Shoreline Quilt Backstory

   Sometimes I wonder if I would finish any quilts if it weren’t for the Puyallup Fair (Washington State Fair). For some reason, the fair’s deadline for entering quilts seems to be the one that I take seriously. One year I stitched the final stitches of one of my quilts while being driven to drop it off at the fair.

    This time I thought I had allowed plenty of time. I started “Shoreline” three years ago, after seeing quilt/fabric designer Tula Pink at the Sewing & Stitchery Expo’s Quilter’s Night Out.

She has a playful personality and is on the cutting edge of the Modern Quilt movement. I love her fresh, fanciful fabrics! That night I got to meet her. She autographed one of her books and a scrap of her fabric for me.

    I spent the next few months collecting her fabrics, and even enlisted my son to pick up a few yards at a Pacific Fabrics store near Seattle.

My favorite Tula Pink fabric.

I found the free pattern for Shoreline online at TulaPink.com.

     Summer rolled around which meant it was time for my husband John’s annual faculty meeting at WSU. I tagged along in August 2014. I packed up my sewing machine, a rotary cutter and mat, and yards and yards of Tula Pink fabric and rode across the state to a newly opened, air conditioned room in the Residence Inn by Marriott.

     While John was in meetings, I set up my sewing area and started rotary cutting strips and then stacking them by color. Rows of strips outlined the room.

     John came back that afternoon, and asked me to look at his elbow. It was hurting and swollen. It looked like there was a golf ball in it! Did he get stung by a bee? I gave him an antihistamine and he went back to his meeting.

     My sewing machine was blazing through strips of Tula Pink fabric. Long loops of colorful fabrics combined with midnight blue strips started coming together. I would cut the loops randomly later and then piece them to each other. The assembly of this quilt was super easy. I was on fire! I had tons of fabric, why not grow this quilt from throw size to queen size?

     John came back to the room before he met his colleagues for dinner. His elbow looked even worse. We put ice on it. I thought we should go to the emergency room. He thought he should go to the dinner. I ate the 6” sub he’d brought me from Subway and then continued the sew-a-thon. I managed to get most of the quilt top pieced!

     A couple of hours later, John returned again. His right elbow was huge, red, and angry looking. I ordered him into the car and we headed to the emergency room.

The doctor said he thought John had either broken a bursa sac in his elbow or had an infection---MRSA? He drained fluid from it and sent it to a lab to be tested. We couldn’t understand how he broke a bursa sac since he hadn’t hit his elbow. They bandaged up his elbow and put his arm in a sling. The doctor gave us a prescription for antibiotics to be filled first thing in the morning at the local drug store. In the meantime, ice and elevation was the treatment.

    As soon as the drug store opened, we picked up the medication. John went into his meeting to tell them he had to leave early. In the room full of entomology professors, the consensus was that he got stung by an insect. I packed up my makeshift sewing room, loaded the car up, and drove west for 5-1/2 hours with John’s gigantic elbow propped up on an ice pack.

     The next week was spent in various doctors' offices: a general practitioner, an orthopedist, an allergist. They drained his elbow a few more times. The lab reports came back clean, no indications of an infection. In the end, we agreed that it was probably an allergic reaction to an insect bite or sting on the way to Pullman.

     And then progress on the quilt stalled. Life happened, and in the years between that Pullman trip until recently, my family faced some major health problems. I spent a lot of time visiting doctor’s offices, hospitals, hospice, and nursing homes. Quilting was the last thing on my mind. My sewing machine collected dust. Four quilt tops sat folded, waiting for me to quilt them. People asked if I’d entered a quilt in the fair. “No, not this year.” I hadn’t realized how many friends stopped to see my quilts hanging in the fair.

     A couple of weeks ago, a spark of quilt memory ignited. Wasn’t the deadline to enter quilts in the fair usually in late August? I looked it up. I was ten days out. Of the four quilt tops stacked up waiting, Shoreline would be the easiest to complete. All I had to do was make a backing, and then quilt it. That’s when the trouble began.

     Awhile back I came up with this “rule,” well more of a “guideline,” that I should use the leftover fabrics from the front of the quilt to make the backing. Don’t buy new fabric!  Use what you have! It made economic sense, obviously the fabrics would play well together, plus when the quilt was being snuggled under and you flipped it back to go and get a bowl of ice cream or popcorn, both sides would look beautiful. In my noblest intentions, the back side of the quilt should be as beautiful as the front.

