When I Leaked Transmission Fluid on I-95

So Thursday I get in the car and hit the highway on my 23-hour visit to Washington, D.C., to see Jamie from Notre Dame and take in a Cowboy Junkies concert at the 9:30 Club in the city's skanky section. For anyone who knows Washington: The Club is on V St. Anyway, with Jamie at work, I make my way into the city and park beneath her building, just a few blocks from the White House. I walk over and look at the front door and all the tripods and TV equipment on the lawn near the West Wing. Jamie tells me later that if there are people there in addition to all the equipment, then POTUS is in town, which there were, so he was. I continue around the building and gaze across the South Lawn expanse at the back door, where a black limo and Suburban were parked, sparking a montage in my head of all the news reports, TV shows and movies I've seen that have involved the President. With hours to kill, I walk around Our Nation's Capital in the 60-degree sunshine, heading down to Constitution Ave. and walking toward the Capitol Building, past the Dept. of Commerce and National Aquarium, the Interstate Commerce Commission and Justice Dept. on my way to the National Archives. On the way, I pass the IRS as well and think of an episode of The Simpsons when a woman points the building out to Homer, and he sticks his head out the window and boos. I also kick myself for shelling out the money to send my tax return certified mail when I could've walked in the door and dropped it off myself.

At the archives, you walk in, stand in line, shuffle past what they tell you are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights encased in green ectoplasm, and you have to take their word for it because you can barely make out what's in those cases beneath all the goo. Then you have time to look at the rest of the display they've put out from the vast collection of stuff they keep. If the Smithsonian is the nation's attic, the archives is the nation's filing cabinet. I wanted to ask someone if I could see JFK's brain. "Oh, right, you lost it," I'd say. There were some interesting artifacts from our nation's early history, including a letter from Andrew Jackson and the draft of FDR's "Day of Infamy" speech that he read to Congress asking them to declare war on Japan. Either it was left behind or the president handed it to a Senate aide or someone, and it was filed with the Senate records and found years later, with "Delivered to Congress" and the date written on the back. And there's an original copy of the Magna Carta displayed too, found in England in the 80s or early 90s and bought by Ross Perot, who has donated it to the archives indefinitely.

After leaving all the school trips behind there, I walked over to the National Mall and turned toward the Washington Monument to begin heading back to meet Jamie. Before doing so, I ducked into the National Museum of American History, where if you enter from the mall side, you usually see the Star-Spangled Banner hanging on the wall, the actual flag that flew at Fort McHenry that inspired Francis Scott Key to write our National Anthem (set to the tune of a drinking song). The flag has been taken down for conservation and restoration (kind of). Years ago, the flag was sown to a linen backing, and now they're removing it. Stitch by stitch. All 1,700,000 of them. They'll have it back up in 2002. But until then, you can watch them work, which I did, and learn all about the history of the flag, including all the parts that were cut off and given to important people as gifts.

Long about 5:30, I met up with Jamie and saw her windowless office -- a true work environment, devoid of distracting pictures of me, I pointed out. After dinner at the Capital City Brewery (where else would two Domers go?) we made our way through the skewed streets of Washington to the 9:30 Club. We parked in a fenced in lot that looked like it might be a used car lot during the day and were informed that we had to be out 15 minutes after the show. Inside, the mid-20s to middle-aged crowd did not reflect the pink-haired, tattooed, multi-pierced employees of the club. Two bars flank the dance floor in front of the small stage. There's a back bar under blacklights and a small merchandise booth on the edge of the dance floor opposite the stage. When Jamie and I noticed there was an upstairs, we went up there and got a spot along the railing near center to watch the show. The balcony ran around three sides of the club, with three steps along the sides for better viewing. It was a little like Antone's in Austin, but smaller and without the drug-lord ownership.

