Another Fine Mess Read online

  ‘I can make three hundred bottles a day! Reckon I’ll be needin’ to!’

  This ingrained rural inventiveness was another of Henry Ford’s legacies. Six million farmers saw him as one of their own: they fancied themselves touched by his everyman genius, and some felt vaguely entitled to a slice of the fortune it earned him. Ford’s put-upon secretaries opened around a hundred letters from self-styled inventors every day, proposals for everything from electric revolvers to dashboard coffee percolators. A self-lighting cigarette; a hollow steering wheel that could be filled like a hot-water bottle on cold mornings; a horn that yelled, ‘FORD!’ Their effrontery was often splendid. ‘My price is $250,000 and it is easy worth it. I would like to have the cash by return mail.’ ‘Would the best transmission in the world interest you? Now listen, boy, I’ve got the Deluxe Baby. If I come to Detroit, will you promise me a square deal?’

  A couple of hours later I was back down at reception, asking its ample young occupant if I might find a restaurant within walking distance.

  ’You mean, walking on foot?’ Her eyes widened as she struggled to imagine the unimaginable. ‘I don’t … I mean … just … well, there’s that Mexican place back down the hah-way, food’s good and they serve adult beverages, but that’s gotta be like …’ She exhaled loudly and shook her head. ‘Like, maybe a half-hour?’

  This had become a routine reception-desk exchange, indeed a universal one at motels which, like the Danville Super 8, found themselves out on some peripheral highway, clustered between malls and gas stations under a thicket of lofty, illuminated signs. At the Red Roof Inn in Fairmont, West Virginia, the woman at the desk was so appalled when I asked for pedestrian directions to a clearly visible Walmart that she slammed a set of car keys down on the Formica. ‘That’s my pick-up outside. ’Fraid I smoke.’ Coastal Americans might clock up the daily steps on their fitness bands, but in the flyover states no one goes anywhere on foot. One afternoon in Detroit I strolled for almost three miles down a sunny, broad sidewalk in a smart part of town and passed precisely two other pedestrians: a cheery old nutcase collecting pretty leaves in a plastic sack and a black guy asleep in a bus shelter. The discouragement of pedestrian activity – and if that fails, its brutal subjugation – is one of the Universal Car’s most prominent legacies. On the rare occasions you’re legally permitted to walk across a hah-way, the flashing red hand of panic bursts into life the second your feet touch tarmac: RUN, LITTLE MAN, RUN FOR YOUR SORRY, WORTHLESS LIFE.

  Well, it wasn’t even a half-mile to the Mexican restaurant as the crow flies, though a bit more as the crow scrambles up a couple of steep embankments and crawls through a hedge. I would become steadily less critical of the natives’ pedestro-phobia. There are only so many evenings you fancy a pre-dinner tramp through marshy culverts and derelict laminate-flooring showroom car lots, getting bathed in sweat and nibbled half to death by blood-sucking buzzers. At any rate, I was sat behind a taco salad, wild of hair and damp of brow, within fifteen minutes.

  Given my extensive exposure to US-style Mexican dining, a few related tips seem in order. Here are a couple to be getting on with.

  1. Don’t order the taco salad, unless you enjoy eating week-old lettuce out of a deep-fried cardboard bed pan.

  2. Unless you enjoy tripping face first into gopher holes, don’t order a third adult beverage.

  In the morning, I raised the hood to give Mike his breakfast quart of oil and saw something was amiss. Something fundamental: the fan belt had, at some unknown point the previous day, shredded itself into a clump of grey spaghetti, wrapped like a rat king around the bottom pulley. It wasn’t a great look, certainly not one compatible with a shrug, a slam of the hood and a whistling return to the open road. At least not in any other car. Reasoning that I had covered at least some miles – possibly loads of them – without ill effect, I hacked the fan belt’s tortured corpse off the pulley, loaded up and drove away into the sun. It felt like a turning point of some sort. The redneck skill set required to patch up a T on the hoof would hopefully come to me in time, but at least I’d now bagged the gung-ho, fuck-it mindset.

