Strange Rituals and Cheat Codes

This last weekend, my wife and I said goodbye to the aging minivan that had been a fixture in our family for the last decade.  It was a Honda Odyssey, of course, and just as it had replaced the decade-old Honda Odyssey that came before it, so too was it replaced by a decade-newer, lower mileage used Honda Odyssey.  

I mean, I'd been hoping for a midlife convertible, but danged if minivans aren't just so relentlessly useful.  Where once it was for carrying kids and stuff, now it's for carrying elderly parents and stuff.  

The Van is dead, long live the Van.

The new van is a 2023, with just under 31K miles on it, and that means...even though it's a lower trim level...that it's brimming with features that are new to us.  Like, say, auto start/stop, that unjustly maligned system that saves owners five to seven percent at the pump.  I mean, sure, if you've been bought by the oil industry, it's a bad thing.  But for anyone who cares about pinching nickels, it's a great feature.

If it works.  Which it did not, not for the first few days of driving.  

Every time the engine should have shut down at a stop, it didn't, and instead flashed an alert that the "system wasn't charging."  We'd noticed it during the test drive, but figured it would resolve.  It did not.  It kept flashing the error, even after forty minutes of driving.  Even after an hour.  The engine was warmed up.  The alternator should have charged the battery fully.  Which meant that something somewhere was wrong.

There's a warranty on the vehicle for the first month, but I really didn't feel like taking it in if another solution could be found, so to owner's groups I went.  There, I found the usual kvetching and complaining and frustrations with dealerships.  Mechanics seemed at a loss, as did the manufacturer.  

But in all of that, there were claims of a strange and magical solution.

An owner by the name of BadWolfOdyssey (A Dr. Who reference, I assume) had discovered how to get the system working again, without a trip to a mechanic or dealer.  Dozens of commenters sang the praises of the method, swearing it worked perfectly for them.  

Here's what they did:

1. Drive the Van for fifteen minutes.  
2. Stop in a parking lot, checking that as you do so the error message is showing.  
3. Turn off the Van.  
4. Pull the hood release latch and open the hood.  
5. Get out, and fully prop the hood.  
6. Then get back into the Van, close the door, and turn it on again.  
7. A "your hood is open" alert shows.  
8. Turn off the engine, get out, and go shut the hood.  
9. Return to the Van, close your door, start it.
10. Hey presto, the system will work again. 

That sounded as mechanical as standing on one foot with your finger on your nose and saying "Start/Stop" seven times while hopping in a circle.  It felt like a secret cheat code for a video game.   It was wibbly wobbly, as one might expect from a Dr. Who enthusiast. 

I tried it on the way home from church on Sunday, and it worked like a charm.

Why?  It's not clear.  It likely interrupts whatever software glitch causes the error code in the first place, in the same way that breath control exercises can prevent hiccups.  Some sensor doesn't pick up a necessary state for reactivation, and the system locks, until you do the silicon age equivalent of giving it a good whack in just the right place.

It was, whichever way, a little bit delightful.  

If only there were similar solutions to other problems, ritual movements and arcane positionings that would reset the deeper failings in our glitchy human code.

If only.

The Van

There is some question as to whether or not I'll get home tomorrow.  Not much, mind you, but enough that I find myself a little unsettled.  

Last night, after I warmed up our old Honda van to schlep the family to a nearby pizzeria, I was unpleasantly surprised when...goaded to movement...it sputtered into silence.  Sure, the temperature was barely fifteen Fahrenheit, but it had started without a hitch, and it'd warmed up for ten minutes with no problem.  I'd expected to slither it out through the eight inches of wind-driven snow without too much difficulty.

That was not, however, what the Fates had in mind.  The idiot lights, suddenly all illumined.  A warning on the primitive LCD informed all who cared that the charging system had failed.  The lights dimmed.  The engine pulsed and surged and waned, then went cold.  The van was kaput.  It would not restart.

It was, as intuition and a little frantic dabbling through Reddit revealed, the alternator.  Almost without a doubt.

The thwarted family recoalesced into three smaller vehicles, and together we made our way to an Uno's dinner.  But my mind was on the van, and the uncertain return to Virginia.   My thoughts remained there throughout the night, as my sleep was repeatedly disturbed by fretfulness.  Where would it be repaired?  And could the repair be accomplished in time to get me back for worship on Sunday?  None of these things were known, when I went to sleep last night, so Lethe was miserly with her ministrations.

But further, there was my peculiar care for the van itself.  Not for its use.  For what it is.  

We have had that van for thirteen years.  It has been, for a quarter of my middle-aged life, a perfect and practical thing.  It's been a shared family space, not a home but very much homely.  I have taught children to drive in that van.  Eager teen canoodling has happened in that van, because, yes, my sons, I know why those rear seats were down in the morning.  It has carried us all, together, to vacations and graduations, to funerals and marriages, to weeping and joy, all in humble comfort.  It's a liminal space, a travelling space, a Maker of the Ways, in an Esu Ellegua/Soichiro Honda sort of way.  

We've been sinking money into it lately, more and more as the years have progressed.  System after system has failed, five figures worth in the last twelve months.  It is a dying Honda in winter.  My Scots blood knows that to continue this is madness.

Part of me...probably the Irish part...wants to hold onto it forever, like I'm Cubano and it's a '57 Chevy.  But it's fading, and unreliable, and practical me struggles to justify such a romantic absurdity.   It may be time, I say, and my wife...never one to care about my concupiscent lust for novel wheeled and motorized things...agrees.

It is doomed.

"I can see the van recoiling in terror," said my older son, who drove it to prom, and who was moved in and out of college with it many a time.  "'No, surely, surely you won't, not after all these years,' it cries."

I too personify this object.   It has the heft of time and care.  I allow it to be imbued with my deep fatherly male pleasure in its function, in providing both utility and comfort and a sense that all is well, that all is safe, and that all are cared for.  It is now The Van.  We have named it.

Yet I remember the van that was The Van before it.  A machine that held that name, that carried tiny little ones in carseats, that carried beloved family that are now ancestors, and that schlepped mulch and brick and appliances. 

And though my midlife cries out in protest against it, surely and convertible yearnings be damned, there will be a van that follows the Van.

That will, in time, become the Van.  As I hope, someday, not to be the Dad, or my wife the Mom.  That a small voice will name another with our name, and that will be a good thing.  

Assuming, of course, that the country garage that holds our van now delivers it, functioning, as expected.