The opening "act" was two guys on guitars. A guy and a Beck look-alike he got to play backup, which involved guitar, mouth organ, and a few other various intstruments. It begged the question, if you're the backup musician in a two-man "band," do you brag about that to pick up chicks? And does it work? The Junkies came out a little before 10 and played nearly two hours (a change from their Baltimore show, which was shut down by the sheriff after only a few songs. And this is not a slam-dancing, raucous band, either). They played a good selection from their song library, hitting all their albums and including my favorite, "Miles From Our Home," the title track to an album that came out the day before my cross-country odyssey and became my theme song for the trip. The first set ended with a Dylan cover, "If You've Got to Go, Go Now," off their new album and the show ended with "Blue Guitar," written by the late, great Townes Van Zandt and the Junkies' Michael Timmins, a.k.a. my friend Walker's uncle. When the show ended, Jamie and I went to get the car before the parking people got mad, so we couldn't stay to chat with the band's front woman and singer, Margo Timmins (Mike's sister), who often invited the audience to meet with her after the show at small places like the 9:30 Club.

A nearly third-quarter moon hung over the Lincoln Memorial as we drove by it and over the Arlington Memorial Bridge on our way to Jamie's Arlington aparment. Tired and thirsty, we labor up the stairs and into the apartment, with its life-size pine tree air freshener -- that is, their Christmas tree, still standing in the corner next to the sliding doors. I put some ice into a glass and turn the faucet for some water, just as Jamie shows me a note from her roommate reminding us that the water in the entire neighborhood is shut off for the night until 6 a.m. There's no water in the fridge, so we have to head down to the complex's 24-hour gym to get some from the vending machines. It would've been a problem had we started brushing our teeth before realizing we had no water. So, during two trips in February to see friends in Austin and Washington, I've had to flush the toilet with a hanger attached to the innards of the bowl because the handle is broken, and I've had to quench my thirst, brush my teeth, rinse and wash off my brush with a mere 20 oz. of Aquafina.

Friday morning, we watch the news tell us that the highs in Washington are expected to reach the low 70s. In an attempt to continue to revisit some of the historic sites of my Eighth Grade Trip To Washington, we go to Arlington National Cemetery and visit the graves of JFK, RFK and Jackie O, as well as the Tomb of the Unknowns, a memorial to the Challenger astronauts and the grave of boxer Joe Louis, a WWII vet. There are more school groups of children walking the roads and hills of Arlington, and we watch one school ceremoniously place a memorial wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

The last Washington stop is at the new FDR Memorial, along the Tidal Basin not far from the Jefferson Memorial. It's a somewhat elaborate, spread out series of granite walls and waterfalls, with quotations from FDR etched into the walls of the memorial at various points. Starting from the right end (the west), you walk through his presidency, reading what he said and passing statues representing the Depression, Eleanor and, finally, FDR and the dog. A very fitting tribute.

After lunch at a place popular with White House staffers, Jamie went to work for a few hours Friday afternoon and I did my best to get out of Washington without getting lost. I did, but I began to notice that my car did not seem to be getting any better. I've had a lot of work done on the ol' '86 Volvo in the last month, and after getting a new water pump and other extensive work done, I noticed there was a little transmission slipping going on, mostly when I first started the car in the cold February weather. After driving for a while, it usually got better. My mechanic said it was the new seals that were put in, that they were still a little hard. So he had someone put some conditioner in the oil tank that would fix things. It seemed to be getting better, until I got to the stop-and-go city driving of Washington. I stopped at a rest area in Maryland on the way home, and when I tried to back out of the parking space, the engine revved and the car did not move. Someone asked me if my clutch was gone, and when I told him it was an automatic, he said I need to get the gear box looked at "as soon as possible." I hoped that would be at least after I got home. He pushed me out of the parking spot, and I was able to go forward. Accelerating onto the highway was a little difficult, but once I started cruising, it seemed to be going better. For a few miles. Then the car would slip in and out of gear, momentarily here and there. I made it through the tunnel near Baltimore, slowing down at a backup at the toll. Two cars in front of me were waved through the toll booth, and stupid me, worried about the car and wondering if I'd make it home, I thought it was like they do in Massachusetts when the toll plazas get backed up, so I drove through as well. At the moment I passed through the toll booth, money in my hand, window open, I made eye contact with the toll collector, and realized that the two cars in front of me had Maryland's equivalent of E-Z Pass, the electronic toll account. So I expect a photo of my car to come in the mail in the next few weeks.

