the Walnut Diary

Remember the opening scene from the Coen Brothers’ movie? A beige 1987 Olds Cutlas appears through a whiteout with what appears to be another identical car reared up behind it. Turns out the clone rides on a U-Haul car dolly, and the camera reveals William H. Macy grimly fighting his way through a prairie storm to deliver it to a pair of hit men. It’s the stuff of legend for Coen buffs, if not for car lovers.

This morning I had scheduled myself to deliver Mom’s Scion to the Kingston Toyota dealership, so there I was on Hwy 15 amid the blowing salt dust as the sun came up, locked in a Hollywood fantasy. Couldn’t I have done better than William H. Macy? I squinted through Ruby’s frosted windshield and waited for my vision to clear.

Loading the Scion had proven quite easy. Though the dolly came without rental agreement or instructions, its operation seemed straightforward and my son Charlie was there to supervise. The only confusing part came when I tried to attach the safety chains which hold the car to the dolly. I couldn’t find any frame under a Scion onto which to hook anything.

A dozen or so U-Tube videos during the evening and early morning led me slowly to the realization that 1) the chains are essential; 2) they don’t have to be tight; and 3) just running each over its lower control arm and hooking back to itself will be fine. I finished tying them in place at 7:15, just before departure.

Some of those videos had flat-out scared me. Half of them portrayed accidents in waiting, so this one time I decided not to cut any corners.

Generally I am loathe to leave Ruby out of doors on a cold night lest her engine frost up and her lubrication fail. But the car and dolly were already attached, so the garage was out of the question, even during an Arctic clipper.

Ruby lit up at first touch, regardless of the extreme cold, but then took her sweet time at warming up. Nonetheless we descended the driveway, a trim towing package, and turned onto #15 to face the rising sun.

On the highway with a two-ton load the Cayenne’s V8 certainly does not lack power. Cruising at just under 2000 rpm in 6th gear, Ruby occasionally downshifted to 4th for steep hills, but the whole thing went smoothly. I was struck by how quiet and comfortable the towing experience was — nothing like the tooth-grinding battle the same load puts my Tacoma through. Yes, I soon had the cruise control engaged at 93 km.

After fifteen minutes I stopped for fuel, tightened the straps, and had largely recovered from the frostbite of that experience by the time we turned onto the 401. Ruby’s speed crept up to 110 km/hr without any sign of instability in the load or the tow vehicle.

We breezed through empty west-end intersections in record time. Chuckling at how clever I had been to make this run early on a Sunday morning to avoid the Christmas traffic, I found my entry blocked by security gates at every entrance to the Kingston Toyota lot.

OOOOPS! Hadn’t thought of that.

Surely the answering machine will have someone on call to open up. Ten minutes of phone tag during which I spoke to no human led me to realize that I had outwitted myself this time.

Across the street lay an almost-empty parking lot for a drugstore. We pulled in out of the growing traffic to unload. The chains came off the Scion’s control arms with a shake. Tire strap webbing was a little stiff in places, but the ratchet mechanisms worked as promised, with just a bit of brute force. By now the idling Scion was making progress on its windshield, so I lowered the ramps and prepared to back off the dolly.

Nothing happened but whining tires. Mom’s car was stuck on the dolly.

With visions of last night’s videos (jeep and mini-van belly-hung over twisted car dollies), we rocked ahead an inch, then reversed. More whirring of tires on steel. The Scion was without usable traction on small squares of slick metal between the thick angle irons fore and aft designed to hold the car in place. I left the idling car in neutral, set the parking brake (on the rear wheels), fired up Ruby and shot forward. On the third try, it worked. I looked back to see the bemused Scion sitting on all fours, with its right front wheel tentatively pressing down on a trailing tire strap, for security, I guess.

The drug store staff accommodated my request to park my charge overnight for the mechanics to collect, so I sealed up the envelope with a key and a hypochondriac’s list of ailments for diagnosis and repair as well as the air bag replacement, wrote the car’s number and location on the front, and marched it across to the service department. Every dealership has a hole in a door for car keys.

As I walked around the gate I didn’t notice. After I had dumped the key, on the return trip only, I realized that the gate which had barred my way was not locked. I had dropped the key through the dealer’s wall, but there was another Scion key in Ruby, so I fired up the patient, scurried through the gate, and parked it in slot 12, right in front of the key drop.

And away Ruby and I went, home by 11:00 with the entire business of the delivery completed. A first-gen Porsche Cayenne is built for this sort of errand. The hand warmers on the steering wheel and the butt-and-back heaters in the seats take on their full relevance after sessions on frozen ground stringing chains through another car’s undercarriage.

U-Haul Car Dolly rental: 1 day $59.68 CDN

Morning with my Cayenne doing something hard: difficult to say, but pretty good