Car Pool
by Scott Teel

Floods are a common phenomenon of nature, mother earth’s way of dealing with an overload of water, oftentimes seasonally bringing much needed life to crop-bearing regions. But the passenger side of my car is not rich with crops. There are some french fries down there, but I’m almost positive they didn’t grow there.

So it seemed a bit odd to me when water started pouring out from under the glove compartment. First it was just a trickle when I turned on the air conditioner, dribbling out from the a/c motor. Not a good place for water to be holing up, but I was pretty sure I knew what had happened. The strongest thunderstorm in memory had torn through two days before, dumping water so hard from the heavens it seemed as if all of the oceans had evaporated just to rain on New York.

It must have come down so hard for so long, I reasoned, that some water had gotten down the vents and into the air conditioning system. This seemed like a logical answer to me, who knows exactly one thing about cars: look both ways before crossing in case one is coming. So all I needed to do was drain the water out of the a/c motor and things would dry out like King Tut. But how to drain it out? I assumed that there was a drain to the underside of the car, since that’s where air conditioning puddles build up, but if it wasn’t coming out from there, it must have gotten in too far for that.

I realized all this Monday night, just before leaving work, and I looked around and found a rubber plug in a largish plastic reservoir next to the air conditioner motor, under the glove compartment. The plug was on the side of the container facing the seat, and I pulled it out and stuck my finger in there.

“Uh-huh,” I said, as if I knew what I was doing. I could feel water up to the first joint of my finger. I left the plug open and turned the air conditioner on. Water spilled out the hole like a faucet onto the floor mat, soaking it through to the rug. “Aha! That should do it,” I said, in the true manner of an idiot who thinks he has solved a problem he has no real knowledge of, all by himself. That was like trusting Paris Hilton to come up with a Grand Unification Theory of the universe. I started the car up and began the drive home.

And it was during this drive that I started to realize what you did in the second paragraph: that I was not as big a handyman as I thought.

Each time I accelerated after a stop, water would gush and splash out of the hole I had opened, as if Shamu was performing under my dashboard. The a/c fan was gurgling water. The floor was becoming saturated. An actual puddle was forming. Common sense said I should close the plug at this point, so I told common sense to get bent and left it open. “There’s a finite amount of water in the world,” I thought, “so it’s got to get empty some time.” But for all I knew, the water was coming from some other dimension that consisted entirely of water and had only one interdimensional hole which drained onto my passenger side floor.

“My plan is to leave the plug open for a few days, and all the water will eventually spill out or evaporate. Then I’ll dry out the rugs one day,” I told Julie as she car-pooled to work with me.

“Do you really think that’s going to work? I think you should take it in and have someone look at it,” she told me. Chicks.

“Nah, it’ll work. Besides, I just got the car back from having the doors repaired and I don’t want to bring it in again. It’ll work.”

“My feet are getting wet,” she said.

By Thursday it was starting to get obvious that the water was going to be around a lot longer than I was. On the way home, Julie said, “Jeez, if you don’t do something soon, this rug is going to start to stink. Why don’t you have one of the engineers at work look at it tomorrow? They know a lot about that stuff.”

“Yeah…I thought about doing that,” I lied, making a mental note to have one of the engineers look at it tomorrow.

Bryan the engineer came out to look at the car after work the next day. He felt the rug and watched as the water sprayed out of the hole. “Hmm,” he said, though his “hmm” was much more informed than my “Uh-huh” from Monday.

“Let me get a five-eighths and take off the air conditioner motor. The water’s in the motor. I’m surprised it’s been working at all.”

He went inside the building. I sat in the car, sweating. A drop of sweat slid off my forehead and fell the floor. Now I was at one with the car: we were both leaking water onto the rug.

Bryan reappeared with a small toolbox and a handful of rags. He spread the rags out onto the floor and lay on his side through the passenger door, soaking his sleeve immediately. “Sorry,” I said. “No problem,” he told me. He unscrewed the motor, trying to help me seem useful by telling me what was happening, as if I’d understand and empathize. “Mmf…what’s wrong with this one? Oh, there’s a clip here, too…is this as far as it comes out? It’s gotta come down more than…I don’t wanna pull it too far in case there’s wires holding it in, you know?” I played along and nodded my head at his murmurings.

After a few minutes of struggling, he got the motor off as much as he could and we looked into the small tube that ran from the motor to the plastic reservoir with the plug in it. Brownish water spilled over the lip of the hole onto the rags. “Wow,” Bryan said, “That is a lot of water.” He couldn’t get the motor down far enough to tip the rest of the water out, so I ran inside and grabbed a huge stack of paper towels from the bathroom.

