Around here, nineteen-eighty-three is the year that counts and that is where the line should go if they ever write a history of this place. This was long before he started, years before they got in, but nineteen-eighty-three matters for everybody. The way it came along and shook up the whole domestic side of the business. Lee Iaccoca taking a risk. The famous picture. His not-so-confident smile as he stands there at the Auto Show in front of the first generation. The paint they used to have. That in-between shade of maroon and a strip of Wood-grain paneling running down the side. It was the last of the real game-changers and they decided to build it here. Somebody’s arm got twisted on that, a face was pushed up against a wall. He knows that, thinks about it sometimes, the question of origins. Why it is where it is. The first one, the one in the picture, it’s in the Smithsonian now.
It goes by different names. The Magic Wagon or the Grand Caravan. The Voyager or the Town and Country. Chrysler, Dodge and Plymouth. The customer picks the model and the trim package. A hood ornament that holds the eye. Chrysler looks like a star that lives inside your house. His daughter used to say that. His son drew pictures of the long-horned sheep. A Dodge is Ram Tough and always red. Plymouth is more mysterious: a silver ship with wind in its sails. What is that supposed to be exactly? The Mayflower, he thinks. The Mayflower landing on Plymouth Rock. A car for pilgrims. Word associations that don’t quite hook up. None of it matters. The company will sell it any way you like, but it is always the same underneath. You do not fool around with a machine that works.
He has seen enough of them to know that there is no secret behind the Grand Caravan. It is exactly what it appears to be, an object designed to fulfill a basic need for a reasonable price. In the beginning, the sliding door was its signature. The way the whole side of the car could detach and roll along its track to give you such a large opening, even with only six inches of clearance on the side. A big door that wouldn’t bang against all the other doors in the mall parking lot and enough room inside for seven people and all their stuff. Those were the original brute facts, the Caravan’s simplest truths. Parents and kids piling in and out all the time – the soccer mom, yes, the soccer mom – but a seat for the visitor, too. A place for grandma when she has to be picked up at the airport. The driver and passenger up front and two benches in the back. You click down and the rows pop out. No points for style, but versatility has always mattered for this segment of the market. You take out the seats and there’s enough space back there for a 4x8 sheet of plywood. A plan for all the standard dimensions. He knows nothing fits together like that by accident.
People in the city feel the car in different ways. The Caravan goes past the men and women who work in the plant, beyond Chrysler and the CAW and Local 444. It moves over his family to reach everybody else. The guy who sells carpeting or the orthopaedic surgeon or the lady who teaches grade two French immersion. They all know. They can tell when things are going well and when they aren’t. They understand the way it sits on every bottom line.
It was the number-one selling minivan all by itself for more than a decade. The number-one selling vehicle for the whole country. Took years before the Asians caught up. Millions rolling away from this spot. They build it on the S-platform, then the AS, then the NS, then the RS and the RT. It started with a piece of crap 2.2 litre in-line 4 with barely 85 hp and that weakling would whine and complain and shake like you were re-entering the earth’s atmosphere every time you pulled into the passing lane. Now you go for the optional 4-litre turbo-charged V6 with 251 hp and that monster can pull your whole crew and all their bikes and your little hardtop camper up a mountain in the middle of July. He liked to watch the temperature gauge whenever he took theirs out on a long trip. The way it never budged and always stayed straight up, right in the middle, balanced between the red hot H and the cool blue C. He used to think that was all a person could ask from a car. An engine that was ready when you called.
The way it comes together is something to see and he has never taken it for granted. The interconnecting lines of yellow and orange conveyors, bodies and chasses moving separately before they mate. The bright white lights in paint, the orange robots swivelling in for their welds. The flash and the flash again. He used to think you could count the individual sparks and always arrive at the same number.
