ford Ranger cannot be described as tight.  There was not any play in the steering, but tight corners required turning the wheel at least 180°.  The steering directions had to be amended, on the fly, to include clock directions like "three o'clock left," or rotating the wheel 270° counterclockwise.  This might make sense reading it here, but remember this was driving at night, on a windy gravel road, with no prior agreement, and lots of natural hazards provided by the arroyo that ran along side, or sometimes on the road.  Calling out, "three o'clock left" with a shrill sense of urgency does not make a great deal of sense.  I think I swore, the natural reaction of the shifter, who could only make the vehicle go faster, and watch danger coming.

When we made it back to the highway, the navigator position was dropped for reasons of public safety, but we kept team driving.  I think the experience made us better at team driving, like some sort of crazy trust and team building exercise for adults.  If any security clearance background checkers or wives are reading this, I think two things are important here, as soon as speeds were involved that could really injure someone, we stopped doing the really dangerous part of this nonsense.  Secondly, I trust these two people so much that I will let one of them close their eyes and drive the car, while the other gives directions so as not to injure any of us, or destroy my most valuable possession.

As a non sequitur, it is said that students from top tier institutions like Harvard and Stanford are being trained not for the positions of tomorrow, but to create the positions of tomorrow.  If that, whatever it means, is true, than the lower and middle class students at New Mexico School of Mines are not being trained to create the positions of tomorrow, but rather how to solve the problems of today.  Facebook is an amazing revolution in procrastination, but the minds that created team driving are engineering energy sources, and programming electronic security.  We may not have changed the world, but damn if we did not have a good time in the desert solving problems that didn't really exist.

War Stories

It has been something of a challenge to get online for any decent length of time since arriving here.  The internet is somewhat expensive and somewhat elusive.  To add some complications Sarah has come to visit, and I fell ill.  Sarah visiting is a great distraction!  Getting sick is a much less desirable one.  In the end though, it has all added up to a paucity of posts in September.  Since it seems that people do occasionally read my wandering thoughts, I have decided that I need to come up with "easy" posts for times that I am not able, willing, or motivated to write something new and exciting.  While telling new friends and acquaintances the stories of my life, it occurred to me that some of these stories could make good posts, even though most people who know me have heard at least some of them.  Thus, without further ado, a new category of post is born, the war story.

When I lived in Socorro, I lived in economical accommodations.  My duplex was small, fatigued and poorly built.  The ceiling was not insulated.  The carpet was old and gross (I will admit to being partly to blame for this as my vacuum cleaner was generally down for unscheduled maintenance).  The toilet was slowly rotting through the floor, allowing the tank to slosh during hurried ascensions to the throne, further rotting the floor.  The house behind me had pigs.  And, my neighbor was a deaf, retarded smoker.  He could often be seen through his screen door asleep with the TV blaring, a lit cigarette slowly burning in his hand.  Among all of these peculiarities, the most amazing feature of this building is that the walls and floors were not attached.

Any person who has peered into the blackness of a crawl space, through the layers of spider webs and debris that crawl spaces (particularly in unloved buildings) attract and retain knows that while the ecosystem is supposed to stop mere inches into the abyss of the underworld, the simple thought of what might actually be living down there is the stuff of nightmares and horror films.  I know this, not from ever venturing into that crawl space, but because when the walls and floors of a building are not connected, what lives in the crawl space, lives in the house.  It was not uncommon to be sitting in front of a movie, and spy a visitor scuttling across the floor.  Sometimes they were harmless roaches, other times they were centipedes, or worse.  Jason once woke up to watch a spider cruise by on a mission to wherever spiders mission to.  All the insects mostly just passed through, but at one point the population of mice exploded.

I did not want to kill the mice with traps, nor did I want bricks of poison laying around.  Thus, I endeavored to capture the mice, by hand.  In the beginning, it was largely unsuccessful.  Heidi would often attain a perch, on a chair or other high place, and I would tear the house apart after the mouse.  In these days, I used the domesticated dog approach to capturing prey, with no knowledge of what to do should I actually meet with success.  While  I never truly "caught" a mouse in my early attempts, I did once chase one into the pantry, where it seemed to simply disappear.  Days later, I discovered a tail sticking out from under a bin filled with camping gear.  Lifting the bin, I discovered a dehydrated mouse, pressed to the bottom of a Rubbermaid, as a flower between the pages of a book.  A definitive failure in the avoidance of killing the mice.

My first success was actually a careless mouse, more than skill on my part.  The mouse managed to climb into a bag of tortilla chips, and having discovered what it thought was mouse heaven, decided to munch chips until it was caught.  I took this first mouse out to the shed in front of my house (yes, the shed was in front), figuring it would find plenty of mouse habitat there, and never want to return.  The next mouse I caught in the silverware drawer, and again relocated it to the shed.  With time, I learned stealth, and hunted the mice like a cat, or less like a domesticated dog.  With every mouse I caught, I worried more that the mice were not retiring to the shed, but were returning to my crawlspace, more convicted in their quest for chips, flour, chocolate, peanut butter and the other stores of my pantry.

This concern led me to relocate the mice further and further away, but with every captured mouse, the concern escalated that I was simply capturing the same couple of mice over and over again.  Thus, I did the only logical thing.  I obtained a vast array of colored Sharpies.  Upon capturing a mouse, I would use a Sharpie to give the mouse a racing strip (or two), and would then release them to the neighborhood.

Never did I get a repeat mouse.  This may be because mice shed their fur rapidly.  It may be because they never came back.  It may be because one of my neighbors kept getting mice in their mouse traps with carefully drawn racing strips.  I'll never know.

In time, the mouse population subsided, and I moved onto new endeavors and new homes.  The days of mouse hunting are hopefully behind me, but the memories live on as stories shared with people, and now the internet.  I will endeavor to keep a queue of these types of post at the ready in the inevitable event I encounter a period of few posts.  I hope you enjoyed it, and there should be a plethora of updates in the coming days as much has happened, and is happening in establishing myself in the land of the long white cloud.