I should amend that title. I’m talking about a VERY small miracle. In fact, it’s scooter-repair related. However, when your muffler is dragging along the pavement and your scooter is making more noise than a trio of Harley Davidsons, you’ll take any miracle you can get.

The muffler on my scooter fell off as I was driving to work in the rain this morning. I wasn’t in the mood, I can tell you that. I honestly thought the noise was coming from some other scooter. I’ve encountered this before. I’ll be driving along happily when some broken-down piece of junk pulls up beside me with an unattached muffler and the noise is enough to drive your ears into your skull. It’s astonishing how much noise these little scooter engines are really making. From that point of view, the existence of mufflers in the first place is a miracle.

The times that this has happened to me, the driver of the other scooter was always one of these middle-aged workers in Taiwan. I’m not quite sure how to describe them or what they do, but they definitely are a type unto themselves. They always have one of those little plastic helmets with no visor or anything like that. It’s the kind of helmet you get for NT$50 out of a gumball machine. They are almost always wearing some kind of dirty white T-shirt and other work clothes, often with flip-flops. They always have a cigarette dangling out of their mouth as they drive. And they almost always cut someone off and nearly kill them.

So this morning, my ears are being assaulted with this horrific pounding noise, and I look around for the idiot, the jerk, the rude moron who can’t be bothered to fix the muffler on his scooter. No matter which direction I look, however, the noise doesn’t get stronger or weaker. I can’t fix on a direction. Where is this creep? Then I realize with a sinking heart, that the creep is me. The noise, to my amazement, is coming from my scooter. I look down, and there’s the muffler hanging on by a thread and dragging along the pavement.

I thought about parking the scooter and taking a taxi the rest of the way to work. I probably would have parked it, except once more I was on Nanjing in rush hour, and there was no parking anywhere around. And the scooter shop I go to is on the other side of the city from where I work, so I bit the bullet and decided to drive my scooter the rest of the way to work. I thought I could leave it there for the day and then bring it to the shop after work.

As I’m driving, heads pop up, swivel around, and stare at me from all directions. At intersections, while I wait the endless amount of time it takes for lights to change in Taipei, I’m looking around and smiling wanly at people and apologizing for the noise with my whole body, indicating the muffler dragging on the pavement and trying to show that there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m sorry. So very sorry.

To my amazement, the muffler stays attached the entire 4 kilometers to work. I get down on my knees after I park it, and I see that in fact there was one bolt still holding the thing to the scooter. The muffler had come right off the exhaust pipe, it’s true, but it was still somewhat attached, and that gave me hope.

 

And that brings me to my small miracle. That miracle is the scooter shop. Scooter shops alone make living in Taiwan a joy. They are a place where miracles happen every day. In my case, I left from work and drove down Bade Rd. to my scooter shop. It’s about 7:30 in the evening the day before a national holiday, and the second – literally the second – that I drive up to the scooter shop and stop, one of the mechanics has run up to me and seen what the problem is. He grabs the scooter and pushes it into the shop and is examining the problem within sixty seconds. He says, in English, that he can replace the broken bolt and re-weld the muffler back onto the exhaust pipe in half an hour and it will cost me NT$450, which is roughly $14 US.

He’s true to his word, and in thirty minutes I’m back on the road with my scooter barely making a sound. Miracles really do happen.

 

Tags: Bade Rd, Harley Davidsons, NT, scooter, Taiwan