The Butterfly Effect

10-13

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The “Butterfly Effect” is a well-known concept in chaos theory that postulates that a small change can cause a cascade of increasingly larger changes through time and space.

It would be really easy for me to apply this concept to various philosophical discussions of my road trips with Jane. This is, after all, my 10^th year on the road with this car, so such a discussion wouldn’t be out of place.

Maybe I could wax poetic about how that one decision to take a totally untested, freshly-rebuilt half-century-old car on a coast-to-coast trip across America in 2014 led to a richer life than I ever could have imagined, filled with tons of new friends, new memories, and incredible experiences of the best sights of America, all seen over the hood of the original pony car. I’ve been truly privileged to see all that I’ve seen, and I consider that every minute of every day that I’m on the road.

Or I could begin with musings on how even deciding to buy this car in the first place has completely changed me as a person, giving me wings where before I had none, giving me the strength and the skills to take the more challenging and rewarding routes in life with a little more surety. The Kelly of 11, 12 years ago would never have even considered taking so many risks for the reward of the sights I’ve seen from Jane’s driver’s seat – nor would the Kelly of 15 years ago have even really have imagined having such a car and such a life in the first place.

Or maybe I could aim a little lower and say something like “My decision to not put an overdrive transmission in this car has led to increasing amounts of deafness over time”, which isn’t really an application of the butterfly effect, but certainly is something that is true.

But this post isn’t named “The Butterfly Effect” for any of those reasons. 

It’s named “The Butterfly Effect” because it is apparently butterfly season in central Texas, and Jane has consumed, in one way or another, approximately a hundred of them over the course of the day.

They’re everywhere – stuffed in the grille and radiator, wedged in the lamps, coating the engine bay and bumper and windshield alike. It’s disgusting. But if you ever needed a randomly sampled lepidopterological survey of butterfly populations of central Texas… well, this is probably one of the more creative but effective ways to accomplish it.

 

Ugh.

So, there you go, a really gross story to start you off, instead of a nice in-depth exploration of the minute interactions in the world and their consequences.

Anyways, you may be wondering what we’re up to, that Jane is in this situation. Well, welcome to the 10-year anniversary road trip! This year I’ve taken some time off in the fall so I can experience Arizona without the heat stroke. I’m very excited to be out on the road again! Although, as always, the first day is just kind of… blah. Boy I hate the drive west to escape Texas. There is just no good way to do it.

This year I thought I’d stick to smaller highways for part of the first day, in an effort to not totally blow out my hearing with the roar of a small block Ford V8 turning interstate-level RPMs. So I took Hwy 29 out of town and hooked into 190 out in Hill Country, which is where my butterfly troubles began. I have to say I was hoping for more from the roads, but after we got out of Hill Country it was nothing but bleak scrub-brush, just on a 2-lane road instead of a 4.

Some windmills seen through a haze of bug juice... ew.

 

I mean, wow, I was NOT kidding about that!

Eventually we did have to hop onto I-10 – there’s just not many other options that will get you anywhere in a timely manner out there – and we hoofed it west. As always, a pretty mind-numbing drive, but just jarring enough to keep me awake. And hey, sometimes I got to go through fun rocky roadcuts.

 

Something significantly more interesting, very far away...

Of course, the other thing that kept me well awake was the constant suspicion of classic Jane Day 1 antics. I never know what it’ll be – sometimes inconvenient, sometimes good for an adventure story, but usually pretty minor. Usually. So I wasn’t terribly surprised when the car revealed an odd ominously oscillatory vibration at speeds over 82 MPH, once I was quite a distance from home. But then I remembered I had forgotten to check tire pressures before bolting out the door this morning… so that one’s on me. I maintained my vigorous paranoia, but the other oddity of note was the constant engine temperature fluctuations from 170-190*F. This has been going on for well over a year now – probably the result of a thermostat stuck open – but I’ve pretty much opted to ignore it as the car’s not overheating and I don’t feel like replacing the thermostat again (finding a thermostat that lasts longer than 2-3 years these days is quite impossible, I’ve found). But as I watched those temps yo-yo around in my nearly 60-year-old classic car as I drove steadily further away from home… it did occur to me that maybe I shouldn’t have ignored it. Oh well.

We made it to Van Horn in good time and surprisingly without incident, arriving triumphantly at our motel of choice in a gruesome fluttering cascade of butterfly wings. The front desk lady stepped outside at my arrival and chose to ignore the horrifying display plastered to the front of my car, instead opting to say, “It’s you! You’re back! How is your car?”.

Ah, notoriety.

It’s good to be back.

Kelly signing out.