Saturday, 4 October 1986: An Automotive Crisis with No Good Options

Gaborone, Botswana, 18 May 1987

I was up at dawn for a short hike along a dry river bed in the Ben Lavin Nature Reserve.  It was pleasant but I didn’t spot any wildlife.  Afterword, I broke camp and drove a few kilometers to Louis Trichardt where I bought a sandwich from a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop (hard to believe that the Colonel is in such a remote corner of South Africa).  

The route of my early morning walk in the Ben Lavin Nature Reserve.

 

I took the sandwich back to my car which was parked in a large lot.  While I was eating, a black fellow approached my car and politely asked if I would move.  This was a lot for black buses and I was in his spot.  The lot was practically empty, and there were no signs indicating assigned parking, “Why don’t you just park next to me?” I said incredulously.  “I’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”  He gave me a dumb smile indicating that he didn’t understand my reasoning.  I got pissed off:  “Look, I’m not from your country.  If you don’t want me here, I’ll leave.”  I was trying to act offended to make him feel guilty for being so nit-picky.  I should have known by now that such a ploy is a waste of time with Africans.  He just kept standing there smiling and probably didn’t understand what I was saying anyway.  So I started up the VW, peeled out and stopped a few hundred feet further down the lot to finish the sandwich.    

It was the third time in four days I’d lost my cool with a black because of what I considered stupidity.  Deep down, I was embarrassed and mad at myself for doing it.  At the same time, I was reminded that South African whites had to put up these kinds of interracial misunderstandings throughout their lives.  Though I hate to admit it, I felt a bit of empathy for the whites.  I’ve since learned to let go of my ego and go with the flow when interacting with Africans.  Having done so, I find them really easy to deal with.  However, their perceptions never cease to confound me. 

I left Louis Trichardt around 11:00, giving me plenty of time to reach the South Africa – Botswana border posts at Martin’s Drift before the 4:00 PM closing time. The highway wound over the scenic Soutpansberg Mountains and through the H.F. Verwoerd Tunnels.  Considering the tunnels were named for Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called “Architect of Apartheid”, I decided they should have had separate traffic lanes for white and non-white drivers.  80 kilometers south of the Zimbabwe border, I turned west to make my way back through the bushveld to Botswana.  After more than 100 monotonous kilometers, I was rolling along a virtually deserted and nearly straight road with visibility for quite a distance ahead.   “Damn sure there are no cops around,” I thought.  “Let’s see what this baby will do.”  I pushed the accelerator pedal into the floorboard and got her up to 145 (90 mph) before slowing back down to about 110.  The temperature gauge was within the normal range which seemed to indicate that my couple minutes of teenage fun had not caused the engine to overheat.  She was running fine and I pressed on toward the border.

View north toward the Soutpansberg Mountains north of the town of Louis Trichardt.

 

A few minutes later, I stopped on a hilltop to take a photo of the dry, empty landscape.  I shut off the engine leaving the transmission in gear.  When I got back in and started the car, ooooooooooo shit!  There was a horrible metallic clicking noise.  My brain flashed back 13 years to that same wretched death rattle I’d heard along I-95 between Providence and Boston when I blew the engine on Gretchen, my 1960 VW bus.  My body stiffened, I started to sweat, and my mind drifted off into Panicville.  Was I totally fucked?  It was as if I my mind was hovering above my body which felt like it was numb and falling apart.  I went into autopilot mode…..

The hapless American got out of the VW, opened the hood, and checked the oil.  The level was down at bit but well within the acceptable range.  The fan worked and the belts were fine.  The engine didn’t seem overheated.  He was no mechanic but it was obvious that the noise was coming from inside the engine block.  He shut it off, then restarted it.  This time it was hard to turn it over, but it finally got going and the noise was every bit as bad as before.  He drove the Passat forward about 100 meters.  The noise seemed to go away. 

What to do?  The American was in the middle of fucking nowhere.  The traffic volume was perhaps one vehicle per half hour.  He probably could have eventually hitched a ride to somewhere, but it was now 1:30 in a rural South African Saturday afternoon.  The chances of getting a tow truck or a mechanic out to this isolated location seemed very remote indeed.  And where could the car be towed anyway?  Louis Trichardt?  Pietersburg?  That would have cost several hundred rand.  He wasn’t very crazy about leaving the car out in the middle of the bushveld for a couple days only to come back and find it stripped.  There had been nothing resembling a garage in Alldays, about 25 km back to the east.  According to the map, he had just passed through Gregory, but it was so small that he hadn’t even taken notice of it.  His situation seemed hopeless.

The only thing happening in the village of Alldays was a farmer herding his critters.

The engine was undoubtedly buggered anyway, so he decided to drive it a little and see what happened.  The map showed a couple more villages up ahead.  The car was losing some power going uphill but it maintained a fairly constant 80 kph otherwise, noise and all.  At times, the noise almost seemed to go away and it didn’t seem to be getting any worse.  There wasn’t even a petrol station in Maastoom, the first village, so he continued another 40 km to Swartwater.  By the time he got there, the engine seem to have little power left and the noise had gotten worse.

