That's a tough "brake"...Sometimes you have to stop before you can start

To understand why my friend Joan was laying prone beneath my truck at 11:00 at night during the on-set of a Polar Vortex, we must travel back several months to when we first began the habit of periodically topping off our brake fluid reservoir.

Now that you've refreshed your memory...

Ready to depart for Connecticut immediately after school, I received a text from Sydney...obviously being used as her father's mouth-piece. "Make sure you check the brake fluid," she reminded me. I arrived at my friend Joan's house to pick her up. She emerged, clutching her bag and a container of brake fluid. "I got a text from Sydney," she said, shaking it at me.

As we embarked on this by-now familiar journey, I carefully monitored any change in the emergency dashboard warning lights but, in the process, overlooked the fuel gauge. "Uh, Joan," I said casually, "We might want to start looking for a gas station." She leaned over to see the line struggling valiantly to perform a pull-up over the empty indicator and glared at me. "Again?" she sighed. Having left the gas station-littered lanes of the free-way, we were a wee bit worried about finding fuel options at this late hour along the winding roads of Connecticut.

The GPS led us, first, to a closed station where I decided to pull over anyway in order to top off the brake fluid as a warning light had popped on and I could feel the pedal was somewhat spongy. That accomplished, we proceeded the 2.6 miles to the next, hopefully open, gas station. "I don't mean to alarm you," I said in a slightly-alarmed voice to my friend who was already fighting the impulse to punch me as she anticipated our running out of gas on a dark country road in near-zero temperatures, "but the brakes aren't bouncing back like they usually do." "What does that mean," Joan asked worriedly as we careened along a 45-degree downgrade approaching a 25 mile-per-hour curve.

Good news! We made it to a gas station! Bad news. Brake fluid was erupting like a whale's blow hole from beneath my truck. Joan heroically duck-taped the brake line while I heroically ripped off strips of duct tape with my bare fingers in near-zero temperatures while pointing out Joan's exposed legs to drivers racing blindly through the parking lot.

"Did that help," Joan asked as we merged back into traffic. "Yeah," I reassured her, rising up out of the driver's seat to slam my entire body weight onto the brake pedal. Joan gave me a quick lesson in down-shifting an automatic vehicle while I bemoaned the loss of my standard-shift Ranger. We were an hour away from our destination. We called Savannah to be on alert in case we needed her to come get us but, as traffic was light and Connecticut turns all its traffic signals to blinking yellow after 11, we thought we could do it. "Did you top it off with brake fluid?" Savannah advised, "Sydney said that you were going to need to do that anyway." "Thank you, Savannah," I said, gritting my teeth as I death-grip clutched the steering wheel and told Joan that I would understand if she felt compelled at any time to yell, "Abort!" and leap out of the truck. "No way," she said loyally, "at the worse, I'll hang out the window, open my coat like bat-wings and try to provide some drag."

Much later than expected, we arrived. We sat in the (thank God) stopped truck, counted our blessings and pondered our immediate future. Would there be a mechanic open and available on a Saturday to repair Titan? What if we couldn't get it in until Monday? Oh no! Missing a school day connected to a holiday would cost me two personal days! This was a nightmare! How were Joan and I going to get home? As you can see from the picture...we would stop at nothing!