     I dug out the remainder of the Tula Pink fabrics. Then I remembered that I had also bought several yards of various navy/indigo/nautical blue solid fabrics in an attempt to match the dark blue part of the quilt top in case I didn’t have enough.  After receiving my online order and comparing the five or six ½ yard cuts to what I was trying to match, I recall thinking, “this may as well be 50 shades of blue, and none of them match!” Three years later I spent half a day searching for those “50 shades of blue.” Late at night, after surviving a fabric avalanche in my sewing area, I gave up and went to bed.

     When I opened my eyes in the morning, I knew exactly where the blues were and pulled them out. Ah, sweet progress! I set about improvising, starting with the biggest pieces of fabric. I cut the smaller pieces into 8” squares and made two rows of those. Since the quilt top was all vertical columns, I made these rows horizontal.

   Taking a short break from the quilt one day, I dropped some old clothes off at a thrift store. Afterwards, I went inside to wander around. I found a paper roll of “Triangles on a Roll” to make 3-1/2” half square triangle blocks. It was $4.99. They usually run about $10, which is why I’ve never tried them. I snatched that up to use on the quilt back. It would fulfill another of my quilting rules: Try a new technique on every quilt that you make. Those triangles on a roll were excellent! Paper piecing is always precise. I used up one of “the blues” to make a row of pinwheels.

     I pieced together all the sections of the quilt back and then pin basted the back, the batting, and the top together. It was ready to be quilted!

     “Quilt as desired” is the usual ending to quilt directions. The problem was that I didn’t know what I desired. After much deliberation, and probably a lot of influence from excitement over the eclipse, I thought I’d quilt some big spiral circles scattered over the colorful area and then add straight vertical lines echoing the seam lines on the deep blue sections. The circles would be a nice contrast to all the straight lines, and it would fit with in with the modern look.

    I had seen an easy looking spiral technique on Pinterest. I found spools of variegated threads in blue, green and orange in my thread drawer. I loaded the green onto my long arm sit down machine and settled in to get started. My foot pressed down on the pedal, the motor hummed, and nothing happened. I gripped the hand wheel and tried to turn it. It was frozen. I scanned the manual and it said to not plug it directly into the wall. I rustled up a surge protector and re-plugged it in. Still just motor humming. I took the bobbin out and tried again. No luck. I crawled under the table with a flash light and shined it in the bobbin case, poking around in there. I couldn’t see anything obstructing the needle. After spending another hour trying to get my Tin Lizzie to run, I gave up.

     I thought about scheduling time at a quilt shop on a long arm machine, but you usually have to schedule that a month and a half ahead of time. It was Tuesday. I wanted to turn the quilt in on Friday. I would have to quilt it on my “regular” machine.

     I tried the Pinterest technique, drawing a small, tight circle on my quilt top and using my walking foot to circle around it. It looked horrible. I double checked the Pinterest post. She was quilting on a 20” square, not a queen sized quilt.

These are the spirals/circles I had in mind.

     I tried lowering my feed dogs and spiraling using free motion quilting. It was terrible.

     The quilting should not ruin a beautifully designed and pieced quilt top! I started brainstorming. What if I took yarn and couched it over the zig-zaggy amoeba-like spiral? If you can’t make a circle with regular sewing, why would yarn make it better? It will be hard enough to rip out without adding yarn. What if I used a zig zag stitch instead of a straight stitch? Then it would look like I made crooked lines on purpose.

This is the amoeba circle I quilted.

     There’s a popular saying among quilters: If you can’t see a mistake in a quilt while riding by on a galloping horse, then it’s OK. I get that, but if my eye goes straight to a mistake every time I look at one of my quilts, I’d rather correct it while I can. It took 3-1/2 hours, but I ripped out every stitch of the sorry looking spiral.

     How could I be struggling so hard with this? This is a very simple quilt. I’ve been quilting for 17 years and sewing for almost 50 years.  Yet, here I was: three broken needles and one broken long arm machine later. I hadn’t been this frustrated since ninth grade Home Economics when I had the great idea to make a pant suit out of red, white and blue houndstooth wool and my teacher insisted that the seams be matched to the thread.

