Yrjö

In October, I wrecked our car on one of those all-too-rare Finnish autumn days when there’s just too much sunshine.

The sky was clear, for a change, really clear, not just a lighter shade of gray. It was near sunset. We were driving west. Because of Finland’s location at 60 degrees north, sunset here at certain times of the year can last a long time. The sun just seems to sit forever on the horizon, right above the pavement if you happen to be driving in the right direction. This is why I was practically blinded when I hit a temporary barrier in a construction zone and crashed our Honda, leaving it hanging on the lip of a ditch.

A couple of weeks later we bought a used Nissan Qashqai, a smallish crossover SUV. To find ourselves unexpectedly car shopping made me think of how many cars I have owned, alone or with my wife, since the first one, a beloved light-blue VW beetle that my father and I bought from a relative for $800 ($3850 in today’s money) and an outboard boat motor.

Since I’m apparently keeping score here, the Qashqai is my ninth car. All have been either German or Japanese makes. Not a lot of diversity there, I’m afraid.

Scene of the accident. And the sun still won't go down.

Of all of these, one that I have special fondness for was my second, a compact, yellow 1974 Toyota station wagon. Although the car was small, by folding the rear seat down I could make enough room in the back to sleep in it, which I sometimes did on camping trips.

I guess you could say that in my early twenties I had a somewhat cavalier attitude toward cars and setting out on road trips. In college, I took my VW beetle twice to Florida on spring break, without the benefit (or so I recall) of bringing along a jack. I probably did have a spare tire. Can’t remember.

Luckily, I had no flats on those trips with the VW, thought I did lose a fan belt once returning from Florida, and much, much later the engine caught on fire on my way to a wedding reception. Good times.

To replace the VW, I paid $1200 ($3900 today, no outboard this time) for the yellow Toyota, and I grew even more attached to it, as it became my companion on many a road trip, both long and short.

Being young and more foolish back then, I could afford a more devil-may-care attitude toward car travel. Maybe that explains how I thought it was a good idea, in the summer of 1980, to take the Toyota on what turned out to be kind of a classic cross-country buddy road trip.

My college roommate Eddie and I had both graduated the previous year from the University of Georgia, where we had roomed with my other best friend Bob. At the time, Eddie was a newly minted high-school teacher. I was working as an unskilled technician in a university laboratory, mostly feeding fruit flies and later dismembering them.

Our friend Bob, on the other hand, had had the foresight to actually think about his future. He ended up with a degree in geology and right after graduation landed an outrageously well-paid job at a uranium mine in Grants, New Mexico.

Bob’s move to the open spaces of the American southwest gave me and Eddie the perfect excuse to undertake a trip that was adventurous, carefree and completely dumb. Dumb because my Toyota station wagon was definitely not up for a traveling across the vast stretch of America that lay beyond Alabama.

I was pretty sure the car could make it as far as New Mexico (an 1800-mile/2900-kilometer trip from Georgia). What I could not be so sure about was the trip back home. With a reckless attitude I have since lost, I figured that if worse came to worse, and the Toyota completely stopped working, we could just abandon it and take a bus home. It seemed so Kerouac.

On a long-awaited morning in June, Eddie and I set off on our journey at daybreak from my parent’s home in North Georgia. After about two hours, we had made it as far as northern Alabama when a tire blew out. This time, I did have both a jack and a spare. After buying a new tire in Birmingham, we pushed on. The trip was uneventful across the rest of Alabama and Mississippi, all the way to the KOA in Louisiana where we pitched the tent for the first night. 

(KOA is a chain of commercial campgrounds, where travelers with trailers or tents can sleep for much less than the cost of a motel room. It was our kind of place.)

Besides the blowout, the only hint of car trouble had been in Jackson, Mississippi, where I had looked under the hood to investigate a funny sound.

Everything looked fine, except the alternator (generaattori, in Finnish) was vibrating in an odd way.  Not to worry, though. The noise didn’t seem to get any worse on the drive halfway across Texas on Day Two.

