By Buster McNutt
It is not totally impossible to keep a vehicle clean in our part of North Central Florida, just as it is not totally impossible, in the lyrics of a great country standard song, to “Put a buffalo up your nose.” I think at this point I’m supposed to add “don’t try this at home,” if only to protect those misdirected Hillary Clinton voters who are still convinced The Donald was conceived in a test tube in the Russian orbiting MIR space station — when in fact, as the rest of us all know, they have confused Donald Trump with the late David Bowie.
There are any number of reasons why clean vehicles around here are about as rare as nose-hair clippers that actually work for more than a month or so, particularly the solar- or wind-powered ones. We are unique in having a combination of kamikaze love bugs, toxic Bradford Pear mold spores, and water-melon-carrying school bus diesel/vegetable oil fumes. But the main culprit, to use the scientific term, would be “dirt roads.”
I did not grow up living in homes on dirt roads. My world was simple: you plant things in dirt; you drive on things like asphalt. Dirt roads went out with wagon trains, recapped mud and snow tires, and 45-rpm high-fidelity car record players on pages 73-78 in the annual JC Whitney catalog.
An “inconvenient truth” that Al Gore and the Tree Huggers (great band name!) don’t want you to know is that dirt roads are responsible for 90 percent of global warming! Something like 30 percent of the dirt-road dust kicked up when vehicles whiz by does not return to the ground (or land on my vehicles). The same “thermal updrafts” that allow birds to circle in the sky, moving ever higher without flapping their wings, also cause this dirt dust to rise, until it gets to the point where the artificial thermals from aircraft take over and cause it to rise even higher, at which point additional updrafts are provided by the fleet of “decommissioned” U2 spy planes that were sold to Google Maps several years ago – thank you WikiLeaks!
If you live on a dirt road, you could wash your vehicle everyday and it wouldn’t matter. It would be like living inside an ant farm and vacuuming and dusting every day. Our outside faucet is in the front yard, about 30 feet from the dirt road. Unless you wash the vehicle around midnight, there is no way you are going to get it washed and dried before some pickup truck Bubba or Bubbette comes speeding by, depositing a new coat of dirt dust on your still wet vehicle, which of course causes the chemical reaction known as “sticking.” The absolute worst are the UPS drivers, and what do they care? Their trucks are already brown, they are in a hurry, and somebody washes it for them when they get off duty. I used to have a similar “somebody else washes arrangement” but they grew up, left home, got good jobs, and live on asphalt roads.
There is a nice little car wash about six miles away. The good news is that 4.5 miles of that is on “hard roads.” The bad is that the 1.5 miles leading to the hard road is all dirt, except when it rains, and then it turns into mud the consistency of chocolate pudding that has been left out on the counter in August in a non-air-conditioned “mobile home” for a week or so. And I’m not even talking about chocolate pudding with nuts in it, so there is absolutely no traction involved. So your vehicle is either being pelted with dust storms or mud balls. I had some limited success driving through all this, hitting the hard road and washing the truck at the car wash, and then wrapping the whole thing in Saran Wrap for the drive home. Then I peeled off the Saran Wrap, and the truck looked great. I could even see my reflection in the side mirror, along with of course, you guessed it, the UPS truck speeding by. If NASCAR ever expands to a dirt track UPS truck series, our guy has a great shot.
Most of the locals take this in stride. When they go to the gas station, while the vehicle is filling up they’ll take the windshield washing squeegee and go over their hood and front fenders. The next time they’ll “wash” the rest of the vehicle. I suspect some of them do the same with their clothes when they take a shower, which may or may not be as often as they fill up. All I know is that the store owner complains about all the squeegees that go missing on Saturday nights.
One of my neighbors took advantage of a particularly hard rain storm, and made enough mud to cover all but the windshield and side windows on his car. He drove it this way for a couple days, and then took a rubber mallet and cracked all the mud until it fell off. The dirt that had been on the car under the mud had stuck to the mud, so when the mud came off, so did the underlying dirt! He’s thinking about franchising this process and opening up a nationwide network of Muddin Clean shops. He has a few changes he needs to make, such as not mudding the rear glass area and then using the mallet on it. But he figures this will be an easy sale to women, who think nothing of going to an expensive Spa, “disrobing,” and having their entire bodies coated with mud to “peel the dead skin off.” Hmm, I wonder if he could combine these two services?
Actually, I wonder if he’s hiring! •