    It was the beginning of a long hate relationship with the seam ripper. When I finished that outfit, it was perfect, but I only wore it a few times because I couldn’t stand it. Through tears of frustration, before I made this quilt situation even worse, I put the seam ripper down and stepped away from the sewing machine.

    During the ten-plus days of my quilting crunch, John grilled dinner every night while I popped up from the machine long enough to eat. On Friday night, over a barbecued burger, I told him I was ready to throw in the towel. He raised an eyebrow. I’m not usually one to concede defeat.

    A few hours and many deep breaths later, I went back to my sewing area and used a method that always worked for me. I calmly took a black Sharpie and drew a spiral onto a piece of tracing paper, then pinned it onto the quilt. This time I used an open toed foot with my feed dogs up. Although I still had to muscle that queen sized quilt through the 11” throat of my machine, the result was much better. It even looked like a spiral!

Much improved spiral!

    Then I added more different sized spirals using the technique that worked. They don’t exactly match what I pictured in my head, but they were good enough which fits my quilting motto—my quilts aren’t perfect, but they’re Good ‘Nuff.

     The rest of the quilting was a breeze—parallel lines following the seam lines on the dark blue parts of the quilts until they hit a spiral. All that was left was the binding, label, and hanging sleeve.

     It was so late in the game, I wouldn’t have time to bind this quilt my usual way—machine sew it to the front, flip the binding to the back and then hand sew it to the back. Shoreline measured 70” x 85.” It would take too long to hand sew around that 240” perimeter. I’d try another new technique that I’d also seen on Pinterest. Machine sew the binding to the back, then flip it to the front and machine sew it down. It was Saturday. I’d already missed my self-imposed deadline of Friday. This new binding technique was do or die.

     So, of course since I didn’t have enough pressure, I decided to add another technique challenge to the time challenge.  Why not make the binding color match the quilt color on the sections that weren’t midnight blue? Yeah! That’s an awesome idea! I didn’t waste time measuring where the color changes would fall. I just sewed the binding on until it was about 6” from the next color and matched it up then. That actually worked!

     Usually I stitch two sides of the label into a corner of the quilt along with the binding, and I also stitch the sleeve in with the binding along the top of the quilt. Sometimes I use permanent colored Pigma pens to draw the label, but since I was just a bit pressed for time, this time I wrote the label on our computer and printed it on the printer.

     To print the label on fabric, I soak muslin in a special solution that makes the ink on an inkjet printer permanent. After it’s dried, I iron freezer paper to it and then cut it the same size as a standard piece of paper, 8-1/2 x 11.” The fingers crossed part is feeding it through the printer without it jamming. That only happened once this time, so I didn’t have to hold my breath for too long.

     While I was working on the label, I remembered that scrap of fabric that Tula autographed for me three years before. That should be on the label. Where was that 2 x 3” scrap? I was positive that I put it someplace “special” so that I wouldn’t lose it, but where in this overflowing sewing room that now looked like a hurricane had blown through? After rummaging through quilt debris, I spotted it tacked to my bulletin board!

     The last call for quilts at the fair was Sunday, August 20 from 12 to 6:00 pm.  I rolled through the fair gates at 3:00. Three hours to spare! Upstairs in the Pavilion, the ladies spread that quilt on a table to measure it and I watched the edges of it ripple—too many seams, no stabilizing border. Add that to the mediocre quilting and the only ribbon I would be getting would be a participation ribbon. But, that would be ribbon enough. I was participating again, quilting again after too much time off. And despite the setbacks, this quilt, Shoreline, is a winner in my eyes!

Shoreline quilt completed!

Shoreline quilt back.

Update: It’s September 1, 2017, the first day of the fair. John and I got there bright and early. Our eyes looked upward in the Pavilion searching for Shoreline. It was hanging near the door. I was astonished to see a yellow Honorable Mention ribbon pinned to it! Sticking with it through all the challenges paid off!

Laura Keolanui Stark is trying to fix her longarm quilting machine using online advice before taking it to the shop to be repaired. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

Timber!