People outside think people inside must hate the machines, but it’s not like that. The Local has to fight for every job, but precision is precision and a person working on something likes to see it done right. When he watched those hydraulic shoulders rotating, lifting 1,300 pounds and holding it perfectly still, always within the same range of a hundredth of a millimetre, he felt something, but it wasn’t hatred; it was more like confusion or a stab of deep-down uncertainty. It gets confusing after awhile if you have to watch a robot work and you watch it and you watch it again. The repeating sequences start to blur and it seems like time stops and there is only this one task left in the whole world, this one job, separated from everything else, and it has to be done again and again, forever. The robot sees a hundred divisions in a millimetre and it always hits the same spot. The same weld. The same number of sparks.
A standard dash assembly comes as a single unit. It moves on a hydraulic but has to be guided into its spot by hand. You need to feel it in. An engineer told him once that they were decades away from creating a robot that could mimic the instinctive muscular adjustments of the human wrist. The engineer swivelled his hand around a couple of times. Think about this thing, he said. The wrist. You can’t imagine the number of interrelated calculations. The way it pulls together force and angle and time, the way it cross-references. Makes it look easy, but never the same way twice. Can’t replicate intuition. A bolt. An infinity of bolts tightened just enough. Not too far and not not far enough. A car is held together, fastened more than assembled.
They think of everything. The big stuff and small stuff, it all matters. Subtle cosmetic redesigns for the interior and complete retoolings. Power windows and locks. ABS. The new transmission. The second sliding door. Keyless entry and remote starter. The new suspension. Standard air bags – multistage and curtain – even in the base model. Five-star safety. Side impact beams. Always tweaking the engines to find a little extra. Before the gas got crazy, 20 miles a gallon in the city wasn’t so bad. Stow n’ Go seats rolling straight into the floor. Swivel n’ Go seats spinning around. A built-in card table. Two different DVD players for the kids showing two different movies. Everybody gets their own headphones. Nine cupholders. Chrome accents. They move the shifter off the column. They fix the clock. Put in the MP3. The GPS. Every small change in the finished product is a bigger change on his end.
He liked to ride along sometimes as the next one rolled off the line and into the world. He liked to be the first person to read the cooing odometers with all their 0’s in a line. A fully loaded special edition Town and Country with the windows that go down in the back to let the fresh air get in. One minute in there and you know. They flick the wipers, honk the horn two times and flash the brights just before it leaves. When it passes the last inspection, it gets the all clear and begins its life. He liked moving inside his work and feeling it moving around him. He liked understanding the interconnected parts and being the first to look through a clean windshield and see everything from this point of view. You cannot beat a brand new minivan. Ask around. Ask anybody. A person appreciates being up high when they’re driving.
There are gaps built into the process. A couple of extra seconds before this one goes and the next one comes. Sometimes, in that space where nothing is supposed to happen, he used to take off his glove and press his palm flat against the glass or the body. Then he’d pull away quickly and watch the print flash up clear and detailed. A perfect outline of his hand visible for one second against the new paint or the dark tint, even the individual grooves of his thumb coming through. Whenever he did that, he used to imagine a detective. A smart person, somewhere far away, working with a magnifying glass and a
light and a fine brush, dusting for clues. He used to imagine a person who could trace this car all the way back to him, back to this spot and this moment. A detective who could follow the chain of material evidence and find all the linkages and establish an incontrovertible proof.
The pay and the benefits are all that anybody else ever talks about and most of what they say is wrong. Massive inflation in all their numbers. Anti-union spin. He has done the real comparisons, added everything up and come out slightly ahead. To make the real money, you need to understand the complexity of the system and you need to think about taxes and shifting brackets. You need to figure out how to live with the overtime and how to get in there for the stat holidays. When the kids were small, he used to scramble for the possibility of a double-time shift or for the perfect conditions that came around twice a year on Good Friday or Christmas.
