Washington College Magazine
Of Mice And Men With Tools
By Dean Hebert '88
No matter how many implements are stored in your tool shed, Dean Hebert '88 has discovered that you never have the one you need at hand. That can be a good thing.
Recently I was riding with my mother's neighbor to his farm, about five miles, just to keep him company, since he was doing me a favor. I needed a soldering iron, and he had one at his place. I was in a hurry to reconnect a couple of wires and then commute 60 miles to work, so riding shotgun in the dark to get the tool I needed beat waiting for the hardware store to open.
The wires were on my mother's car. She had called me a few days earlier to tell me that the "check engine" light was on. The last time that happened the repair bill was a few hundred dollars, so I wanted to use my code reader to see what was wrong, just to make sure the service center wasn't charging her for work she didn't need.
I have all the basic tools: wrenches (standard and metric), hammers, saws. I have some specialized tools, and a few that are less common: a chimney brush, a grim-reaper scythe. I inherited a lot of tools from my father and his father, and I feel a connection to the past whenever I use them. But perhaps the coolest tool in my collection is one they never needed, which I bought myself: the OBDII code reader. It's a hand-held device that plugs into a jack under the dashboard of cars built since 1996 and reads codes stored in the car's computer. When the "check engine" light is on, it can tell why. What actually goes on inside its tiny brain is a mystery to me, but it has helped me diagnose and fix troubles on a variety of vehicles for family and friends.
The computer on my mother's car said that a fuel injector was faulty, so my plan was to simply write down the error code, send her to the repair shop armed with this information, and they'd fix the injector. I don't know what made me pop the hood. Curiosity, maybe. I had no intention of replacing a fuel injector, if that's what the problem was. But like generations of guys before me, I just had to have a look. And there it was: a neat row of fuel injectors along the top of her engine, with the wires to one of them clipped, the ends displaying tiny teeth marks. Mice.
It strikes me as a bit odd that a fuel-injected, computer-controlled marvel of twentieth century engineering could be so vulnerable to a rodent, ignorant of technology, using only its teeth. And I, holding my high-tech OBDII reader, could only kick myself for having left my low-tech soldering iron at my house.
Which is how I came to be riding alongside my neighbor before dawn. Rolling through the dark, we could have easily slipped back in time about 50 years. The basic shape of a pickup truck hasn't changed much in the past half-century, and neither have the fields and barns we passed. We talked about things that guys 50 years ago would have: the weather, where the deputy catches speeders, hunting. We went in his barn, which was full of old tools, and he found the soldering iron. On the ride back, I thanked him for going out of his way to help. He was happy to, he said. I told him that if his truck's "check engine" light ever comes on, I'd be happy to come over and read its computer. I owe him a favor, but that's not why I offered. Sharing tools is just what guys do. It probably goes all the way back to the first tools, when somebody needed a good rock, to throw at a mouse that kept getting into the grain.
A former Sophie Kerr winner, Dean Hebert '88 teaches the short story at the University of Maryland. He lives in Mechanicsville. Really.
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