     How did this happen? Twenty years ago I watched out my kitchen window teary-eyed as trees in the woods behind our house were pinched at their bases by heavy machinery and then toppled crashing to the ground. Like the song says, “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot . . .” only this time instead of a parking lot, they crammed cookie cutter houses in. Oh well, people need places to live.

     A few months later, we moved to another house, one with a wooded backyard. Nobody would be able to cut our trees down. Except us.

     On a breezy, cloudy March day, a man scaled up two of our 150’ Douglas Firs and a couple of Hemlock trees with a chainsaw dangling from a rope tied around his waist. I watched him harnessed to a tree that was swaying in the wind like a metronome--one last dance. I thought I was a tree hugger. How had I turned into the one signing the check to bring these trees down?

     In the seventeen years that we’ve lived in this house, we weathered many Northwest storms: windstorms, snow storms, even the Nisqually earthquake. But the ice storm on January 22, 2012 was the one that made us start questioning the wisdom of living “in the woods.”

Douglas fir branches bow under the weight of snow and ice.

   The ice storm hit our area hard. Throughout the night we heard branches snapping like gunshots followed by thunderous thuds on our roof and in our yard. We took shelter in our basement. Clearing the debris from our yard and roof took more than a week. The pile of branches along our curb ended up being almost 4 feet tall. We took load after load to the dump waiting in 30-minute lines with other trucks brimming with yard waste. (See January 18, 21, 22, and 28, 2012 posts.)

The pile of debri grows.

     Most of our debris came from the trees on the north side of the house After we cleared it all away, we realized that we had to replace the roof. We filed an insurance claim. We rigged some of the battered rain gutters and eventually replaced those as well.

     Weatherwise it was relatively calm until 2016 rolled around. On Thanksgiving, a windstorm hit. After a filling Thanksgiving meal, we stood in the driveway with our daughter Sarah and her boyfriend saying our goodbyes. John and I went inside and were turning off the lights to go to bed when the house shook with what sounded like an explosion.          

   We thought one of the trees fell on our house. Outside, we saw that it was a 15-20’ branch that fell.  It came down on the roof and then landed on my Camry. It was 11:15 at night, so we couldn’t see the full extent of the damage and we were worried about more branches coming down. We scurried back inside and considered ourselves lucky that the branch hadn’t hit us 15 minutes earlier.

     By the dawn’s early light, we checked our house and car. The house roof had a dent in it, but not a hole. The 250-lb branch must’ve hit the roof like a nail, then bounced off, landing on my car’s roof and rolling onto the hood. Somehow, it hadn’t broken the glass sunroof or the windshield. But there was a dent above the driver’s door, and also in the door. We get a lot of rain around here. Would it start leaking?

     The house roof didn’t seem to be leaking, but there’s a lot of insulation up in the attic. We called the company that put the “new” roof on and they sent someone out quickly. He inspected the damage and put a temporary patch of plastic over the dent to keep the rain out until they could fix it permanently.  We filed a property claim with our homeowner’s insurance.

     I took the 2001 Camry to three body shops for estimates. The news was not good. All three said that the repairs were going to end up costing a little more than the car was worth, so our insurance company would probably declare it totaled.

     One of the estimators told me that the damage was not structural, just cosmetic. She suggested I might want to repair it myself. Since the car is a Toyota and may have another 100,000 miles in it, that’s what I did. I sanded the dents down and painted it so that it won’t rust. We didn’t file an insurance claim on it.

    We had been working toward selling some of our cars and getting another newer model car for me. The plan had been for the Camry to go to Sarah anyway, just not damaged. We donated her Audi to Public Television, and then gave her the Camry with instructions not to open the sunroof because we aren’t sure it will close again.

    I finally switched my Toyota loyalty off and made up my mind about which vehicle I wanted. For the second time in our lives, we bought a brand new car—a zippy Mazda CX-5 in rich, lustrous Soul Red Crystal!

My new baby! Zoom! Zoom!

Our garage already has two cars in it which is why we are trying to shrink our fleet. So, I parked my sporty new Mazda SUV in the driveway.

     Two weeks later, on February 5, Super Bowl Sunday, Sarah and her boyfriend came to visit again. It started snowing heavily. We loved watching it sift down outside while we were warm and cozy inside. As the snow got deeper, 10” worth, they decided to stay with us overnight rather than attempt to drive back to Seattle.

