Part Six: Mountains Beyond Mountains

As spring turned into summer and summer began to turn into fall, it was becoming ever clearer that I would not be getting my clearance any time soon. I watched everyone from my class graduate their ‘C’ schools and hit the fleet, then watched friends I made who arrived at Dam Neck after me graduate, and I was still there. I did find out in a meeting with the command security officer and the executive officer of the school (a civilian and a Marine lieutenant colonel, guess who made more money?) that the investigation had been concerned with some of my habits in the past, particularly my enjoyment of and participation in the furry community. I was unrepentant about decisions I made back then and my personal tastes, feeling them irrelevant to my reliability, and I resented the fact that this of all things was holding me back. Meanwhile, kids failing out of three different ‘A’ school classes and going to mast for not showering or washing clothes were getting clearances and being pushed out to the fleet. I was falling through the cracks. Without much else to do after my days buffing floors at the schoolhouse were done, I always went back to my 1985 Buick Electra.

My love of the Buick and love of working on it, not to mention my reluctance to let some dealer parts manager pour sodium silicate down its throat so I could get $3000 in trade-in value on a Cobalt, had saved it from the Cash for Clunkers madness. However, in the summer of 2009, after nearly three years of ownership and two years after installing an unknown-mileage junkyard-sourced LN3 3800 in a trailer park, the Buick started to really show its age. A couple weeks after the original transmission failed, necessitating an emergency swap in the parking lot of the base officer’s club, the alternator decided to join it, although it was courteous enough to give me a two weeks’ notice by making a lot of noise whenever I had the headlamps on or the radio turned up. I put my AutoZone rewards card to good use and replaced it in their parking lot. My door panels had been rattling ever since the Concert Sound installation at an “E-1 AND UP APPROVED” radio shop. I discovered that almost all of the cheap plastic clips that help the various screws hold the panels into place had disappeared (this would not entirely be the shop’s fault, these clips are meant to go in one time and one time only), so I visited the As Seen on TV section at Wal-Mart and picked up some Mighty Putty. Hey, if it can tow a 747, surely it can hold 1985 Buick Electra door panels in place, right? After that, the rattling stopped.

I had taken a bit of a break from my roadgeeking while at Dam Neck, mostly because I found the various highways around Hampton Roads a bit confusing with their constantly changing designations and discontinuities. I found U.S. Highway 58, which constituted the last big leg of my drives between Dam Neck and home, immensely interesting given that all but about half a mile of it is in Virginia, running along the longest part of the state from the mountains in Lee County to the ocean. So, one weekend, I arose at 7:00 AM, drove to the eastern terminus at Pacific Avenue (U.S. 60) on the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, and stayed on U.S. 58 for all of its 508 miles, my longest single clinch ever. It was a bit hard to follow through Norfolk and Portsmouth as it shifted alignments several times in only a few blocks, but into and past Suffolk it was a straight, easy shot.

I found that my old Buick, probably nearing 200000 miles on the chassis by this point, was not an ideal U.S 58 clinching vehicle, especially on the roller coaster sections between I-85 and I-95 (where at one point I actually had to pull over because I was getting a little motion-sick), and even more so once I got into the tight hairpins and steep climbs in the Appalachians. Although it was a massive upgrade compared to the LK9 my car originally came with, the LN3 quickly ran out of breath as I heeled it hard up steep grades and popped the column shifter into “3” or even “2” to apply manual engine braking down them. The temperature gauge in the LeSabre T-Type cluster began to point at the horizontal part of the dial, past 200 degrees. At a fuel stop, I found more water drips than there should be coming from the underside of my engine. Putting half my body into the roomy engine bay revealed that my old water pump was dripping in places it shouldn’t be, not a good thing trying to climb 30 percent grades in a balmy Virginia summer. I nursed it to the nearest town and replaced the pump in the parking lot. Exhausted and filthy, I decided to spend the night in that town (Abingdon, I think) before finishing the clinch and heading back to Dam Neck the next day. With as much love as I can give to my old Buick, next time I decide to do the mountains-to-ocean clinch (maybe a Murphy to Manteo run on U.S. 64, which is almost 100 miles longer, all in North Carolina!) I will have to take a slightly better handling and less-hooptie vehicle.

