Rest In Pieces, Naidine, March 1984 – June 2013

Thirteen months ago I was taking one of those once-in-a-lifetime trips.  It was nothing fancy, nothing overseas, nothing out of the country.  It was the trip to my brother’s wedding in North Carolina.  The first week was all the normal wedding things, being with family, the wedding itself, and seeing the newlyweds off.  But while everyone else from the Grohn side of things flew home, I drove my brother’s ’78 Corvette back to Oregon.  It was a storage situation, and having no garage where he would live with his wife, it seemed the best thing was to store it in Oregon for the time being.

A properly working Corvette is fun to drive.  And this one was properly working.  Sure, it dripped coolant and power steering fluid the whole way.  Sure, the cruise control was completely disconnected.  Sure, air conditioning was not working.  In June.  But Austin had gone over this machine, and with a new 350, I was out to cover more than 3000 miles in one week.  I stopped along the way to take some pictures at landmarks and monuments, and since I was alone, the car was my proxy.

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This car was fun to drive.  Maybe I’ve said that before.  The carburetor was new, and hadn’t been adjusted all the way.  It was after-firing a little under some accelerating conditions, and we didn’t know yet what octane to use.  But by the time I got to South Dakota, most of this was sorted out, and I was able to chirp the tires on the shifts.  My longest day of travel was 820 miles in 20 hours from Clemmons, NC, to Saint Louis, MO.

Now, when I say fun to drive, I mean for the first 200 miles the first day, or the first 100 any day thereafter.  The floorboards get hot, the car is LOUD, and the bucket seats kind of ride up on your hips (i’m not particularly wide either), and after a few hours, I shifted back and forth in the seat periodically.  You can’t take much with you in this car – there are two seats, and a little spot under the back window that can hold a suitcase, maybe a suitcase and a half.

The last day of travel was over 700 miles from Grand Teton National Park to my folk’s house in the Mid-Willamette Valley of Oregon, by which point, I thought I’d driven the car enough, a total of 3500 miles.  But this was a time of major transition in my life, and 3500 miles of open road in a sweet car was good medicine.

At this point, I realized, this car I’d spent a week in, this car I’d crossed the North American continent in, this car my brother had spent so much time working on, didn’t have a name.

A couple days later, I prepared to return to my home in order to go to work.  I got in my own car that had been parked for almost three weeks, turned it on, put it in drive, and touched the accelerator.  Nothing happened.  I pushed the pedal a little more.  It started to heave, but didn’t roll.  I put it almost all the way to the floor . . . and then it moved.  But this is all very normal, because it is a Mercedes diesel, and that’s how they are when they’re cold.  My car is nothing like a ’78 Corvette.  I don’t get many looks about it, not so often do people say “hey, nice car!”, and I can’t do 0 to 60 in less than 20 seconds, unless I’ve driven off a cliff.  I can, however, haul things in the trunk, mainly because it has one, and more than two people can sit in it comfortably.  I don’t know that this stately four-door sedan is more my style than the flashy Corvette.  I don’t really know what my style is for that matter, but the 300SD is my car, I know it well, and it has served me in the same way for almost ten years.

Her turbocharged 5-cylinder diesel motor sounds like that of a tractor.  She smells like a tractor too.  She had 280,000 miles when I got her, and she came with a name: Naidine.  Naidine was so named because her license plate was 203 NAI, and the previous owner, or his wife, thought it was right, even if misspelled.   In Washington State, they make you replace the plates every seven years, whether they need it or not, so the NAI plates are gone, but the name stuck.  When I went to pick her up, the previous owner showed me how the glow-plugs worked, how the seat switches worked, and how short the turning radius is (surprisingly short for a full-size sedan).  The seat switches are not toggles like most other cars, they are shaped like the seat cushion, and you simply push the model cushion in the direction you want that part of the seat to go.  “Hey, it’s a Mercedes!  What do you expect!” said Bruce, the previous owner.

Original plates 203 NAI

Original plates 203 NAI

The engineering in her is something else. There are only two design flaws I know of, both relate to accessories bolted onto the engine, and I made workarounds for both of them in time.  I got to know the car pretty well.  I replaced the engine when it developed a loud knock (never put starter fluid in one of these engines, as tempting as it is when your glow plugs aren’t working).  The hood (bonnet in Mercedes-speak) not just goes up, but has a second position where it is straight up in the air.  This is useful when you take the engine or transmission out, because both must be done together through the engine compartment.  There isn’t too much I haven’t worked on on that car.  If you have one of these cars, or one like it, and the battery doesn’t want to stay charged, there is a way you can modify your stock alternator regulator by adding a diode, and this will boost charging voltage by about .5V, and make your modern battery happier.  I never had to rebuild the transmission.  I never rebuilt the steering box or injector pump.  I never had to mess with the differential.  Otherwise, I pretty much know how it works, because I kept it that way.  I keep a thermometer in the A/C vent to be sure that the service I did on the system is holding.  The only time I paid someone to work on Naidine was to have the rust under the rear window (windscreen in Mercedes-speak) repaired and repainted, and to have the glass reset.  I guess I also had someone else install ball joints and do the front-end alignment.

