It goes by different names. The Magic Wagon or the Grand Caravan. The Voyager or the Town and Country. Chrysler, Dodge and Plymouth. The customer picks the model and the trim package. A hood ornament that holds the eye. Chrysler looks like a star that lives inside your house. His daughter used to say that. His son drew pictures of the long-horned sheep. A Dodge is Ram Tough and always red. Plymouth is more mysterious: a silver ship with wind in its sails. What is that supposed to be exactly? The Mayflower, he thinks. The Mayflower landing on Plymouth Rock. A car for pilgrims. Word associations that don’t quite hook up. None of it matters. The company will sell it any way you like, but it is always the same underneath. You do not fool around with a machine that works.
He has seen enough of them to know that there is no secret behind the Grand Caravan. It is exactly what it appears to be, an object designed to fulfill a basic need for a reasonable price. In the beginning, the sliding door was its signature. The way the whole side of the car could detach and roll along its track to give you such a large opening, even with only six inches of clearance on the side. A big door that wouldn’t bang against all the other doors in the mall parking lot and enough room inside for seven people and all their stuff. Those were the original brute facts, the Caravan’s simplest truths. Parents and kids piling in and out all the time — the soccer mom, yes, the soccer mom — but a seat for the visitor, too. A place for grandma when she has to be picked up at the airport. The driver and passenger up front and two benches in the back. You click down and the rows pop out. No points for style, but versatility has always mattered for this segment of the market. You take out the seats and there’s enough space back there for a 4x8 sheet of plywood. A plan for all the standard dimensions. He knows nothing fits together like that by accident.
People in the city feel the car in different ways. The Caravan goes past the men and women who work in the plant, beyond Chrysler and the CAW and Local 444. It moves over his family to reach everybody else. The guy who sells carpeting or the orthopaedic surgeon or the lady who teaches grade two French immersion. They all know. They can tell when things are going well and when they aren’t. They understand the way it sits on every bottom line.
It was the number-one selling minivan all by itself for more than a decade. The number-one selling vehicle for the whole country. Took years before the Asians caught up. Millions rolling away from this spot. They build it on the S-platform, then the AS, then the NS, then the RS and the RT. It started with a piece of crap 2.2 litre in-line 4 with barely 85 hp and that weakling would whine and complain and shake like you were re-entering the earth’s atmosphere every time you pulled into the passing lane. Now you go for the optional 4-litre turbo-charged V6 with 251 hp and that monster can pull your whole crew and all their bikes and your little hardtop camper up a mountain in the middle of July. He liked to watch the temperature gauge whenever he took theirs out on a long trip. The way it never budged and always stayed straight up, right in the middle, balanced between the red hot H and the cool blue C. He used to think that was all a person could ask from a car. An engine that was ready when you called.
The way it comes together is something to see and he has never taken it for granted. The interconnecting lines of yellow and orange conveyors, bodies and chasses moving separately before they mate. The bright white lights in paint, the orange robots swivelling in for their welds. The flash and the flash again. He used to think you could count the individual sparks and always arrive at the same number.
People outside think people inside must hate the machines, but it’s not like that. The Local has to fight for every job, but precision is precision and a person working on something likes to see it done right. When he watched those hydraulic shoulders rotating, lifting 1,300 pounds and holding it perfectly still, always within the same range of a hundredth of a millimetre, he felt something, but it wasn’t hatred; it was more like confusion or a stab of deep-down uncertainty. It gets confusing after awhile if you have to watch a robot work and you watch it and you watch it again. The repeating sequences start to blur and it seems like time stops and there is only this one task left in the whole world, this one job, separated from everything else, and it has to be done again and again, forever. The robot sees a hundred divisions in a millimetre and it always hits the same spot. The same weld. The same number of sparks.
A standard dash assembly comes as a single unit. It moves on a hydraulic but has to be guided into its spot by hand. You need to feel it in. An engineer told him once that they were decades away from creating a robot that could mimic the instinctive muscular adjustments of the human wrist. The engineer swivelled his hand around a couple of times. Think about this thing, he said. The wrist. You can’t imagine the number of interrelated calculations. The way it pulls together force and angle and time, the way it cross-references. Makes it look easy, but never the same way twice. Can’t replicate intuition. A bolt. An infinity of bolts tightened just enough. Not too far and not not far enough. A car is held together, fastened more than assembled.
They think of everything. The big stuff and small stuff, it all matters. Subtle cosmetic redesigns for the interior and complete retoolings. Power windows and locks. ABS. The new transmission. The second sliding door. Keyless entry and remote starter. The new suspension. Standard air bags — multistage and curtain — even in the base model. Five-star safety. Side impact beams. Always tweaking the engines to find a little extra. Before the gas got crazy, 20 miles a gallon in the city wasn’t so bad. Stow n’ Go seats rolling straight into the floor. Swivel n’ Go seats spinning around. A built-in card table. Two different DVD players for the kids showing two different movies. Everybody gets their own headphones. Nine cupholders. Chrome accents. They move the shifter off the column. They fix the clock. Put in the MP3. The GPS. Every small change in the finished product is a bigger change on his end.
He liked to ride along sometimes as the next one rolled off the line and into the world. He liked to be the first person to read the cooing odometers with all their 0’s in a line. A fully loaded special edition Town and Country with the windows that go down in the back to let the fresh air get in. One minute in there and you know. They flick the wipers, honk the horn two times and flash the brights just before it leaves. When it passes the last inspection, it gets the all clear and begins its life. He liked moving inside his work and feeling it moving around him. He liked understanding the interconnected parts and being the first to look through a clean windshield and see everything from this point of view. You cannot beat a brand new minivan. Ask around. Ask anybody. A person appreciates being up high when they’re driving.
There are gaps built into the process. A couple of extra seconds before this one goes and the next one comes. Sometimes, in that space where nothing is supposed to happen, he used to take off his glove and press his palm flat against the glass or the body. Then he’d pull away quickly and watch the print flash up clear and detailed. A perfect outline of his hand visible for one second against the new paint or the dark tint, even the individual grooves of his thumb coming through. Whenever he did that, he used to imagine a detective. A smart person, somewhere far away, working with a magnifying glass and a light and a fine brush, dusting for clues. He used to imagine a person who could trace this car all the way back to him, back to this spot and this moment. A detective who could follow the chain of material evidence and find all the linkages and establish an incontrovertible proof.