Shimming with the Ching


     (My truck popped a u-joint climbing out of the Missouri breaks southeast of Havre, Montana. I was laying on a flattened banana box in the middle of nowhere when a skinny guy appeared from somewhere. He was wrapped in an army blanket poncho and drank from a neatly creased brown paper bag. He plopped down on the shady side of the truck, looked at my repair job and started talking…...)
     “About ten years back, I woke up one morning in the back of my van underneath that railroad overpass just east of Cut Bank. You watch the weather on TV? Cut Bank is the coldest spot in the lower forty-eight most every day. You leave a six pack outside on the Fourth of July, it could freeze overnight.    

     I was a mess, running low on fun tickets and too grubby to get a job. Red dog wine was blurring my vision. So I pulled out the three bronze Chinese tokens that I got in Nam and threw the I Ching on the question of what I should do next.
     The hexagram came up with a broken line at the bottom and solid lines all the way up from there, "Kou, Coming to Meet", talking about how the strong and the weak, the good and the evil, are part of the same thing and are going to meet and join. The first line said that bronze was going to be important to me.
     I took it to mean that it was time to get out of Dodge, so I put twenty bucks worth of gas on my brother's debit card and headed south. Twenty miles beyond Darby, going up the divide between Montana and Idaho, I came around a long righthand corner and almost smacked a brand new white Cadillac Eldorado that was stopped in the center of the highway. Two senior citizens were dancing around on the center stripe, waving me down with a purple Pendleton blanket.
    These folks were from California, headed north out of Jackpot, Nevada, on their way up to Glacier Park. The wife bought a book in Boise to help her identify Rocky Mountain wildflowers, spotted a patch of Indian paintbrush and made her husband pull a U-turn in the highway so she could pick a sample. The car crapped-out on them right there next to the flowers, wouldn't turn over. Could I rescue them, please? 
     I squoze under that big old boat and saw that Mr. Goodwrench down in Anaheim had used an air tool on the mounting bolts for the starter and chewed the threads to mincemeat. The starter wasn't making contact with the flywheel housing anymore, just hanging there on the studs by gravity, which wasn't quite solid enough for a reliable ground path for the electricity. No juice for the starter motor.
      Meanwhile the folks were chatting me up. You know, was I an actual Native American, did I live in a tipi, did I have a herd of horses, did I eat buffalo? Not exactly savvy travelers. 
     Then I remembered the Ching, "Coming to Meet," and how bronze was going to be important, so I went back to my van, got the Ching coins out of the Crown Royal bag, took a little ballpeen hammer out from under the passenger seat, crawled back into the gravel and drove the bronze tokens as shims around the starter motor. Bronze is a good conductor. The positive and negative electrical paths came to meet. The solenoid threw the starter gear far enough, and the Caddy started five times in a row. The old couple were more than tickled and the dude laid a hundred silver dollars on me that he won in Jackpot.
     I told him they should for sure stop up in Missoula at a real General Motors garage and get things fixed right. Last I saw of my Chinese coins they were under that Caddy, headed north. I been throwing the Ching with these here three silver dollars ever since. This morning I threw “Expansion.” You wouldn’t happen to have any weed would you? “

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