In September, not too long after Labor Day, I got the news that my grandfather passed away. He went to the hospital complaining of a bad cough and didn’t leave there alive. I was in a state of shock, although I had talked to him a time or two in asking him to help me diagnose problems with my car when I first got it and with my successful completion of boot camp, I never knew much about him and I never knew how proud of me he was until after his death. Although I could have gotten an emergency loan to get a quick flight home, I decided it was most appropriate to drive my Electra home to the funeral, taking the 16-hour drive in one manic shot. His military funeral was the first and only time I ever wore my dress uniform in my hometown. He never knew the story about the shitshow my military career was becoming by that point. At my grandparents’ house after the funeral, I spent a long time examining the award citation for his Distinguished Flying Cross, wondering if I would ever accomplish something of that caliber in my own career, or if my future in uniform would be spent buffing floors.

Part Five: Spinning A New Odometer

I don’t remember a whole lot about boot camp, primarily because you never have time to think about anything. I had even forgotten about my Buick, only being reminded of it in my mom’s and Kirstie’s letters about how they were taking care of it for me, and how it was almost smashed by a tree limb in Hurricane Gustav. Navy boot camp is a cinch compared to that of the Marine Corps, but it’s still two months of go-go-go, where you’re re-wired to think, speak, and act Navy. All common sense and rational thought goes away as soon as you land in Great Lakes, and it takes a while for you to get it back. In the meantime, I made it, graduating with Division 373 in October 2008. My mother cried seeing me in my uniform for the first time.

After boot camp, I reported to the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center, in Dam Neck, Virginia Beach, Virginia, for ‘A’ school to become an intelligence specialist. I was allowed to have my car there, but scheduling and money kept me from retrieving it right away. It was the first time in two years I hadn’t had one, apart from the week and a half or so it was out of commission before the LN3 swap. I didn’t like having to rely on “boot shuttles” or expensive cab rides to get anywhere. Virginia Beach and Norfolk seemed like nice towns, but I wouldn’t get to really do any exploring just yet. In the meantime, I was slowly acclimating to the new routine. New Sailors at their first school command generally fall into a handful of categories, and I’m not overly proud to say that I was very close to the line of being the “dirtbag”. I was occasionally late, I didn’t spend too much time preparing my appearance or my uniform beyond cleaning it and myself, and I chafed against most of the authority figures in general. It seemed like, just like the LN3 swap wasn’t entirely done properly, I hadn’t been fully re-wired to Navy standards. I would “get it” eventually, but I never forgot who I was or where I came from.

I had to wait until the holiday leave block to return home. I was happy to be back, but everything felt different, as though I no longer had a place there even if I belonged. The Electra seemed to be a lot rougher than I remembered it. The paint was worn down to bare metal in places, especially around the hood and fenders. But the 3800 fired up first time, just like how everyone who saw me welcomed me warmly, and everything still worked just as it had when I left, which is to say good enough, but not very well. Even my meager E-2 Navy pay was more money than I had ever had in my life, and it always came on the first and the fifteenth of every month, so I decided it was time to make another round of big improvements to the Buick. On the long drive up to Virginia, my mind pored over the possibilities.

The most important and obvious thing that needed to be taken care of was the permanently Christmas-tree’d two-gauge cluster. I wanted a full set of gauges. 90s Buick LeSabres and Park Avenues were plentiful in wrecking yards, but they had different engines and wiring setups, so I went to eBay to find a cluster from a LeSabre T-Type of the same generation as my Electra. I probably paid too much for it, even at the time, but it was confirmed good by a well-rated seller. Since my car had the LN3 out of a LeSabre, and having found a decent YouTube tutorial, installing the T-Type cluster was a fairly easy job. The cluster swap further complicated the story of my car’s actual mileage (bought at 167000, unknown-mileage engine swap at 176ish, now new gauge cluster showing 132568.4), but the gauges and idiot lights worked! It also transformed my old dashboard from grandma-spec to 80s-tastic cool, with the odd shape of the auxiliary dials and the x100 tachometer.