  CHAPTER 8

  I crossed the Tennessee state line on the Grundy Quarles Highway. Americans just love rewarding local notables with lumps of infrastructure. Most, I assumed, were public servants, though who knows: Grundy Quarles sounds more like someone who might have made his name speed-eating hot dogs. I was forever rumbling over Wilkes T. Thrasher’s bridge, or dribbling Outlaw Energy down my chin in Jeff Busby’s state-park picnic area, or desecrating a tree behind Hernando de Soto’s wildlife refuge. I suppose it’s part and parcel of America’s cult of the individual, the legend of a land built by great men. What a shame nobody tried buying Donald Trump off with an interstate service station and a couple of long-drop earth closets.

  Grundy Quarles did pretty well for himself. His highway wound across some spectacular sandstone bluffs, cut deep and straight through the corky, slab-sided rock. At the foot of its steepest section I picked the wrong gear – that Ruckstell underdrive was a bugger to shift on hills – and willed Mike onwards as the uncooled engine laboured up that big red cleft. The motometer was about to blow its top when I finally crawled over Grundy’s summit, half out of the seat, willing Mike on like a jockey in the home straight.

  Everything felt more southern at once. Bob Kirk’s rattlesnake thermometer nudged up to 110. The roadside ads were all ominous or folksy: ‘LEARN PRACTICAL COMBAT IN A REALISTIC URBAN ENVIRONMENT’; ‘DONNY’S DINER – IF YOU DON’T EAT HERE, WE’LL BOTH STARVE.’ I was finding ever larger and more exotic corpses snagged in the fins of that tombstone radiator, iridescent dragonflies and blue-green beetles. On terrifying occasion, something large and buzzy would inveigle itself through the slender gap at the top of the windshield, and be introduced directly into my face. These incidents induced the least helpful of all human reactions – clumsy panic. If I had come home in a coffin, this would have been why. ‘My father died as he lived,’ one of my children might tell a horde of weeping mourners, ‘swearing at wasps with a sack of crisps in his lap.’

  And I was moving ever deeper into the Bible Belt. Even the tiniest towns were bestrewn with churches, most brand new and many enormous. Tennessee is home to sixty-seven megachurches – defined as Protestant congregations with an average weekly attendance of at least 2,000 – the most per capita of any state. I now see that I passed quite close to Jamestown, which has a nation-topping ratio of 230 churches for a population of 1,900. And that I also narrowly swerved Dayton, the Tennessee town that hosted the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial the year after my T rolled out of Highland Park. This was a test case for the teaching of evolution in schools, and though the verdict went in favour of the creationists, the national fallout poured so much scorn over the backward, Bible-bashing hillbillies that the scientific progressives who lost the battle won the war.

  Or thought they had. Fuelled by the rise of tele-evangelism, in the 1980s a backlash took hold. Between 1985 and 2005, the number of American adults who accepted evolution actually fell, from 45 per cent to 40. A recent Gallup poll established that an extraordinary 42 per cent of Americans believe humans were created by God 10,000 years ago. Only a fifth think God has played no part in evolution. Since 2012, almost every school in Tennessee and Louisiana has taught creationism alongside evolution, with eight further states considering legislation that would protect teachers who present creationism as a scientific theory. Across the nation, just 30 per cent of biology high-school teachers take ‘an adamant pro-evolutionary stance’ in lessons. In the coming weeks I passed several anti-evolution billboards: ‘In the beginning GOD CREATED,’ they announced, above a circled progression from knuckle-dragging ape to Homo erectus, with oblique red lines through all the missing links.

  As a pro-choice, pro-science Euro-heathen who doesn’t know his Presbyterians from his Pentecostals, I found it overwhelming and a bit scary. Where might the Countryside Church of the Nazarene fit in America’s myst
erious holy spectrum? Or the Bikers Church, or the Cowboy Church? The signs outside every religious establishment offered few clues to anything except the incumbent pastor’s mastery of grammar and passive aggression. ‘JESUS LOVE’S EVEN ME’; ‘SMILE – YOUR MOTHER CHOSE LIFE’; ‘BE GOOD TO EVERYONE. I’LL SORT EM OUT LATER – GOD.’

  On a benignly secular level, America’s churches have always offered a social focus for far-flung communities. In the pre-T era, going to church might have been the only time you got to meet your neighbours, and had the chance to turn them into friends. This was why Henry Ford walked eight miles to church and back every Sunday. Churches still form the backbone of many small-town civic structures: they run sports clubs and youth clubs, and organise community outings. But as those strident roadside messages suggested, there was something deeper at work. Something more literally fundamental.

