This can be verified with sworn affidavits.

The recent question regarding a belt slipping off a 1998 Chrysler minivan whenever a single drop of water got on it filled me with disgust and revulsion (again).

I owned a Dodge Caravan of similar vintage. One fine Sunday morning, the steering wheel came off. while I was turning onto a highway from a city street. I managed to stop on the highway about halfway through my turn.

While I was standing there thankful that I wasn’t going 100 mph through a tight S curve, a family heading for church in a neighboring town stopped and we pushed my van right back to where I had been at the stop sign, sans steering wheel. Before these fine folks headed off down the highway, I imagined that they were feeling queasy since they were also in a Caravan.

A friend happened by just then, and as we were contemplating the great mysteries of the universe, another man who owned a bulk plant stopped. He loaned me a large crescent wrench to steer with. I drove to another friend’s house and he gave me a short tire iron that fit the (former) steering wheel nut perfectly.

I cruised here and there for quite awhile using my steering iron, including, but not limited to down the highway. I finally went to a salvage yard and bought a steering wheel taken from a Caravan crumpled up like a piece of aluminum foil.

From that day on until the day that my Caravan was repo’ed, I felt a dead man’s hands touching mine every time I gripped that wheel.

Duck

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duke larance -- the drugstore cowboy poet