Another Fine Mess Read online

  Approaching the steepest incline, Bill stuck a hand out of his window and made an urgent beckoning gesture. I knew what this meant: hit full gas now, or feel gravity’s dead hand grasp Mike by the tail pipe, then struggle all the way up to the brow at walking pace. I complied and was touching 45 by the time the road tilted up. Piloting a T at such speeds meant a deafening, buffeted flirtation with terminal velocity, but looking ahead at Bill’s depot hack pulling away from me and thus going faster still, there was no indication of the clattering frenzy I knew he would be enduring. With a sigh I understood that no matter how fast I went, no matter how raggedly I heaved the car around, to every other road user I would always look like some pootling old fart. With a deeper sigh I realised they’d be at least half right.

  Our convoy pulled in for refreshments at a remote little diner. Over several beakers of iced tea we put the four-wheeled world to rights, agreeing that if every motorist was required to spend an hour behind the wheel of a Model T, they would become vastly superior drivers. ‘Read the road better, allow safer distances, keep an eye out for dangers and escape routes.’ Then agreeing that several of them would perish during this experiment, and changing our minds. Stopping for gas an hour earlier, Dave noted with interest that one of his tyres had almost completely detached itself from a wheel rim. And we’d all been obliged to speed through a couple of red lights, a routine flirtation with tragedy for which I now adopted a special ‘brace face’: pursing my lips tight and turning my head sharply to one side, an expression ready-made for smearing across the tarmac.

  The presence of four parked Ts drew a procession of passers-by inside. A very old man shuffled up to our table, took out a very old cellphone and spent a long time silently scrolling through fuzzy images of a dim barn filled with car-like shapes. Halfway back to the door, he turned, fixed me with a look of perfect blankness and said: ‘You got a accent.’ Soon after, a more excitable and slightly younger chap all but burst through the door. ‘Sure is good to see all those Model Ts outsad! My brother un me used to go out moonshinin’ in my uncle’s T when we was young and dumb as bricks. Why, one night we gone broke most every bone in our damned bodies. Woooh!’

  ‘You are deep in moonshine country,’ confirmed Seth, after he’d gone. His girlfriend was a teacher, and at her first parents’ evening one of the more rustic mothers had sidled up with a gift. ‘My husband said I oughta give you a jar of coffee, but that don’t seem fittin’ for a teacher, so I got you this,’ she’d said, and plonked a big mason jar of bathtub spirit on the desk.

  A deadlier narcotic scourge had now reached Alabama, as I learned when Bill took a brief call and reported it in his default tone of incredulity. ‘That was a friend of mine, she’s about fifty years old, got that Crohn’s disease, they put her on those opioids for it, and she got addiction.’ He shook his head. ‘She just overdosed. For the third time.’ In testament to the appalling epidemic sweeping the US, this wasn’t even my first brush with it. A few days after starting, shopping for oil-drain pans at a parts store in West Virginia – the epidemic’s Ground Zero – I overheard a customer freely discussing his son’s oxycodone habit with the guy behind the till: ‘Don’t know how he’s still getting his hands on that shit, boy never seems to leave his damn apartment.’

  The statistics are shocking beyond belief. In 2016, 42,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses, victims of an epidemic that has so far claimed more than 200,000 lives. Drug overdoses now kill more Americans than cars and guns combined. Indeed, overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans under fifty.

  Most of the more downbeat motels I’d stayed at had a tattered flyer in reception giving details of the local opiate addiction support network, and there were billboards everywhere. The most common featured a steely-looking middle-aged, middle-class woman beside the slogan ‘STAND. FIGHT. WIN. TOGETHER WE CAN BEAT PAIN MED ADDICTION.’ There were even stickers on police cars, giving the number of an opiate-addiction helpline. And almost every CNN commercial break featured an ad for the Addiction Clinic, in which a pretend doctor in green scrubs delivered grim-faced deadlines: ‘A million people have called us already. Don’t leave it until you’ve lost your job or worse.’ What a very American circularity: the opioid crisis, a prescription-drug scandal created by criminally cynical pharmaceutical corporations and doctors with dollar signs in their eyes, would now be conquered by fee-hungry private clinics.

