A Visit to the Nest

I took in my car to a repair shop my father recommended. I needed to get one of my motor mounts replaced. A motor mount is exactly what it sounds like, a thick piece of rubber that connects the engine to the chassis and reduces vibrations. This final motor mount was deep in the engine and neither me or my father or a previous repair man had been able to get it out. Peter, the head of the repair shop my father recommended, started the operation by removing several components of the engine just to see the motor mount clearly. Peter is an older man and a quiet man, whether because English isn’t his first language or because of his personality I’m not sure. The 1997 Honda Civic I had just brought in he had undoubtedly seen countless times before, he knew what he was in for.

It didn’t take long after he began working on the car for me to notice the disarray his repair shop was in. This shop was in a state of utter chaos. Now when I say “chaos” you’re probably picturing a shop filled with SOME unorganized parts, a mess here and there, maybe a desk filled with junk mail and scattered garbage. “Chaos” does not even begin to adequately describe the overwhelming mess that was this shop. Imagine a desk filled with a mountain of greasy CV joints, maybe a hundred of them, picture, right next to it, another desk right next to that one filled with the exact same thing. Imagine several shelves filled with heaps of CV joints above and next to those. Imagine a vise somehow dangling off of the ground, hanging for dear life off of the shaft of one of those CV joints near the bottom of a heap.

(CV Joint for reference)

There are at least four cars in this garage, who knows if they have ever been driven once within the last decade. One car has its engine missing and in its place, in this gaping void, it is filled with random parts, plastic coverings, and broken twisted pipes. It’s hood is open and tools are resting on the windshield wipers as if someone, some lunatic, thinks this car is actually just steps away from being operational. Another car in the back is considerably older, its body more rectangular. It’s a 69---no 72, as Peter corrects one customer. Imagine piles and piles of what can only be described as junk to an outsider. Engine coverings, motor plates, lumber, office chairs, empty fast food bags and soda cups, empty oil jugs, dirty blue shop towels. In one corner there is a huge puddle of bolts, washers, sparkplugs, and all manner of short steel pipe—sitting there, somehow disconnected from the other messes like some sort of great pacific garbage patch. In another corner is a collection of half a dozen engines, each with an obvious large gear on the side and smaller gears on the other, some of these gears are covered by belts, others have belts loosely hanging off of them pathetically. Tools: wrenches, screwdrivers, sockets, pneumatic tools, pliers of all sizes and type strewn everywhere and in every nook and cranny created by this great accumulation of things. And the gaskets. So many gaskets of every diameter, of every material, of every semi round shape litter the ground and can be found on top of the heaps and engines and cars, as if a bomb made exclusively of gaskets went off many years ago. They are more everywhere than any other part. And on top of all of this is a glaze of grease, grime, and every mysterious and caustic substance that blackens it all. 

And yet somehow, Peter, with his lifetime of knowledge, has made some sort of sense of it all. It is soon revealed this is his natural environment, built up over years like a nest. There is a grinding wheel nestled in one of the piles of CV joints that he instinctually goes to, to grind a tool. In order to get extra leverage he plucks out a twisted pipe from the chaos and sheaths it onto a wrench. He somehow knows which type of wrench to turn which type of nut with as little as a glance to his side. And, while the process is not speedy by any means, he gracefully manages to remove and replace the motor mount that had plagued me and my father and a previous repair shop for weeks, and with that my car is fixed. He charges a modest amount for two hours of focused work. I thank him for his labor and expertise and he walks away without another word.