Likewise, all was well as we entered New Mexico on the following day and made a crazy all-night drive from Carlsbad Caverns National Park up through the desert in inky blackness, with jackrabbits scurrying away from our headlights and lightning storms flickering in the distance, a non-stop drive that finally brought us to Bob’s house-trailer-in-the-desert at dawn on the fourth morning.

We had a fantastic couple of days in Grants, visiting lava fields, the cinder cones of extinct volcanoes, and other natural sights we didn’t have in Georgia, such as ice caves (where an accumulation of winter ice never melts, due to the superb insulation qualities of volcanic rock).

In his jeep, Bob took us up the dustiest road I’ve ever seen to the top of Mt. Taylor, an 11,305-foot (3,446-meter) extinct volcano where we found bits of turquois, presumably left as some kind of offering by the local Native Americans, for whom the mountain is scared.

Then on a Saturday afternoon, as Bob left for another week of working the night shift in the mines, Eddie and I continued our trip, heading further west for the Grand Canyon and ultimately Las Vegas. As it turned out, we were already pushing our luck. 

We were about 80 miles into the drive, some 20 miles past Gallup along the path of the famed Route 66. We had just crossed the state line into Arizona, happily humming past colorful sandstone cliffs right out of a Roadrunner cartoon, when the Toyota’s alternator fell off.

Immediately, we knew something was wrong. I pulled over on the shoulder of the road for a look. The metal arm that had held the alternator in position was broken, the alternator itself was sitting at the bottom of the engine, and shreds of the fan belt were everywhere.

As luck would have it, we were within sight of an Arizona weighing station, where I figured I could find a pay phone. Looking back, it’s hard to remember that there was a time when I didn’t carry a cell phone with me everywhere. No one did. 

As I walked up to the weighing station office, I was amazed to see that one of the rigs parked in front had license plates from my home county in Georgia. I still can’t get over this coincidence after all these years. My home county had a population of about 10,000, most of whom were not truckers, yet here one was.

Inside the office, I asked the drivers waiting to clear their paperwork which of them was from Ellijay, Georgia. I didn’t know the poor guy at all, but since we were practically neighbors he probably felt he had no choice but to help this clueless kid from back home. 

After looking at my engine, he realized that our only chance was to head back into Gallup and have the alternator fitted back on. He explained to us two uninformed motorists that it’s actually possible to drive without a working alternator, but you can’t go far without a belt to run the fan, especially in Arizona in summer.

This Good Samaritan trucker took some nylon cord we had among our camping gear and jerry-rigged a belt that would run the fan well enough to get us the twenty miles back into Gallup without having to be towed. I gave him ten-dollars for his trouble, but knowing how valuable time is for truckers, I’m sure it wasn’t nearly enough. We parted ways and limped back into Gallup.

“We don’t work on no damn foreign cars,” was the response we got at the first service station we came to. Checking the yellow pages at a phone booth, we managed to find the only place in town willing to work on non-American cars. It was just closing for the night. There was nothing to do but check into a motel and wait for morning.

We were there bright and early, just as the owner was opening up. He was a crusty transplant from back East with a colorful and profane way of expressing himself. I remember saying to Eddie, “Looks like we got a hard ass.”

In between pumping gas and making politically incorrect comments about the local Native Americans, he welded the alternator back onto the broken metal arm and replaced the fan belt.

The only problem with this quick-and-dirty repair job was that once the new belt was on, its tension couldn’t be adjusted since the alternator was welded firmly in place. There was no way, if needed, to move the alternator back and forth to tighten the belt. No problem. The whole thing only cost 40 dollars, the belt was tight enough at the moment, and the alternator was working again. We were back on the road by noon.

We spent two days camping near the Grand Canyon, soaking in the scenery and getting sunburned. As we aimed the Toyota toward Las Vegas, there was only one unsettling development. The fan belt had started to screech, at first just a little, but then louder and louder as we crossed Hoover Dam and neared Sin City.

