I
got my first car because of someone else’s Christmas present. Gerald Rana’s neighbor got an arc welding kit
for Christmas and that very day pushed an old Pontiac into his front yard. He was going to make a dune buggy. No one worried about the lawn; Trona has no
lawns. The soil is so alkaline it kills
any lawn seed that tries to poke out even a tentative root.
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| dimasobko / 123RF Stock Photo |
Cutting
arc in hand, Gerald’s neighbor dove in and sliced a big cut right through the
middle of the car, drive shaft and all, so that the car lay in two pieces. Then he cut through again, this time in front
of the rear wheel assembly and hauled away the whole middle section of the car. He was energized! Work continued for days. After stripping off the car body, he welded together
the front and rear pieces of both the drive shaft and the frame. The car was now half the length it had been.
The
straight-eight engine, with its 8 pistons in a row, took up half the length of
the buggy. Behind the engine on the
shortened frame was a bench seat with a gas tank tucked behind it. With no real weight to pull, that engine knew
no bounds.
The
next step was to weld on roll bars and side supports, but Gerald’s neighbor ran
out of steam. Gerald had been observing
the project all along and one day his neighbor turned to him.
“Hey,
Gerald. You like this dune buggy?”
“Sure,”
Gerald said. “It’s going to be great.”
His
neighbor chewed his lip. “I think I’m
done. I’m tired of this buggy.” He raised his eyebrows at Gerald. “If you want it, I’ll sell it to you for fourteen dollars.”
Gerald
told me he would let me in on the deal if I paid half.
I
approached my Dad as he was eating a solitary breakfast at the kitchen bar.
“Hey,
Dad. Gerald Rana’s neighbor has a dune
buggy for sale. Can I buy it?”
Dad
looked at me. I could see dollar signs
adding up in his brain, wondering how many hundreds of dollars this was going
to cost him.
“It
won’t cost much,” I said.
Dad
smiled and shook his head. “How much?”
“Fourteen
dollars total. If I pay seven dollars, I’ll
be half owner.”
Surprise flitted across his face, then his
grin widened. He stood up, pulled his
bill fold out of his pants pocket and peeled off a five dollar bill and two
ones. Handing them to me he said, “Here. Just don’t kill yourself.”
I
had a dune buggy. It was a very
educational purchase as well. Whenever
anything went wrong we’d drive over to the city dump and rummage around in the
abandoned cars for a new part. We didn’t
care if it came from a Pontiac
or not. Once, the starter motor went
bad. We found one that didn’t look too
corroded and drilled holes in the frame to make it fit our Pontiac.
It started up like a dream. Already
a Frankenstein creation, we were constantly attaching miss-matched parts to
make it better.
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| CC DonQuichot/Wikimedia |
The
real joy was what that buggy could do. And
the freedom we enjoyed. We drove all
over the desert, exploring places a regular car could never get to. The only things we missed were the gauges,
especially the gas gauge and the speedometer.
We were always dipping a stick in the gas tank to see how much gas was
left, and we never knew how fast we were going.
Once
when Gerald’s parents were out of town, he drove his dad’s car behind me while
I raced the dune buggy down the highway as fast as I could go. In just a couple miles, Gerald started
falling quickly back, so I slowed and waited for him to catch up. When he pulled up beside me, I yelled,
“What’s the matter?”
“When
you got past 120 mph, I couldn’t keep up anymore.”
I
never did tell my Dad about that.
