Absolute Satisfaction

Paul Vail woke up falling. It was dark—the blackness of mountain night under a socked-in overcast. The headlights picked out trees and boulders on the side of a cliff. He couldn't see how far he'd already dropped or where the car was going to land. Last Paul remembered, he was at 11,000 feet, northeast of Fort Collins, Colorado. He must have fallen asleep and driven off the road.

His car was a Saab model 96, the humpbacked model from the sixties.

It was November, the last day of the trout season. He'd been trying to get away from the shop all summer to go fishing, but the cars kept showing up, and when you are in the independent repair business, you do not turn customers away. Today had been his last shot. The night before he'd hung a CLOSED sign on the door, woken up at 2:00A.M., and with a friend he'd driven up from Boulder to fish the Cache de Poudre, his favorite stream. They'd hiked and fished all day and hadn't left the river until after dark. When they climbed into the car they remarked on how tired they were. Unusual for Paul, he'd buckled his seat belt.

Paul and I are talking in his office at Absolute Saab, his parts and repair business in Encinitas, north of San Diego, a block from the beach. The shelves sag under rows of dark blue Saab service manuals. Every flat surface is covered with used parts and invoices. On his desk, a huge clay pot spills a tangle of yellow cymbidium orchids. Paul is compact and solid, dressed in a sweatshirt the color of a muddy river. A baseball cap, same color, is pulled down over his blonde buzz cut to the tops of his aviator glasses.

I need a car. Last week I sold my daughter's car to Ecology Auto Parts for $60 cash. I've given her my '85 Saab, maintained by Paul, with 305,000 miles on it. I want another Saab. I can afford to spend $5,500. There's not much that's promising in the Auto Trader for $5,500. I've driven up to Absolute to talk things over with him.

The night of the free fall, his car slammed down onto a huge flat boulder. The sound of rushing water was all around them, and the headlights lit up a river full of rapids. The boulder sat in the middle of the river. Paul and his friend were shaken up but had no injuries. Snow was falling hard. They waded hip-deep through water colder than a fuel line in January, then clawed their way up the cliff to the road. They hitched a ride 110 miles to Fort Collins and the next morning woke up to two feet of snow. That night, a tow truck driver took $100 to drive Paul back up the mountain. He scrambled down the side of the cliff in the snow, in the dark, while the driver reeled out cable. Paul figures the car dropped fifty feet.

He hooked the cable to the car.

"Driver starts winching, hauls it off the boulder, through the water, over rocks, over stumps, up the cliff, crunch, crunch, crack. I didn't want to watch. We get it back on the road. I turn the ignition, and it starts. The car starts."

"I drove it back to Boulder. It had one bent rim, and it was a pretty bumpy ride, but I drove home."

Paul has been working on Saabs since 1982 when he lived in Boston. His Mustang was stolen, and Mary, a coworker at the Unitarian Universalist Association, told him about the car her mother had for sale up in Bangor, Maine. It was a model 99, the squat, dumpy design that followed the 96, with 200,000 miles on it. It came with the phone numbers...