A carnival of technology

I kept some strange habits from my first car. It was a 1980 Tercel, a couple years older than I am and the perfect car to teach a teenager how to drive. It was a tiny hatchback, built like a tank because they figured solid steel was better than your pansy foam and crumple zones back in those days, a five speed, shook like it was going to fall apart if you got going to fast on the highway, no air conditioning, a broken fuel gauge and it had those manual crank windows that we now find so quaint. The lack of air conditioning presented a challenge in those hot Alabama summers, along with, at times, the hot Alabama springs and falls, but I got by. I learned not to mind the heat too much so long as there was some air moving past me, and even now that I have a fancy car with fancy A/C, I’ll more often open up the windows—now much less of a workout, and less of a moving violation when I reach for the passenger side—than sacrifice that bit of power to modern technology. As for the gas gauge, the trip odometer took over that duty. Given a tank size and a rough estimate of the car’s mileage, who needs fancy gauges and lights and all that nonsense? I’ve maintained that habit in my current car. The gas gauge works, but it’s not very useful. Its seems to hang around the full mark for a while, drops into the middle where it makes a calculated, precise movement through the middle quarters of the tank, and then it drops down to E and wiggles around for a while not telling me much of anything. The light comes on at somewhere around the three or four gallon mark, and beyond that I have no way to know how much gas I have left other than by looking at how far I’ve driven.

Gas has been a little weird here lately. The Colonial Pipeline passes through the general area of Atlanta, so a good share of our fuel is pumped up from refineries in Houston, which is all well and good except when there’s a hurricane in the gulf. The last time things were this bad was in 2005 with Rita, which, besides really messing up the Texas coast and an already-devastated Louisiana, screwed up the pipeline that feeds Georgia, causing a run on the gas stations and prompting Sonny Perdue, always the champion of education, to call a couple of snow days early in order to shut down the school buses. Gustav and Ike this year caused a whole bunch of damage, and I feel bad for all of those affected, but what do the hurricanes mean for me this year?

That nasty, smoke belching refinery I passed on the great In-n-Out trip of 2003, along with its neighbors, had to shut down for the storms, and that’s made gas a little scarce around here. The lack of supply drove prices back up past $4, so at first I thought I’d get by buying just a little at a time, purchasing partial tanks in the hopes that prices would soon drop, and not resetting my odometer, which turned out to be a mistake. Whether through a run on the gas stations by paniced people who remember what happened a couple of years ago or just stations legitimately unable to keep up with normal demand, a bunch of gas stations ran out of gas in the past few days. And so did I. After driving around with the fuel light on and a mystery displayed on the panel, I figured it was about time to refuel, and I couldn’t. Everywhere I turned, numbers were removed from station signs and yellow bags covered the pump handles. The stations stayed open, hoping to keep selling doughnuts and beer, and frustrated drivers kept them busy. I ended up going to work today on a mystery tank, trying to remember all the way just how running out of gas was supposed to be bad for fuel injectors and wishing for that 1980 beater. I was able to finally refuel; someone at the office found a station nearyby that still had gas. It had sloppily-written signs taped up everywhere warning of the lack of higher octane fuels, but my low-powered chump engine doesn’t need any of that junk. After waiting in line for a while I pumped 12 gallons back into my confused 13 gallon tank. I guess I might have had enough to make it home after all.