What needed to go next was the ancient and barely-functional original audio system, which could only play FM radio through two speakers that grew weaker every day. I have an irrational, burning hatred of aftermarket stereo head units, I think they’re all hideous, have maddening interfaces (those who think MyFord or LincolnTouch sucks have clearly never tried operating a $49.99 Coby special), and never fit the factory stereo space properly. I wanted something factory, so I naturally went to go find the first 1997 LeSabre in the junkyard that didn’t look like it was turned down from a background part in Mad Max because it was too much of a hooptie, and yanked its complete Concert Sound II six-speaker stereo system. Unplugging things is easy enough, but wiring jobs were foreign territory to me at the time, which meant I needed to find some help. I didn’t have access to the Cool Loaded Uncle or my mom’s boyfriend and his friends-of-friends-of-friends, nor did I know anyone in person who could make a ’97 LeSabre stereo work in an ’85 Electra, so I had to call around. The bemused clerk at the Best Buy stereo-installation informed me that they could not, in fact, install a junkyard LeSabre stereo into a hooptie Electra. That left me to talk to one of the local “E-1 AND UP APPROVED” stereo shops, trying to keep them focused on what I wanted, not what they thought I wanted, which was apparently a 1200-watt, 12-speaker setup with built-in satellite TV. A few days later, I returned to Best Buy for an installation they could perform, an XM Radio box. With an ultra-high tech cassette adapter to play my Zune through, my in-car audio setup had improved by at least a full decade.  

Having made the most necessary improvements, the possibilities in my mind expanded. I started thinking about engine swaps; a supercharged L67 3800 would bolt right into my Electra with little fuss, giving me 240 horsepower and enough torque to shrink Nebraska, but I held off on that dream for the time being. I had graduated from intelligence specialist ‘A’ school, but I wasn’t ready to hit the fleet as a real Sailor yet. I also had to attend a ‘C’ school, at which I would learn one of the four specialties within the rating, all of which required a top-secret clearance I did not have yet. Thus, I went on hold. Being on hold is an interesting position. You have all the esteem and privileges of a ‘C’ school student, such as the blue liberty card giving you no curfew any day of the week and no barracks duty, but none of the actual­ work of a ‘C’ school student. I settled into a routine of buffing floors at the schoolhouse during the day, out no later than 3:30 PM (1530 to me back then, although I have long since abandoned 24-hour time), first in line out of the barracks at the 4:30 PM liberty call, and into the Buick. Even more so than they had in high school, where I generally had some state highway I wanted to clinch or some other destination, my drives while I was at Dam Neck generally had no destination. Sometimes I would drive out to the Lynnhaven or MacArthur Malls to just wander around and carb-bomb on mall Chinese food, but more often than not I would find myself just driving, which the Buick had long since proven itself to excel at, watching my new gauges move.

Cash for Clunkers was also coming into full effect around this time. Dealers would practically chase you down if they saw you driving a vehicle that was more than 10 years old, or had out-of-state plates. If they could kill it with sodium silicate, they would give you several K-notes of trade-in value. I was tempted a time or two, given the prospect of getting several times what I paid for the Electra back in trade value on something I wouldn’t have to put new engines in at trailer parks, and the credit I could get for which had a long-term guaranteed source of income to pay back. After a Buick dealer heard my stories about Christmas Tree during a test-drive of a 2009 Buick LaCrosse Super (which I thought was awesome with the weird front-wheel-drive V8), I was advised to hang onto my car, even if I ended up getting a new one, because as he put it, “you just can’t put a price on that kind of thing”. He went on to say that I had the perfect car for my age and position in life, that the fact I had already done so much with it with my bare hands (it wasn’t all my own hands, but I didn’t tell him this) meant that I was going places. I took his advice, not so much because I was inseparable from the Electra, but even though I was making more money than I ever had in my life and I only had a few fiscal responsibilities, I found myself broke more often than not, and I was wary of how much more often I would be broke if I also had a car payment to deal with. Nevertheless, I continued taking the Electra on tours of the car dealerships in Hampton Roads, sometimes curated ones with friends along. The Electra brought a few people to the place where they bought their first car.