It is more difficult to calculate the value of the benefits. The kids’ braces and top-of-the-line Green Shield for their prescriptions. The education fund. He marched for those things. They walked arm in arm carrying the banner. Campaigned for the need to make progress, to look out for working families, to stand up against the big guys. Ken and Buzz and Bob making their speeches. A union puts you inside of something larger. Tickets for Tiger games and a rented bus. Tickets to the Wings and the Spitfires. Everyone sitting in the same section. All the good money his daughter picked up working TPT – Temporary Part-Time – in the summer. The card tournaments. The Christmas party and the Christmas bonus. The employee incentive plan. It was impossible to say no to the deal they gave you if you just bought what you built. Straight out of Henry Ford and the original Model T. Make enough to drive what you make. Four in a row. They went through four different vans before the last one. Hundreds of thousands of miles piled up. The kids grew up riding back there. It was their sole means of transportation.
He remembers turning around and telling the boy to shut up. The only clear part left. Hand on the wheel, craning his neck around. Looking at him closely. Wife sleeping in the passenger seat. Daughter already away at school.
His son. The teenage slacker called up from central casting. Lying down sideways in the back seat, high-tops up against the window. Head on the armrest. Game Boy. Ear phones. Distortion coming out of his head. Tight jeans. Black hooded sweatshirt. Hair in his eyes.
What a kid can do to a parent. A wave of disappointment washing through him as he drives. Bitterness, like the taste of ammonia, coursing through his mouth and his entire bloodstream. He feels it in his feet. It has been nothing but continuous argument for months. The boy talking even though he can’t hear his own voice through the music. How it all sucks. His parents are hypocrites. They say one thing and do another. Smart teenager with bad grades and stupid friends. Comes home one day with an idiot tattoo on his shoulder blade. A tide of complaint that will not stop. How he doesn‘t want to be here. How this is stupid. How he’s going to run away. How he’s going to move out the minute, the minute, he turns sixteen. You think you own me. You don’t own me.
They cannot make him understand why it is important for a family to do the same thing every year. Why you have to hold on to your little traditions. It’s only one day, his mother says. A trip to the county in the fall. Follow the Number Three and go to Ruthven. Joe Colosanti’s Tropical Garden and then Jack Miner’s Bird Sanctuary. Plants and birds. Muck and Cluck, his wife used to call it. Maybe this weekend we’ll go for the muck and cluck. What do you say?
At Colosanti’s Tropical Garden they will sell you a miniature cactus in its own clay pot for two dollars. Get the one with the purple head. It can live on nothing. Push your finger against the needles for fun. There is no threat from a Colosanti’s cactus. It is what the kids will remember. The greenhouses. The turtles and a little alligator swimming in its pond. The humidity and the baby animals wandering around, goats and chickens. They will remember that you have to keep your palm flat when you feed an apple to a pony.
Then on to Miner’s. Every year the same thing. Canadian Geese by the thousands returning to Crazy Jack. A hundred years of banding and tracing routes and charting schedules. A warmer fall means a later departure. It doesn’t take long. You drive by and it’s over. You hear and you smell. The sound and the stink: incessant honking and acres of bird shit. That is what you get from a visit to Jack Miner’s.
But there is something else, too. Something a person has to see at least once. The way an entire field can take off at the same time. The land deciding to become the sky. Everything lifting at once. Tight formations and instinctive patterns. That V writing itself on the clouds. You look at that and you don’t forget you saw it. It can make you believe in order if you are the kind of person who wants to believe in order.
He remembers turning around and telling the boy to shut up. Last words. I’m getting so sick of your bullshit. Watch, he said. You watch. A couple of years down the road, you’ll be thanking us for this.
Turning back, he catches a glimpse of his face as it passes the rear-view. The sneer. An angry man caught in a bit of glass. The red glint of the brake light comes through first, starts in the corner of his eye, then straight ahead. The back end of the flatbed. Too close. Already there. No chance to slow down. He tries to swerve, but they hit full tilt. Then rolling. They are strapped inside a rolling metal object. The V6 with 251 hp – a fire burning in the middle of a metal cube – the new fuel injection system. The driver’s side airbag explodes out of the steering wheel, knocking him back against his chair. The back of his head slams into the rest. Bad twist in his neck. Sharp pain and an instant numbness in his legs. Powder burning in his eyes. His vision blurs. It happens fast but he sees it slowly before the total black comes down. Two seconds worth of action is more than enough to fill in all the rest of the time that follows.