     Our winter reverie snapped back to reality with a loud boom and the house shaking, again. We ran to look outside and found two of our cars buried in branches. The branches missed the new Mazda by 3."

Near miss!

There was also a 30’ branch on the roof covering half our house. It was from the same tree that dropped the branch on the Camry.

Buried classic BMW.

Branch on roof stretches across two bedrooms.

     We moved our dogs out of the bedroom under the trees. The four of us humans spent the night trying to fall asleep in the basement but keeping an ear open for more falling branches. This was getting old.

     In the morning, we unearthed the two cars buried under branches and removed the covers that protect them from tree sap.

The classic 1985 BMW had cracks streaking down the windshield. The branches hit hard enough to knock the computer out of the roof. The roof and hood were dented.

     My son’s Honda Accord, a survivor of many brutal winters at WSU in Pullman, WA, had the entire back window shattered. The center rear brake light was also destroyed and the frame around the window had dented under the weight of the branch.

     I was hopeful that we could just replace the window and fix the brake light ourselves. It was an entertaining, rainy drive to a Safelite AutoGlass with a shower curtain taped across the back of the car. I was following John and could tell when he turned the defroster on because the shower curtain poufed outward like a bubble. He made it most of the way to the shop before the painter’s tape let loose and the shower curtain started flapping in the wind and rain.

     The window technician told us he couldn’t replace the glass because with the dent in the frame, the glass wouldn’t seat properly. John nodded in agreement. He had predicted this. But, the Safelite guy was great. He vacuumed the glass pieces out and replaced the shower curtain with a more professional temporary back window.

     I followed John to our favorite body shop, Abra, for an estimate. (We’d never had a favorite body shop before.) We filed insurance claims for the Honda, and the BMW, but worried that they’d be declared totaled because they are old cars.

     We decided the trees had to go. It was just too much. We were constantly worried about the danger looming from those trees. We couldn’t park our cars in the driveway. Every time the wind picked up, I was fearfully watching the trees. If it got blustery, I got the dogs out and left the house.

     Some background: Our neighborhood was built in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The idea was that the houses were built to blend into nature and become a part of the natural forest, a la Frank Lloyd Wright. As many older trees as possible were left in place during construction. That’s how Manorwood was created and it still has its wooded feel, due to the homeowners’ association covenants.

    To have a tree with a diameter of more than 6” removed, it has to be approved by the board of the Manorwood Homeowners’ Association. Getting approval is difficult if not impossible. You have to hire an arborist to assess the health of the tree. The effects on neighbors is taken into account, as well as how it affects the forest density and how much light your property receives. You must provide a map of all the trees on the property. New trees have to replace the removed ones.

   Most of the stories that I’ve heard about getting approval for tree removal did not have happy endings. All I’ve ever heard are tales of people cutting trees down and then having liens put on their homes, or being fined $600 per tree removed.

    The neighbor who shares the property line with the problem trees is also a board member. He encouraged us to go to the next homeowner’s meeting to talk about the trees. We went and the woman who makes the tree decisions was not exactly sympathetic. When we told her that our roof was damaged and we had three cars totaled, she told us we should park our cars in the RV lot. We were trying to be positive, so I didn’t ask her if we should park our roof in the RV lot too.

     Instead I went home and filled out the request to remove trees. I mapped the trees on our property (we would still have more than 20 trees left after removing the dangerous ones). I prepared a 35-page report documenting with photos the damage done by the trees since 2012. We hired arborists to examine the trees and give us their findings. At least two trees were diseased. Most of the branches left on the trees were on one side--over our house. I included that in the report. Our neighbor had several board members come by and look at the trees hovering over our house. One was growing only 4 feet from our bedroom.

Douglas fir 4 feet from our bedroom.

Douglas fir leaning toward our house.

   We submitted the report and waited. If they didn’t approve it, we would work with our neighbor to get the covenants changed to allow for dangerous trees to be removed. He wanted to get a petition started. John and I also talked about moving if we didn’t get approval.

Fortunately our request was approved. I think the tree committee realized that if they denied us and someone got injured or killed by one of those trees they could be legally liable.

    We worked with our neighbor to get bids on removing the trees and settled on an experienced, affordable company, Foothills Tree Service & Stump Grinding. I called utilities companies to come out and mark where our gas lines, cable lines, and telephone lines were.

