Broad Sound

There’s an Australian phrase I’ve long been drawn to: fair dinkum. I love the fact that my Deaf self can sound it out phonetically with consistent accuracy. It’s like a tightrope walk between solemn and goofy. In other words: totally my vibe. Fair dinkum means a few things, but first and foremost it means for something to be true. As a former English major, I found myself looking up all kinds of exotic Australian lingo over the years as a way to connect with my father, a true Aussie born and raised. He arrived stateside in the 1980s to travel the American highways and explore the country. Rather improbably, that journey led him to my mother, which led him to my eventual hometown of Spokane, WA. I spent many years somewhat baffled at our connection. I have brown hair and brown eyes, clearly my mother’s son. My father has strawberry blond hair and blue eyes. I often wondered how we could be related. We seemed so different, so unable to really connect in the easy way I naively believed other fathers and sons could do. But this isn’t a story about how different we are. No, this is a story about a son who thought he had told the whole story—twice—only to have the thread thrown to the wind. This is a story about a father and son who took 36 years and one 1941 pickup truck to realize they were far more similar than they’d ever imagined. Fair dinkum.

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I spent my whole life hearing about how incredible my father was with cars, how he could bring them back from the junkyard’s greasy gates. Weekends would unexpectedly be filled with family friends unable to afford a proper mechanic and hoping my father would save them. He almost always came through. And when he didn’t, he could tell you exactly what to do next. I would hear all these stories knowing that would never be me. Cars felt impenetrable. Far too many moving parts crammed in a big metal body, like an opaque Trojan Horse. So, when he would talk about identifying the root cause of a mysterious car noise less than a block into a drive, I, his Deaf son, would think, Yup, that’s definitely not gonna be me.

My father couldn’t say exactly when he caught the mechanical bug. He always had an interest in cars but didn’t know how to work on them. He built his expertise in Melbourne through three main stages:  a four-year apprenticeship at a local Holden dealership, where he built the foundation of his mechanical knowledge; three years as the lead mechanic of a three-bay service center, where he could blame no one but himself for a misdiagnosis; and three and a half years at the General Motors Holden Experimental Engineering Facility and Holden Proving Grounds, where he’d conduct a variety of tests and relay results to engineers for further tweaking, developing an appreciation for all the massive moving parts that go into making a vehicle live a long, high-quality life. 

In the middle of his apprenticeship, he drove with his best friend Greg to a drag racing show at Calder Park Raceway in Melbourne and saw a 1941 Chevy panel truck for sale on a front lawn. It was painted purple—with a paintbrush!—and had black fenders. They talked about it throughout the races and bought it on the way home. From there, my father used his new mechanical knowledge to find the sources of all its issues and bring it roaring back to life—installing a bigger 350 V8 engine, a Muncie four-speed transmission, and Positraction differential, effectively making it a muscle car you could easily—and mistakenly—underestimate. Greg played the role of the enthusiastic best friend, helping out however he could, learning new mechanical tidbits from my father along the way. The car was not street-legal. The wood frame in the back had rotted out. But once they got it going, they’d let it stir to life and drive down the streets before bringing it back home and covering it up. It just so happened that a particularly annoyed neighbor often alerted a detective who lived around the corner. Said detective went for a walk one day and saw my father sitting behind the wheel of this very illegal car. “I’m going to let you take it home,” he said, “and never bring it out again.” My dad could only put the engine into another car, a 1973 Holden Kingswood station wagon, and sell the rest.

Nearly forty years later, my father decided to revive the dream. On a trek up a long highway to finish a job his crewmate couldn’t—a job he happily took because a satisfied customer and a working machine were always his goal—he drove past a 1941 Chevy pickup truck. The same one he had rebuilt nearly 40 years before with Greg in Melbourne. After starting life anew in America—a life that took him from Austin, TX to talking dreams of marriage and family with my mother in Yellowstone National Park, through three kids, three dogs, and over 25 years of marriage, of Saturdays soaked up by soccer games and Sundays by mass and everything that came after—the dreams had been mostly set aside. Each opportunity to get his hands dirty came in the form of doing work on others’ vehicles or of fixing our own, saving us thousands we didn’t quite have. But now? The kids were moving on in life. A dream could be sparked again. The next day, he took my mother out for a drive and sold her on the dream he had already committed to. He brought it home and the project of all projects began.

