Mustang Aflame

I remember a story my dad once told me about his old Mustang. He told me of how, once, riding down a lonesome stretch of highway with my mother, smoke suddenly started pouring out from under the hood. Little did he know, but he had become victim of a flaw that is well-known to us today: early Mustangs had a short piece of rubber hose between the hard fuel line to the fuel filter on the carburetor. And as rubber is prone to do, it had rotted with time, ruptured, spilled gasoline onto a hot intake manifold, and promptly caught fire.

Dad pulled the car over, got out, helped my mother get out, opened the car hood, and seeing the flames, did as any man who spent a large portion of his time watching 80's action movies would: he panicked and assumed that the Mustang was now a bomb capable of leveling a city block. A passerby stopped, and at his advice, the two of them began to throw dirt on the engine in an effort to put out the flames, which succeeded in nothing. Several minutes passed, the fire department stopped, put out the fire, and left my parents at the mercy of the tow truck driver.

But it was what happened next that I always found the most fascinating.

"So that was when you had to get a new car, right?"

"Why, hell no. We couldn't afford to just 'go out and get a new car.' That's what idiot yuppie rich people do. No, we got the thing home, I changed that damn hose, put new plugs and plug wires on it, and drove it to the grocery store ten minutes later."

How any car could withstand such catastrophe, I could not fathom. Dumbfounded, I could think only to ask, "But what about the dirt?"

"What about the dirt? God made dirt; dirt don't hurt."

It was the same explanation I got when I skinned my knees playing in the yard, one I didn't understand at all because I had at that point acquired indisputable evidence that, while God had most certainly made the dirt, it did, in fact, hurt very much. Yet it didn't hurt that Mustang's engine. Meanwhile, I would watch my Dad work outside for hours on our Ford Taurus that didn't run because of what would turn out to be a "piece-of-shit dirty 'mass airflow sensor.'" That Mustang engine had caught fire, but Dad was able to drive it that same day after a simple, routine repair. Meanwhile, the newer Ford Thunderbird we had blew a head gasket because it "ran too hot for more than thirty fucking seconds."

Within my own mind, the legend continued to grow. A legend that would later be solidified and prayed for when I encountered the most notorious car I have ever been cursed to work on: a 1995 Volkswagen Jetta.