One of the principal lessons I garnered from my Years at Sea was that living on the land is for pussies. This is not due to any intrinsic maritime-enforced toughness or testosterone-inflamed need to risk, but rather the mere fact that if you can’t do everything; well, bucko, you’re gonna die. If you’re days away from land and the boat is changing elevation by ten feet every twenty seconds while tipping over at an angle varying from zero to forty-five degrees in the same interval and you can’t cook a hot nutritious dinner: you’re going to die – or at least arrive at your destination very hungry. Sitting in a dead calm being swept by a foul current toward the rocks and you don’t know how to fix a diesel engine? Dead. A hole in the hull that you can’t fix? Dead. Broken rigging? Dead. Giant invading jellyfish? Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

It always made me wonder why the sport of cruising long distances in a sailboat was so popular. But it also explains why there are so few people who did it more than one season. Nevertheless, the skills acquired with the proverbial gun to your head will stand you in good stead regardless of what shore the winds of change cast you upon.

And it’s no exception here at Playa del Micro-farm. Even though, by my own prejudices, I am now a pussy.

As I talked about a few weeks ago, I made a misguided purchase that resulted in a 1989 Ford F-250, Super-Duty, 4×4, Lariat (or some such cowboy-sounding name) pickup sitting in the driveway. I took it to the mechanic as part of a tax dodge and found out exactly how foolish I was to have purchased this P.O.S. mode of transport to the tune of three kilo-bucks to fix only the things that would kill me if I didn’t. And so the truck sat, unused, dripping toxic petroleum products onto the gravel.

Meanwhile, my ocean-honed survival instincts kicked in, I adopted my “What? Does this guy think I just washed up? I’ll show him.” attitude, and I was off and running.

There were two major issues with the truck that needed immediate attention. First, a large part of the exhaust gases were not, as intended, coming out of the tailpipe but, instead, issuing forth from various perforations that had chewed through the exhaust system over the previous twenty-four years. The aromatic compounds drifted through the highly efficient ventilation system and filled the interior with a gray cloud. This being the Pacific Northwest, the cloud blended in with the ambient conditions and was – until consciousness left the vehicle – largely unnoticeable. Driving around with the windows open did improve the local air quality, but to fix the stink I would need to come to terms with the thousand-plus dollar replacement of several Swiss-cheesed components.

Or I could just buy a tube of “muffler repair compound” for a dollar-three-ninety-eight and be done with it.

Now out of pocket nearly four bucks and with goo in hand I realized that there was one fatal – or potentially so – flaw in my reasoning. A flaw not listed on the instructions that came with the goo. To wit: the problem with fixing things that are under pressure by plugging them is that when the pressure is re-applied – in this case by starting the engine – the gooey plugs tend to get shot out of the “repaired” holes like so much snot out of a straw (if you will forgive the imagery). There’s just nothing to hold back the pressure. So, with a new carbon monoxide fueled plan wobbly lodged in my head I rushed down to get the parts I would need at my local muffler repair shop; which, in this case had large orange letters reading “THE HOME DEPOT” atop the building.

This may seem a stretch given that Home Depot does not actually sell car parts, but for my purposes it does sell the next best thing: plumbing supplies. As you saw back when I built the greenhouse, I’m a fan of putting plumbing supplies to uses for which they were not intended. This has been going on since my youth but has yet to result in any formal charges filed against me. To meet my current goals I needed two items and within a half-hour I was back on the road, now a grand total of fifteen dollars poorer.

The problem with the muffler was the series of four holes rusted through the bottom of the muffler’s steel shell. The mounting brackets and structural parts of the muffler are all intact. So I took the thin aluminum sheet I bought at Home Depot, cut it in half, smeared it with muffler repair goo, and stuck it in place over the holes. I next took the super-jumbo hose clamps – originally meant to secure very large sewer pipe – and slipped them over the aluminum sheet and tightened them down. Wait a few hours while the glop dried and VOILA! The exhaust system now sends all the gas out the tailpipe with the throaty rumble that is the signature of a large-block Ford V-8.

Is this now “fixed” in any conventional sense of the word? Nah. But we got this truck to haul straw and cow poop. I spent fifteen bucks instead of fifteen-hundred. Plus, now I’m not going to die from the exhaust. It’s fixed enough.

I hope.

The other problem was more severe. According to the mechanic, “I don’t think this truck has ever had any maintenance done on it.” At which point he handed me an estimate for $1,124.51 – pretty precise for an estimate, huh? – which covered essentially replacing the ignition system and cleaning the fuel and air system. Eleven hundred bucks for what used to be called a “tune up.” When I looked at the labor he was charging me I almost croaked. Eleven dollars to replace a spark plug! Unscrew it, toss it in the trash, check the gap on a new one, screw it in. Five minutes tops, if you have trouble getting the old one out.

Eleven bucks.

I am clearly in the wrong line of work.

Fortunately, the estimate came with the part numbers included in the estimate. With this cache in hand I went first to Ford’s website to confirm he wasn’t trying to pull a fast one, and thence to Amazon to actually buy them.

Amazon, unlike Home Depot, really does sell car parts and has this feature that if you tell it what kind of vehicle you have will make sure that the part you selected will actually fit. Plus you get Amazon’s low-low prices so that by the time I bought all of the parts and the tools I needed for the job I was still several hundred dollars under what the parts alone would have cost had I let the pros do the job. And what a job it was.

I hate gasoline engines. Hate ‘em. Diesels are so much nicer. A little fuel, a lot of air, and chuff-chuff-chuff, off you go. Gasoline engines have all these wires and spark plugs and voltage and spinnie-things just to make the gas go boom in the cylinder and they all have to work together with precision of a moon shot. It’s a nightmare. Out for a drive when I stepped on the gas the truck would shudder like it wanted to flip over and die, and then surge off down the road. Each and every component in the ignition system was trash. It was so bad that if you opened the hood at night and ran the engine it looked like the aurora borealis arcing across the engine compartment from every cap, coil, and insulator. 

It was very disconcerting.

Once I had the parts in hand it wasn’t going to be too big a deal to do the repairs. Except that this truck is the biggest vehicle I’ve ever owned. The top of the fender comes up to my chest and I have to use a ladder to check the oil. To do the tune-up I had to climb into the engine compartment and replace all the parts one-by-one. Some went quite quickly. Others, like the rust-crusted spark plugs, sent me scurrying for bigger tools. But by the end of the day I got it all done, put back together, and buttoned up.

And it worked.

Since then we’ve put the truck to good use. It’s hauled actual straw. The bed got fifteen hundred pounds of “fish compost” dumped in by a very aggressive front-end loader operator. The truck handled it all with ease. Plus it’s nice not having to explain why the Camry smells like that.

In the end I may have to reassess my negative opinion of dirt-dwellers. While the truck wouldn’t have sunk if my repairs hadn’t worked, the work was still fraught with danger.

I could have fallen off the ladder.