But as excited as I was for my father, his purchase emphasized a personal reality I had yet to face: I didn’t know jack about cars. With him always being underneath a car or snaking his hands through tight, greasy spaces, it wasn’t easy for my Deaf self to access all this knowledge. So, I compensated with the drier, cleaner knowledge. I knew many of the makes and models. I knew which ones he enjoyed working on and which he didn’t. I would occasionally dip into my father’s Car and Driver magazines, which often collected dust in the living room wicker basket, and try to decipher as much as I could of this new language. I’d ask him questions about certain cars, letting him show his thinking through mixed metaphors and carefully drawn-out examples. We were never the type of father and son to throw the football in the backyard or watch sports on TV, so this was our way of bonding. In the colder Spokane months, I would often call him when my car wouldn’t start, and he’d explain to me the three things to consider: spark, fuel, and air. I’d follow his instructions or wait for him to leave a job and come rescue me. He’d later lament to my mother how we siblings only ever called him when our cars broke down. That’s when I realized, perhaps more than ever, the bridge we stood on opposite ends of.

THE SPARK

On a cold, blustery spring day in 2008, I sat in my maternal grandmother’s Buick LeSabre, watching my brother’s middle school baseball game. We were barely paying attention. I told her about the relationship between my father and me and how I wanted to write about it for a college leadership class. She told me about a time in the kitchen in which she warned my mother of what was to come—how she saw, even at a young age, the similarities between my father and me and between my maternal grandfather and my Uncle Mike. She laid out the dichotomy like the believer in angels she is: on one hand, my grandfather, a carpenter and user of tools, his hands missing fingers from projects gone awry; on the other, my uncle, an intellectual and artist, a lover of poems and the abstract. They did not get along, she explained, until my uncle went to college. There, the respect for their differences formed. There, they built a bond she wasn’t sure would ever come. In my grandfather’s last days, his life cut tragically short by aggressive pancreatic cancer, my uncle brought the poem he’d later read at his father’s funeral. After reading it, my grandpa said, “Michael, that’s a work of art.” “No, Dad,” he responded. “You’re a work of art.” Tears held in my grandmother’s eyes as she said this. I had no way of knowing how many times she’d told it. But the emotional heft remained. Perhaps the only thing holding in the tears was the relief that this story ended the way it did—that what began as two repelling forces had become forever entwined.

And so, I went home and I wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to grasp my way around this feeling. This knowing that we were probably never going to be the father and son who threw the football in the backyard over a charbroiling BBQ, or drank beers on weekend fishing trips. Intimacy seemed impossible, even beyond the minimal thresholds of any toxic masculinity. I turned the essay in to my professor, convinced I got something out of my system that would never see the light of day. 

When your car doesn’t start, the cheapest fix is often the spark plug. Each time it ends up being the culprit, the owner of the vehicle is shocked at how something worth thousands and thousands of dollars can be brought to its knees by a part that costs a mere couple dollars at the local NAPA. They get over that shock when they feel gratitude that such a cheap solution exists. And then they marvel at knowing someone like my dad to find this cheap solution for them.

When Father’s Day rolled around, I, a perpetually broke college student and general cheapskate, returned to the essay. The perfect gift. It cost me an entire 15 cents at the college library. It was the most efficient inverse relationship you could form of cost-to-emotional impact ratio. I probably left it at my parents’ house, afraid of whatever feelings it might stir up, and wondering if some lifelong dam was about to burst open. That flood never came. I got words of gratitude, but it couldn’t help feeling muted. I knew my father kept his emotions under the skin. I would often joke—mostly to myself—that strong emotions prompted my father to look like he was about to sneeze, and that the only conclusion to be drawn from it was that the emotional state was an allergic reaction. It would be years before I realized he felt things as deeply as anyone.

