Sometimes you can go home again

I’m a car guy. What that means is that I have a fascination, akin to obsession, regarding certain aspects of cars and trucks.

When I was a kid, most of our cars were not new. These cars frequently malfunctioned, and at an early age I was introduced into the art of being a shade-tree mechanic. That’s a misnomer, because we mostly worked on the cars out in the dirt road. And I mean right down in the dirt, lying under the car, having oil and other fluids dripping in your face. In the winter you couldn’t feel your fingers, in the summer you couldn’t touch metal left in the sun.

During my first couple of years in college, I attempted to turn away from my legacy. I decided to pursue matters of the intellect and forsake the dirty arts. Alas, the first time my car wouldn’t start, I had three hippies trying to advise me. I had to intervene before one of them hooked up the jumper cables backwards. Thereafter, I adhered to the path of righteousness.

I bought a little ’63 Ford Falcon; 6-cylinder, three-on-the-tree. My Dad and I started tweaking more miles per gallon out of it. Play with the spark timing, adjust the carburetor float level, run a multi-viscosity oil, acquire steel-belt radial tires and pump ‘em up to the max. We succeeded in increasing the mpg from 22 to 27, which was phenomenal in the early 70’s.

Right now, I’m driving my ’83 Rabbit diesel pickup around the county with a campaign sign attached. I’ve had the pickup about nine years, but I’ve had the engine and tranny for twenty-five. I took them out of my legendary ’81 Rabbit sedan when it had close to 300k on it. (The Rabbit is now a project in progress, which means it’s parked in the weeds up in Corning.) The current pickup engine is a 1.6 liter naturally-aspirated four cylinder diesel. It has never been rebuilt, although it broke a radiator hose in 1994 when someone else was driving it, and ran it till it quit. So the cylinder head has been off a few times.

I took the truck for a test run the other day, about a hundred miles. By the way, test runs are very important. You fix or change or adjust something, then you drive the car and see what it does. On that test run, at freeway speeds, the truck achieved 40 mpg. It should do a little better at slower speeds.

Back in early 2008, when fuel prices were going crazy and apocalypse seemed near, I filled the pickup’s fuel tank as a hedge against a possible scarcity of fuel. Prior to last week, I had used possibly 5 gallons out of the 30 that the tank holds. I consulted my mentor, Willie Blakely of Chico VW. He told me that I needed to do something with that diesel, not just leave it in the tank. “Best to run it out”, he said.

So essentially I’ve got 25 gallons of free fuel, a potential thousand miles of campaign driving. It may look like I’m traveling off to far-flung parts of Butte County, but in reality I’m coming home.

Ramsey doesn't keep you safe

On his signs and in his television ads, Ramsey proclaims that he is “Keeping Butte County Safe.” That’s strange. I’ve lived in North-east Chico for nine years, and we now have gang shootings and drive-bys.

However, the real question is: Whose job is it to keep the county safe?
Answer, not the District Attorney’s office. It is tasked with prosecution after a crime has occurred, not before. The more brutal, sensational and unpredictable the crime, the more obvious it is that the DA has no power to prevent such crimes, and can only react after the fact.

If not the DA, then who keeps us safe? Take a look in the mirror, my friend. Each of us has the personal duty to live our lives cautiously, to refrain from heedlessly walking out into traffic, and to keep ourselves out of harm’s way. We also have a moral duty to monitor and watch out for those less able: The very young, the very old, the disabled. Only when events escalate into the danger zone must we seek professional help.

We’re talking basic law enforcement here. It’s the Chico Police Department for the East Avenue area where I live, with the Butte County Sheriff’s Office for the unincorporated pockets. Over by the College, you’ll see the University Police. And of course, up on the freeway, it’s the CHP.

When Ramsey says he is keeping Butte County safe, he is distorting the truth. When he embraces that distortion, and makes it his campaign theme song, he does so with reckless negligence.

During the course of a jury trial, there comes a time when the judge reads the jury its instructions. One of those instructions goes more or less like this: “If you find the testimony of any witness to be unreliable in one instance, you may disregard the remainder of his or her testimony in whole or part.”

If Ramsey can’t tell the truth on his campaign signs, why should you believe anything else he says?

The lackluster consumer that I am

In this bipolar political world we inhabit, it is hard to avoid being pinned with some kind of label. For example, I am routinely described as “liberal”, whereas I would describe myself as an unincorporated amalgam of at least all of the following: Liberal, cautious, skeptic, frugal, intellectual, laborer, anarchist, enlightened redneck.

One thing that I have never considered myself to be is a “tree-hugger”, which is not to say that I am oblivious of the need to conserve. My wife, Kristy, and I live moderately. We have three operating vehicles: 2003 VW Jetta, 2007 VW Eos, 1983 VW pickup. The two newer cars have 4-cylinder gas engines that will get in excess of 30 mpg on the highway, without sacrificing power. The VW diesel pickup just got a solid 40 mpg on a test run.

Kristy and I keep the house thermostat low in the winter and high in the summer. We have a whole house fan. I am well-acquainted with the crawl-space under the roof, and have spent many hours augmenting the insulation. I hate paying PG&E, and I do believe it is best to conserve energy.

At our house, we don’t buy much stuff, and we throw away even less. When we get tired of eating left-overs, the doggies get them. We compost all vegetable matter from the kitchen, and everything except tree branches from the yard.

After starting this post, it occurred to me that there are some particular trees that I am quite fond of. When I was a 4th grader at Independent School, I became the proud recipient of a Ponderosa Pine seedling. I planted it in a vacant stretch of our yard. By the mid 90’s it was 35 feet tall and about 16 inches in diameter at the base. Then came the big storm in 1997. When the storm ended, the tree was listing at a 45-degree angle, threatening my Mom’s garage. I drove over from Chico with my chainsaw. I tied the tree off with a rope, and then climbed up and cut off the top of the tree. Back on the ground, I hitched a come-along to the tree and cranked until it was as near straight as I could make it. I then tied a rope to the fence and secured the tree with a trucker’s knot. It stayed that way till the ground got hard in late spring. After a year or two, the tree sent a branch up that replaced the missing treetop.

I guess the reason that I went to all that trouble to save the tree is that I was sort of attached to it. Maybe I am a damn tree-hugger after all.