Grandpa Buckwitz and I drive through a rock, and Harold hydrolocks an engine

 

I dreamed that I was talking to Grandpa Buckwitz about WWII. We went to visit a site by the North Sea in Germany, a place where he'd spent a considerable amount of time doing some kind of special forced labor project for the Nazis. I listened intently as he solemnly recounted the technical details of some mechanical contraption that they'd had him working on. 

The factory, which had been built right on the shoreline, was gone, destroyed by bombing, its remnants eroded by the ocean. Nothing remained of it, just two empty holes that were now tidepools, lifeless and indifferent, reflecting the cold, ashen sky and the slate gray ocean. Something about the place and my grandfather's story placed a weight on my chest that I couldn't bear, and I began weeping uncontrollably.

In another part of the dream, my brother-in-law Harold was rebuilding an engine. He'd bought all new parts and had assembled them with the greatest of care. It gleamed with a pristine machined finish and was clean inside and out. He'd just put the finishing touches on it and was about to test it.

Somewhere along the line, though, he'd made a critical mistake. When he went to fire it up, it ran smoothly for a minute or so and then seized up. Nothing would make it budge again after that. He shook his head and puzzled over what could have gone wrong.

Grandpa and I were still at the site of the old factory when Harold called us, asking for advice about the engine. I asked him about the fuel, and that's when he told me that he'd added some water to the fuel tank to "clean the engine." It sounded like he'd somehow managed to hyrdolock the engine.

I was familiar with the practice of introducing a small amount of water into the intake of a running engine as a means of cleaning out carbon deposits on the pistons. It is done by adding a measured drip through a vacuum port for brief intervals, creating an internal combustion steam cleaner. The engine has to be at operating temperature, and the amount of water must be carefully controlled.

"What do you think, Grandpa?" I asked. "Is it possible that he could have gotten enough water into the engine to hydrolock it?" 

"This is Harold," Grandpa said flatly, "so anything is possible. He's a knucklehead."

We got in Grandpa's pickup truck and set out to to see Harold. We were driving down a country road,  cruising at a good pace, when I spotted a giant boulder in the road up ahead.

"Grandpa, you'd better slow down, or we are going to hit that rock," I stated matter-of-factly.

He made no sign that he'd heard me and didn't slow down at all. The rock loomed larger and larger as we sped directly toward it. By the time we reached it, it was as big as the truck, and Grandpa still hadn't taken his foot off of the accelerator. 

"Grandpa! We're going to hit the rock!" I shouted.

He remained unfazed, staring intently ahead, as if the rock wasn't there. It was now too late to stop. We were on a collision course with the massive boulder. I placed both hands on the dash, bracing for impact. 

At the moment when there should have been a crash--a grinding of metal and granite, shattered glass and a fireball of exploding truck and people parts--there was nothing. We glided through the rock as if it were a mirage. I sat in stunned silence for a moment as we continued down the road a bit, then finally regained my ability to speak.

"That was a neat trick, Grandpa," I said, looking over at the unassuming,  plainspoken wizard sitting next to me with new respect.

"I know a few things," he said cryptically.