Pre-Apocalyptic Driving Adventures

There are days that are good for driving and days that are not. I prefer Wednesdays. This was a Thursday. Close enough. I took the day off work and we hit the road, back to Athens.

We didn’t want to go. But to avoid a pandemic you have to be willing to sacrifice. And where we were there were no sacrifices being made. There is a sense of entitlement that runs deep in this country. I can’t figure it out, but I see it all around me — this idea that you can get everything you want out of life without compromise or concession. It’s annoying when you’re talking about politics or economics, but it’s disastrous when it comes to community health.

Staying six feet away from other people is socially awkward, but if that’s all it takes to stop a pandemic, that’s not a big deal for a few months. People spent years avoiding London and Paris during the plague. If all we need to do is stay six feet apart, and remain at home for a few months, we’re getting off light. Unfortunately, even that wasn’t happening in the campground. Rather the opposite in fact.

We’ve already had a bout of bad illness in the bus and let’s just say it’s not an ideal place to be ill. If one person gets something, everyone gets it, there’s no way around that. We were not interested in dealing with that and having South Carolina State Parks close on us.

Our reservation at Hunting Island was up. We’d planned to go back to Edisto for a couple more weeks, but the uncertainty regarding public lands — would state parks in SC stay open? Would we be safe in them? Would groceries continue to make it to a small island at the edge of the world? Would the residents of that island mind our presence if things got real bad? — made it an easy decision. We decided to head for some private land.

Fortunately we had a friend back in Athens with a place we could stay for a while, so we jumped on it. We just had to make the four hour drive back. No big deal.

It started inauspiciously, as stressful drives inevitably do. I was dumping the tank when I noticed the driver’s rear tire was low. There’s two wheels in the back, so I wasn’t overly worried, but it wasn’t a great way to start. Still, it was only a couple hundred miles, what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing for the first 70 or so miles. I even managed to get the rear tire filled up at a truck stop. All my tires in fact. No charge. And the woman stayed well away from me while doing it. Perfect. For minute I thought, hey, maybe this will all work out.

Forty miles later the engine sputtered. At first I thought maybe my foot had let up off the gas pedal by accident. My knee had been swollen and driving was painful, so it wasn’t out of the question. But no. Ten minutes later, it happened again. This time it was worse. I pulled over. Naturally it was the only stretch of the drive with no cell service.

I knew from the way it behaved that the problem was gas, specifically not enough of it getting to the engine. I had a quick look and saw air bubbling into the fuel filter. Not good. I knew there was a little leak in the filling hose at the rear of the gas tank. I decided to start there, I got out old trusty — the rigged up combo of small hose clamps that, along with some aluminum foil and header tape, once let us limp along with a cracked exhaust manifold — and put it to new use on the rear of the gas tank. It stopped the leaking gas (a task I’d had on my list for the following weekend anyway), and for about ten miles I was pretty happy with myself.

Then it happened again. Damnit. Stopped again. Now Corrinne wasn’t just looking at me with that look that said, really? today, she actually said, “Really? Today?” I didn’t say anything. I opened up the doghouse again. There were still bubbles leaking up in the fuel filter, so I knew the problem was somewhere between that and the gas tank. About 18 feet of fuel line and one pump. I put on my headlamp, crawled under the bus, inhaled unholy amounts of grass pollen, and slowly worked my way up the fuel line to the pump. No leaks. I stared at the fuel pump. The very first thing I ever replaced in the bus. It’s probably the fuel pump I thought as I lay there in the pollen.

Under ordinary circumstances I’d just hop in the car, drive to the nearest parts shop, get a new fuel pump and install it. But that would mean all kinds of potential exposure of me and the family to coronavirus. That would defeat the purpose of this drive, which was to get us away from people, not closer to them.

I considered the problem for a bit, lying there, staring up at the engine. If there’s extra air coming in, maybe if I tightened up the carburetor to cut the air coming in that way it would balance out? At least enough to let me limp back to Athens. I crawled out and did it. It didn’t help much — the real problem was not enough fuel, not too much air — but it helped enough that it got us back on the road, limping along.

After experimenting some I figured out how to accelerate in such a way that it would not stutter much and I could get up to about 50 miles an hour. It took a while, but I limped into Augusta. I decided to skip the interstate and drove through on surface streets. It was slow going, but the bus didn’t stutter as much at lower speeds, and eventually we got out of the city and back onto the highway to Athens.

In the end it took an extra three hours, but we made it to the old farmhouse turned schoolhouse where we’ve been staying ever since. I was tired, but grateful to have made it. I squared the bus away, and made dinner. We put the kids to bed, and I went online and ordered a fuel pump from Rock Auto. Problem solved, no one sick.