Okay.
So there we were, tooling down I-95 in southern Georgia en route to our place in Florida from our place in Connecticut.
We left Connecticut three days earlier, and had gone about 1,000 miles.
No. We weren't averaging only about seventeen miles per hour. We had stopped off in Wilmington, North Carolina to spend a couple of days with some friends...if you must know!
While visiting our friends, by the way, I had two “firsts” occur in my life. I ate my first oyster, which I absolutely LOVED! (You have to get past the looks of the things. Oscar Wilde once said that the first man ever to eat an oyster was the bravest man in the world.)
AND...I also had my very first Krispy Kreme donut. Okay...I didn't have just one...I had three. But they are SMALL and filled with air! I think Krispy Kreme trains its bakers to pump as much air into the little critters as they can possibly hold. You bite into them and feel them deflate. It's kind of like eating baked, round cotton candy. It's there one moment, and then POOF!, it's just a fond memory.
Anyway.
There we were, with three hundred miles under our belts that day, about 100 miles from the Florida border. We were doing about seventy-five miles an hour, which, in the Wrangler, feels like about 450 miles per hour. . . in a hurricane. . . with the doors off and the emergency brake on.
I had been driving along for the past hour, wondering what the hell was up with hood. It kept jumping up and down every time a gust of wind buffeted the vehicle. (The hood on a Wrangler is held down by three latches. Two are exterior latches on either side of the hood, about a foot behind each headlight. The third one in hidden under the hood in the middle of the front grill. (And, in order to get that one to open, you must do a ritualistic dance while wearing a leather loin cloth and swinging a dead chicken over your head, which is outlined in the Jeep Wrangler Owner's Manual, and then say the words, “Open Sesame” three times...with feeling.)
So, we're bumping along on I-95, when, all of a sudden, I see something fly off the right side of the Jeep. Then, the right side of the hood starts to lift up in the air to alarming heights. I slam on the brakes, and steer the vehicle onto the shoulder of the road. I look at Mary Ellen and say, “I think we just lost the right hood latch.”
I throw my door open, (the door that is closest to the traffic moving at warp speed,) and almost lose the it to a Prius that careens past with it's horn blasting and passenger's face about three inches away from my own!
At that point, with my heart pounding in my temples, I wanted to jump and down, screaming something like “Thanks God! Thanks for showing me YET AGAIN how much You love me!!!!”
But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that doing something like that, no matter how good it might feel at the time, would only cause embarrassment to me while recounting the whole episode at later dates.
So, I merely whimpered a little and walked around to the other side of the Jeep to assess the damage.
Uh-huh. The hood latch was missing on the passenger's side. Snapped off clean.
NOW what the hell was I going to do?
“MARY!” I shouted over the din of the rushing traffic, “Do we have bungee cords or rope or anything in the Jeep?”
She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.
That's what I thought.
We're screwed.
At that moment, I just happened to look down the road a bit. And there, by some miracle or other, on the shoulder of the road, about fifteen feet away from me, was an old, decrepit bungee cord! It was busted, and the metal hook on one side was missing, but I thought that maybe I could use it.
Meanwhile, Mary Ellen, who has all the faith in the world in my mechanical and problem-solving abilities, got on the phone with a person whom she later described as, “a nice, young woman from AAA and gave that person her calm and objective assessment of our situation: “We're all going to die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Then her end of the conversation continued like this: :”No. I don't know where we are. We're on I-95 in Georgia. No. I don't know what town we're near. No. I don't know what mile marker we're at. No! I don't know what exit we're near! All I know is that we're stuck in the middle of nowhere with traffic racing past us, and if we drive the car, the hood is going rip off of the vehicle, come crashing through the windshield and DECAPITATE US BOTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
While she was describing the scene like it was something out of a Wes Craven horror flick, I opened the hood and peered at the frame of the Jeep.
Where the in the hell can I stick the good, metallic end of the bungee cord and have it grab onto the hood?
As, I leaned over the engine, I heard a “tick...tick...tick” sound, and looked down to see my end of my belt being whacked by the radiator fan. (I recently lost a few pounds, and now my belt is too big for me, and the end of it sticks out a little past the buckle.)
WHOA!
I backed away before it did any damage.
I could just see the the headlines in tomorrow's Morning Gazette of East Bubbaville, Georgia: “ Hey Y'All! Connecticut Idiot Disemboweled By Radiator Fan On I-95 Because The Stupid Yankee Didn't Have The Brains To Shut Off His Engine Before Attempting To Work On The Interior Of The Hood On His Car. (They have LONG headlines down here in Georgia . . .Y'All!)
So I backed off, and walked around to the driver's side, reached in, and turned off the key. Then, I went back and leaned over the engine once again, burning my hand on something that I didn't know what it was, but it was really, really hot!!!
As I was nursing my burnt hand, suddenly, the horn blasted away about three inches from my only good eardrum, startling me so badly that I shot bolt upright, and smashed the top of my head on the inside of the hood.