The airbags on her side do not deploy. The bags on the whole right-hand side of the vehicle do not deploy. They do not do what they are meant to do. Instead, they sit patient and useless, like a pile of neatly folded white towels in a linen closet.
Almost no visible change in her body. She is sleeping before her head goes against the window frame. Too hard. He knows it. The unnatural angle of her neck. The end of his wife. The way her ear moves too far to the side and her chin hangs too far down. One beat later, something flying past, about the size of a black hockey bag, thrown through the side window. He watches it move, following a smooth trajectory, an arc in the sky. That movement is the last thing he sees. It can’t be processed. Elegant, he thinks, or something like that. The curve in the air.
Two days later he wakes up in the hospital. Can’t feel his legs. His daughter holding his hand. She looks thin. His first thought. You need to eat more. Take better care of yourself.
There are six airbags in the Dodge Grand Caravan. Standard equipment, even on the base model. Safety sells. Front, side, and rear impact zones. They were the first to make it to market with protection like that. Went from design to production in an eighteen-month turnaround and caught everyone by surprise. Brought a little momentum back into sales. The car met or exceeded all standards set by the National Highway Transportation Safety Association. New sensors woven into the bumpers and the panels and the doors. Scored above average on all the tests. You watch the crash test videos and see what you see. Those are the standard factory models.
In the videos it all works. Everything and every time. The bumper touches the test obstacle – the same immovable cube for all vehicles – and the bags deploy. Long before structural damage. Long before the crumpling of the frame dissipates and redirects the force of the impact. The dummies inside get tossed around. Sturdy back coils of spring in their necks wobble back and forth. Their fibreglass arms and legs extend, but you can tell they are going to be okay. If they were alive they would be okay. Everything behaves as it should. The touch on the bumper, the explosion of compressed gas inside the cabin. No hard surfaces left. No space at all. Nowhere to move. The vehicle becomes a solid mass. A wrecked exterior with a sa
fe place at its core.
An electrical short, he figures. One circuit. A single wire that did not carry current the way it is supposed to. Failure of design or manufacture or installation. Everything is possible. Corrosion, perhaps. Not enough consideration made for the deteriorating affects of road salt. The back of the flatbed too high. Again, not standard. Higher than the test cube. The boy’s unbuckled seatbelt. Nothing anybody could have done about that. A flaw outside of everything else. Mentioned in all the reports. Passengers are rarely thrown from a moving vehicle when seatbelts are used properly. Cops and their cameras. Images of everything. Pictures you shouldn’t be allowed to take. A stranger’s finger pushing down on a button. Numbered evidence. Accident recreation teams. Investigations. Measuring tapes. Insurance people with their duplicate sets of forms. The length of skid marks. Indexed to tread wear. The angle of impact. Angle the car left the road. They work backwards with their calculations. Crumple zones. Vectors. Radius of broken glass. Distance from the car to the body in the field.
Twelve weeks in the hospital. Then twenty weeks of physio after that. The benefits covered everything and an officer at the Local made sure the paperwork moved along and the claims were filed on time. He had to learn to walk again, how to wiggle his toes, make his bowels churn on command. He lost almost half his weight and his hands callused against the railings. Messages sent from his brain and only slowly received. Twitching toes, half-bent knees, hips that took months before they remembered how to work right.
There was a moment to choose. An opening that wouldn’t last long they said. Everybody talking about the same things. The Big Three going down. For real this time. Bankrupt and bailed out. Negotiations and concessions. The new deal and its different terms. Never going to be like it was before. Peak oil. Calculations that depended on the shifting value of a Mexican peso. Rising interest rates. The Environmental Protection Agency. Californian emission targets. Household debt levels. Burning wells in the Middle East. Security for a pipeline in Nigeria. Drilling in the arctic. What the average person in India does in their spare time. They said it all mattered.
Light Lifting Page 18