Not long after, my father returned home to Melbourne in time to see Pop, my grandfather, in his last days. Pop was the one who taught me the Collingwood Magpies anthem, my proper musical introduction to the stunning world of Australian rules football. He drew caricatures of the family on a notepad as we watched the Magpies lose at the massive, historic Melbourne Cricket Ground. He used to sell books for Collins and Penguin, allowing him access to conferences and lots of books on the side to dive into. At Pop’s funeral, my father gave the eulogy, a complicated task for someone who perhaps felt sandwiched between two generations in love with drawing, with books, with sports. 

When my father returned from Australia, we bombarded him with questions about the trip and how the family was doing. But there’s a look someone gives you when they want to say something to you and only you, when questions are like trees swaying before them, their eyes looking past it all, eager to reach out. He was holding something, quietly listening while not really listening, worried he’d lose his train of thought he had so carefully laid on track. When the lull in the conversation finally came, he told me all about the funeral and how he had used a paragraph from my essay in his eulogy, and how many men came up to him afterwards to share how much they connected with that specific passage. It was an undeniably cool moment: my father, who would never call himself a writer and knew words would fail him as he described his own father, used my own words in place of his. And it worked out perfectly.

But the emotional disconnect came from the fact that this cathartic moment happened in a different hemisphere, an entire Pacific Ocean away. I wasn’t there to see it. There was no way to tell how much it meant other than to trust my father’s recollection. I wanted more. The spark plug is a cheap and easy fix, just like the paper gave us a way into understanding our relationship in ways we never had before. But a spark is only the beginning, only one of three elements necessary to get an engine running. We still had so much of our lives ahead of us. There needed to be something to keep it going. 

THE FUEL

In the midst of my post-graduate aimlessness, the kind you wade in as everyone moves away to bigger jobs and bigger cities, I took up an oil pastels class. I learned as much as I could by watching my patient instructor—I still hadn’t learned what it meant to request an interpreter or to use the law as a guide. I gleaned enough not to embarrass myself, and for one of my final projects made an oil pastel rendition of a photo we took of the 1941 truck, when it rested on the backyard lawn, rocks and trees decorating the scenery around it. There, the blotchy blue paint of the truck almost matched the sky above it. Something so rusty felt so natural. I gave it to my father for Father’s Day, another attempt to bridge a gap through gift-giving. My father called it a real “facsimile,” a word I would later have to look up to even appreciate, and he placed it upon the living room mantel where it sat for many years after.

When I moved to Austin in 2012, it slowly dawned on me that Christmas would be the only real time I would be home to see my father open the gifts I gave him. Father’s Day and birthdays would have to be mailed presents with low expectations. But Christmas? That’s where I could really pull off some magic. If going away to college a mere 30 minutes from home could stir up feelings of mutual respect that would be written and read from Down Under, then moving 2,000 miles away from my parents gave me even more time to appreciate what I had, and to dream of new ways to show such appreciation.

I would often try to tug at my father’s nostalgia for his homeland. One year, I gave him two giant flags to hang in his shop: one for the Collingwood Magpies and the other the Australian national flag, representing two of his most important allegiances. Another year, a subscription to an online library of Hey Hey It’s Saturday, an SNL-like show he grew up on (and whose required technology proved a few clicks and passwords too far to ever enjoy). If nostalgia didn’t work, I’d lean back on cars. A reprinted mechanic’s guide to his 1941 Chevy pickup truck. A fancy, colorful book of car history from the discount aisles of Barnes & Noble. Anything to warm his petrol heart.

About six years ago, I found myself deep in an artistic rut. I hadn’t written much. My own interest in drawing remained in the ‘admiration from afar’ stage with rarely any application to paper. My blog existed with few, if any, updates. I needed something to jolt my creative spirit to life, to give it a spark, and I found my fuel in the form of a 1941 Chevy Pickup model set. I had spent my entire life building Lego sets and then forming my own creations from the many pieces I had accumulated. A model kit seemed like one step above that. How hard could it possibly be? As it turned out: almost impossibly so.

It took all the late and early hours I could squeeze out of the day to get it built prior to my flight home, fighting through shoddy glue, frustratingly luxurious drying times, and pieces too small to be sweating about but also necessary to sweat about or the whole thing would collapse like a sad house of cards. I nearly gave up. But then, as it dried and looked almost like the real thing, I took it one step further. I applied carefully cut lines of painter’s tape around the surface. Then I used some red and blue acrylic paint to make it look like an Australian flag had been draped over it. It came out beautifully. I’ve rarely felt prouder of a project.  This was going to do the trick. This had to do the trick. This had to be the gift that would drain whatever emotional water had kept us at a distance. 