  America is a land settled by religious dissenters, so I suppose it’s natural that they’re still making the most of the freedom to worship how they want. The national superiority complex that is such a feature of American Christianity seems almost inevitable. If you emigrated from half a world away in search of free religious expression, you’d doubtless feel an enhanced and lasting debt of gratitude to the nation that granted it, and might forgivably think of your new home as the Promised Land. It certainly looks the part: in almost 2,000 covered miles I had been routinely presented with sumptuous fecundity and scenic grandeur on a scale unknown in Europe. The landscape artist Thomas Cole memorably described America’s mighty wildernesses as ‘the undefiled work of God’.

  We should also appreciate just what an awful lot America has to feel proud of: saving the planet from dictatorship, putting the world on wheels and man on the moon. But with all those real-world achievements receding, the conflation between patriotism and Christian belief really does seem to have been cranked up in recent years. Both, I suppose, are leaps of faith, and in the small towns those leaps landed smack in the middle of every other front yard and car bumper. ‘GOD, GUTS & GUNS MADE AMERICA’; ‘BLESSED IS THE NATION WHOSE GOD IS THE LORD.’ I saw a fair few crucifixes painted up in Stars and Stripes.

  The nation’s flag is revered with religious devotion: for days Fox News pursued a ‘totally sickening’ incident wherein some small paper Stars and Stripes ended up in a trash sack during a clear-up after a veterans’ parade in somewhere like Minnesota. After an outcry the authorities agreed to retrieve the flags and ‘retire them’ with due reverence at a special ceremony. ‘Mamaw always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America,’ writes J. D. Vance of the grandmother who raised him. ‘I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.’ So many small-towners believe, quite plainly and passionately, that they’ve been born and bred in God’s own country, that they’re the chosen ones. In this context, making America great again seems less like a campaign slogan than the battle cry of a righteous crusade.

  It was swamping, and often surreal. With 1,600 religious broadcasters in the US, it must be very difficult to spread the word in a way it hasn’t been spread before. I’d tune in to a radio station and hear a man comparing human temptation to a broken dishwasher, in tones laden with dramatic foreboding. One night I flicked on my motel telly to be met by an evangelist with an easy manner and extremely bright teeth holding smoothly forth about marital repairs: ‘If you feel your marriage is broken, give all the pieces to God and he’ll make something beautiful out of it.’ Then the camera panned back and behind him, stuck on a plinth, was a life-sized great white shark.

  Here’s the rub, though. Small-towners, judged as an entity by their Christian fundamentalism, their electoral decisions and their personal armouries, filled my bleeding metropolitan heart with dread. But on an individual level, there were just lovely: cheery, mellow, hospitable, polite, helpful, enthusiastic, informative, fun. At Cookeville, a youngish janitor in a baseball cap and huge sunglasses ambled over as I was loading Mike up in his motel car park. ‘That Model T of yours is quite the deal,’ he drawled, before casting a glance at the terraced hutches lined out around us. ‘Kinda weird to think that little old car started all these places, the whole auto touring thing.’ The Virginia plates were beginning to speak for themselves, marking me out as a visitor from a faraway realm, a man on a mission. At a flyblown gas station near the Alabama state line, a posse of truck drivers came over and shook my hand with jaw-rippling intensity:

  ‘Coast to coast, huh? Ain’t that something.’

  ‘Name’s Bubba Merryweather the dooce, real good to meet you, sir.’

  ‘My granddaddy had a Model T, put in a little fuel hand-pump to get up the hills. I was in the back one time in the rain, he’s working that little hand wiper on the windshield, Grandmammy is pulling hard on the fuel pump, both of ’em jacking the car off like crazy!’

  Every time I pulled over, motorists would stop to ask if I needed assistance. Grumpy hardmen, toddlers, hip teens, young mums, old men and all in between – never have I been so universally loved. No one even laughed at the vast ghastly hole in the ass of my pants, at least not until I’d left the room. Anyone suffering severe self-esteem issues might do well to consider a transcontinental journey in a Model T Ford. The comedown’s pretty rough, mind you.