I took another two weeks off to drive back to Louisiana, spending an extended amount of time with Kirstie for the first time since before I left for boot camp. I was surprised to find out that I really didn’t want to go back to my indefinite drag at Dam Neck, and I waited until the last possible minute to leave, but I still pulled the all-nighter to make it back on time. Not too long after I came back, my transmission began making some odd noises, as if it was trying to make its best impersonation of a Porsche racing gearbox. All Electras of the time period used the same THM440 transmission regardless of engine, but mine had spent over 20 years and 170-some-thousand miles behind the leisurely LK9 base engine. It had apparently decided it could no longer handle the extra power, and one day on the way out on Dam Neck Boulevard for a drive, my car stopped moving altogether, nothing but the noise. Not wanting to get towed, but also not wanting to pay for a tow, I recruited a couple of my friends to push the damn thing the two miles or so back to the barracks where the amused base security questioned each one of us as to why we were trying to push a hooptie-ass Buick back on base.

Just like the Trailer Park Hooptie Repair Hell episode two years earlier, the thought of abandoning the Buick altogether passed through my head, but it was followed closely behind by the Buick sales manager’s advice, so that weekend I hit the junkyard with a couple friends to find a new transmission. We eventually found one in another Electra that had been the unfortunate middle piece in a Fender Bender Centipede. Wrestle it out, stuff it into the trunk of their then-new-to-them 2007 Ford Five Hundred (wrapped in a barracks blanket to keep his pristine trunk clean), bring it back to base. Normally, heavy vehicle maintenance is verboten on military bases, but we had nowhere else to go. I found out that my car would still move as long as the running gear was still cold, so I parked it behind a sand dune in the parking lot of the base officer’s club, and there we got to work. Unlike Trailer Park Engine Swap Hell, we had access to an excellent YouTube tutorial that informed us on both the junkyard transmission removal and the installation on my car. With that and three people to lend a hand, I was back in business in time for curfew. Now that even more of my sweat, muscle, and blood was expended for it, I was even more attached to the Buick, and the T-Type odometer kept spinning.

Part Four: A Buick in Uncle Kage's Court

The year 2007 became the year 2008. As the number of days before my boot camp ship day counted down, I was settling into a solid routine: school, work, Delayed Entry Program meetings on the first Saturday of every month, and filling in the time between in Christmas Tree as much as possible. I hoped that the car would be my ticket to independence and maturity. While it was clear that, especially since the LN3 swap made it orders of magnitude better, it was fulfilling the first purpose superbly, its effect on the second purpose was a little more abstract than I expected.  

Before the Buick, my entire life revolved around video games, mostly Halo 2 and Burnout 3, and my group of friends who played them. Nearly every weekend of my freshman and sophomore years of high school were spent with Halo 2 LAN parties, but then I got a job to prepare myself for car ownership and the weekends duking it out on Coagulation and Foundation, eating cheap pizza and off-brand soda were becoming a thing of the past. The Buick was my ticket to independence and a dream I had (even if I wasn’t always aware of it) since I knew what a car was, but to my friends it seemed like mostly a ticket to (mostly) free rides and a cavernous trunk to hide illicit (for our age) substances. Of course, I had never been above the partying, having participated in many a party with them when I was 16 and 17, but I found myself saying no, and also being glad to have my job to fall back on, more and more as the parties became less let’s-see-if-we’re-still-good-at-Halo-drunk and more like proto-frat-boy ritualization. I was growing up, but I was beginning to wonder if my friends were not. 

After one of the parties at my friend’s house became raucous enough to be busted by the police (I had been at work), I decided to take a break from that group and began exploring the friendship of some of my coworkers. By this time I had been promoted from cashier to grocery clerk, which I enjoyed significantly more than cashiering. My managers enjoyed me as a clerk much more than they did as a cashier as well, and I was firmly in the camp of Valuable Employee. My fellow clerks were mostly rednecks, both of the moneyed part of West Monroe and the semi-white-trash parts out in unincorporated Ouachita Parish, generally decent young people (we weren’t old enough to start talking about sociopolitical issues). I didn’t fit in at all but we all enjoyed my square-peg-in-a-round-home attempts at being cool, and they especially appreciated that I could take any amount of ribbing and dish it out just as hard. Once I started getting invited to their parties, I found they were just as raucous, but enjoyably so (for 17-18 year old me, anyway, maybe I hadn’t quite grown up yet after all), and since at least someone there had some sort of direct connection to the local law enforcement, there were no uncomfortable encounters.

