About my Corvair

Corvair
I remember being in the teacher’s lounge over in Greene County at their vocational school (This was about fifty years ago). Three or four people were there and we had been talking about the weather outside.

Two of the people were academics and the others were vocational teachers. I was describing to them how bad the roads were, and some of my driving experiences. I had driven to the school that morning from Brookville on I-70 and SR-235. Cars and trucks were on and off the roads but more were off than on because “ice” covered the roads. I brought up how, when I was working at NCR, I had noticed the patches of ice on the sidewalks and in the parking lot simply had disappeared during the day while I was inside building Thirty — Research and Development.

More than once, we drove to and from Dayton on roads that were solid sheets of ice. I told them about buying one of the first Corvairs sold in Darke County and how I loved that car. I could walk out of our tiny house in Gordon and find my Corvair covered with a foot of snow, and ice on the windshield was under that. All I had to do was get in the car and turn on that wonderful, gasoline-fired, heater and watch the snow and ice vanish. That heater roared like a jet engine and the snow would begin to melt and slide off the windows within seconds. That heater was a blessing for me and made that car very special.

My Corvair, said to be unsafe at any speed by Ralph Nader, had an engine in the rear and that was fine for plowing through snow as it put the engine weight over the rear drive wheels. When I got to I-70, however,  and had to go over I-70 on one of the bridges leading to it, as on SR 49, the rear end of my Corvair would break loose on the ice and slide towards the inside guard rail. That made some of my passengers scream. To go over I-70, with the car’s rear end bumping along the curb, on the inside of the road, and the front end pointing up the incline toward heaven, was more than one middle-aged bladder could tolerate.

She would never ride in the front seat again. I don’t know if it was her accident or if she didn’t want to be there and face those crazy curves again. The lounge residents had listened and then each had said a few words and went on to some other subject of more interest. One word that they said was one I had never heard before and I asked what it meant. I was told it meant how ice evaporates or disappears. It was a very descriptive word and one I had never heard.

Over the years since then I have tried to remember what that word is. I have not remembered it and still don’t know what it was. When I asked them if they recalled what word they had used to describe ice disappearing on sidewalks, parking lots or the sides of buildings, they all offered words that I know about and am familiar with but “that one word” had vanished like the ice it was used to describe. This, then, is a search among the readers of this column to find that missing word. Words like evaporate, vaporize, disappear, gasify, aerify, vanish and atomize are not it.

If you think you know what the word is, please make note of it in your comment.

© Abraham Lincoln