One Tooth Off

The exhaust camshaft was one tooth out of time. That's the whole problem, mechanically speaking. One tooth, out of however many, on a chain that has to be exact or the engine bends its own valves against its own pistons the first time it turns over.

I didn't know that when I started. I didn't know a lot of things when I started. I pulled a 2011 Prius apart in my driveway because nobody else would, and I found that out the hard way, staring at three timing marks that were supposed to line up at top dead center and didn't.

I went to a shop. Not to hire them — to ask. I needed someone to tell me it was fixable, or tell me it wasn't, or just tell me I wasn't crazy for trying. The guy said you could move the cam. That was it. Didn't say which one. Didn't say how. Didn't say what happens if you get it wrong, which is that you ruin the engine you've already spent weeks taking apart.

I went home and started drinking.

I want to be honest about what that stretch actually was, not the clean version. I was scared the car was dead and I'd wasted everything I had proving it. I was in withdrawal from something I'd been trying to get off of, and the fear underneath that was worse than the fear about the car: that I'd ruin everything I'd built to get here, not with one bad decision but by just not being able to hold the line. The two fears ran together. I couldn't always tell which one I was drinking at.

I found out about the intake cam on my own — that you could borrow slack from it, walk the exhaust cam back into time a fraction at a time instead of forcing it. It's slow work. There's no torque spec for "am I doing this right," no gauge that tells you. The only proof is your own eyes, checking three marks against three lines, over and over, until you trust what you're looking at more than you trust your fear of being wrong.

I did that for days. Sober enough hours to do it carefully, and then not sober after.

I got it back together and cranked it on the Fourth of July. It ran. I remember that specific relief — the sound of an engine that wasn't supposed to exist anymore. And I celebrated the only way I knew how that year, which was pounding beers like the fight was over.

It wasn't over. The fifth was worse than the fourth. I woke up and told myself something I didn't fully believe yet: that I had just done a thing that should have been impossible — timed an engine by feel, alone, with half an answer from a stranger and no one coming to help — and if that was possible, the other impossible thing was possible too. I told myself I had to stop.

That day, I stopped.

I don't think the car saved me. I think I used the car to prove something to myself I needed proof of, because I don't trust promises, mine least of all. I trust a thing I can point to. Three marks lined up. An engine that runs. A day I said I'd stop and then did.

I still don't know, in the way you know a thing for certain, whether I did every step of that repair correctly. I know it runs. I know I haven't had a drink since that morning. Some kinds of precision you can check against a spec. Some kinds you can only check against whether you're still standing on the other side of them.