     And that is how I came to be sitting in my car across the street and up the hill from my house watching those stately trees that I loved come down. It was a bittersweet experience.

     I focused on the skills of the tree cutters. I’ve always been fascinated by trades people who are great at their jobs, and these men were experts. What they were doing—climbing 150 feet up trees that were swaying in the wind—in a harness with a chain saw was extremely risky. The guys below were also in potential danger from above, and from feeding a chipper. Coordination between those in the sky and those on earth was crucial.

Tree cutter in the center of the photo.

     They were totally comfortable with their work, doing their jobs automatically, joking easily. I, on the other hand, was holding my breath a lot! I watched the climber throw a rope over upper branches, tie it to lower branches, start up the chainsaw, cut the branch, slowly spin it into a perfect position to lower it below the roof line, and then let it drop to the ground. It was a narrow strip of a target between our house and fence yet he managed to hit it without taking out his co-workers, our houses, fences, sheds, or shrubs.

Note how tall the trees are over the
 lightpost and our  2-story house.

The top of one tree ready for the chipper.

     Questions swirled in my head as I watched them. How do you tie a knot that holds a 250-lb branch, yet releases easily when it needs to? How do you keep the saw from binding up? How do you make sure you don’t cut a rope or yikes, your harness? How do you know how high to climb before you cut the very top of the tree off? I didn’t know the answers, but watching them work was mesmerizing.

     What do they do when the chainsaw runs out of gas? Lower it on the rope, and get one of the other guys to fill ‘er up, then pull it back up. How do you make sure you don’t slide back down the tree? Have spikes on your shoes, and against instinct, lean away from the tree trunk, even when your arms are pushing a 3-ft chunk of cut tree trunk in the opposite direction, away from you.

    During a donut break, I listened to their stories. Most of them had been cutting trees all their lives. They had learned their craft from fathers and grandfathers before them. One told me that his grandfather was still climbing trees when he was 65 years old.

     When I told them I could never do their jobs, they teased me and told me to step into the harness, they’d teach me. I think I’ll stick to fighting battles with a pen (or laptop). When those chainsaws started buzzing, neighbors from up and down our street came out to watch, and to congratulate me on winning over the homeowner’s association. For now, in my tiny neck of woods, I’m a suburban legend.

Laura Keolanui Stark is starting to trust trees again. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

Girl Gets Car

Buying a new car has made me nostalgic about the cars I’ve owned over the years. I know cars are machines—metal and rubber, nuts and bolts, and yet I form such an emotional attachment to them. Each one has taken me on journeys and taught me lessons. Each one has a special place in my memories.

It was 1976 and I was going to be a senior in college at Louisiana State University, when I moved out of the dorms and into an off-campus apartment. There was a bus that shuttled back and forth between Tigerland and campus, but I needed a car, mostly to get to the grocery store.

My family had moved to Fairfax, Virginia and I went there during Christmas break and summer. My summer jobs didn’t pay much, so at the end of summer, Dad bought me a light blue ‘71 Volkswagen Squareback—a little station wagon. I named him Joey, as in Joy wagon.  He even had a little smile in the front where the trunk was.

      I was delighted, but worried. I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift and I would have to drive more than a thousand miles back to Baton Rouge.

Learning to drive an automatic had not come naturally to me. Now I had to learn a different kind of driving, in a week. Dad was confident that I’d learn how to shift. I wasn’t, but I didn’t have a choice.

My brother Bob was my teacher and he was excellent—patient and with a sense of humor.  He took me up to the elementary school and had me practice letting the clutch out slowly without much gas, just to feel when first gear would catch. I stalled Joey. I made him lurch. I ground gears putting him into reverse. Eventually I drove laps around and around an island in the parking lot while Bob coached me.

In explaining downshifting, Bob forgot to tell me to let the clutch out slowly for that also, so it was a good thing we had our seatbelts on or our heads would’ve hit the dashboard. We laughed, but it made an impression. I didn’t make that mistake again.

It didn’t take long before he had me practice stopping and starting on hills, feeling just how far to let the clutch out without stalling the car, and setting the emergency brake in case. Dad was right. I did learn how to drive a stick in time to drive my “new” car back to school. My boyfriend flew up north to help me drive down to Louisiana.

