We’re back in Lander. Back so soon? Isn’t this supposed to be a climbing trip? Why are we always hanging in town? As we were driving out last time to go set up camp at Sinks Canyon, Mico noticed this little golden light on the dashboard. This little golden light was in the shape of letters, and these letters spelled the words “check engine.” When Mico pointed this out, I was ready to have him turn the car around and head back to Lander immediately. To me, a car is a mysterious, magical creature. I do not know how it works, but most of the time I take for granted that it does work. I’m willing to pay people, who claim to know how these creatures work, large sums of money to assure me that everything is hunky dory. Mico knows something about cars because he is a mechanical engineer and did an extracurricular activity with the alleged goal of building a race car. Before I went on this trip, my mom told me to do whatever Mico advised because he is an engineer. I have been trying to follow her advice, though she herself is not an engineer. Mico said he thought we could wait, climb for a couple days, see if the check engine light turned off on its own, if it didn’t, then we could go back into town and speak with experts. Thinking of my mother, I agreed.

The next day, when we turned on the car to go climb, the little golden light was still on. In the afternoon, when we drove back to camp to put the rain fly on our tent (who knew it was possible for it to be sunny in the morning but rain later in the day?), the light was still on. We decided to get up early the next day, climb for the morning, and head into town in the afternoon to get the car looked at. Worst case scenario, we’d be stranded in Lander for a week while they ordered a special part for my 1999 Subaru Legacy.

With this in mind, we tried to make the most of our climbing. We got to the crag at 7am, and by noon we were struggling to complete climbs due to exhaustion. In town, we asked the woman at the local climbing store for a mechanic recommendation, dropped the car off, and went thrift store shopping. We purchased a set of 4 cassettes titled “The Golden Age of Country” and a Celine Dion cassette. It’s possible that we may have been overcharged ($5.15) since, last time I checked, cassettes stopped being used in the early 2000s.

We took shelter from the hail in a coffee shop with a climbing wall. There I received a call from Brant, the mechanic, who said the problem with the car was the catalytic converter but that I wouldn’t need to address it until it affected performance. After I hung up, my resident car expert asked me with a grin if knew what a catalytic converter was. I, of course, did not. Appraently, it has to do with car emissions, so we’ll be polluting at a higher rate until it gets fixed. I wonder if there’s a room in hell reserved for people who don’t get catalytic converters fixed, and if they share that room with oil industry tycoons and Scott Pruitt. Probably not. That seems a bit extreme.