  The authorities had belatedly woken up to the crisis, yet enough opioids were still being annually prescribed to give each and every American – man, woman and child – a full month’s supply. An estimated two million people in the United States now suffer from ‘substance use disorders’ related to prescription opioid pain relievers. Opiates did seem grimly well suited to the zeitgeist: doomsday drugs, blotting out pain and bleak reality and allowing you to retreat into your own little cocoon. The age of Trump just doesn’t lend itself to good-time, yee-hah moonshinin’. McDowell County in West Virginia, now cursed with the highest overdose rate in the US, recorded one of the highest swings to Trump in 2016, and did so with a record turnout.

  Beyond that, I’m pointing the finger at the nation’s hard-wired consumerism. Americans like buying their way to health and happiness. The TV ads promise a pill for every ill, and if one pill is good, ten must be better. I was flabbergasted by the pharmacy section in the Walmarts I went into to bulk-buy quarts of oil. There would always be an entire aisle devoted to painkillers, many in industrial-sized drums. In England, supermarkets won’t let you buy more than thirty-two painkilling tablets at a time. At Walmart I could have bought 1,000 ibuprofen for $12.97. So I did.

  I’d have happily stayed all day shooting the breeze with my convoy buddies. In fact, I’d have happily just sat and listened to them take turns reading out some of the more appealing names from the state map that Bill had laid across the table: Tuscaloosa, Alabaster, Eclectic, Loachapoka, Splunge. Social bonding, I had learned, was a firm and instant process with Model Ts. They tapped into some sort of communal folk memory, and seemed to stir up a warming nostalgia for a cheerier, slower, more optimistic age. An age of rose-tinted, apple-pie afternoons at Granddaddy’s farm. An age when America had a future, not just a past. And that, I suppose, explains why almost a century since the last one was built, almost 300,000 Model Ts still survive in one form or another.

  Collecting old cars was an inherently conservative hobby, indeed literally so, but it shared nothing with the divisive mean-spiritedness of Trumpism. As curious as I always was about their politics, it was very plain that these guys got into their Model Ts to escape from all that crap, exchanging the grim, intractable conflicts of the modern world for a simpler time when everything could be put right with some baling wire and a hose clamp. And so I patted my new, old friends on their hot, damp backs, and watched them walk across the gravel to that wobbly old wooden truck, and the two antique warm-rods beside it. Bill climbed into his open-sided cab, then called out, ‘Teeum, I gotta ask you …’ The corners of his mouth eased upwards. ‘When are you going to get a damn haircut?’

  Alabama was poor – the road out of Tennessee shrivelled and fell apart as soon as I crossed the state line – and I now broached some of its neediest counties. The settlements were scratchy and underpopulated, with plenty of dead grocery stores and gas stations, many of which appeared to have gone under during the last surge in the price of oil: the rusted pump dials were set at $4 a gallon, double what I’d been paying. Those claims-to-fame painted on the water towers grew ever more daft and desperate, stuff along the lines of ‘DRY PRONG – BIRTHPLACE OF CARSON FUDGE, ALABAMA’S MR BASKETBALL 2003’ or ‘VIGILANTE – HOME OF THE RUSTLIN’ VARMINTS.’ Tina Turner wrote ‘Nutbush City Limits’ about her childhood home, a declining, unincorporated town a couple of hundred miles north-west of me, and those lyrical snapshots of one-horse, parochial banality sprang from my blistered lips for days, generally in a sun-crazed bellow.

  The heat really was daft, and now came accompanied
with wilting, claggy humidity. A bag of sink-laundered socks and underwear steamed for three days on the engine-room floorboards, before I abandoned all decorum and dangled its fetid contents up to dry, wedged in the breeze-catching roof hinges. The mirages that loomed on the road ahead were very often actual patches of shiny, melted tarmac.

  And the accents were going all to hell. A guy in a pick-up truck pulled alongside me at a stop light in Russellville, surveyed Mike with deep appreciation, then opened his window and said: ‘Compass back you rack-toot and spurs root up cork now, sir.’ His young son leaned over and shyly added: ‘My daddy misshapen my beard-flag.’ I would be doing a lot of wordless, smiley nodding from this point onwards.

