Tikkabik

My wife and I decided to go to the mall to get some shopping done, and we dragged the kids along as well. The mall is only about 20 minutes away, in Hyannis, so we took off, and everything seemed fine until I pulled into the parking lot and found a space.

Maybe the stereo was up too high or maybe we were talking loudly to each other, but it wasn't until I got out of the van and swung open the tailgate to get out James' carriage that I realized something was wrong -- very wrong. For somewhere ahead of me I heard the sound of a cascade of water -- like a waterfall or a fountain like you find in some people's gardens. The steady drip -- more of a rush, in retrospect -- of water splashing onto the ground.

I looked underneath the Frickin' Van, in between the two front tires, and saw a torrent of bilgy green water pouring forth onto the ground. Something under the hood -- some part of the cooling system -- had given way, and the Frickin' Van was dumping coolant onto the ground with the same force as a freshly slaughtered pig dumps blood onto the floor of the slaughterhouse after its throat has been cut.

If there was fortune to be had, it was that we were parked just slightly uphill from a drainage basin, so the coolant dumped into a nearby storm drain, rather than puddling underneath the car or oozing back towards us. My misfortune did not go unnoticed by the other patrons of the mall, either. Across the row of cars from us was a white-haired pensioner and his wife. He shot me a dentury grin and offered, "Looks like you sprung a leak there, pal!"

No shit, grandpa.

I popped the hood and found that a peculiar Y-shaped hose under the hood unlike any radiator hose I had ever seen before was totally shot -- it had ruptured near the base, which is why the pressurized coolant fluid had spilled everywhere.

While I was basically capable of diagnosing the problem, fixing it was something else entirely. So my first call was to AAA to summon a tow truck. My second was to my mother, so she could ferry Bonnie and the kids home. Mom got there well before the truck did, as I sweated it out in the hot sun.

Once the truck got there, the guy had a look under the hood and decided he'd have a go at fixing the problem himself. He unscrewed the clamp from the end of the hose and tried to cut it to see if he could mickey mouse something together that would get me going again, but after about a half an hour of this it was clear that he wasn't going to be able to get it working.

I have a mechanic I like to use in Falmouth. It's about a half an hour's drive from where the van had died, and what I've learned after owning the Frickin' Van is that towing companies are incredibly provincial. They'll usually only cover one or two towns at most, so when you ask them to drive outside that radius, you're at their whim about when you'll actually be able to get service. But as it turned out, that day he had to make a trip down to Falmouth anyway to deliver another vehicle. So we mounted mine on the flatbed and dragged another car behind us, dropping that one off first and then mine.

As it was Sunday, I had to wait another day before my mechanic could look at the Aerostar to give me an estimate on what it would cost to fix. Predictably, it was a lot of money, because the cooling system -- like so much on that van -- is odd and not a regular bin part. It was a couple more days and a couple hundred dollars later before I got the van back.

The sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I drove away from the mechanic's that day told me I'd never feel really comfortable driving the Frickin' Van again. And my intuition was right.