Christmas morning came and I felt queasy in my stomach, the way you do when an entire event hinges on one moment that could go any which way. We had gone by ages, allowing the youngest—my brother—to open all his gifts first, then my sister, myself, my mother, and finally my father. I could barely focus on anything up to that point. I was so sure this would flip some switch I couldn’t even define and yet so worried the circuit would be shorted, that the spark would not be met with fuel. I don’t remember his exact reaction, but I do remember it being far more understated than I had hoped for. He definitely seemed to think it was cool. He picked it up and showed it to us all. And then we moved on. That was, I then realized, as good as it was going to get.

Texting is not something my father ever had an affinity for. Perhaps he was too old-school for it, desiring the occasional phone call. Perhaps the buttons were too small for his big thumbs. It was a big day when he first started using emojis—he thought we were impressed at his technological growth when really we were more excited to get different colors in his responses. Finally, his dry humor and silliness would shine through. Even then, his texts were short and to the point. They served a simple communicative function, an agreeable cog in a Luddite’s routine. And because we were still at least a couple years away from using FaceTime to talk with each other, we were slowly running out of fuel. Our relationship didn’t have much to keep it running.

So, imagine my surprise—months after the gift that did not give quite enough—getting a text at 6:42am with a photo of my model beside his sink. Just a quick note, the text began, as if we had been carrying on some invisible conversation, the ’41 plastic model that you gave me at Xmas has been a big help in just checking the correct body lines, etc…I have the model on the counter in our bathroom and study it everyday. Thanks! I was floored. The longest text I’d likely ever received from my father. I delighted over every detail. The way he described it as ‘plastic.’ The idea that a model I spent many error-filled hours nudging together would help with tracking model lines for a full-size metal vehicle. What the actual hell? It didn’t quite seem real. But I basked in the delayed response. Here we finally were, connecting in a way that suited us both. There I was     , with my amateurish creative skills, putting something together for the mechanical, practical mind of my father. I was putting art in the machine, and the machine had just responded in its own artful way.

Growing up, whenever my parents would be out for the night, I’d throw down a big blanket and dump all my Legos out, eager to come up with a creation I would describe as cool. Half the fun came from piecing together seemingly incompatible parts—the propellers of a sub, the probing arm of a space shuttle, the wings of a fighter plane—and making something new. You could make anything work with the right story. You could fit it inside any dream, like an engine taking you places you never imagined before. My father has been rebuilding his dream with this truck, mixing and matching parts. He bought and used the suspension and frame of a 1991 Chevrolet S-10 to form the foundation. He replaced the 1941’s engine with that of a rebuilt V8 small-block Chevy, itself bigger than the S-10’s. Then he pulled the doors and grill from another 1941 pickup he found. Three different trucks in various forms trading spaces in and near the shop. The creative process was visible for anyone to see. No wonder the reference lines helped him keep on track.

Fuel in any vehicle is a complicated system with many parts. It’s oil and gas and everything that keeps the engine lubricated and moving. If any of the parts are not lined up, the engine will not start. It will take an expert to work through the fuel system piece by piece to locate the problem. A plastic model I had agonized over sat beside my father’s sink every morning, reminding him of all the important body lines in his project, giving him a reference to check in with just as often as he brushed his teeth. I was helping him stay in alignment. Perhaps this is the fuel we needed to keep going. To admire each other’s work from afar, from the bathroom sink and the pictures we sent to each other.

What I didn’t see coming, and wouldn’t understand for another half-decade, is how much my father and his truck would help me. As I accumulated certifications and another master’s degree in an educational field in which I had no clear way of moving up, I found myself turning more and more to my projects, desperate for something to make the world feel a little bigger again. At the same time, my wife and I had another far more important project walking around our ankles, consuming some of our sleep and our previously idle moments: our daughter. I felt the pressure to do something with all these projects, with these drafts and hundreds of phone notes, to make them something visible. At least you could see my father’s truck. You could walk into his shop and see the wires splayed everywhere. You could see the stain of oil in every corner. You could see ten years of work, each piece with a story to later be told, all out in front of you. But for me? Most of my stories existed in digital files no one would ever see except when they were ready to be seen. I needed to figure out a plan. I needed to learn how to be an artist and father and actually breathe.

