Hook It Up to the Machine

In the early 2000’s, my parents took us on a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. We made the journey in our new (used) family van: a green Dodge Caravan whose reputation was soon to become “a lemon”. I was a teenager and didn’t pay a lot of attention to the details of what was happening around me, but I do remember how the van kept overheating. It ran fine on the interstate, but anything under 40MPH had the car’s temperature gauge rising into unsafe zones. I remember stopping in some small town in Montana to get it checked out by a mechanic. He checked it out, took it for a test drive, etc., and told my Dad the reason the car was overheating was because the idling fan wasn’t turning on. At higher speeds, like on the interstate, that was fine because there was enough airflow to keep the engine cool but at lower speeds the car would overheat. The mechanic said he didn’t know why the fan wasn’t turning on. There was nothing wrong mechanically from what he could see. But he…