It was also around this time that I met my future girlfriend, Kirstie. She started as a cashier at the store I worked at several months after I moved to the grocery department. Her first reaction to meeting me was something along the lines of “holy shit, your eyes”. I have one blue eye and one brown eye, which I learned was an extremely attractive trait in the furry community (the appreciation of anthropomorphism, to give a simple definition), in which she was a budding artist. While she didn’t understand my hard-wired obsession for cars, it was very nice to have some else very close who was weird. From then on we were inseparable, or writing now with hindsight, she was inseparable with me. She had developed for herself the “fursona” of a fox, and fashioned me one of an odd-eyed raccoon, both vagabonds who fit in just enough to function and get what we needed but who would never truly be a part of anything. There was a bit of a learning curve, and even though there was (and still is) a bit of a stigma on minors, I fully immersed myself into it all.

With at least my immediate future guaranteed through the military, I hadn’t put as much effort into my studies as I had the Buick, work, or my pursuit of furriness with Kirstie. My last semester of high school I needed to take 7:00 AM classes to have enough credits to graduate, which I did in May 2008, 400-something-th out of the 450 or so students in my class, the first (and, as it would turn out, only) one of my mother’s three children to do so. Only a handful of the people who became my first friends in high school did. I had suddenly become aware of the passage of time. I was a Real Adult now, without even realizing it, and whether I liked it or not.

Wanting to spend as much time as possible together before the Navy took ownership of me, Kirstie wrung her parents for two tickets to Anthrocon 2008, all the way up in Pittsburgh. Neither of us had ever been that far north, and I was excited to test the Buick’s mettle as a real long-distance road cruiser, having only wet its feet a little bit on long roadgeeking excursions. I planned a route with the latest copy of the Rand McNally Road Atlas (the other thing I read religiously and memorized cover-to-cover apart from car brochures), and we hit the road. The trip started off less than encouraging, at interstate speeds there was a hand-numbing vibration through the wheel, bad enough to prompt me to find a shop just a few miles across the Mississippi border. They found that my wheels, the ancient Pontiac 6000 alloys that had been on there when I bought it, had shed their weights. It was a quick and easy fix, one that the shop even did for free, and the ride was significantly better after that. The Christmas tree’d-out dashboard made me a bit wary, keeping in mind the cause of the engine swap that inadvertently caused the Christmas tree-ing, because I had no way of knowing whether or not I was running hot or low on oil. I took to checking the oil and coolant every time we stopped. Kirstie was not a confident driver, and even less so in my big, ponderous, quirky old hooptie, so I ended up pulling the lion’s share of the 1100-mile drive. If we ran hot, the Buick never showed it, and it was even averaging close to 25 mpg by the time we arrived in Pittsburgh.

The convention was generally enjoyable. I really dug the brightly-colored fursuits, welcoming and cuddly-looking, although I only admired from afar as I was too worried I would accidentally offend or somehow damage someone’s expensive work (those suits cost about three or four times what I paid for my Buick). I also had the feeling that, being a non-fursuiter at a furry convention, I was missing a significant part of the point, and the fact that we were under 21 (in the city with the most bars per capita in the U.S.) and on a shoestring budget limited our appeal as hangout buddies after-hours. Still, I had as much fun as I felt I reasonably could have, and Kirstie was especially happy that I came with her. As far as a final trip in my last days as a civilian, I couldn’t have asked for much better.

When it was all over, we pointed the Buick back south, my convention badge hanging from the rearview mirror, where it would stay for a couple years. The drive home was largely uneventful. I spent much of it reflecting on the past, the future, and all that philosophical nonsense of a teenage mind racing as it realizes its halcyon days are just about over. I wanted the road to continue into infinity, just the two of us and the Buick. Of course, that didn’t happen, and we returned to West Monroe.

My last couple weeks as a civilian were a blur. I don’t remember a whole lot aside from leaving my grocery-store job, the going-away party my friends from there threw me (of which I don’t remember much after the Everclear showed up), and trying to spend as much time as possible with Kirstie and the Buick before the day I had to be at the recruiting office at 7:00 AM sharp for my six-year date with the Navy.