Learning stick shift in hostile Injun country

     Correy learned to drive like Jarred and I did - on the highway and back roads of the Stanislaus National Forest, from about age 12 on. And Correy, as most will attest, was a pretty solid driver with an automatic transmission; however, Correy behind the wheel of a stick is a whole different matter.

     Correy flew down to Albuquerque New Mexico to help me drive back to Portland Oregon following a month I spent down there doing disaster medicine stuff and eating green chile breakfast burritos. We had no driving plan, just figured we would switch off whenever. I drove us out of  the ABQ and west towards the edge of nowhere. Exactly on the edge of said nowhere is a town called Gallup, NM where there is a Sonic Drive-In (a fun story from there will come a different day). After we filled up on delicious sugary flavory sodas there, I thought it about time for Correy to drive. After all, the road ahead was exceptionally flat and desolate, easy drivin. Little did I know Correy's complete lack of experience in driving a stick shift. When I invited him down, he said "Oh sure, I've driven a stick before, no problem." What he didn't mention until that fateful day was that he had driven a stick before... once, briefly.  Needless to say we needed a bit of a crash course, and in a hurry.

     We coasted backwards out of the spot, and managed to chug our way across the parking lot into a gas station lot before stalling. It took about eight F-bombs and fifteen minutes to back out of that spot again under power. Eventually... eventually... we made it to the driveway and rolled (after stalling) into the middle of the road. One restart later, we were officially underway and quickly out of Gallup.

     Leaving Gallup is not just leaving a city, it is leaving the United States of America. No joke. Correy was to test his driving meddle on the reservation of the Navajo Nation. This is, by all white-man accounts, very dangerous country, with people (mostly drunk bored teens) that will rob you and beat you up and steal your car if you so much as stop to take a picture (let alone break down in a black cloud of shredded transmission). And here was Correy tooling along, stripping my gears, accidentally revving up the engine of my poor and dying 200K+ mile Jetta. And don't even ask about the cars he passed against oncoming traffic.

     Perhaps the more hairy times came when we reached a quasi-town on the reservation, where Navajos were walking about, their sketchy police eyeballing us as we rolled through. Then there was a traffic light! Which means we had to stop, and worse yet... GO AGAIN! Oh please Correy don't stall here, don't stall here. Gratefully my real-time coaching kept us moving every so slowly so as to not actually require first gear, which may have meant certain death in the desert the way we had been going.

     Two close call streetlights later and we were again off into the flat desolate badlands of the rez, where only fifth gear was required. Correy managed to get us all the way through Navajo country and to the relative safety of some white trash redneck hamlet back in the US of A. But it was close, and we drove on singing along to old Dixie Chicks tunes at the top of our lungs, glad to still have our scalps.