Finally culled enough of the crap in the garage to make room for the Mustang Fifty. She's going to be sleeping there till spring.
There's guys who go all out when they park a car for the winter. Take the wheels off, put it on blocks, drain the fluids.
Bit excessive if you ask me. Besides, thanks to the benefits of global warming, I might be able to take her out for a rip in the middle of January.
My buddy Jimmy Lippert, may he rest in peace, always took the battery out of anything he stored. Claimed that was the only way to ensure that there was no chance of a barn fire. Just disconnecting the battery cables wasn't good enough for him. You take the battery out and store it in another room.
I don't know. If batteries can start fires, wouldn't the fire just start in the other room? Maybe that was a bit excessive too.
Back when I stored the SD 455 Trans Am for the only winter I owned her, I didn't disconnect or remove anything. When it came time to pull her out she fired up and I drove away. Simple as that. Kurtz's barn didn't burn down.
Kurtz's barn was just by Ariss Ontario, which was up the road from me. At the time Ariss had two variety stores and four houses. And Bill Bailey.
I met Billy at Marden Public School. He was the first guy I met my age who bragged about feeling up girls boobs. That was on the school bus in grade six, a point in time at which it hadn't occurred to me yet that I would want to touch boobs.
Funny how things change.
So old man Kurtz had a farm outside Ariss and I agreed to pay a hundred bucks to park the Super Duty there for the winter. There were a couple of camping trailers stored there as well. I knew him because I knew a couple of his youngsters, who were more or less my age.
Five years later I was on the ferry between Vancouver Island and the mainland, and I'm sitting there, and I'm thinking I'm seeing a couple of the Kurtz boys, but I can't be, because they live on a farm by Ariss and I'm on a boat in the Pacific Ocean.
So I'm sitting there staring at them and they're sitting there staring at me and finally somebody says "hey man, you look just like.... "
Sure enough. It was them.
The Super Duty was one hell of a piece of machinery. She'd break the tires loose in every gear if you wanted. If the road was a little damp she had a tendency to do that even when you didn't want it.
For me, it was the right car at the wrong time.
Life does that to you. Right car at the wrong time. Right woman at the wrong time. Great job but I just gotta follow the call of the wild...
Finest shoes you've ever owned but they don't go with your suit. Finest suit you ever owned and you've never looked better but by God here comes a hemroid flare-up... The hemroids fade away and the job's working out and the suit and the shoes are working out and the woman is working out and everything is A-plus and then the cops show up while you've got the mother-in-law over with a warrant from five years ago.
Fuck me!
So I get to talking to the Kurtz boys and they've been in the Okanogan for the last month picking cherries, and they did the math and realized that compared to a shit-level job back in Ariss, home base of the Hasenfratz Linamar empire, it was actually costing them money to pick cherries.
So they buggered off and decided to see a few sights.
I knew a variety of Kurtz's back in the day. Even dated one once. One of the girls. That didn't go anywhere. Right woman at the wrong time.
Bill I ran into years later at a gas station in Guelph. He was back for a visit from a job in the Yukon. He'd settled down.
"Ya can't just loot and pillage yer whole life" he said.
He's right.
But it gets me thinking about how what goes around comes around.
Karma.
It wasn't till I got to Falling Downs that things seemed to work in harmony. The shoes, the suit, the woman, the job, the friends, the life...
The vehicles tend to be older and rusting, but they start up every day and they're paid for.
For a long time everybody I knew eventually got stuck in the mud. You'd get the dream house with the dream kitchen and your husband would leave.
Or the best job ever and a shop out back and your wife would leave.
And hemroids can rear up any time.
So there's something comforting about finding everything fitting into place when you're well past ever hoping that's gonna happen.
Unfortunately this place is called Falling Downs because it's falling down.
It ain't gonna last forever.
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