THE AIR

Already a decade-plus into his truck project, my father needed a second wind. Retirement approached, and with it all the promises of uninterrupted hours he could spend in the shop. We all thought the same thing: this thing might finally get running. In a fortuitous turn made possible by loose ties suddenly pulled taut, my father stumbled upon a retired Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape instructor, a man who not only lived a mere 25 miles away from my parents, but who specialized in rebuilding the exact 1941-46 Chevy pickups my dad had worked so hard to bring to life. They quickly hatched a plan in phases, my father bringing the truck in various stages to be sanded, painted, and put together in ways that would shave months, if not years, off his timeline. It reminded me of the times I would bring a piece I had written to an editor, hoping they could help me beat it into its final shape with guiding questions and later with line edits, and I could take it back and bring it to the finish line, finally feeling that sense of accomplishment.

In the summer of 2022, home for an extended visit with my wife and ever-curious daughter, I snuck out to the shop one afternoon. My father, deep into his task, was trying to figure out why certain things were not working the way he had hoped. I asked him what he was up to, a question I had lobbed at him many times over the years, both in person and over FaceTime, often getting some very technical explanation followed by a nod that said, with some resignation, it was all still a work in progress. But this time was different. I got another extended response, but one less technical. I got something I could truly, unequivocally relate to: I got the response of an artist deep in the weeds. He described how he was just so close yet felt so far away. Each time he thought he had closed a loop, another would open. In many ways, these final steps seemed the hardest of all.

He sounded demoralized. I immediately recognized this lunging, exasperated cadence. I thought about all the stories and essays and screenplays I had worked on where I found myself near the end and completely unable to just quite wrap it up. How there would be a moment where everything felt lost, a true spiral and some dark nights of the creative soul before it could be found again. There is no way to avoid this moment. It is a necessary part of the process. The only way out is through.

So, I explained this to my dad, dropping technical terms that made sense to me, such as ‘editors’ and ‘drafts’ and whatnot (at least they sounded as technical to him as a ‘crankshaft’ and ‘piston’ would sound to me). I painted for him a picture of the emotional churning, the anxiety of it all that chews at you as you keep trying to move forward. How what keeps you from doing more work isn’t so much your skill in doing it but your confidence in your ability to pull it off. And how, sometimes, the only way to get going again is to actually begin. Anywhere, anytime, anyhow.

I could see the wheels turning as he stood, listening. Something was flickering and it wasn’t just the shop lights. The truth is, I have no idea how much of this process I actually conveyed that afternoon. It’s very possible my father will read this and go, “Huh.” It’s hard to accept feedback when you’re in the middle of it, too. But what I remember most is the unmistakable buzz I felt as I left his shop, the feeling of finally getting to be the one to give him a pep talk. I felt full confidence in delivering it, yet I wondered if any of it got through. I remember the way his face turned as I talked to him, the way it released some tension. As if some mental wires that once held him back had been cut, allowing him to make new connections.

In the months that followed, my father continued to work on getting his truck to start, eliminating possible culprits and getting ever closer to the source of the problem. When we visited for Christmas, I came out to the shop again. His demeanor was entirely different from the summer. Here, the truck sat, painted black like a shadow you could trust, imposing and inviting all at once. He hurriedly ran around to the driver’s side and hopped in. As my father cranked and roared his truck to life, this black beauty ran rich and loud and alive. We were a long way from the early days of a patchy, sky-blue truck with dents and rust resting alongside trees and grass. Here, the body looked immaculate in its lines and curvature. The black paint blended it all in, like a vehicle the Devil himself might drive alongside the highway of souls. 