Fairfax, Virginia to Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Dad also gave me a Chevron credit card, but I still took the bus back and forth to campus. He called me in disbelief because my gas bill was often less than $20 a month. I kept a $10 bill in my glove compartment. If money got tight (which was the norm back then), I knew I could fill Joey’s tank with $10.

Joey saved my life once in a very dangerous situation. My boyfriend’s family lived in New Orleans. One Friday night after work, I drove from Baton Rouge to New Orleans for the weekend. On a long dark stretch of I-10, there was a causeway that spanned a bayou.

 
Joey started pulling to one side.  I was pretty sure I had a flat tire (left,rear), but it was a long causeway and it doesn't get much darker than a Louisiana swamp. I slowed down and continued on. At the end of the elevated causeway on dry land, the stupid boyfriend had told me to take a shortcut to his house.

The shortcut was through one of New Orleans' housing projects. I pulled up to a red stop light and could hear that I had a flat, but I wasn’t about to get out of the car in that neighborhood. That’s when a group of black men came up to Joey and started pounding on my hood and peering through the window yelling at me. Maybe they were just trying to tell me I had a flat. I wasn’t sticking around to find out. The light was still red, but Joey and I peeled out of there!

Instead of showing some concern for me and apologizing for telling me to drive through the projects when I got to his house, stupid boyfriend yelled at me for driving on the rim and being a chicken. The rim wasn’t damaged. Stupid boyfriend wasn’t my boyfriend much longer.

I liked bragging to guys that my car didn’t have a carburetor. It had fuel injectors in its suitcase engine. They usually didn’t believe me until I opened the engine up in the back of the car.

Other than the fuel injectors, Joey was a very basic, no-frills car. The engine didn't have a radiator. It was air cooled. Someone stole the VW emblem off the hood not long after I got him.

He leaked oil. He leaked in the rain. The floor was rusted out so that there were holes that you could see the road through. It was sort of like driving Fred Flintstone’s prehistoric car.

At one point Joey’s horn started randomly honking, so I waved to people as if they were my friends to head off any road rage.  I figured out how to pop the center cover of the steering wheel off with a screwdriver and bend the wire in there so that it wouldn’t touch metal—that’s what made the horn beep.

One night John and I went to a disco and parallel parked perpendicular to a row of cars. While we were dancing, someone else was backing into Joey leaving a huge dent in the driver's door. Somehow (without the help of Google) I figured out how to pop the dent out by sticking a plumber's plunger on the dent and pulling. Lesson learned. To this day I won't park behind a row of cars like that.

 Joey was a two door car, but you could fold the back seats down. That sure came in handy because I loaded Joey up with all my stuff to move to five different apartments including Married Students Housing after John and I got married.

Joey was my transportation after graduation to my first grownup job as an advertising copywriter. I carpooled with Marian one of the artists.

John changed Joey’s oil in the apartment parking lot after backing it up onto the curb so he could lie down under the car. I got my first ticket in that car. You couldn’t downshift into first gear in Joey unless you stopped. If I was in a rush, I’d just put the clutch in leaving it in second and brake pretty hard, but not completely stop. The ticket was for making a rolling “California stop” at a stop sign.

In 1981 we moved to Hawaii so John could get his PhD at the University of Hawaii. It was summer when we drove 1800 miles from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles and then shipped Joey over the Pacific Ocean. There wasn’t any GPS back then. Our navigation system consisted of relying on AAA maps with Trip Tiks which were close-up maps showing construction held together with a spiral binding like a skinnier stenographer’s notebook. 

We didn’t pre-book any motels. We just looked for Vacancy signs at hotels/motels when we stopped for the night.

It was an eventful trip. Our first stop was San Antonio. Our high rise hotel was across the street from the Alamo. The only view we remember of The Alamo was from the curb we sat on with our suitcases when the hotel caught on fire. John had just started a shower when I heard firetrucks wailing. I called the front desk. They assured me there was no cause for alarm.

One of my grandfathers was a fire chief.  When I looked out the window and saw the firemen laying hoses, I knew this was serious. I told John to get out of the shower. We had to evacuate. Someone set off the fire alarms. We grabbed our bags, directed people away from the elevators and to the stairs, and then rushed down six flights. Luckily it was a small fire so after the firefighters put it out we went back to our room.

