Oregon spring brings it all back — sudden song sparrows and returning swifts all buff and tanned from Mexican bugs and sun; out of nowhere sassy squirrels scamper crazy across our asphalt shingles.

Oregon spring also brings on all those inevitable breaks northwest winter has patiently waited for. Downspouts snap and separate. Furnaces flicker and flame out. Ordinarily steadfast cars stutter and stall.

Our achy old Subaru’s spring breakdown began late Tuesday night, when, without warning she shifted straight into poltergeist gear. It happened right after I slipped her into park. It happened in our driveway, under Portland’s most majestic maple and elm. From bumper to bumper all things electrical pulsed to life. Even though I’d already turned the key to OFF. Her dash and headlights; all four corners’ hazard blinkers; her radio’s crybaby love songs and our cabin’s cozy ceiling lamps, front and rear all went on and off, on and off. All on their own. Scar-ry.

I yanked the key clear out. Still it continued. I clicked loose my seatbelt, stepped outside, smacked my door. The throb went on.

From inside our house, I sneaked a peek between my wife’s Nihon noren kitchen curtains. And you know, that eerie pulsing still went on. And on.

So I did what every urban guapo does when gripped by dark supernatural doubt: I fired up my Compaq and asked YouTube what on earth to do.

Wednesday de-evolution

When I slid aside an inch of kitchen sink curtain, near midnight — it was over, all that life exhaling from our Forester wagon. The next morning, her battery was dead. Dead as a doggone doornail — as they say.

"Boleh-boleh" (it’s nothing, as we say), I said to myself, because we come from times much badder than these, and because those festive sparrows and swifts and squirrels were already clowning around our spring morning.

I pulled wide our garage door and rolled out my motorbike. But so uncharacteristic of my trusty Honda, so unlike our 31-year love affair, she did not jump to life when I pressed START. Tidak. Instead, she gave an awful grind that ended with the dreadful rattle of a snapped cam chain dropping into her engine block’s black bottom. Then a gasp. Then silence.

"Boleh-boleh," I whispered to my baby and me, and dashed to do what every ricepicker not yet out of tricks does: tippy-toe onto your neighbors’ porch, listen for morning noise, then politely rap on their screen door.

"Salamat pagi (peaceful morning) Stephen," I said apologetically when he opened up. "Can you give me a jump start? Cables are ready to go."

Ten minutes later, our possessed station wagon was running and I tossed my bicycle in back.

Twelve minutes after that, car and key left with our corner mechanic, and I was pumping across Hawthorne’s hectic bridge along with a hundred other earnest early morning Portlanders.

Near noon I got the call. Ghost in the machine exorcised, for a little over a hundred bucks. "Pick her up anytime," he said.

Back, I pumped across our swollen Willamette, thick as Dove Bar milk chocolate. Oregon’s still-distant sun warmed my face and neck and forearms. "This must be heaven," I said to myself. An honest mechanico, a bright blue sky, a good hour before my next meeting waaay out east on 102nd Avenue. That’s when my rear tire went flat.

But you know, this essay’s actually not about any of this. It’s not about three types of typical transport falling down one spring day. What I really wanted to tell you about is the following lazy Saturday on our sunny porch, a punctured inner tube and flat-repair kit between my legs.

I want to tell you about fixing lots of bike flats on three very distant continents, in three very different eras.

Saturday tripping

Our pop taught his boys how to patch tires back in Kota Ambon. Bikes were how middle-class families got around back then, back there. In fact, our father’s father — a tall, honey-eyed, half-blood orang — delivered Djakarta’s daily mail on his official Netherlands East Indies PTT bicycle. Djing-djing went his handlebar bell.

I loved early — and I mean that sincerely — the sensual smell and elemental feel of rubber. Even today, rubber remains a minor miracle. It’s tough but elastic. It’s compressible and expandable. Last century’s modern age, the industrial surge that rapidly advanced around our wobbly Old World, ran on steel and oil and rubber.

The latter two, as is true for all things precious, brought our islands as much misery as prosperity. Cold colonial Dutch and cruel Imperial Japanese battled over our oil and rubber. Angry armies and air forces crushed us where we lived. The winner enslaved our boys and men to lay their goddamned railroads. They enslaved our sisters and daughters to lay ...

But I stray again. Ma’af. Forgive me. That elemental feel and scent of rubbery rubber sends me and our folk there, every time. No matter which country, no matter what decade, we’re sitting in.