AND FINALLY: IGNITION

Every artist knows the power of a deadline. After getting his truck running, my father set a goal of not only running but driving the truck in the Car d’Lane classic car cruise nearly 45 minutes away. It’s an event he had attended over the years, one in which dreams would ride alongside the cars themselves, and after not getting the truck done in time for last year’s cruise, he knew he had to get it done this time. So, he took a particularly nerdy trek out to the Spokane Valley Library to swim through their collection of automotive reference material. He took pictures of the wiring schematics of a ‘91 Chevy S-10—the underbody of his ‘41—to make sure his wires were lined up correctly. He covered the hole in the floor around the transmission—a product of his Frankenstein efforts—and set the new taillights in their place. He did all this with an accelerated timeline because people had been asking him about this truck for over a decade, and he was finally ready to let this properly licensed and insured art project be seen. 

When he finally rolled around to Car d’Lane—on Father’s Day weekend, rather fittingly—the truck overheated. The electric cooling fan and radiator were held together by a plastic zip tie, a necessarily temporary solution to beat the deadline. The zip tie breaking halted the fan, causing a fuse to blow and the engine to overheat. It would have been demoralizing for anyone, to come this far and to break down this close. But he calmly moved a fuse from another place, tightened everything up, and finished a night he once could only dream of. 

When I came to visit this past summer—a full year after throwing my best artistic advice at a mechanical wall, hoping for something to stick—he had me ride in the passenger seat out onto a nearby highway. The speedometer wasn’t plugged in yet; we rode by feel, by watching the speed of the cars around us. And without the cab sealed, the true noise of the truck’s powerful engine flooded in. As pure a driving experience as I may ever have. 

But then he pulled over into the local middle school parking lot. We switched spots. I took a look at the pedals, crammed a little tighter together than usual, and tried to summon up all the necessary muscle memory for driving stick. The clutch demanded a hard push. The engine threatened to leap out. But this was no different than driving lessons nearly 20 years ago in another parking lot, working out the clutch, the gears, and the expectations of my father. I felt honored to be trusted with this work of art; it all came full circle in a way that felt almost too writerly, a little too perfect. After so long, the future was finally here. We were riding in a moving, ever-tinkering dream. It was time to show everyone his work. 

My father learned—in many hard ways—what it’s like to wait for a response that will never come. He understood the lesson before I did. He understood it when I drove off after he spent two weekends bringing my Honda back to life, puttering away with exhaust and not the words of gratitude he should have received. He understood it when he brought all the many other cars back to life and his miraculous touch became so expected that people would still forget to thank him. Any artist knows that once you release a piece you’ve worked on back into the wild, for others to see and witness and digest, you have to let it go. You cannot control the response. The desire for one will kill you. 

This truck is an art project my father has been sharing with me for over a decade. Each time I see him—either on FaceTime or in person—I ask him how it’s going. Sometimes he hasn’t touched it in weeks, due to the reality of appointments, obligations, and unexpected weekend errands. Sometimes he’s wrist-deep in oil, or underneath with a mini flashlight clutched between his teeth, determined to find a mechanical culprit, asking to call him back in five minutes. The amazing thing is I never feel lost. My father can explain his progress in ways I understand. He can elaborate on technology in layman’s terms that would make a handbook blush. This is a man who knows his art form and how to manipulate it. This is his craft. He is an artist through and through.

My whole life, I was led to believe my father was too practical and mechanical and I was too intellectual and creative. But I wonder how much the confines of language limited what we could be if it made us feel like we’re two completely different people when we’re far more similar than anyone realized. Why couldn’t a mechanic—who knows the ins and outs of engines and parts that make a several-thousand-pound project safe for the road—be considered an artist themselves? We admire the looks of cars. We immortalize them in film and pictures, in carefully designed magazine spreads. We speak with reverence of the guttural growls hot rods can make, echoing throughout the city. My father used references to help him stay on track with his project just like I used reference photos of his truck to create the oil painting or the plastic model.  The reality is that my father and I had been talking about his most important project for years. It is barely any different from all the times I’ve talked to my writing peers through their stories and ideas, digesting feedback and offering ways to get to where they really want the work to go. Perhaps we were just two artists who took so much of our lives to realize that the real art project, the one that lives as long as you do and often long after, is in the relationships with others you keep working at. Each step we take—each FaceTime call with my daughters, each link texted, each story unspooled, each book or movie shared—is another draft in a living, ever-changing document. Fair dinkum.