Back sometime in 1976, in the Fall (Like we have seasons in Florida), we were travelling East on Alligator Alley, heading home from Sanibel Island back to Miami. It was about 11:00 at night, as we’d gotten a really late start after closing up my grandparent’s house for the year.

Now, Alligator Alley is a real nice road. There is one on, and one off for 115 miles. There are no rest areas or 3^rd lanes, just 2 lane road all the way broken up by an overpass over the canals every mile. Roughly 20 feet from either side of the road is a ditch that is about 20 feet wide and really deep. After the ditch, are the Everglades. They go on for miles and miles. There is nowhere on the Alley that you want to stop, ever.

I knew something was up when through my sleep I heard my father say “Shit.” Quietly. This is not normal for my father.  I sat up and asked him what was wrong. “I think that the fan belt just broke.” He said. I only assumed that was bad, not knowing what a fan belt was. “Is that bad?” I asked. “Well, we run out of battery and water pump, so yeah, pretty bad pretty quick. “I’m going to pull over.” He said. I knew what that meant.

We pulled over, and he told me to stay in the back seat of the car. He got out and got under the hood with a flashlight. He came back 5 minutes later with what looked like a tattered belt. ” That was our fan belt.” He said. I don’t know exactly what he said, something about the longer we sit here the worse it is, the hazard lights are eating up the battery and I can’t turn them off or no one will see us in the dark and run into us, then again, maybe someone will see us and we can get some help. It was 40 miles to the end of the Alley, so it wasn’t like we were going to walk it.

We had been sitting there in silence for about 15 minutes when he said “Give me your shoes.”. Ok, I passed my shoes over to him. “This might work…” I heard him kind of mumble. I saw him take his shoes off and pull out the laces. He was braiding one long shoelace. He got out of the car, spent a few minutes under the hood and came back and sat down working on his shoelace loop. “There” He showed me, one fan belt, sort of. “It’s only gotta make it 40 miles to the end.”

So, he installed his makeshift fan belt on the engine, but he had one more problem. There wasn’t enough power left in the battery to crank the engine. We were about 20 yards from where the lanes go over the canals. Not a big incline. He pushed the Camaro up to and to the top of the rise. Yes, my father ran long distance track all through high school and college, so pushing a car 50 yards was nothing, I guess. Once on the top of the hill, he got in, pushed in the clutch, put it in 2^nd gear and gave a shove with his left foot. As we picked up speed going down the hill, he popped the clutch and that straight six roared to life. The battery light was off, so the alternator was spinning, we were on our way.

We made it the 40 miles off the Alley, and my father found an all-Nite garage and quickly had a real fan belt on the Camaro. The guy at the shop was impressed. We got home late, but no worse for the wear. The next morning at school, during inspection, my teacher asked me why I had no shoelaces. I tried to explain the whole story to her, but I don’t think she knew what a fan belt was or how to make one. She did understand about being stuck on Alligator Alley.

Like I’ve said before, if it can break, my father could fix it against any or all of the odds.