  I drove footloose and fan-belt-free for 500 miles, suffering occasional steamy alarums up long hills or at red lights that took too long to change. We were into the Sun Belt now, and the heat was relentless and astonishing. It messed with my head, my mouth and my limbs. I started pushing the throttle lever the wrong way. Incredibly, twice I nodded off at the wheel, hypnotised by the temperature and the stroboscopic shadows of telegraph poles laid across the softening tarmac. Both times I was mercifully roused to full alert by fortissimo contributions from my back-seat symphony: the wind-whipped snap of the ugly blue tarp I’d tucked in over my bags and boxes, or the clatter of energy-drink cans and oil quarts in the rear-footwell empties’ bucket.

  Long into the evening, as I sat slumped before a steaming tortilla, the world around me still seemed to shimmer and pulse as it had done all day through Mike’s shuddering windshield. Then one night I took out my Trumpland route map, laboriously brought it into focus and understood that I would soon be passing into the deepest south, where Model T guys seemed very thin on the ground. And that I’d then be hitting Texas and heading due north, a proposal that shook a lot of heads and sucked a lot of teeth: ‘Sir, you are headed for the hottest part of the US at the hottest time of the year.’ That fan belt would need sorting before then, and if I wanted any help with it I had better start looking now.

  The MTFCA worked its magic and directed me to Bill Robinson’s workshop in Gurley, Alabama, not far from the space-race city of Huntsville. Skirting it I caught a glimpse of the 360-foot Saturn V rocket that towers over the centre, like a cathedral spire to American achievement. The rocket that put man on the moon was designed in Huntsville in 1963 by ex-Nazi aerospace whizz Wernher von Braun and his team. It was made up of three million parts – all of which had to work – and in thirteen launches never lost a payload. I simply couldn’t get to grips with the brain-bending fact that less than forty years separated Mike from the Saturn V. It occurred to me that the two machines neatly bookended America’s gilded pomp. No matter how long mankind may survive, we will surely never again witness such astonishing progress in such a stunted time frame.

  An encounter with a cruel and discouraging T guy seemed long overdue by the law of averages, but it wouldn’t be happening in Gurley. Bill was another splendid fellow, a tall, ponderous retiree with a grey beard and an air of cheerful bemusement that may be the lot of those who live on Salty Bottom Road. A home-made sign on his shop wall wished me a ‘Happy Hillbilly Christmas’. One of the five Ts in his fleet was a tourer the same age as mine: with a wink he flipped up the hood and jabbed a thumb at the spark plug leads, which I noted were fashioned from barbed wire.

  ‘Any partickler reason you ain’t put a new belt on yourself, Teeum?’


  That detached half-smile tugged at the corners of Bill’s mouth. It was a fair question: I’d just watched him fit one in around three minutes. Any auto spares store could apparently have offered me a spare of the correct diameter. Another must-do-better stamp on my obliterated report card.

  We were presently joined by two further T men, Dave and Seth, each driving a stripped-down, two-seat, topless speedster. Seth was the youngest old car guy I would meet, a Huntsville mechanical engineering student whose bright yellow T offered a technological counterbalance to his research into 3D printing applications for the aerospace industry. The car had been in his family since his great-great-grandfather bought it new in 1914 – a wonderful story, but one that barely surprised me: the supporting role played by the Model T in the history of almost every small-town American was now taken as read. I was considerably more taken aback by the revelation that Seth’s performance modifications – an additional carburettor, a high-compression cylinder head, everything slavishly period-correct – had endowed his T with a top speed of 75mph. ‘Guess I ought to consider uprating the brakes,’ he chuckled wryly.

  Dave and Seth had come to induct me into the fellowship of the antique roadshow. It was a giddy affair. Bill led us out of his yard in a 1921 Model T ‘depot hack’, to all intents and purposes a quaint bus shelter on wheels, and for three splendid hours we trundled nose to tail through the soupy heat of the high Alabaman summer. Up and down red-earthed hills, over the wide Tennessee River, between fields and yards alive with crops and colour: carpets of green studded with fluffy white cotton, garish blurts of bougainvillea and crepe myrtle. How strange to find Mike hemmed in by fellow centenarians, to no longer bear sole responsibility for that huge rearward queue of traffic (though to be fair I still bore half of it: both speedsters jockeyed impatiently about in my juddery mirror, straining at the oily leash). And what a relief that nobody had proposed such an outing before: playing follow-my-leader in those cack-handed early weeks would have swiftly stoved in somebody’s pride and joy. After eight states and 2,300 miles, I had finally mustered a decent approximation of cruising competence.