"Hati-hati, Joh," our father used to say to me back there, back then. Pay attention, Boy.

"Focus," I say to myself nowadays. Keep our past in the past. Stay present in our present.

Concentration’s necessary to spot a tire’s puncture. It’s that compressibility thing about rubber. So you pump fat your inner tube. You dip it into a pan of warm water, and watch for bubbles. Circle the source with a yellow crayon.

There’s a little grater, a lot like a nutmeg or clove or ginger grater, set into your tire repair kit’s tin lid. It’s for roughing the area your patch will soon be applied to. So rub-rub-rub, 10 seconds should do.

The next step’s a real trip — of course because the glue you squeeze onto your rough spot will send you to the moon if you hover too near, too long — but really because its vapor sends guys like me back to rear stoop stairs in Salem when we first arrived in chaotic America, back to our front door landing when we received asylum in Den Haag, and even farther back to our sunny veranda in Kota Ambon, before all that ugliness began. Back to those times and places our families were determined to leave behind.

I am a captive of memory sailing this way and that. Maybe we all are. Probably it’s the season catching us in these currents.

But staying present is really important — you must spread your rubber cement thin and fast. It evaporates like nostalgia. To this prepped area you apply your rubber patch, quick. I use a hammer’s flat side to iron it smooth. Just like our pop taught us, first between his legs, then beside him. Now without him.

His grandsons I taught. His great grandsons I will teach. Otherwise I sail this cycle alone. Or it ends for all of us.

Like I said: Oregon spring brings it all around — those sudden song sparrows, our buffed and tanned swifts, all those inevitable breaks in hardware that northwest winter has patiently waited for. Spring likewise brings around memories of seasons of joy and seasons of sorrow.

There’s rebirth and there’s repair. Surely there’s redemption too, but that’s probably for another cycle — right now there’s this busted cam chain I’ve got to fish out of the bottom of my baby’s crankcase.

I’ll get back to you later.

* * *

The Asian Reporter’s Expanding American Lexicon

Busuk (Indo patois from Hokkien and Malay): Rotten.

Dead as a doornail (Americanism): I don’t know how we got this.

Den Haag (Dutch): The Hague. Parliamentary capitol of Netherlands.

Djakarta: Former governor’s seat of Colonial Batavia. Now Jakarta, capital of the Indonesian Republic.

Enslaved Indos: Reference to brutal enslavement under Imperial Japan (1941-1945). Many of our elder generation of men survived to talk about it. Most of their sisters and daughters did not survive their torment — no one will speak of their humiliation. Or our sorrow.

Guapo (Indo patois, from Spanish and Tagalog): Good-looking dude.

Gripped by supernatural doubt: Underlying many modern religions are earlier shamanic traditions that integrate the spiritual presence of animals and trees, rivers and mountains, the living and the dead, into one reassuring human experience. Because this unifying knowledge and practice goes missing in mainstream America, old-school guys like me sometimes get anxious.

Half-bloods: Reference to Eurasian social and economic class in colonial apartheid system of Netherlands East Indies. Dismantled after independence of the Republic of Indonesia. Also called Indos.

Hati-hati (Indo patois, from Malay): Look-look. Beware.

Honest mechanic: Reference to our best buds at S.E. Stark’s Honest-1 Auto Care.

Joh (Indo patois, from Portuguese sinho): Address for a well-educated young Indo man.

Kota Ambon: Ambon City on Ambon Island, one of the old Spice Islands.

Nutmeg, clove, and ginger: Reference to intense trading and ferocious warring (circa 1600-1850) over Indonesian spices, highly prized by upper class Europeans. Much like today’s Latin American drug business.

Netherlands East Indies PTT: Colonial Post, Telegraph, and Telephone Company.

Nihon noren (Japanese): Traditional Japanese curtains adapted to contemporary needs. Originated in Jomon Era (14,000 to 300 B.C.E.) as shamanic protection from negative spiritual and natural elements.

orang (Malay and Bahasa Indonesia): Man. Person.

Portland’s majestic maple and elm: Reference to inner southeast Portland’s Ladd’s Addition. Many families "moved up" from Chinatown and Japantown, across the river to tidy Ladd’s Addition after World War II.

Subaru and Honda: Many elder generation nationalities sorrowed under Imperial Japan, so refused to buy products associated with their nightmares. Hence my jumpiness when my stuff goes busuk.

Tidak (Bahasa Indonesia and Malay): Nope.