By the time we hit the Las Vegas strip, there was a full-fledged banshee scream coming from under the hood. The sound was worrisome – not to mention annoying to our fellow campers at the Las Vegas KOA as we screeched our way to our tent-site after midnight, returning from watching the over-the-top “Hallelujah Hollywood!” topless review at the MGM Grand.

Clearly, this wasn’t good. The screeching would drive us crazy before we ever got back to Georgia. But I had a plan. I noticed that by pushing the metal arm down just a little the belt tightened enough to stop the noise.

At a hardware store, I bought some metal wire and needle-nose pliers. The next morning, I slipped under the car and attempted to pull the metal arm down by looping the wire tightly around it and one of the engine supports.

It didn’t work. The wire was too stiff – I couldn’t make it taut enough to hold the arm in place. Then I had another idea. I tried instead using a bit of the same nylon cord we had used for the makeshift fan belt. I ran a loop of the cord from the metal arm to the engine support. Then, using a piece of wood that happened to be lying on the ground next to me, I twisted the loop in the middle, like a turnbuckle.

That worked, but only if the piece of wood stayed in place. By taking a second piece of cord, I was able to also tie down the stick well enough to make the whole cockamamie thing function. We drove out of the KOA later that day without a hint of screeching. 

We still use the same improvised nylon-cord-and-stick turnbuckle system 
to straighten up our fruit trees. 

That was as far west as we went. From Las Vegas we started a meandering trip home through southern Utah, the four-corners country of Monument Valley – where Eddie and I planned to stop by the side of the road and do our infamous impersonations of John Wayne – and then up into Colorado. At least, that was the plan.

Three days out of Las Vegas, with southern Utah behind us, we were in the Painted Desert of northern Arizona and just about to turn toward Tuba City on the way to Colorado, when the alternator light came on and stayed on. 

We decided this was not good and aborted the trip to Monument Valley. Instead, we decided to rush back to New Mexico and let our trusty mechanic in Gallup take a look. We stopped only once at the Petrified Forest National Park visitor center to take one more look at a cute female ranger we had noticed on the trip out. Hey, we were in our twenties.

In Gallup, the mechanic’s assessment was that the alternator was kaput. Since I didn’t want to spend any more money for repairs on this trip, the only advice he could give us was to avoid using the headlights by driving only during daytime. We decided to do this all the way back to Georgia. 

We crashed (in the sense of stopping to sleep) once more at Bob’s in Grants before starting the epic flight home. Despite having to have the battery charged at least once, in Oklahoma, the daylight driving strategy worked. Mostly. The main problem was that we were limited as to where we could stop for the night, since we always had find a place well before sundown.

At first that seemed like just a small inconvenience. On the first day, we made it as far as the KOA in Amarillo, Texas, before darkness overtook us. So far, so good. The following day, we were nearing Memphis when twilight forced us to start using our headlights and stop for the night with no KOA on the horizon. We’d have to shell out money for a motel.

The lone motel at the first exit we came to had no vacancy. We continued on to the next exit, draining precious electricity for the headlights. Here, just on the outskirts of Memphis, there were several motels. No problem, we thought. If only that were true. We were surprised to find they were all full up, even the Holiday Inn, which was a bit upscale for KOA campers such as ourselves. 

The receptionist at the Holiday Inn told us there was a big square-dancing convention in Memphis, and we wouldn’t have much better luck further down the road since practically every place along the way was full.

It didn’t matter anyway. It was already too dark. We couldn’t risk going any further to look for a place. We had to stay put. We spent the night trying to sleep sitting in the car in an out of way spot in the motel the parking lot.

After spending two weeks in the dry heat of the arid Southwest, the humidity of Dixie was hard to get used again. Keeping the car windows rolled up was suffocating, but keeping them open invited the Mississippi River mosquitoes to join us inside. And those are big mosquitoes.

All night long, we were rolling the windows up or down, depending on what was the source of our misery at the moment -- the heat or the bugs.

As soon as there was a hint of daylight, we took off. In a small town in Tennessee, after we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer, we parked on the street to take a nap, giving rise to some suspicious looks from the few locals out early on a Sunday morning.