In the car, I started twisting them into little sticks that would fit into the motor. I handed Bryan the towels as he soaked water from the air conditioner. We made a good team, like a surgeon and his assistant, only the surgeon kept saying, “Sponge…sponge…sponge…”

We stopped when Bryan stuck his finger in as far as he could and it came out dry, like you would test to see if a cake is done with a toothpick. He put the motor back on and I started the car. Julie was standing over us by now. “Did it work?” she asked.

“We’ll find out in a second,” I said turning on the air conditioner. I listened for a tense moment. Just air. Good sign. No dripping. Also good. “You did it!” I told Bryan. “Lunch is on me Monday.”

Bryan went back inside and Julie and I headed home. “Aren’t you glad you had someone look at it?” she asked me. “Yeah.” I said. It was nice in the car, cool air blowing, trees flitting by, the nice quiet gurgling of a nearby stream—

“I felt a drop,” Julie said.

—birds flying overhead, a horse in that field there, the pleasant trickle of the stream getting louder—

“Uh-oh,” Julie said as water drizzled out onto her shoe. I paused at a stop sign and glanced down. There were familiar drops piddling from the a/c motor. I opened the plug and accelerated the car. Julie had moved her feet, luckily, because there was an audible splash, and water gushed from the reservoir like a sumo wrestler had done a belly flop in there.

“Ah, shit,” I whined, slouching as the Goddess of Victory realized she was hanging out with the wrong guy and took off to go find someone who actually wins at something, like that nude guy from the first Survivor show.

I had no other options. A week had passed since the storm and water was still pouring onto my passenger side rug. I had to take it in to see what was wrong.

I went to the dealer the next morning. “It sound like it’s just a clog to me,” Russell, the mechanic said, “Let me bring it in and put it up on the lift.”

I watched through a window as my car was raised over the heads of Russell and his manager. He reached up and pulled something out from under the passenger side. For mechanics who had seen stuff like this for years, they seemed genuinely shocked. They shouted things like, “Woah!” and “Holy Cow!” and “It’s like Niagara Falls!” Russell motioned at me to join them in the garage.

He held out a small, inverted L-shaped piece of rubber, with a round hole on the smaller end and a slot at the bottom. “That’s the drain,” he told me. “Look in there.”

I looked in the hole. It was dark. “What am I looking for?” I asked.

“Oh…I guess he went back in there,” he said.

“Who did?”

“There was a big spider in there, made a web and blocked the water.”

I leaped backwards as if auditioning for Swan Lake. I don’t like spiders.

“I don’t like spiders,” I remarked, trying to keep from twitching.

“Oh,” Russell said, tossing the piece away onto the floor. “Yeah, they’re pretty nasty. One bit me in here on the eye once, my whole eye swelled shut. Looked like someone beat the hell outta me.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I mumbled. I didn’t want to hear that. Spiders are horrible, intelligent creatures out to get me, and this looked like one had come awfully close. This one had tried to drown me. An attempt on my life. How many more would there be? Would the next one be successful?

“It was still alive in there?” I asked him.

“Oh yeah, the web blocks the water off so they get a nice little home. Spiders like it in there because it’s warm and moist, and they can open the web a little when they want to get as much water as they want. Strong webs.”

I had heard of something like this once before, but it involved my father’s barbecue. A spider had built a web in the neck of the propane tank and blocked the gas. My dad had to take it to a propane dealer and have them surgically remove the thing with a wire brush. Awful.

I’ve since read that spider silk is so strong, a pencil-thick strand could stop a 747 in flight. It’s has the potential to be the strongest substance on earth, but it’s been impossible to harvest. Spiders don’t make enough of the stuff for us to do anything much with, the selfish little bastards, but recently, a company put a spider gene into some goats, I swear, and now they can milk the goats and then extract spider silk out of the goat’s milk, which can be harvested easily, and plentifully. So, soon, they’ll be able to make almost anything from the silk, things that need to be extra strong and indestructible, like a cage for Michael Jackson.

“Stuff like that happens all the time,” Russell explained, bringing me back to the present situation. “One time, there was a family came in here, they had gone on vacation and a few days after they got back they started to notice a smell in the car, so they brought it in to see what was up. A baby snake had crawled up in there and died.”

There was a huge puddle of water on the floor. In the week, between the rain water and the humidity, a full gallon had easily been absorbed into the rug, and here was a half-gallon more. Russell picked up the drain.

“I’ll just blow him out of there,” he said, sticking an air jet in the slotted end. I stepped back as he held the piece away and blasted a strong burst of air through the drain, which was pointed at the open front window of the car next to mine. Russell looked at the car. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Well, whatever was in there before, he took off now,” he remarked. “It was definitely a big spider, though, I saw the legs after I took the drain off.”

So it was still out there somewhere. And the bounty was still on my head.

I thanked Russell as he had someone vacuum water out of my car. Driving home, the cool air blew from the vents. But I was still sweating. Because I knew that in the end of the song, the itsy-bitsy spider climbs up the spout again.

© 2005 Scott Teel