Hunting

Hunting

I would have driven her anywhere, and often did.  I took her hunting in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon.  As a Washingtonian, I didn’t want to pay for the non-resident permit, so I was only shooting with a camera.  When I got to camp at an elevation of about 10000 feet, I asked my uncle if he had seen any other Mercedes diesels up there.  He said, “not too many, less than twenty.”  She has never left me stranded, except one time when the alternator/water pump belt tension bolt broke.  She couldn’t stay cool enough to drive on the freeway, so I limped back home, tensioned it by brute force, bolted the alternator down, and got to work two hours late.  I later invented my own bolt, since the one from the parts-house cost over $141 and kept breaking (one of the two known flaws), and it has never been a problem again.  That was the only time I couldn’t get somewhere on time on account of trouble with Naidine – all the other failures were minor, or detected and dealt with ahead of time.

Camping

Camping

As I drove away in my slow ’84 300SD, I realized how nice my old car really was.  The input jack on the radio wasn’t intermittent.  The dash clock kept perfect time.  The ride was smooth and quiet.  She drips a little oil (what Mercedes diesel doesn’t?) but I don’t have to check the fluids every time I fill up the tank.  Good ol’ Naidine.

Naidine in fine form

Naidine in fine form

This Saturday past, I was stopped in a line of traffic, and someone ran into the back of Naidine.  I don’t know exactly what size truck it was, but it something like a 1- or 2-ton flatbed.  I didn’t get out of the car at the scene, but a couple days later I got to see Naidine where she’s locked up at the tow yard.  It’s ugly.  Naidine is done for.  Mercedes gives grille badges at 250K, 500K, and 1M kilometers. Naidine had already passed the first two marks, but I figured I’d just wait and go in to get them when the last one had been passed too.  But we’re 250,000 miles short of that, and it would have taken at least 25 more years at the current rate.

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I thought I had taken more pictures of my car, but apparently not.  This is all of them, and most of them only once she got crunched.  Strange I should take over 1000 pictures of my brother’s car in 3500 miles, but only a handful of my own in almost 90,000 miles.

Final Odometer reading

Final Odometer reading

And which car got driven in the Strawberry Parade this year?

Going to the Strawberry Parade

Going to the Strawberry Parade

Not Naidine.  She was left behind in the driveway.  Sorry Dad, you missed your chance on that one.  And Naidine had air conditioning.

But lets face it – Naidine is just a car, and will be replaced with another car, or maybe a pickup truck.  And I’m already working on the most important part: getting another bumper sticker.

Issues, Etc.

Issues, Etc. – Christ-Centered Cross-Focused Talk Radio – www.issuesetc.org

getting back to normal

My Grandpa Baker died on June 3.

We buried him on June 8.

His estate sale is done, and the remnants went to auction.

The keys to his duplex have been turned over.

Only a few details remain.

Everything can go back to normal now.

For about two months I made the most of my time in order to spend as much of it with him as I could.  I crammed my workweek into less than four days so I could get to where he was by Thursday afternoon.  But there are no more Thursday afternoons.  I am no longer a caretaker.  My time is left to me to do what I will with it.

There is time enough to afford an extra fifteen minutes in the morning to commute to work by bicycle, and and extra thirty in the evening to get back home again.  There is enough time to do some chores I’ve put off, like cleaning out my storage unit.  All that stuff I’ve been dragging around, saying I was going to sell it on Ebay?  I’ve got most of it listed.  My laundry is not just washed, it is also folded and put away.  I even made venison stew for supper, which required a monumental commitment of time since a whopping nine ingredients were involved, and most of them required cutting up.  Yes, now that one of those unavoidable sad and bad parts of life is over, everything is getting back to normal, and everything is good.

Except it isn’t.  This world is still pretty rotten.

It’s funny how we look back on a year and say it was good or bad.  From my perspective, 2009 was a good year – my nephew was born.  ’10 was bad – Mom got sick.  ’11 was a good year – another nephew was born!  ’12 was pretty much awesome – my brother got married.  But ’13 is shaping up to be a tough haul, and it’s only half over.  People die, people are still sick, churches split, brother is set against brother, disasters strike, accidents happen, healthy people are killed in the course of their work, perversion abounds, and the list goes on.  All of it is simply what happens in a broken world, in a world in which people sin because they are sinners, in a world in which creation groans under the curse.  It’s messy and dirty and painful out there, but it is still better than we deserve, sinful sinning sinners that we are.

People want to comfort you in your pain.  All of them mean very well, and their comforts usually take some form of one of the stock phrases hauled out for this purpose.  One I heard was, “Well, everyone dies!”  I thought, Not permanently!  If you think death is permanent, your sense of time is rather short!  A more common one is, “Well, he’s in a better place now.”  And I wanted to reply, Only half of him is!  We had to bury the other part!  Finally, there is the ubiquitous “Well, he had a good long life.”  By the point of this utterance, I’m almost bursting to shout, He still has!

It isn’t normal that we had to bury Grandpa.  It isn’t normal that he has to wait.  It isn’t normal that we suffer and die.

Do you want to know what normal is?  You can see it, in a way.  You can actually hear it. You can even taste it.  Eternal life isn’t so much a place, as it is a Person.  He comes to His people with the words “Drink of it, all of you; this cup is the new testament in My blood, which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”  He comes in the faithful reading and preaching of His Word.  He comes in the absolution.  He comes in ordinary water with the words “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

It’s just a foretaste, but it is still eternal.  And it’s entirely normal, right now.

 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Romans 8:18-25, ESV

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This painting was on the wall of every house my Grandma and Grandpa Baker lived in during my lifetime.  It now hangs here on my wall, which is really too small for it.  It reminds me of them.  It reminds me of the hymn in the previous post.  And in that way it reminds me of my Comfort.IMG_5880b