Factory Spec? No. Zip-Tie Spec.

It was a hot summer day, the kind that calls you out into the wild with the sort of bright, foolish confidence that belongs only to those who have not yet been humbled by machinery in a desolate location. The forest had awakened from its winter slumber a few months earlier and filled with the kind of green that makes you feel as if you’re watching an ancient goddess paint with her magic paintbrush.  As if she had been watching men make the same mistakes for centuries and was entertained by the performance of humans.

The trail called to us: ruts like old scars, stones like knuckles, dust rising in soft, holy clouds that christen our souls. I felt, briefly, like a conqueror. Like a capable creature who would role the backwoods trails.

Like someone who would not, in a few short minutes, be standing over an open engine bay bargaining with fate.

And then it happened: the fan shroud, such a thin, black, deceptively innocent item, that you believe is the energizer bunny and will just keep going and going and going…

It decided it would no longer cling to its appointed place in the world and keep on going.

It began to wander, to loosen, to rattle with a kind of petty, theatrical rebellion, as if it had grown resentful of duty and returns to the city and longed for freedom to frolic amongst the squirrels.

I pulled over. I lifted the hood. I stared at it the way one stares at a betrayal of your soul: intimate, shocked, offended, and needing to perform delicate open-heart surgery.

There is something deeply personal about a failure under the hood, like discovering your own skeleton has opinions. Bolts refused me. Tools offered only mockery. And around us, the woods breathed quietly, as though enjoying the show.

So, I turned, as we always do in moments of desperation, to a darker magic that is conjured up by duct tape and BF hammers: the holy grail of the off-road world – zip ties.

Not the delicate little ones meant for tidy desks and gentle order, those would only be sacrificed to the pothole bounces…

These were the thick, brutal kind, the kind that arrive with the unspoken promise that whatever they embrace will not be leaving without permission. The kind Fort Knox uses to hold the gold bars back from being kidnapped by the Italian Maria.

I bound the shroud with ruthless affection, cinched it down until it submitted, until it accepted its place in the hierarchy of things. And then silence, the engine bowed and cooled its temper and realized that there were those mightier than it.

 It held. It held through the shaking and the heat, the call to return to the forest, and the trail’s merciless laughter. It held like a vow. It held, unbelievably, faithfully… right up until the day I swapped my engine, when I finally set it free and thought I have seen true loyalty, and it was a selfless soul of rigid strips that refuse to give up.