Clutch Adds Spice To Driving

I have come to take the clutch for granted.

I stomp on it regularly, without a thought to its difficulties, its aggravations, its demands.

But it wasn’t always this way, as I recalled last week while teaching my son to drive. At a stop sign, the car did a brief neck-whipping imitation of a bucking bronco, which triggered suppressed memories of a time when I nearly bucked myself and three innocent children to death.

Before I tell you that story, I should probably give you a brief description of the clutch.

A clutch is a flywheel/pressure plate mechanism that engages/disengages the engine from the drivetrain/transmission, causing the vehicle to jerk/stall. From the very earliest horseless carriage days, it was a key element of automotive technology, as well as a popular thing for motorists to curse, trailing only flat tires in the polls. Then in 1939, the automatic transmission was invented.

The automatic transmission performs all of the functions of the clutch and gearshift, yet it accomplishes it through a more technologically advanced method called “sorcery.”

Which is why I learned to drive strictly on an automatic transmission, and why tragedy nearly struck me one day when I was merely 16.

The neighbors across the street had gone away for the weekend and hired me to baby-sit their three boys. They left me the keys to their ‘65 Mustang with instructions to take the boys to their midget hockey practice. I was excited about driving a Mustang, a far hotter car than our Chevy Bel-Air. I’d never driven in a bucket seat before.

I loaded the boys in the car, sat in the driver’s bucket and to my horror discovered - one pedal too many.

I was dimly aware of the identity of that pedal, having seen numerous James Bond movies. I was also aware of the identity of the little stick thingie, with a billiard ball on top of it. What I didn’t know was how to operate it.

“Hey,” yelled the little hockey darlings. “Let’s go! What are you waiting for?”

“Just familiarizing myself with the controls,” I said, making a show of examining the dash board. “Yeah, OK. All set. There’s the radio.”

What I was really doing was searching my memory for clues about how to drive this thing. One clue I failed to retrieve was the one that said: Be sure to step on the clutch when you turn the key.

“Hey!” the little hockey pucks shouted. “You almost crashed through the garage wall! Cool!”

After carefully scrutinizing the diagram on the little billiard ball, I got the thing into reverse and backed out of the driveway. I got going down the street with the help of a considerable incline, and then I spent approximately the next mile attempting to shift into second. Cars were passing me, honking at me, approaching me at crazy angles and veering away at the last minute.

The little hockey dudes were crying by now. I have no idea why, although I will admit that my steering was suffering. Both of my hands were clenched around the stick shift.

I finally wrenched it into second at about the time I reached a stop light. I slammed on the brakes. I came shuddering to a halt, and so did the engine.

I knew I had two minutes to prepare for the green light. I jammed the stick into first as hard as I could and revved the engine up. When the light turned green, I let up on the clutch, and …

Ride ‘em cowboy! Let’s go, let’s show, let’s rodeo! Ladies and gentlemen, look at that little Mustang buck!

The engine stalled once at the beginning of the intersection, twice more in the middle, and once more toward the end of that particular green-light cycle. Cars were honking, motorists were yelling, and the little hockey guys were shouting, “Mama!”

Finally, I discovered the problem. I had it in third, not first. I savagely jammed it into first, let off the clutch, and killed the engine again with a massive whiplash jerk.

The rest of the trip is a blur. To this day I don’t know how I got those kids there and back, but I did. Except for that intersection, I never found third gear again, or most of the other gears, for that matter. I believe I drove the rest of the way in first, including that one freeway stretch.

Soon afterward, I learned to drive a clutch with something akin to competence. In fact, when it came time for me to buy my own cars, I always bought a manual transmission because (1) I wanted to be James Bond, and (2) I was cheap.

Which is why I now find myself with nothing but a manual transmission vehicle for teaching a 15-year-old boy how to drive. I feel badly about this, because learning to drive is hard enough without learning a clutch.

But on the other hand, he’ll never get into a strange car and have to buy time by saying, “Just familiarizing myself with the controls.”

, DataTimes MEMO: To leave a message on Jim Kershner’s voice-mail, call 459-5493. Or send e-mail to jimk@spokesman.com, or regular mail to Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review