We made it through Tennessee as in a trance. At a rest area only about 60 miles from home, the battery died, and the two of us had to push the car back out of the parking spot (running over my foot, in the process), then across the rest area in order to jump it off. 

It was a once-of-a-lifetime trip – maybe for good reason. Bob didn’t stay much longer in Grants. Eddie became a pastor. We never talked about another drive cross-country.

I got a new alternator put on the Toyota and took it on a similar trip West a couple of years later. This time it was with my future wife, who christened the car “Yrjö”, the Finnish name for George and a slang term for vomit. She said it was the color that inspired her.

Me and Yrjö, Independence Pass, Colorado, June 1982.

On that trip we traveled across the southern tier of the US, all the way to California, braved Tijuana traffic for a couple of hours, wound our way up the Big Sur coast to San Francisco and then headed back east toward Georgia. We stopped in Las Vegas, but only to cool off after traveling through Death Valley without air-conditioning.

Yrjö finally did make it to Monument Valley and into Colorado on that trip. The only time I had to tinker under the hood was to remove the air filter cover to help (so I figured) coax the car over 12,095-foot Independence Pass in the Colorado Rockies. I would say two cross-country trips for a car that old and poorly maintained ain’t bad.

Anyway, that was a different era. Today’s cars are too complicated for most laypeople to tinker with. We get ours serviced regularly, by pros. I don’t anticipate ever again having to resort to using a nylon cord and a stick in some kind of slapdash repair job. Or, for that matter, to take to the road without the benefit of a jack in the car. 

But, you never know. I just recently realized that the Qashqai didn't come with a one -- or even a spare tire. What could possibly go wrong with that?

National Bargaining Chips

One of the notions that is drilled into the head of every American practically from birth is that the United States, of all the countries on Planet Earth, is uniquely “exceptional”.

This is such as a firmly anchored article of faith that to question it in the least is to risk almost branding yourself as anti-American.

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, (I forget which one, since he won twice), one of the many accusations that his opponents hurled at him was that he didn’t believe in “American exceptionalism”. This is a serious charge.

American exceptionalism ranks right up there with a belief in God when it comes to the standard litany of heart-felt convictions that all American politicians must profess, loudly and often, if they hope to attain any office higher than that of dogcatcher.

As you might guess, I don’t completely buy into American exceptionalism, at least in the sense that many conservatives like to think of it. But I do agree that the US is exceptional in other ways that Americans should be proud of. One is its multicultural society. Another is its National Park System.

Now, the fact that the US is blessed with an unusual abundance of natural spots of amazing scenic beauty is something no national leader can take credit for. It’s just a lucky feature of the North American landscape.

Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon were spectacular long before any forefather, who might have been inclined to bring forth a new nation on any continent, ever set foot in the New World. And these places will remain spectacular long after the last vestige of the “United States” has faded away.

It’s not just that the US has an outstanding wealth of natural wonders, or even that it’s the only country so blessed (I’m thinking of places like Switzerland and New Zealand here). What really makes America exceptional is how, thanks to visionary men like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, the nation decided to protect these wonders, making open to the public immense swaths of the best scenery America has to offer.

I’m grateful and proud that the US has a National Park System that, in many ways, has set the gold standard for safekeeping natural treasures.

Growing up in North Georgia as I did, a natural treasure that we often gravitated to was the chunk of wilderness that makes up the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As a teenager, my buddies and I spent many days exploring some of the more remote corners of the Smokies on extended hiking trips that I still remember fondly.

Over the years, National Parks have often played a big part of our family vacations from Finland. We’ve taken our kids to various parks whenever we’ve traveled somewhere in the States. This past summer, we briefly visited Mojave National Preserve in California, Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, and the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona (my third time there).

We are not unique in that regard. Every year, there are some 280 million visits to some part of the National Park System, and this out of a nation of 314 million Americans, plus of course foreign tourists who flock to sites as varied, and iconic, as the Grand Tetons and the Statue of Liberty.

