There's No Light At End Of Tunnel For This Bus Mechanic -- It's Work To Keep Old Green Tortoise On Road Every Week

LOWELL, Ore. - Mike Cobiskey is down there somewhere.

Underneath the old Seattle Metro bus that rolled 2 million miles before it reached the canny hands of the Green Tortoise company's chief mechanic. Underneath the grease that covers everything from his gaunt face to his retread cowboy boots.

He takes a drag on a cigarette, a sip of his 20th cup of coffee of the day, and begins wrestling a rebuilt rear end into place with a crowbar. "Yes. That's it. Patience," he mutters as the radius rod shifts into place.

Given the unending twists in the road of life, it just figures that a bus line founded by hippies and patronized by New Agers keeps its vintage fleet on the road through the work of a man who describes himself as "a plain old hick."

"Actually, the people down at the main office in San Francisco call me an enlightened redneck," he says, peering out from under the bus. "I guess that sounds better."

Eric Gerrick, the general manager of the last surviving counterculture bus line in America, uses the word "irreplaceable" to describe the 39-year-old mechanic who logs 80 hours in a week at the company's two-acre compound.

"He's a genius who knows more about buses than any person should ever know," Gerrick says.

For its first decade of operation, the 22-year-old company known as much for its regular breakdowns as for its low fares enabled flower children to flit from New York to San Francisco to Baja for pocket money.

But thanks to Cobiskey's blue-collar work ethic, encyclopedic knowledge of diesel cruisers and old-fashioned horse trading skills, the company now prides itself on the reliability of a 10-bus fleet that averages 30 years in age.

"We hardly ever break down any more," says Cobiskey, whose most recent emergency call came last June. "I had to throw a blower in a suitcase and jump a plane to some place between Sheep Dip and Blow-

hole, Wyoming," he says.

It wasn't always this way. Cobiskey recalls his first job about 11 years ago as a driver on a cross-continental Tortoise run.

"I ended up doing a front-end alignment somewhere in South Dakota, rebuilt an oil cooler in my cutoffs in Spirit Lake, Minn., and then made it to Colorado, where I had to replace a water pump that went out as I was going through a tunnel," he says. "And that was a pretty typical trip."

A former high-school dropout who grew up in Eugene, Ore., Cobiskey had no formal training. But then he'd had none for previous jobs which ranged from cooking for a gourmet restaurant to hauling slag from a gold mine to driving a 2,000-mile bookmobile route in Nevada.

His background equipped Cobiskey perfectly for life as a mechanic at the Green Tortoise, which buys well-worn buses at auctions and then overhauls them at its Lowell shop.

The Green Tortoise cannot afford new buses that cost more than $150,000, or new parts, which can easily run in the thousands of dollars.

"I buy a used bus for $450, take it apart and end up with thousands of dollars in parts," says Cobiskey, who also provides added income for the company by fixing up and reselling buses to other transit companies or private buyers.

By the time Cobiskey and mechanic Bob Johnson are done rebuilding a bus, the cost runs about $35,000 for vehicles that usually run 400,000 to 500,000 miles before requiring major repairs.

Cobiskey's domain is a former U.S. Forest Service building in a fenced compound that could be declared an international museum of urban transit.

Standing in rows like worn tombstones are more than a dozen General Motors buses picked up for next to nothing from transit systems in Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco, Los Angeles.

At one end of the lot are several American Generals, which Cobiskey bought to cannibalize their 8-cylinder Detroit Diesel engines - "the best ever made," he says.

One room is filled with 16 diesel engines. Half have been completely rebuilt and polished and repainted a baby blue, not for aesthetics but to help spot oil leaks. The others lie like naked bodies in a medical-school lab with entrails of springs, valves and gears exposed.

"I won't use old parts for brake or steering systems but I will for just about anything else," says Cobiskey. "We couldn't stay in business for more than a few weeks if we didn't."

Parked inside the barn is a 1968 General Motors diesel cruiser, which Cobiskey is equipping with one of his inventions: a pneumatic "hijack system" that will give the bus an extra half-foot clearance for traveling the unpaved back roads of Baja California or Southern Mexico.

Next to the bus is a large tool cabinet. Painted on the lid in large block letters is Cobiskey's favorite saying, one he says comes from "somewhere in the Bible":

"Whatever you can find to do with your hands, do it with all your might," it reads. "For this is one of your few rewards in your life."

"It's the truth," Cobiskey says.