I've made a habit, over many years, of buying used cars. My dad is in the habit of helping me fix those cars when they inevitably break down. I can't visit the man without being greeted with a question.
"How's that Pontiac running?" he's asked me numerous times over the last eight years or so. "How's that T-Bird treating you?" was the question for about five years prior to the Pontiac. There have been Dodges and Fords and one Chevy Nova. I remember one Dodge-Mitsubishi half-breed that when the hood opened you'd find a handful of American-made parts that took wrenches measured with inches rather than millimeters. Those Detroit parts -- an alternator/regulator set-up for the electrical and a radiator to cool the Japanese engine -- were mounted cheek-to-jowl with parts that required metric tools. It took a dozen hours and two sets of tools to replace the Mitsubishi's clutch.
If you dumped my toolbox on the floor, you wouldn't find one full set of wrenches. But you would find one of the reasons I spend time turning wrenches in Dad's garage.
My father, Carol Christiansen, turned 80 this year and owns more than enough tools. He has also spent a good part of his life in his garage. When I'm there, I tell myself I'm being frugal. But lately, as Dad ages and I begin to listen to him more, I've wondered if I buy crappy cars just so I can spend more time with him.
Fearless words
We've fixed a lot of cars together. We've fixed window defrosters and electric charging systems. We've replaced more than one clutch and too many brake pads for me to count. Each of those jobs used amateur skills -- inherited, I suppose, from a long line of Danish farmers who fixed plows, harnesses and, more recently, diesel tractors. I'm told my great-grandfather traveled west to the Dakotas as a teenage immigrant because, despite barely being able to speak English, he convinced a man who was hiring that he could repair steam engines.
What my dad inherited from those farmers was the wherewithal to fix things himself. Dad's garage-time motto is simple: "If an engineer can design it, and factory workers can build it, then I can take it apart and I can fix it -- and I can put it back together."
To my ears, those words sound fearless. It's a motto that goes a long way on a farm or in a suburban garage. If you've ever looked at your car, your only car and the car that's supposed to take you to college -- or to work or on a date -- and realized half the car is hung from the garage ceiling and the other half is about a dozen pieces on the floor, then you know a special kind of fear.
I don't think my dad thinks of himself as a teacher, and he certainly never took a philosophy class or used the word "axiom" in conversation, but like good fathers everywhere, he's been teaching his philosophy most of his adult life. He's got rules we can follow. He's never written them down and I doubt he even knows they could be compiled, but as near as I can tell there are three of them:
• Save your parts and keep track of them;
• Take good notes; and lastly,
• Use the right tools.
I don't know how long I've used the three rules. I've only really known about them the last few years. But I do remember taking apart spider bikes right down to the bearings and re-greasing everything before putting the bike back together. I was instructed to lay all the parts on cardboard in a row, in the order in which they were removed, so the whole array looked like one of those exploded-diagram graphics from the pages of a car-repair manual. I don't remember being scared, because Dad was always nearby and as often as I had a bicycle stripped apart, he was absorbed in work on some much more complicated machine. Taking good notes may be the rule but saving the parts and arranging them in an order that makes sense is one way to follow that rule.
Glued-together taillight lens
Last year Dad and I were replacing the electric blower motor on my most recent Pontiac. The car was still getting me around, but with winter approaching, the job felt urgent; there's not much point in having a heater if it doesn't defrost the windshield. About midway through the job, Dad wanted to show me something on the back end of his Oldsmobile. It was a glued-together taillight lens.
While parking, Dad had backed his car into the plow on his Farm-All tractor. True to form, he saved all the parts, picking the pieces of red plastic out of the gravel in his driveway. When dad learned the replacement lens would cost about $130, he declined to buy it. He taped up the light, temporarily, and the pieces of red plastic that once were his taillight lens sat waiting in a coffee can inside his garage. Dad also made a mental note to find the right glue, a good glue that would hold a busted taillight together.
"One day I was carrying groceries for your mother, I found this red mesh. It's an onion sack," Dad told me. He seemed really proud of this little eureka moment. The fabric of the onion sack is not super strong, but it can stretch in more than one direction without breaking. It was also red, a near match for the red taillight lens. And he found the right glue, a glue that dried transparent. And so the red onion sack became a key component for a poor-man's fiberglass of Dad's design. And the new glued-together lens fit perfectly into the back of his Oldsmobile.
Dad has used the three rules -- save your parts, take good notes and use the right tools -- to do many things outside of his garage. He's been a youth football coach and league director, a church elder and treasurer, a taxi driver for six children, and an enthusiastic -- if not five-star -- barbecue chef. Those are among the things I want to thank my dad for.
He also built a house, with help from my two grandfathers, Myron Carol Christiansen and Walter Seidlitz. And Dad was a Cold War electronics technician who worked his entire career as a hardcore phone geek. I like to tell people he invented the Internet, and if you know much about the history of telephones and computers in Alaska, you'd know that's partly true. Of course, a few thousand other people helped, but the phone geeks of the Alaska Communication System worked on the cutting edge of military technology that predates the Internet we use so much today.
People: the good glue
Dad also performed service for his community. He sat through long meetings while serving on commissions for roads, trails and parks. He has been a church elder, treasurer for a congregation and a sports coach.
He was a volunteer firefighter and a member of the downhill ski club that operated lifts near Hatcher Pass. In the 1970s, a small group of men and women, including Dad, attended meetings at the home of Dad's friend, the late Les Maynard, and together they founded the Lakes Volunteer Fire Department.
Today, that fire department is called Central Mat-Su and it's one of the larger parts of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough's public safety network. When Dad could no longer serve as firefighter, he continued to serve as a fire service board director. That's a quiet service. It's one I'm pretty sure he did out of respect for his friend Maynard, who passed away quite young, but left a fire department as his contribution. Maynard left behind him all the parts. Together, my dad and dozens of other people have saved those parts and kept the fire department ticking by using the right glue. That good glue is mostly made of people.
If you're reading this, I hope you can think about stuff your own father taught you, even if he didn't know he was teaching at the time, or if you didn't know you were learning from his example. And if something does break and you need to fix it yourself, feel free to use my dad's motto: If they can build it, you can take it apart and fix it, and put it back together. You just need to remember the rules. Save all the parts; take good notes; and use the right glue.
Scott Christiansen lives and writes in Anchorage.