It’s little wonder then that, for many average Americans, the national parks are a very visible and familiar part of the federal government, the federal government that many of those same average Americans seem to otherwise detest and think they could live much better without.

On the Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canyon National Park, 2013.

When the federal government partially shut down on October 1st, thanks to some unwise negotiating tactics by Tea Party Republicans, one of the most immediate and visible impacts was the closing of all national parks, sadly bringing places set aside for nature and recreation to the front and center of a nasty political debate.

Some conservative pundits and politicians, openly giddy over the prospect of a federal shutdown, tried their best to downplay any negative fallout from the sudden disappearance of most government services (98 percent of NASA, for example). “What? The sky didn’t fall?”

But, the closing of the parks hit a nerve and has the real potential of reminding voters that there’s one part of the national government that they actually appreciate.

You would think that the disruption, or even ruin, of family vacations by the closure of parks would be enough to spark a backlash against those Republican politicians who, out of pique, so cavalierly caused this mess.

And maybe in some ways that’s the case. But in the eyes of some people, it has also somehow made the Park Service out to be the bad guy, the face of an arrogant and manipulative government.

Media images of WWII veterans being denied access to war memorials in Washington has been exploited by conservatives to fuel criticism of the Park Service and led to civil disobedience by conservative on the Mall this past weekend, presided over by the oh-so-ardent Tea Party celebrity Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, the shadow leader of the GOP.

The closure of open-air monuments that don’t require entrance fees seems a bit over the top, even to me. It would be like the Finnish government putting barricades around the Sibelius monument (standing alone in a city park) due to austerity measures. Unless there are some arcade legal reasons behind such closures of open spaces that I’m not aware of, it doesn’t really make sense and plays into the hands of Republicans who are all too happy for any excuse to vilify Washington.

Despite the opportunities for schmaltzy photo ops within walking distance of the Capitol, the Republicans soon realized how closing popular parks can come back to bite them. Early into the shutdown, the GOP-dominated House scrabbled to partly backpedal by passing resolutions to fund only the Park Service (along with a few other shiny objects that gained media attention, like cancer treatment trials for children).

Magnificent view of Yosemite Valley.
Photo by Eeek.

The Senate wisely didn’t go along with the piece-meal approach to governing, so the parks remained closed.

Except, not entirely. Some parks have now reopened after five states, desperate to stem the loss of tourist dollars, agreed to provide the money to keep marquee parks operating. Arizona, the Grand Canyon State, has agreed to fork over state money, to the tune of $93,000 a day, to keep part of the Grand Canyon National Park open for a week. Utah is transferring $1.67 million to the US Treasury to reopen five parks in that state for ten days.

What is interesting is that these states, bastions of the Republican Party, are two of the 28 or so that typically receive more money from the national government than they pay in federal taxes. Or, to put it in the parlance of Ayn Rand, these are “moocher states”.

I hope that having to pay out of their own pocket for services normally funded by the taxpayers of more liberal states like California and New York provides an object lesson to the good people of Arizona:  sometimes it’s beneficial to be part of a larger union of diverse states.

I dearly hope Arizona and Utah are not reimbursed, so as to drive that lesson home.

However, some people may be taking away a different lesson. I’ve seen some Internet chatter from folks who, miffed at how shutting down the hated federal government has also shut down beloved parks, have jumped to the conclusion that maybe it’s time to devolve the national parks to the individual states and let them run places like Yosemite and Yellowstone.

On National Public Radio recently there was even someone from the libertarian Cato Institute suggesting that the national parks, to me a true treasure of public heritage, should all be privatized.

I hope all Americans would agree that this would be a bad idea, an exceptionally bad idea. ¶

Road Trips

I’ve been back in Finland from our holiday in America for well over a month already and am only now getting around to posting anything about it.

At some point on the trip, along Colorado Highway 13, I think, among the empty (and I do mean empty) red-and-green landscape of Rio Blanco County, I had a pang of homesickness for Helsinki.