The dejected American found a petrol station in Swartwater (closed, of course), but the black people in a house next door located a mechanic for him.  The African fellow listened to the engine and said, “Big job!”  He said something about sending to Potgietersrus (170 km to the southeast) on Monday for parts.  But how did he know what parts to get without taking the engine apart?  He was hard to understand, so the American decided to see if he could locate a mechanic who spoke better English.

There was a Dutch Reformed Church down the road.  He knocked on the door of the parsonage next door and was greeted by a kindly old Afrikaner dominee (minister) and his wife who invited him in and phoned the local mechanic.  Since the mechanic was on a farm some distance away, he wouldn’t be able to get there for a while.  So the elderly couple gave the American tea and friendly conversation followed by a rugby match on the tube.  All this kindness to an American a couple days after the U.S. Senate had overridden President Reagan’s veto of the South African sanctions bill.  The American found it hard not to like these people and feel a helluva lot of gratitude in this dark hour.

An hour and a half later, Johan, the mechanic and owner of the closed petrol station, and his friend Chris, a big brute of a guy, showed up to look at the Passat.  They ran a compression test on the cylinders.  One was OK – about 170.  Two were at about 130 and the fourth was below 100.  Then they took out the spark plugs.  Three of them were melted at the bottom.  “Ach, man.  Thesh bluddy engine ish stuffed,” Johan said in broken English.  There was still oil in the engine (the “low oil” light had never come on).  Johan and Chris figured that at some point in the past, the engine had become badly overheated.  The American remembered that the seller had mentioned having problems with the fan in the past but that had been fixed.  They couldn’t assess the extent of the damage without taking the engine apart, but were certain it would have to be rebuilt.  “What about swapping it for another engine?” the American asked.  They thought that would be better but either way he was looking at 1500 rand (US$600) or more.  That didn’t seem out of line to the American as he had spent $800 getting his VW bus engine rebuilt in Boston in 1974.  Finding another mechanic in the area for a second opinion seemed rather out of the question.  Whatever, the American decided to do, Johan figured it would be Wednesday at the earliest before he could locate parts or an engine to get the bitch running again.  He didn’t push the American into making a decision.  He and Chris seemed to feel sorry for the American and offered to put him up for the night.

The American felt his dead car problems were compounded by the current political situation.  Being stranded in the platteland (boonies) among rural Boers the day after the U.S. had officially declared economic war on South Africa felt like being a Yankee in Alabama in 1861 on the day after Fort Sumter.  Chris kept reminding the American how they could have just left him to fend for himself.  “But we are going to help you.  We want you to see that South Africans are good people.”  And of course, the American had to politely listen to the usual lecture about how the rest of the world picked on South Africa and didn’t understand them.

Johan and Chris took the American to another friend’s place where several young Afrikaner couples (mid-20s to mid-30s) and their kids had gathered for a Saturday night braai (barbeque).  The farmhouse was in the middle of absolute nowhere:  about 15 km south of Swartwater, which is located somewhere near the far edge of the earth.  The power came from gasoline generators.  The interior of the house was very basic – cement floors, painted cinder block walls, and simple furnishings.  Still, they had a TV, stereo, deep freezer, etc.

Johan, Chris, Billy (who owned the place), and two other guys whose names the American later forgot discussed the American’s options over drinks.  Johan said he could store the car in his garage for R50 per month for up to three months while the American decided what to do with it.  Another guy offered to put the VW on the back of his big farm truck and drive it back to Gaborone.  But when they figured out a fair price for the trip (about 350 km), the idea seemed ridiculous.  Leaving the car in Swartwater and getting back there sometime in the future seemed like a gigantic, logistical pain the arse.  The American didn’t want to sit in Swartwater for a week and miss work while waiting for an engine.  And spending nearly as much on an engine repair or replacement as he had paid for the car was a dumb idea.  He had done that with the VW bus engine 12 years ago and then kept on shelling out more dollars on other repairs for the next six months before getting some smarts and selling the lemon. 

“Look, the car has practically new tires and much of the rest of it is very sound,” the American said to Johan.  “It’s got to be worth something as is.”

“If it were a good car like a Toyota or a Ford, it would be worth R500.  But I wouldn’t give over R300 for a fucking VW,” he replied. 

“I’ll think about that,” the American replied. 

A bonfire was built and everyone sat around it drinking scotch and watching steaks, chops and kudu wors (sausage) sizzle.  The locals spoke Afrikaans to each other, occasionally taking in English with the American who played with the kids and practiced his Afrikaans with them (Wat is u naam? – What is your name?)

After a delicious dinner, the couples danced to Afrikaner music on a stereo tape player and the guys danced with each other’s wives.  It was probably the closest anyone gets to hanky-panky or swinging out in the bushvelt, but you never know.  Billy insisted that the American dance with his pretty blonde wife.  He complied but after five months of no physical contact with women, he had to be careful where he put his hands on this youthful beauty.  His parting comment for the evening:  “The biggest problem I have with South Africa is that all the pretty women are married.”