I jumped off to the side, grasping my throbbing head with both hands and glared at Mary Ellen who was now sitting in the driver's seat.
“WWWWWWWWWHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTT????????” I screamed at her, checking both of my hands to see how badly my head was bleeding.
(I would like to take a moment here to point out that during most crises in our lives, Mary Ellen has always been as steady as The Rock of Gibraltar. She is usually the one with the level head who is soothing me while she figures out a solution to the problem at hand. This time was different. This time, the situation really scared her badly.
We all have irrational fears. I've got enough of them to fill the ocean. Turns out that one of Mary's is that the hood of a car will fly up and crash through the windshield. Seriously! She's had the fear since childhood, and does not know its origin. She simply knows that it is irrational, and, being that, makes it no less frightening to her.)
“The nice, young woman from AAA said we should move the car far off the road so that we're not in danger of being hit by traffic. I'm going to move it, okay?”
“Okay!” I said, forcing a smile while thinking, You DUMB son-of-a-...
So, she moved the vehicle forward and off the road a few more feet. When she stopped and turned off the engine, I went back to work looking for a place to put the metal hook of the bungee.
I found one – a hole in the interior of the hood close to where the exterior hood latch normally would be bolted . . .if it was still there . . . if it hadn't fucking flown away.
So I set the hook in that hole in the hood, closed the hood tight and looked down under the engine now for a place to tie off the other end of the bungee. In order to get a better view, I laid down on my back and pulled myself under the vehicle. I found a rod under there that seemed pretty sturdy. So, I stretched the bungee as far as I could, looped it around the rod, and had just enough slack to tie a secure knot.
At that point, God showed me how much He loves me yet again by allowing the sky to suddenly open up and send raindrops the size of golf balls plunging down all over me. Before I bolted for the cover of the Jeep's cab, I tried to raise the hood. It wouldn't budge. GOOD! The bungee was holding fast . . .at least for the moment.
When I jumped back into the cab and got behind the wheel, Mary Ellen was still talking to the nice, young woman at AAA saying, “I think we're all right now. No. I don't think we need a tow. He tied it down with a bungee cord. I'm not sure if it's going to hold though! And now, to add to everything else, it's pouring rain outside and he's soaking wet!”
I started the engine and reached over and grabbed her arm. “It's going to be all right,” I said in the most reassuring tones that I could muster. “The bungee is secure., and so is the hood.”
At that moment, I felt a strange tingling feeling in my right arm. I must have brushed up against some nettles or something when I laid down on the ground. Then, I felt the same feeling running up and down my right leg. I looked at my expose right forearm.
“ANTS!!!!” I screamed as I began swatting at the little, red bastards while they were biting me all over.
“OH MY GOD!” Mary screamed into the phone to the nice, young woman from AAA. “Now, not only is it raining outside, but he's covered with fire ants!”
“They're not fire ants! They're just ants! Red ants!” I shouted as I jumped back out of the car, barely missing being hit another little fucking Prius with a blaring horn that clearly demonstrated the Doppler Effect perfectly as it zoomed past.
“They're not fire ants,” Mary informed the nice, young woman from AAA. “They're just ants. Red ants. And now, they're biting me too!”
I did a little dance on the shoulder of Interstate 95, swatting at my bluejeans and my arms, killing the little, angry critters by the hundreds.
At one point, it got so bad in my crotch area that I considered stripping off my pants. The only thing that stopped me was but I once again saw tomorrow's headlines from The Morning Gazette of East Bubbaville,Georgia, which read, “Get This, Y'all! NOW The Idiot Connecticut Yankee Is Arrested For Indecent Exposure on I-95 Due To A Confrontation With A Colony Of Red Ants!” (ANOTHER, long, southern headline.)
So, rather than strip from the waist down in broad daylight on a major, thoroughfare in The Bible Belt, I simply continued swatting like crazy until the tide of the battle turned, and I managed to finally beat off the onslaught, and emerged victorious.
I then walked back to the Jeep, and, with Mary Ellen's assistance, managed to kill off the rest of the invading army's stragglers that were on the floor, seat, center console and crawling up the steering column and windshield of the vehicle. We took no prisoners. Kill them all and let God sort them out!
When this mission was accomplished, Mary Ellen got back to the nice, young woman from AAA who was still on the line and said, “I think we're okay now. I'll call back if anything else goes wrong.”
Nothing else did. We drove another hundred miles that day and crossed the border into Florida with the bungee holding fast and not a red ant in sight, and the next day, we drove the additional 200 miles to our destination on Terra Ceia Bay.
Once there, we found a Jeep dealership, bought a $15 replacement hood latch, and secured it to the hood of the Wrangler.
The Jeep is now as good a new, but I took the decrepit old bungee cord with only one metal clip and stashed it away in glove compartment...just in case.