Our route: Baton Rouge to Los Angeles with stops in San Antonio, El Paso, Phoenix, and then Los Angeles. 

The next leg of the trip was to El Paso. It was a long, flat 500 miles of I-10 rolling across parched land. Joey only had a radio, no tape player, but we had made mixed cassette tapes of our favorite songs and had a small battery powered tape player that we listened to because it was impossible to get radio stations out there.

       Joey also didn’t have air conditioning so we opened all the windows and pointed the triangular vent windows at our faces, but it just felt like we were in a convection oven. When it’s close to 100 degrees it’s still scorching even if it’s a dry heat. Despite the hot dry air blowing on us, we kept smelling gas and Joey just didn’t feel right.

When we pulled into El Paso we checked into our hotel room and then looked through the yellow pages for a VW dealer. They discovered the reason for the persistent gas smell. Two of the fuel injectors were broken and spraying gasoline all over the engine. The only reason we didn’t catch on fire out there in the middle of nowhere (way before cell phones) was because so much gas was spraying they said it kept putting the fire out. Luck was on our side twice. They were able to replace the fuel injectors right away. We were on a tight schedule. We had to get Joey on the ship to Hawaii in time, and we also had plane tickets to Hawaii.

The next day we headed for Phoenix. All the cross country road trips I’d made with my military family, had taught me a thing or two, and I took that Girl Scout motto, “Be Prepared” seriously. In addition to our suitcases, I’d packed a box with a gallon jug of water and some food. It was a good thing. An 18-wheeler had jack knifed on I-10. The police diverted us onto a two-lane highway somewhere in New Mexico, but that also backed up. We were stuck for hours.

The only way we found out what was going on was from truckers’ CB radios. Everyone was out of their cars sharing stories. Most people had no supplies. We gave some water and peanut butter and crackers to a family with a baby. John, ever the biologist, found the dried up skeletal remains of a goat and added a skull hood ornament to Joey. I was keeping a watchful eye out for snakes.

By the time we got to Phoenix, (remember that song?)  it was stormy and there were flash flood warnings. We were travel weary and ready for the last leg to LA. We slept well that night but woke up in a panic. Who knew Phoenix wasn’t on daylight savings time? We sure didn’t. We’d lost an hour!

Santa Ana winds pushed us along the way as we came into Los Angeles.  Joey’s steering wheel always started shaking like crazy whenever you drove more than 55 mph, so dealing with LA’s freeways was extra scary.  We made it to my Uncle Stan and Auntie Diane’s house in West Covina and they graciously let us stay the night.

We packed some tools into Joey’s front trunk, and drove him to the docks in Long Beach near the Queen Mary for the ocean part of his journey--shipped in a container to Honolulu.

I can’t remember how long it took for him to get to Hawaii—maybe a week? What I do remember is that when we got him, the tools we’d packed in the trunk were gone.

In Hawaii, Joey continued his service as a mini moving van. He transported our belongings through three moves near the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. And, he got more and more unreliable. When we drove over the Pali (part of the Koolau mountain range on Oahu) we’d downshift into third gear and encourage him with our best imitations of Scotty from Star Trek, “Aye Captain, I’m giving her all she’s got!” with Joey floored.

I became an expert at jump starting him, no small feat while dressed for work in heels. If he was acting up, I tried to park facing downhill so that I wouldn’t have to ask someone to push me, or worse yet, have to push myself and then hop in to pop the clutch.

I rarely drove on the H-1 freeway because I was always worried about stalling. More than once, John and one of his buddies, Ed had to come to my rescue on their mo-peds. One of our tax refund checks came just in time to pay for Joey’s engine to be rebuilt at Frenchies Shell station in Kakaako, a garage specializing in VW’s.

Joey chugged along for a few more years, but we finally decided it was time for a new car. We could afford it. Joey’s shortcomings: not being reliable, no power, no air conditioning greatly influenced our choice of the next car we bought.

As 1986 came to an end, we put a “For Sale” sign on him. It was hard to sign the title over to his new owner, but I patted Joey’s side and said good-bye.

Laura Keolanui Stark still loves a good road trip. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.