  One afternoon I drove into Hackleburg (‘HOME OF THE PANTHERS, STATE BASEBALL CHAMPS 2007’) and was mildly diverted by a vast new factory-like structure that rose incongruously from the cornfields just out of town. I asked the cashier about it when I filled up at the Shell station down the road. ‘Randall Jane’s whorehouse,’ she told me, but I was pretty sure she hadn’t meant to, so I persisted. It took a while to decode the whole story, and a lot longer than that for it to sink in. The building was a Wrangler jeans warehouse, built to replace a predecessor that had been destroyed in 2011 by the deadliest tornado in Alabaman history. Seventy-two people lost their lives – nineteen of them in poor little Hackleburg, including an employee at the warehouse. ‘Bluejanes fell right out the sky in Courtland,’ she said, distantly. ‘That’s 50 miles from here.’ In an appalled moment I understood why I’d been seeing storm shelters – reinforced concrete Nissen huts – in every town I’d passed through, and why that grain elevator I’d driven past an hour before had lain crumpled like a giant beer can at the edge of a roadside field.

  A gas station full of bereaved survivors didn’t seem a diplomatic forum to satisfy morbid fascination, so I transmitted my sym-pathies to the cashier, then went straight outside and Googled it on my phone. As I read my jaw steadily lowered. The mile-wide Hackleburg tornado, one of a dozen that ripped across Alabama on 27 April 2011, was clocked at 210mph. Those who heard its approach – ‘like a very loud, very low organ note’ – dashed into the storm shelter, then watched through its porthole window as cars and hunks of masonry flew through the air outside. In fifteen seconds, 75 per cent of their town was destroyed. Proceeding north-east – the exact route I’d just driven down – the tornado carved a 90-mile gouge in the earth and hoovered up long slices of road. Three million chickens were killed on the region’s many poultry farms. Thousands of pine trees were snapped in two and thousands more bent double: their trunks had been twisted around five or six times, pulping the innards to plasticine. People were killed in their homes by flying furniture, then sucked out of windows, their bodies carried to faraway places that were in some instances not located for days. Across the state, 236 people died that day – America’s deadliest twenty-four-hour tornado toll since the year after Mike rolled off the Highland Park line. What a haunting juxtaposition with the slow-paced, slow-voiced rolling tedium of southern small-town life. The people of Hackleburg had probably only just got over winning that 2007 baseball championship.

  Yet Alabama was once a veritable hotbed of violent death, mostly caused by the deadly game of historical consequences that played out across the southern states in four terrible decades. In central Alabama I drove right over many branches of the Trail of Tears, those death-march expulsions of Native Americans ordained by the authorities in the wake of the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Of the 21,000 Creek Indians forced to walk 700 miles from their Alabaman home territories to Oklahoma, 3,500 died en route. The principal motive? To open the land up for cotton plantations, where in the coming decades more than two million slaves would be put to work in murderous conditions that afforded a life expectancy of twenty-one. And which in turn begat the US Civil War, whose southern killing fields I was now entering. The conflict that ended when Henry Ford was a toddler claimed more American lives than both world wars and Vietnam combined: 4 per cent of the male population was slaughtered, amongst them 30,000 Alabamans.

  In apt sympathy, the car was now filled with fire and fury. Just after crossing into Mississippi, I inadvertently established it was possible, via the fickle miracle of Bluetooth, to transmit the live audio content of TV news stations from my phone to my giant radio. This discovery just happened to coincide with perhaps the angriest, shoutiest news week in recent memory. The brief but memorable tenure of Anthony Scaramucci as Trump’s press spokesman was a paranoid, ranting Scarface interlude that marked the discordant, self-destructive low point of the whole Trump circus thus far. Its absolute nadir was hearing ‘the Mooch’ reference one of the Trump regime’s most unappetising personalities – and by some margin its most repulsive physical specimen – in an image that has been blighting my life ever since: ‘I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.’

