Sticks and Stones

Here's the best worst way to learn how to drive a stick.

It’s about 450 miles from Wagon Mound, New Mexico to Wichita Falls in north east Texas. We, the plucky band of carnies that I was with, were set to make the jump to the next spot, when my boss discovered that we didn’t have enough drivers with valid licenses for the trek. Because we were crossing state lines it was molto importante to have legal drivers for all our armadillo excrement, held-together-with-gin-soaked-spit, “these things don’t actually run, do they?” vehicles. We didn't.

All carnies are on the run from something — ducking the law is the largest of flight incentives. In daylight, a parade of carnies heading down the highway would be 19 kinds of irresistible to law. In daylight, we'd be like strippers to Louisiana governors, like divorcees to English kings, like a cup of Italian roast with a small splash of vanilla laced soy milk to me — irresistible.

So, we were making the jump at night with that cloak of darkness thing going on.

Or maybe our timing could have been due to the summer Texas heat too but, ya know, coulda been a little of each.

It was just an hour before lift off when our dearth of legal drivers was discovered. Being The College Bitch it was assumed that my license was for real. It was. I was drafted. This was cool. I looked forward to the adventure, the voyage, until I climbed into the driver’s seat of the ’69 VW Bus.  The speedometer was busted, the windows didn’t go up and, oh yeah, I’d never learned how to drive a stick.

I got a whiz bang fast instructional buzz around the now empty midway where I learned how to start it up and shift gears. I was 19, thinking “I'm up for the challenge — what could go wrong?”

Now, just like long distance truckers, carnies do major amounts of speed for the longer jumps. The drug of choice, at that time and place, was Black Beauties. I had vicious heebie jeebies about doing chemicals to begin with and was definitely not keen on doing them while driving. Still, I knew I needed something to keep me going over the 9+ hour drive.

Mountain Dew and M&Ms in bulk were my pick.

I was supposed to be following another of the crew but, in my Dew and M&M mania, I must have blown right by them. I arrived in Wichita Falls first, by many hours first at that. I expect the broken speedometer had something to do with this too — without a meter to keep me in line, I paced myself by the truckers.

It wasn’t until years (10 of 'em thenkyew) later that I learned that the way to bring a manual transmission car to a full stop is NOT by stalling it out.
Stones — Before They make Me Run