Aug 01, 2023
We have a good puzzler today for you all. And I know it's good, because it's not mine. I stole this one. As you all know, I steal puzzlers whenever I possibly can.
Okay, here it is. You have to pay attention to all the details for this one.
It was a dark and stormy night. A warm, dark, and stormy night. A guy named Gus was headed up the lake for a weekend of fishing with his buddies. He's driving a 1963 Dodge Dart. And it was driving smoothly all the way from the city.
Now the highway had turned into a small dirt road curving through tall pine trees. The road became extremely rough and they could feel the engine lurching against its mounts as the car bumped over boulders in the road. Suddenly, a shot rang out in the night. Well, it sounded like a shot. It was actually a backfire. The first of many. The Dodge six cylinder began chugging and missing so badly that it soon lost momentum on the uphill stretches of road. The car eventually coasted off the road and stopped in the trees.
Gus got out and looked under the hood. The engine was still running but very unevenly. Gus glanced at it briefly and then smiled and close the hood. He grabbed his flashlight from the glove box and with a wave at his friends still sitting in the car, he walked off into the forest. His friends looked at each other in confusion.
After a short time, however, they heard Gus whistling as he emerged from the forest. He raised the hood again, fiddled with something under the hood for about two minutes, and then slammed the hood down. Then Gus said, "Okay guys, it should run fine now. Start it back up."
And they did. And he was right. The car started right back up immediately and ran smoothly for the rest of the trip.
So the puzzler is, what did he do in the woods and what did he do under the hood that made the car start back up and run smoothly?
Good luck.
Okay, answer time.
It was a dark and stormy night, like all the other dark and stormy nights in our puzzlers.
A car breaks down in the woods. In the pine trees. On the way to a fishing trip. it was a 1963 Dodge Dart, and it had been running fine until this moment. It was backfiring and chugging so badly, that it just stopped.
Gus gets out, looks under the hood, then goes into the woods. When he comes back, he ducks under the hood for a moment and then gets back in the car. And it starts right up again. The car runs smoothly for the rest of the trip.
What did he do in the woods?
So, remember, it was a dark, stormy, warm night. And they were in the woods. So when Gus opened the hood, he noticed that there was a crack in the distributor cap through which water was going because it was a wet, dark, and stormy night. The moisture was shorting out the cap. So Gus saw this. So then he went into the woods and found some pine tar from the pine trees in the area. He came back with some pine tar and globbed it onto the crack to seal it shut. He used the pine tar to seal the crack.
And then they drove all the rest of the way with no problems at all.
