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Timing is everything

The hokey pokey may be what it’s all about, but without timing, even the hokey pokey just looks like some tourist trying to walk around Whistler Village without a clue where they’re going. I’m spending Memorial Day weekend in Aspen.

The hokey pokey may be what it’s all about, but without timing, even the hokey pokey just looks like some tourist trying to walk around Whistler Village without a clue where they’re going.

I’m spending Memorial Day weekend in Aspen. Not the Aspen of fame and fortune, the Aspen of the rich and famous, the Aspen Whistler tries so hard not to become while seemingly embracing many of its fatuous values.

More accurately, I’m spending Memorial Day weekend – that’s what Americans call Victoria Day weekend and, since they don’t kowtow to some foreign Queen, they celebrate their heroes of democracy and the Indy 500 – at The Aspen. In this case, The Aspen is a modest, roadside motel on the eastern fringes of Missoula, Montana.

Modest is not a euphemism for ramshackle and Missoula is not redundant with the word fringes. Hell, Missoula is such a weird word, this place could be in Canada, eh?

I’m spending an unexpected 72 hours in beautiful downtown Missoula because the venerable, if soon to be for sale, Westfailya has, well, failed me. Or maybe I failed it. It’s one of those complicated relationships after all. And it’s not really for sale; that’s just the anger talking.

Mello Yello, as animate an inanimate object as was ever assembled by skilled German craftsmen, just couldn’t handle the praise, the congratulations, the loving attention I’d been lavishing upon it. That’s my theory anyway. I’d

praised it for how flawlessly it performed during the first three-quarters of this 5,000 mile jaunt. I’d washed the bugs off it, changed its oil, rotated its tires, hell, even drained and refilled its transmission for the first time in who knows how long.

Somewhere in the farmland 250 miles south of Missoula, just as the Bitterroots began to rise from the Great Basin, it started to crack under all the pressure. More a vibration than a noise at first, I tried to ignore the early warning signs. I thought positive thoughts. I invoked the blessings of the pagan gods arrayed on its dashboard – Felix the Cat, Burn-Victim Barbie, Godzilla, Brian the Ferengi, a lesser Peruvian deity called Poco Loco and Sol, the god of sunny weather. Guess we need new talismans. Talismen?

The vibration turned into a rumble, the rumble into a knock and the knock into a firm knowledge I was about to be visited by the dreaded CV failure. Déjà vu, dude.

Conjuring my manifest mechanical skill, I relied on every homespun mechanic’s first and best tool. I tried to ignore the problem hoping it would fix itself. It got worse.

CV, or constant velocity, joints – a misnomer if ever there was one – are to cars what ankle joints are to people. Actually, I have no real idea what they are other than hunks of steel and ball bearings that fail with infuriating regularity, at least in Westfailyas. But when they do, they make a sound much louder but not unlike the cracking noises my ankles make sometimes when I think my feet are about to fall off the end of my legs.

A hundred miles down the road, there was no denying the obvious. We – my Perfect Partner, Zippy the Dog and I – were screwed. This is where the timing is everything part comes into the picture.

Mid-afternoon on Memorial Day weekend Saturday is just about the worst time in the whole year to have a mechanical breakdown in America. Memorial Day weekend is sacred. It’s the first weekend of summer and no fool in his right mind is working anything more mechanical than a barbeque. And no fool is likely to again until Tuesday morning.

Missoula being the next town of any size likely to have a Volkswagen mechanic – and older VW’s absolutely require VW mechanics, so weird are they – I raced north, race being in this case about 50 mph. The "maybe it’ll fix itself"

fantasy had been replaced by the fantasy where you stumble upon a crunchy granola VW shop on the outskirts of town just about the time the owner is closing for the long weekend and he takes pity on you and sticks around for the two hours it takes to replace the CV joint and you’re on your way again and make it home sometime early Monday morning instead of sitting in a motel room writing your column.

This particular fantasy was fueled by the coincidence of time and speed. If I didn’t completely break down, I’d make Missoula just before 5:00pm.

Rolling into Missoula at 5:15 – road work – all I could find was a VW dealership with a sales office still open. Finding a VW dealership when your 1982 Wesfailya needs fixin’ is like finding a tent when you need affordable housing. VW dealers won’t touch old VWs, that’s why old VW mechanics, at least the good ones, start their own shops. But a very nice receptionist told me about Pete, a former mechanic who’d left and started his own shop. She even

gave me his cell number.

I now, publicly, take back most of the nasty things I’ve ever said about cell phones, blight though they are. Pete answered his phone. Without telling him, Pete even knew which side CV was making those devilish noises, a trick I’ve got to have him explain to me.

Could Pete fix Mello Yello? Certainly. Would Pete fix Mello Yello tomorrow? Not a chance. Pete was camping... and answering his cell phone. First thing Tuesday morning though, no problemo.

So, Memorial Day weekend in Missoula, which is not Aspen but is probably, all things considered, better. Missoula is a town of three solitudes. There is a large population of people just like most of the people who live in Whistler. They drive Subarus, eat real food, spend disproportionate amounts of time and disposable income pursuing outdoor recreation and believe recycling is next to godliness.

There is a large population of people who make their living off the land.

Loggers, miners, ranchers and farmers. They drive one-ton Ford pickups, are burly if not portly, pursue outdoor recreation that involves large boats, ATVs, snowmobiles, fishin’ and huntin’, and wonder why in hell it’s harder to make a living these days.

Finally, there are the carpetbaggers. The carpetbaggers in Missoula are the same as the carpetbaggers in Whistler. They have more money than brains, they drive Cadillac Escalades, they want a piece of a beautiful place, they build McMansions and gated communities, they fence off what were formerly public trout streams, they believe the highest and best use of any scenic land lies in carving it into over-priced enclaves for people like themselves, they are indifferent if not downright hostile to the people who actually have the temerity to try and make a living around them when they come up for their couple of weeks a year. And they should all be run out of town wearing tar and feathers.

I feel right at home.