“It’s not going anywhere,” he said as he pulled hard on the cord and tied one last knot.
The desk came in parts, and I figured they’d all fit in the back of my little station wagon, but I figured wrong. The guard outside the store offered to help me tie it onto my car rack.
He seemed to know what he was doing. And I keep nylon straps in the car. So I figured between the two of us, we could strap it down securely. But as I watched him tie his knots and pull the cords, I started to shake. Literally, I started to shake. It was dark. It was getting late. I had a long drive ahead of me. With that thing on top of my car? What was I thinking?
“I’m driving home to Austin,” I told him.
“Good luck,” he said as I got into the car.
I was still shaking as I pulled onto the westbound feeder road. As the car got up to 35 miles per hour, the load began to buzz and vibrate. How was I going to make it home? It was now almost 9:00 at night, and I still had over 150 miles to go.
What on earth was I thinking?
I pulled off the road and tightened everything. His not-going-anywhere knots had already slipped. So I retied them and added more cords and knots of my own, and satisfied that it was finally as secure as I could make it, I pulled back into traffic.
But seriously, what was I thinking?
Minutes later, I pulled into a grocery store and bought some nylon rope: two spools of 100 feet each. And I proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes in the parking lot pulling the 100 feet of one of those spools thru my rank-amateur loops and knots, stopping regularly to untangle the yellow nylon mess lying at my feet.
Oh for heaven’s sake, what was I thinking?
I pulled back onto the road. The highway was still too busy and traffic too fast for me to do anything but drive with the local traffic, going from stoplight to stoplight. If I could just get to the outskirts of Houston on the feeder road, the traffic would surely diminish and I could get onto the freeway.
Red tail lights raced by on the freeway and I chugged along on the feeder road. I drove under the Beltway. I passed Fry Road, which used to be so far out in the middle of nowhere. I kept on going until I was by myself on the feeder road and the highway traffic had thinned. And after a few successful test runs up to 50 mph with no vibrating or buzzing, I got my courage up, seeing that no one was behind me, and I merged onto the Interstate. A drove along at 50, and the few cars that remained barreled by me at 70.
Three hours later, 30 minutes after midnight, I pulled into our driveway with the desktop still strapped firmly to the top of the car. I never got the guts to go faster than 52, and somewhere around Lagrange my gas mileage dropped noticeably when the front of the box split open and the box began gulping the cold night air like a Baleen whale.
It was late, but I was finally home. And I hadn’t hurt anyone. But oh my lord, what was I thinking?