What I was feeling had more to do with family than any real longing for the cool, leafy corner of the Finnish capital that I call home. My wife, daughter and I were rolling at 65 miles an hour toward a rare family reunion later that day, and the only thing missing were my two sons back in Finland.

Still, we had been away from home for a while. It was Day Nine of our trip to America, and it was starting to feel like a long one. Maybe it’s a sign of aging that my desire for traveling begins to have a shelf life. (Who knew?)

It wasn’t always so. When I was about to set out on my first "buddy" road trip out west back in 1980, I recall my father advising me that I would find out that a week or so of that kind of traveling is more than enough. Beyond that, it’s no fun to be so far from home.

He might have been drawing on his experience from a hunting trip he made in 1963. For my father, this was no ordinary hunting trip. He and a few friends had driven along two-lane highways across the Great Plains to hunt elk in the Rocky Mountains of southern Colorado. I was too young to remember the details, but it feels like he was away a couple of weeks, though it might have been only one.

The most lasting impressions of my father’s trip came from the elk-head trophy that later towered over our living room and the grainy 8-milimeter home-movie footage he brought home from the trip. I even recall the night that the film was shown at the little community center near our home. It felt like a big deal, and for the time, it was.

I’m sure that the trip to Pagosa Springs had been a worthwhile adventure for my father and a great success, though tinged with some sadness (on the trip, a companion was stricken with the first signs of an illness that would come to kill him). With three young children back in Georgia, though, my father probably felt more than enough homesickness to put him off straying so far from home again without us. He didn’t go out West again until the road trip the whole family took to Wyoming thirteen years later.

In 1980, I was 23 and single with really nothing, or nobody, to miss back in Georgia. At least, not for a couple of weeks. So, I didn’t heed my father’s warning about over-extending my first own cross-country road trip, and in fact, homesickness wasn’t a problem.

My friend and I drove some 1600 miles (2500 km) to visit our college roommate in Grants, New Mexico, and then continued on to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and finally Las Vegas before turning back toward Georgia. I don’t recall feeling homesick even once.

It was the same, two years later, when I made a similar trip, this time for three weeks, though by then there would have been some cause for homesickness, or at least bittersweetness, if I had thought about it.

I called this my “Goodbye America” trip, because I was soon moving to Helsinki and was unsure how long it would be before I returned. I also wanted to show my Finnish girlfriend something of the American West. My battered Toyota station wagon carried us from Georgia across the southern tier of the US to Los Angeles and San Diego (and, for a couple of ill-considered and nerve-racking hours, even Tijuana).

We followed the coast up to San Francisco before hitting a series of national parks (Yosemite, Death Valley, Zion, Grand Canyon) on our way back East. We slept in the car in the hills above LA, took refuge in a Las Vegas casino after crossing Death Valley without air conditioning, and stopped to check out Aspen (where my future wife bought a Moomintroll book for me, as a kind of early introduction to Finnish culture).

In some ways, the trip we made this summer relived some moments from those epic road trips of my youth. We drove to the South Rim for the first time since 1980. On our first visit to LA since the “Goodbye America” trip, we toured some of the most memorable spots from before and tried to recognize others we only half-remember. We stayed at the same ski resort in Utah (and hiked to the same 11,068-foot peak) as we did on another epic road trip we took with the family almost a decade ago. And we met relatives and friends we haven't seen in far too long. There were certainly some nostalgic moments. 

We also broke some new ground and stumbled upon some unexpected finds, like dinosaur bones exposed in a wall of a naked stone, a street-side painting in a Utah ski town left by guerrilla artist Banksy, and an archeological dig, once frequented by the legendary Louis Leakey, now almost forgotten. 

Even the routes and spots we did retrace and revisit all look new again after so many years, so it didn't feel as if we were simply rehashing the past. Not the whole time, anyway.

I hope to eventually post more about parts of the trip. But if my writing output since returning to Helsinki is any indication, it might have to wait until the next big Southwest road trip, hopefully this time in something less than 30 years. ¶

Photo: Taiga Korpelainen