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘Recreational hauling only. No commercial vehicles. Speed limit 50. Patchy signal on your phone, it’s like a Mooch-free zone, all of your own.’ What a tremendous relief to find myself welcomed on to the Natchez Trace Parkway by a sign which said at least most of the above, in a jolly old script font that recalled the credits from an early Hanna-Barbera cartoon. For the thick end of two days I burbled serenely along in a reverie, living the motor-tourist’s dream as Henry would have dreamed it. The sky was blue and the breeze delicious, the velvet tarmac beneath me winding its graceful way through dappled forests and over vivid green meadows. Every curve swept, and every gradient was thoughtfully tempered by a cutting or embankment. Some of the bridges were breathtaking, slender concrete ellipses that vaulted valleys in a single dainty leap.

  A deer and a chipmunk skipped gaily across the road together. White egrets took lazily to the air. It felt like driving through one of the more dreamily bucolic sequences in Fantasia. I didn’t even see any roadkill, because there was almost no traffic. Nor, by stern and hallowed decree, was there any commercial intrusion: no gas stations or motels, not even a single snack stall. I stopped at every historic marker and interpretation board, learning that the ‘trace’ the road followed was left by generations of migrating bison. I unsheathed Slim Jims at picnic tables scattered decorously with pine needles, and relieved myself at rest facilities that seemed to have been spaced apart with a single kind of motorist in mind: quite an old one who drinks a gallon of water a day and drives at 34mph.

  Mike was in the form of his life, purring along as smoothly as he ever would, like a so-so sewing machine. The inclines were gentle, and there were no junctions or stop lights or people to flag me down and shout: ‘WHAT YEAR?’ These felt like free miles. Perhaps Mike just felt at home: as betrayed by the Natchez Trace sticker Bob Kirk had affixed to one of my wind deflectors, this was the first road that I knew for certain he’d driven down before.

  The National Parkways are a legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-fighting, federally funded Public Works Agency. From 1933 to 1942, the PWA embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious infrastructure programme, spending $7 billion on the construction of dams, bridges, airports, tunnels, schools, hospitals and homes. But mainly on building 11,428 roads, some of them extremely long ones. The Natchez Trace Parkway – Europeans may like to sit down at this point – runs for a stupendous 444 miles. A brand-new road, longer than the distance from London to Edinburgh, built with public money and purely for public recreation. As I tooled cheerily along I felt my heart soar.

  What a bold project, and what a noble intent. Drive the Natchez Trace and you can almost hear America – the America of Henry Ford and FDR – rejoicing in its own good fortune. To be blessed with such a surfeit of space and beauty, and then to summon the public-spirited self-confidence to bring this 444-mile joyride into being. The Natchez Trace picnic areas and side trails were built by some of the three million young men who enrolled in FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, working like Trojans in exchange for board, lodging and $30 a month – $25 of which th
ey had to send home.

  You may not be completely astonished to learn that the National Parkways – there are ten of them, and the Natchez Trace isn’t even the longest – are now under threat. The parkways are maintained by the National Park Service, which has lost a third of its workforce since 2002 and is currently burdened with a $12 billion maintenance backlog. One of Trump’s first actions on taking office was to slice 15 per cent off the NPS budget. His administration is also keenly exploring the privatisation of many National Park services, so it’s a decent bet that the next time I drive down the Natchez Trace those leafy picnic areas will have been replaced by Taco Bells.

  If you had to ascribe the National Parkways with a single founding characteristic, it would be sincerity. From planning to realisation, it was such an earnest and well-intentioned project. From FDR to the CCC, everyone involved was inspired by the selfless hope for a better future for each and every American. All my old car guys exuded this sincerity: they were straight-up, genuine folk. In fact, I’m struggling to think of anyone I met who came across otherwise. Yet most of these people, as dictated by the polling data that informed my itinerary, had voted for one of the modern world’s most drippingly insincere personalities. Trump failed even the entry-level tests of heartfelt good faith. He only ever sounded like he meant it when he was doing people down or bigging himself up. A few weeks later, arriving in Houston to inspect the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, Trump delivered a tub-thumping address that came across like a campaign speech. ‘What a crowd, what a turnout!’ he yelled gleefully into the mic, in an address that made absolutely no mention of the death and devastation the city had endured. (Later that day, asked to comment on the inundation that had left hundreds of thousands homeless, he offered this classically Trumpian response: ‘Nobody has ever seen this much water. The water has never been seen like this, to this, to the extent. And it’s, uh, maybe someday going to disappear.’) Why could none of his supporters hear it? It was bewildering beyond words.