Afew years ago my car started hyperventilating on the highway. It was the damnedest thing. The car slowed to 20 mph, the engine huffing and bucking. I pulled over, put on the flashers, called AAA, and sat in the cold dark, waiting for rescue. The truck arrived in 15 minutes, dragged my vehicle on the bed, and off we rumbled to the all-night garage. En route, the driver explained what had happened: probably had an emissions sensor fail, and the car went into “limp home” mode. I did not know that my car was programmed to behave like a soldier wounded at Waterloo who gives up on Napoleon’s glorious return and fashions a crutch from a stick and heads back to his village where his wife and child are waiting. The things you learn.
The driver was listening to a classic-country station, and a Johnny Cash song came on. I said, “Turn it up,” and we both enjoyed the tale of the assembly-line worker who smuggled an entire automobile out of the factory one piece at a time. We got to talking about Cash and gas stations and garages, and since my dad ran a gas station, I could say a few things that weren’t entirely stupid. The tow-truck driver was Hmong, by the way, second-generation, which made this all the more American and Minnesotan.
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