As I was nearing Dayton, I noticed that the gas light was on. What was worse, I had no idea how long it had been on.
It was the steering wheel’s fault.
I find the Element to be quite a well-designed car generally—in fact, I’m a little obsessed with it and am already dreading the day that we will have to trade it in, because I don’t think I’ll ever find a car I like as much. However, there is a problem with the steering wheel, namely the fact that there is no perfect angle to adjust it to—at least not relative to the field of vision of someone of my height (six feet, for the record).
When the steering wheel is tilted all the way up, the upper part of it blocks the top of the speedometer dial. I can see the angle of the needle but can’t be sure exactly what number it’s resting on. 60 mph is at high noon, which is straightforward enough, but let the needle incline much to either side and—with the steering wheel all the way up—I can’t just glance down and see whether the car is traveling at, say, an unremarkable 70 mph in a 65-mph zone or an asking-for-it 76.
Because of this, when I am driving at highway speeds I tilt the wheel all the way down, exposing the upper third of the speedometer dial so that I can easily gauge any speed between about 40 and 80 mph. The downside is that the fuel gauge is now blocked in this position, something I don’t remember ever noticing until on this very drive, as I hurtled along the country roads somewhere between Xenia and Bellbrook.
There are long stretches of the drive between Elkins and Dayton where gas stations are sparse, but fortunately this was not one of them, as the needle was closer to E than I’d ever seen it before in this car.
I quickly found a BP, ran my credit car, inserted the hose, and—while the pump was running—took the opportunity to shed my knit pullover and don the button-down shirt I’d left hanging in the back seat so as not to arrive at my meeting in an excessively wrinkled, bedraggled condition. I used my reflection in the tinted side window to knot my tie, noticing as I did so that traffic had come to a halt on the road behind me, because of a stopped school bus, and I enjoyed imagining the reaction of anyone who noticed my little display.
The realization of how easily I could have run the tank dry reminded me of a time, back when Amy and I were first dating, that I’d had her Cabriolet for a weekend while she was out of town and the car just stopped running one evening.
At first I’d had no idea what the problem was. I was rounding a corner somewhere in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, where I lived at the time, when I noticed the engine lurching and straining. I was able to pull it into an out-of-the-way spot in an alley before it died altogether. I tried and tried to restart it without success.
This was in the last year or so before absolutely everyone had a cell phone—and I certainly didn’t—but fortunately I was near a friend’s apartment and went there to call and wait for AAA. It was a long wait until the call came back that a tow truck operator was on his way, then a longer wait out in the alley before an old-fashioned wheel-lift tow truck appeared in the rearview mirror and eased to a stop ahead of where I’d parked the Cabriolet.
When the mechanic walked up, I told him I had no idea why the car had stopped running. I suppose a mechanic probably assumes that, if you’ve run out of gas, you’ll know it, so his mind did not at first leap to that possibility. He told me to turn the ignition on and pop the hood so that he could start some diagnostic step. Flustered for some reason, I first tried put the key to my own car into the slot, and it promptly became so jammed that he needed to hand me a pair of pliers so I could wrench it back out.
“And I’m the one who’s been drinking and playing cards all night,” he said, laughing, in a rasping, wheezing, startlingly Tom Waits-like voice, before disappearing under the hood.
Tried this, tried that. Finally he stuck his head back into view.
“I think you’re out of gas,” he told me, in a tentative tone that suggested he was beginning to suspect he might be dealing with a stone cold idiot.
Nonsense, I thought. Only an idiot can’t tell whether they’re out of gas or not. I’m not an idiot. Although… how much gas DID I have?
I scanned the instrument panel so that I could tell him he was wrong, that the gas gauge was showing half a tank or something like that.
Then I realized: There was no gas gauge. I could see the speedometer, the tachometer, and, in the lower left of the little window directly behind the steering wheel, a thermometer, but—now that I was looking for it—I could find no gas gauge.
Then my eye fell on Amy’s rock.
Growing up, she had from time to time joined a friend’s family at their vacation home in Maine, and one summer she had kept, as a souvenir, an unusual looking rock, speckled grey and white or, in some lights, almost orange.
This rock now lived on the little ledge of the instrument panel, and the combination of the particular shape of that ledge and the particular shape of the rock and the particular forces of acceleration and inertia that the car’s motion tended to apply had resulted in the rock almost always coming to rest in the lower right corner of the panel—directly in front of the gas gauge, as it turned out.
I snatched it up.
Sure enough, the gauge’s needle was buried below the E.
That was the only time I’ve ever run out of gas. I’m glad to be able to say it wasn’t my fault.