Anyone can make a mistake
Carl stood there, looking at the pump in his hand, trying to remember the past few moments.
He could remember pulling into the station and the sense of journey’s-end relief that had descended when they passed the campground sign a few clicks back, that almost giddy feeling you get when you realize you really are on vacation.
It was just something Puritan in him that kept him from turning into the gate and finding their cabin before completing this last chore. They were almost on empty; better to fill up now than on the way out.
That was the last thought he could recall. The rest was autopilot. The truck was a 2018 model; he must have filled it up hundreds of times. You do something that often, that regularly, it wears a dogtrot in your brain. You don’t have to think about these things.
But now Carl was looking down at the pump in his hand. It was for regular 87 octane gasoline. His truck was diesel. His gas tank had been nearly empty—they’d ridden a few miles with the warning light on. Now it was near full.
He’d held down the lever and stood there thinking about how they had finally come through this covid thing. He thought about going up to Blowing Rock, paddling on Bass Lake, waffle cones of Kilwins ice cream, and a week of afternoon beers on the dock with his wife and his motherin-law and her sister and her sister’s husband, until the mechanism shut itself off.
Only then had he noticed.
His first thought was it wasn’t fair. The BP stations in Louisiana had green handles on their diesel pumps, red handles on their gasoline pumps. The handle in his hand was definitely green-ish, but this wasn’t a BP station. It would only make sense that every oil company used the same colors to differentiate their pumps, but on the other hand, in these times of high capitalism, one might be more concerned with issues of decor, trade dress and brand harmony than providing subtle clues to the idiots who couldn’t read the all-cap sans-serif “DIESEL” above the proper pump.
He hadn’t been tricked; he’d made a mistake. An honest mistake but one he wasn’t sure he’d be able to explain to his wife, who had run inside the service station to splash some water on her face and buy a Diet Mountain Dew.
She always took longer in these places that Carl thought necessary, and at the moment he couldn’t decide whether that was a good or bad thing. For as long as she stayed inside the store, Carl could stand there, the sun on his unmasked face, looking if not feeling competent, another good ol’ boy with a big truck vacationing with his family in North Carolina’s Highlands.
But as soon as she came out, well, he’d have to tell her. They couldn’t drive the truck. Carl knew that. He wasn’t a scientist, but he was a pretty fair mechanic, and he knew that gas was gas—a solvent—but diesel fuel was oil, and that they had different flash points. Diesel ignites at a lower temperature than gas.
If he tried to start the truck up it might turn over because there was some diesel in the tank and the fuel line, but as soon as the gas showed up in what he still thought of as the carburetor (though carburetors had
been extinct for some time now) it would take it longer to combust, if it’d combust at all. It’d screw up the injectors.
Maybe it would blow up. Carl couldn’t say for certain that it wouldn’t.
The only thing to do now was to push the truck away from the pump and call a tow truck. It was no more than a couple of miles back to the campground, and the others were probably there already. They were mostly kind people who wouldn’t give Carl too hard a time about his mistake.
Anyone can make a mistake. The idea was not to compound it by being stubborn or pretending it didn’t happen.
The gas station convenience store didn’t have its own garage, but the clerk behind the counter knew someone who could do the job of dropping and draining the fuel tank. Carl didn’t think it could be that difficult a job so he said OK, and half an hour later a kid showed up with a tow truck and carted away Carl’s ride. And he went onto the campground and sat out on the deck with the others, but his afternoon beer didn’t taste like nothing.
After a couple of days the kid who drained the tank called and said it was too big a job for him; he’d gotten the gas out and cranked it up, but he was afraid the gas had somehow spread through the engine. It popped and shuddered when he started it. A technician with more expertise was needed. The kid was sorry he had to charge them for his labor.
No doubt it dropped a pall over things, but no one would say Carl ruined the vacation with his brooding, and the truth was the vacation wasn’t ruined. The pandemic had kept the family apart, but during that late spring week things felt normal, with only the usual worries about health and money. Carl thought a truck in the shop was nothing compared to the chemo his sister-in-law was undergoing to treat ovarian cancer. He sure wasn’t going to complain.
So Carl rented a car, and he and his wife drove the 700 miles back to Louisiana. They arranged to have the truck towed home—Carl knew a mechanic he trusted with the job; he only hoped his insurance would cover the greater part of the repairs. (And why shouldn’t they? What was it if not an accident?)
It took a couple of months and nearly $22,000, but the truck was put right again. The insurance company paid all but $250 for the repairs, they haven’t decided how much, if anything, they’ll pay for the towing charge or the rental car.
Still and all, Carl doesn’t regret the trip. The Delta variant is strong in his part of the bayou, but a lot of his neighbors are resisting being vaccinated or even being tested for the virus. Now the Louisiana Department of Health is offering money to people to take covid tests: $25 for the first test and $10 for each additional test, up to $350. Yeah, Carl’s glad they got away when they could, because he doesn’t know when they’ll get a chance to get away again. He imagines things will shut down again soon, that even his neighbors will go back to wearing masks.