BATTERY LOW

To give you an idea of my general good fortune when it came to mechanical failures, I would like to describe the greatest misfortune I experienced.

Zagreb is now the capital of Croatia, and Belgrade the capital of Serbia. In the seventies, they were the two largest cities of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A two-lane highway at that time connected the two cities. It carried a large percentage of the country’s heavy vehicles, which plied relentlessly back and forth along its monotonous and treacherous 250-mile length.

As the main route of the countries commerce it was a frenzied artery of passion and impatience, and overtaking a gamble with life itself, in which a frugal width of lane and just a hint of shoulder served only to lessen the odds of getting by before an oncoming weighty juggernaut of truck and tandem trailers with headlights flashing would be destined to make a considerable mess of your latest paint job. Hasta la vista.

There was between Calais and the Kyber Pass no stretch of road more demanding of vigilance in my estimation, and none so littered with the mangled wreckage of human miscalculation and negligence. The flat, tedious landscape offered no relief from the soporific effects of driving on a road that often stretched ahead with exasperating undeviating persistence.

However, on this particular day, none of the dramatic circumstances described could prevail and exert their perfidious influence. I had a bigger problem. A strange, acrid smell, which I tried my best to ignore, persisted for many miles, at times intense and at others hardly noticeable. Mile after mile, my preoccupation with the intransigent stink increased as I persistently and inconspicuously sniffed the air to confirm or not confirm its presence. The dread that was slowly overcoming me would have prevented a rational elimination of possible causes even if my profound ignorance of the fundamentals of vehicular motion had not. In other words, I had no idea what was causing the smell. I hoped and longed fervently for it to disappear and avoided looking at the passengers for fear that they might, with bewildered expressions, be doing bloodhound or hamster imitations.

By the time we pulled into a gas station just before Belgrade and came to a halt, fumes were visible rising from under the hood of the Transit. I was a nervous wreck, feigning normalcy with staring, unblinking eyes and the tortured movements of a confounded imbecile. I could not avoid the concerned furtive looks of some of the passengers who were beginning to connect the small wispy clouds with the strange smell that had been with us for so long and was now indubitably confirmed. There was no escape; I had to lift the hood. Underneath, the bubbling, fomenting battery was erupting, making its demise publicly known through the cloudy profusion of its intolerable, acrid fumes.

“It’s the battery”, I calmly told everybody and promptly slammed the hood shut on the offending object. As the meltdown had not quite occurred, I reckoned there might be a few more miles before either the vehicle came to a halt or we succumbed to the fumes. With bated breath, I found the designated campsite, offloaded the passengers, and went in search of a new battery. Assuming that wherever there were vehicles on the road, there would be many not far away, even in a Communist country, just waiting to have their terminals connected and start pumping out their wattage. Not so.

It took me an hour to eventually find a store that had what I needed, or so I had been told after making many inquiries. It was true, but whereas batteries usually come assembled, these did not, and the acid, usually safely contained inside, was waiting outside in separate containers. Besides that, the battery case did not exactly resemble the batteries I was used to seeing. It was a box of substantially inferior quality, which hardly looked up to the task of containing the unpleasant liquid. Why such a modest inconvenience, easily rectified, caused me so much revulsion and contorted my face into a horrid mask of disapproval had to do with that obnoxious liquid which I remembered from my schooldays and the abhorrent imposition of practical chemistry lessons.

Well, the job had to be done, and by me. So, under conditions far removed from the rigidly controlled procedures of a nuclear reactor plant, the liquid found its way into the communist box, but magically and mysteriously not every drop of it, as evinced by the small holes that began appearing in my clothing and even weeks later were reported appearing in the clothing of some of the passengers. Admittedly, they were not large holes, but holes nonetheless, and having no other conceivable cause than the battery acid. Nobody complained, however, and whether anybody connected the multitude of small holes in their garments with any notion of incompetency, I was spared the doubtful pleasure of finding out. In fact, everybody found the creeping, intractable, holy epidemic quite humorous.