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Hey kids, do you know what time it is? That’s right! It’s time for another all-new installment of Damian’s Epic Saga of Car Trouble!™ Woo!

I had a shoot in Alhambra today. Since most of my projects lately have been in Lancaster, that’s where I’ve been spending most of my time, and the quickest way from Lancaster to Alhambra is via Angeles Forest Highway/Angeles Crest Highway. But that is not a road I like to drive the truck on because the truck is 30 years old and handles like a 30-year-old truck. So I borrowed my mother’s sedan, a 92 Ford Taurus given to her by her father. The drive down was smooth. The event went well. I shot close to 100 pictures. The venue was smaller than last time, but there was quite a bit more media interest. The last event for this program I shot, there was one other still photographer and 2 news crews. This time, at least half a dozen news crews. Crammed in a small space. But, I actually got some cool stuff out of that:

Anyway, driving back to Lancaster through the National Forest, I noticed smoke coming out of the back of the car in the mirror. Thought it might just be dust being kicked up by the wind. Then the rear wheels momentarily lost traction, and I started to fishtail. Got it under control on the first swing, so it didn’t swing back. Wondered what the hell just happened. Then on the next turn, it fishtailed again, this time much more violently, but I recovered pretty quickly. At that point, I said, “Fuck this, I’m pulling over as soon as I’ve got the space,” wondering if I had a flat tire or something. Also, the transmission started freaking out as I started going uphill. It was slipping all over the place. So, I got it off the road, walked around the car to check the tires, noticed the smoke was coming from the engine compartment now that the car was stopped, popped the hood, couldn’t see anything, looked under the car and noticed a steady, heavy drip coming from the back of the engine. At the very least, the car had sprung a pretty significant transmission fluid leak, and if particularly heavy spray had hit the rear tires, that could have caused the momentary loss of traction. This, I knew, would not make my mother happy, as she just paid for a new starter on the car two weeks ago. But, whatever… I needed to call AAA to get a tow into town. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and “No signal.” At this point, it looked like things might start to get out of hand. I considered my options. I could go climb one of the mountains to see if I could get a signal from a higher elevation. That would be manly. If that failed, I had plenty of water in the car… I could have walked the 13 miles into Acton. That would be manly too. But, we’re looking at 3 or 4 hours of wandering around in desert mountains in a dress shirt and tie. Angeles Forest Highway is a fairly well-traveled road, even at 12:30 in the afternoon, and well-traveled probably means well-patrolled. So, I could wait for a forest ranger to come along to give me a ticket for parking in the National Forest without an “Adventure Pass,” and he could call a tow-truck while he’s at it. Not so manly, but probably my best option.

By the way, for anyone not familiar with the “Adventure Pass,” what it is is a fee that you must pay to use public lands… like for the National Parks, only, now your tax dollars no longer pay for your use of certain National Forests, because our government is too busy giving your tax dollars to con artists like Bear Stearns while they borrow money from China to fund their “Kill American Servicemen and Brown People” program. I find it offensive for so many reasons, but the one most relevant to the topic at hand is that, clearly, I do not need to buy a pass to have an adventure in the National Forest. I’m special that way. I don’t go lookin’ for the shit, okay; it finds me.

Anyway, while debating my options with myself, some good samaritans pulled up and offered to give me a lift to the only phone on the road, at the Hidden Springs Cafe. An interesting place, this cafe. The coffee was good black (I normally detest black coffee), and the pie smelled wonderful. I may have to stop next time I go through for coffee and pie, despite the absence of coffee and pie on the meal plan my trainer put together for me. Anyway, I was able to use the phone at the cafe to call AAA. AAA is clearly not set up to handle rural environments… at least not in California. The only information I could give them was the name of the road and the mile marker the car was at, and the name of the place where I was. This caused trouble. They wanted an address, including city, which prompted my response, “Um, I’m not in a city. I’m in a national forest.” The operator eventually figured out how to direct the tow truck driver to my location, and told me he would be there by 1:38. I passed the time listening to the proprietor of the cafe discuss various odd topics with the small assortment of patrons, a couple of whom arrived in a dune buggy. The tow truck arrived at 2:30. It was 3:30 before I got home. Mind you, I was supposed to get home around 1:15, and have a few images up on my server for Scott and Lucila to download by 3:30. Thankfully, as much as I complain about the Cat Fancy job I had for 4 months giving me a mild case of Office Ass, the speed at which I can retouch and color correct increased exponentially while working for them. 5 minutes is heavy retouching for me now. So, I was able to get a number of images up by 4:30 (I may have gotten home at 3:30, but I still had to wait for the car to be unloaded and then spend 30 minutes downloading the RAW files off the flash card).

The day got me thinking about the technology we’ve come to depend on, and how lost we are without it. Cell phones, GPS navigation, and iPods are three technologies that have come about in my lifetime. I lived my life just fine before they came along, but now that I have them, the idea of living without them seems problematic at best. Especially the iPod. My god, what would I do without an iPod? Carry a bunch of CD’s with me in the car and change them as I drive? Madness, I say! Once I saw my cell phone had no signal and decided I didn’t want to climb a mountain, I started going through the GPS to see if there was anyplace nearby that might have a phone. Of course, the closest thing it listed was not the place I ended up going to, but a place 8 miles away. 8 miles away geographically. I probably would have had to walk more like 15 if I actually wanted to get to it. So, my drive home was an exercise in the failure of essential technology. Well, that’s not fair. The iPod still performed exceptionally. Yet, I took it all in stride. I didn’t panic. I didn’t get upset. I evaluated my situation and considered my options. I wasn’t even all that pissed that the tow truck showed up almost an hour later than AAA said it would. Not to toot my own horn, but I do tend to handle crises pretty well. As my mother said when I related the story to her, “Well, as wrong as this may sound, I’m glad that happened while you were driving and not me, because I would’ve freaked out.”

Of course, as far as the epic scale of this particular entry in the Saga of Car Trouble, this is bested only by the time my axles fell apart 5-10 miles east of Tucumcari, New Mexico, where I was stranded for 4 days, eating nothing but Denny’s because I got 10% off the bill with my room key.