Get out before she blows!

I'm going to take a winding trail to get to the heart of this story.  It starts for me with the fact that my Dad often had an old car sitting around that was there as far as us kids were concerned to drive through the two track in the woods behind the house.  Usually the trick was getting it started.  My first rememberence was my great aunt Nell's early sixties Renault Dolphine- it was a little bug of a car with a rear engine that was supposed to be Renualt's answer to the Volkswagon Beetle.  The brakes had gone out on it and so Dad had it at the house to fix them, but I remember hearing him tell people that the car had a full splash pan under it and all the bolts were metric and he wasn't about to tackle that project.  So us kids started driving it though the woods, driving a car without brakes thought the woods- what could possibly go wrong?  Actually nothing ever went wrong, we knew it didn't have brakes and drove accordingly.  My older sisters taught me how to drive it since it was the first stick shift car I ever drove.  It stayed around for a year or so as I remember, then it must have moved over to the junkyard next door.  The next car I remember was  a year or so before I got my drivers license, someone gave my dad an old rusted out mid 50's Ponitac which was an old clunker that was too far gone to fix.  But it ran- if you jump started the battery and poured a little gas into the carburetor before you started it.  That car would roar to life once started and it was a very satisfying sound to a young man's ears.  The exhaust had almost completely rusted away and a V-8 engine with no exhaust is a deafening sound.  I loved the car, but it did have it faults, first of all if you were careless with giving it a shot of gas in the carb it would sometimes shot a flame out of the carburetor like a flamethrower so you never knew if you might catch the car on fire or get a fun ride.  The second problem was the floor boards were totally rusted out and the front bench seat would flip over backwards when you stepped on the gas so you had to hold onto the steering wheel to keep you upright while you drove.  A minor inconvenience for a teenage thrill seeker.  It was pretty fun to drive and I figured out how to make donuts at the turnaround at the end of the two track, the roar of the engine and throwing dirt from the tires while turning around made the trouble of getting it started worthwhile.  Around that time my best friend Tim decided to rebuild the engine in the old Nash station wagon his dad gave him.  Tim espoused to be a seasoned mechanic at the ripe old age of 14 and proceeded to pull the engine out of the car and install new rings and bearings with my dads help.  Somewhere along the way a bolt must not have been tightened properly and when the rebuilt engine was started it had an ominous knocking noise that clearly said something was wrong.  Well my dad laughed and blamed it on Tim (which was probably true) and the car joined my Ponitiac on the trail.  This was all for the good since now Tim and I could race each other through the woods.  It was great fun until one day when Tim slid into a tree and smashed up the front headlight and grille,  After that Tim's claim that he was going to go back into the engine and fix the knocking sound and have the car road ready by the time he got his license quietly went away and the car ended up next door at the junkyard with the rest of the junkers.

Fast forward to around 1989 when we had recently moved to Muskegon from Terre Haute.  Your mom decided Ben needed his best friends Jason and Shawn to visit for a week the summer after we had moved here.  Of course Steve joined in also for a week of camping, hiking, biking, and Michigan's Adventure type activities.  And of course somehow I was volunteered to take the week off work to make this all happen.  It was actually a lot of fun but also the hardest working vacation I probably ever went on.  Feeding and supervising 4 busy boys was a full time job.  I think most of the meals were cooked over an open fire at the campsite at Pioneer park and clean up lasted almost until the next meal.  At that time my dad had an old 70's Buick that he let Ben and Steve drive though the woods,  It was a huge four door land yacht and not in too bad of shape.   So of course all the boys had to take the car for a spin through the woods.  We warned Ben to drive slowly and carefully which was probably just a waste of breath at that point.  We were standing in the yard at Grandpa and Grandma Barnharts waiting for the car to come back from their ride when all of a sudden we heard a tremendous crash sound from the woods.  Sandy and I both raced out to see all of them out of the car which had plowed into a tree and the front fender was crushed into the wheel so the car couldn't move.  Ben's story was he was driving carefully and somehow got distracted or something and hit the tree.  When it happened Jason shouted "get out before she blows!" and I think they all jumped out the windows at that point.  I was really disgusted and took an axe to the fender and chopped it away from the tire so it could at least be driven again.  "Get out before she blows" became a favorite saying in the Barnhart clan after that whenever something crashed or when wrong.  Which was fairly often.