As I neared the Maryland House Rest Area on I-95, there it went. The car slipped out of whatever high gear it was in and wouldn't go back. Hazard lights on, I moved to the left lane and made it to the rest area. It was 3 p.m. and I HAD to be at work by about 6, so this was a big problem. It was perhaps the absolute worst night of the entire year for this to happen, because it was a Friday, the night when we have to put out two sports sections -- the regular one and the separate high school one, which included state-wide district wrestling matches and a local girls basketball conference championship game.

The first person I called was my editor, who told me to do whatever I needed to do to get there. Then I called my father at work, and he ducked out 10 minutes early to come down to get me. We figured we'd have the car towed, he'd take me to work, and we'd worry about the ol' Vo' Saturday. Triple-A was my next call, and they were running within the hour. So I had a problem, because my father was on his way to the rest area, and I had no way of getting in touch with him. But once the car was towed -- one exit away to a Texaco in Aberdeen, Md. -- I got a cab back to the rest area, minutes after my dad arrived. We picked up some things from my car, left the keys and hit the road at 5:30 for the two-hour drive home. I made it to work at 7:45, about an hour and 45 minutes late and exhausted, but still in plenty of time.

When everything slowed down after work, as I went to bed and even when I woke up in the morning, I was upset. It sounds a little ridiculous and it fits the guy/car stereotype, but I felt like I let my Volvo down. I had a friend in critical condition, and there was nothing I could do about it now. That car, now 14 years old with 177,000 miles, had been good to me in the four years I've owned it. I drove it 10,000 miles across the country, through the south and the Texas heat during a 100-degree July, into the New Mexico mountains and the Arizona and Califorinia deserts. Up through Death Valley and into Las Vegas, through the mountains to Utah and around and over the Rockies in Colorado. Near Denver, I drove that car up the highest paved road in North America, summiting Mount Evans at 13,000 feet. I cruised across the Kansas plains and Iowa cornfield, into Illinois and Chicago, then around the Great Lakes, across New York and up into Maine. Not a problem. I'd been good about maintaining the car, but this time I'd let it down, and it bothered me. I didn't want it to end this way.

I will pause here to give some of you a moment to stop laughing at me.

Saturday morning, I called down to the Aberdeen Mall Texaco and was told by the mechanic that he'd only had a quick look at the car and that I'd been leaking transmission fluid. If I hadn't done too much damage to the transmission, it would be easily fixed, but he'd have a better idea if I called back at 2 that afternoon. Mom and Dad went up to Connecticut to visit some friends for dinner, and I watched basketball on TV. At 2 I called back, and the car was fixed and ready to go -- all the lines had been checked and fixed, transmission fluid filled and oil changed. The mechanic also took it on a 10-mile test drive. But I'd have to keep a close eye on the car. Sunday, 20 minutes after my parents returned from Connecticut, I drove Dad down to Maryland to get the car. After lunch at baseball-decorated McDonald's across the street (so designed because of the Ripken Museum down the road), we got back on I-95 for the ride home and I went to work Sunday night.

An amusing side note to end this on, I have a new #1 for the World's Most Unromantic Valentine's Gift. It beats a mouse for the computer and a motorized change organizer that my mom gave me (which is great, because I don't want romantic gifts from my mother). A woman at work who has a new Explorer (no, that's not the Valentine's gift) was given a BUG DEFLECTOR by her boyfriend. What a loser. "Hey, honey, I love you. Here's a shield for the bugs to smack into on the highway so they don't smear all over your windshield."