submitted by Wild, wild west

Spring break 1977, I scooted my ’72 Toyota Land Cruiser out to North Carolina on a lost love mission. I had met this young lady in college after the army and we had hit it off pretty well but the year before we graduated, her folks moved back to New Bern (or near enough) and she went with them and end of story, I thought, except it wasn’t.

After a while we got back in touch and after much encouragement (probably didn’t take her that much), I got in the Land Cruiser and headed East with the band Head East blaring on the 8- track. Who remembers Head East? Anyway, it was a two day trip from where I lived and I’d just had the windshield replaced and was highly annoyed the second day when I ran into some rain and a water leak started around the top of the windshield pretty much centered on where I looked out through it. But I kept sopping up the leak best as I could with paper towels and napkins and ran out of the rain eventually.

About an hour from destination, it started getting dark and I switched on the head lights and oncoming traffic started flashing headlights at me. I noticed my headlights weren’t illuminating much so I pulled over to discover the marker lights were working but the headlights weren’t. There looked to be a town up ahead, so I drove on in and pulled up in front of a country grocery store that I remember looking a lot like the one in DT’s recent “Late Night Gas” posting, popped the hood and started looking for the trouble. The old fart in the store had no flashlights for sale nor one to loan me. Eventually I decided to just hot wire the lights directly to the battery but the old bastidge in the store had no wire to sell either.

It was later determined that the water leak had shorted out a fusible link in the wiring for the lights, but I did not know that then nor did I have any way to trace it down had I suspected it.

Now, it was Friday night and there was a continual stream of folks coming in to buy a six-pack or a bottle of wine and a couple bucks of gas and I was getting a little concerned because they were all giving me rather unsavory looks. I was, to be blunt about it, of a different ethnic background, if you catch my drift, and being a long way from home, to be blunt again, I was greatly comforted by the .45 automatic tucked in beside the front seat.

.45, of course, because they don’t make a .46……..

About that time a guy in a Camaro drove up and noticed that he and I were the only members of our ethnic community present, so he struck up a conversation and went to thinking about where he could find some wire at that time of night. Then a beat up mid-60’s 98 Oldsmobile came ka-lump ka-lumping in and parked under the awning. A huge black guy gets out of the car and shot me a hell of a look before going in the store and coming back out with a jug of wine and got in the car and looked back over at me and said, “Whitefolks, you got a problem?”

Now that could be taken several ways, but I took a leap of faith buttressed by the fact that I was closer to that Colt than he was to me, and said, as politely as I could, “Yeah, my headlights died and I’m trying to fix ‘em.”

“What you need to fix ‘em?” he asked and I told him I was gonna hot wire them to the battery if I could find about five foot of wire and he said, dang, this ain’t my cah but I’ll look in the trunk, which he did but there was no wire in the trunk and he stood there scratching his head for a moment before flashing a big smile and he said, “I’ll get you some wire.”

He popped the hood of that beat up Oldsmobile and started feeling around on the wiring harness, starting at the firewall and working his way toward the front and then felt his way back and grabbed one wire in particular with his enormous hand and after giving it a couple tugs, grabbed it with both hands and jerked it loose from whatever it was attached to and started pulling wire out of the engine bay of the Olds that was not his car, hand over hand like he was pulling rope off of a spool.

I hollered out, “Hey, are you sure you want to do that,” and the Camaro driver said, “Let him alone, he looks pretty sure to me,” which was the absolute truth and this mountain of a man turns to me with what looked like ten feet of wire and asked did I think that was enough.

Uh, yeah, I think that’ll about do it……..

He insisted on doing the hot wire himself and wouldn’t take a dime for his efforts and I got the hell out of there before anything else could happen and that’s the way I finally got to New Bern, North Carolina (or near enough) on Spring Break, 1977.

Had a pretty good time with the young lady in North Carolina and we made some probably unrealistic plans for the future that fell through in relatively short order. You can’t fight time and distance and I’m pretty sure her parents were not delighted with the whole idea but C’est la Guerre.

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