Another Fine Mess Read online

  Prospecting was a humbler affair on the Wyoming side of the state line. In 1878, James LeGraves came running down the Cambria Canyon screaming, ‘There’s salt in them thar hills!’ Ten years later, to rather greater public excitement, a surveyor found a seam of high-grade anthracite coal in the canyon. With the tempered restraint that defined the era, the Cambria Fuel Company swiftly declared this ‘sufficient to fuel the fires of hell for eternity’, and within twenty years the town built atop the seam was home to 1,500 people, an opera house and a hospital boasting one of America’s first X-ray machines. Within another twenty, however, the coal was mined out, and at 4.30 p.m. on 15 March 1928, Cambria’s pithead whistle blew for the final time. The citizens decamped with remarkable alacrity. Meals were left on tables and clothes in wardrobes. Before sundown, every clerk and shop owner had packed up and left. By daybreak the whole place lay deserted. The courthouse lawn sprinkler had been left running and would eventually drain Cambria’s reservoir, built at vast expense on top of a well half a mile deep. Cambria, marooned in a lonesome valley 9 miles from the nearest living town, was slowly reclaimed by nature. Today, its only surviving structure is the hefty mock-Tudor hunting lodge built by the mine’s owners, before whose forbidding oaken doors I now stood.

  The landlady who eventually answered my bereft knocking did so with a pre-loaded expression of regret: the Flying V Cambria Inn had no current guests, and so wasn’t open. I began to wheedle pathetically, then stood back, bid her come out, and waved an arm at Mike, parked on the deserted forecourt with his wheels at a jaunty angle before a rearing backdrop of pine and rock. ‘Built four years before they closed the mine here,’ I said cajolingly.

  ‘Well, I’ll be darned.’

  She was smitten and promptly relented, with the proviso that the kitchen staff had all been sent home.

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’ve got half a packet of trail mix. It’s only been rained in a bit.’

  A motherly smile. ‘Oh, I think I can do a little better than that.’

  An hour later, after a clueless, fruitless under-bonnet round of follow-the-misfire, I heaved my holdall in through the front door. A key had been left for me on the desk but there was no one around. Feeling very alone I wandered through a sepulchral billiard room, along endless corridors, across a dance hall looked down on by antlered trophies. How glad I was that no one had ever thought to set a horror film in a lonely and antiquated off-season hotel. Then I found the designated door, threw it open and made a truly appalling discovery. There was my dinner, ready and waiting on the bed: a half-full, 28-ounce drum of Cheese Balls.

  It was a glorious dawn with a setting to match, and in a spirit of day-seizing adventure I took a short cut a few miles north, striking boldly off asphalt on to a loose-surfaced county road. I’m not sure why the Black Hills aren’t called the Green Mountains. They’re lavishly wooded and properly big – indeed positively titanic when set against the endless, dun-coloured plains from which they vault so abruptly. However, the gravelled corrugations beneath me soon made scenic appreciation a challenge. Even at 10mph the spindly tyres slid helplessly about, while the judders punted breakfast Cheese Balls – waste not, want not – back up my gullet. It was like driving over a greased washboard.

  But after a few bumpy, attritional miles I discovered that the faster you went, the less you slithered. It seemed obvious, really: a rude trail like this, not velvet tarmac, was after all the Model T’s natural under-wheel habitat. Duly inspired, I was soon skating over the ridged gravel at intemperate speed, trailing an impressive plume of white dust as I slalomed across an alpine plateau. Deer pranced out of the Ponderosa pines. A beaver slipped into a glassy mountain lake. I threw Mike down flanks of loose chippings, past stoved-in log cabins and banks of Christmas tree conifers that swept into buttercup pastures, sucking in crisp draughts of high-altitude air. Every so often I’d pass a farmyard full of rust and dust, and a stir-crazy mongrel would scoot out and bark me up the arse for a good mile. Pebbles pinged and clunked off the wood and steel beneath my feet. My GPS showed me plunging ever deeper into a white void. At some point I topped 6,000 feet; at some other I entered South Dakota. After 24 bracing, valiant miles, I patted Mike on the dust-rimed steering wheel and eased back on to grey smoothness. He’d barely misfired all morning. When I stopped to refuel at Hill City, I noted with great satisfaction that his flanks were now slathered in expedition-grade filth. On the Wacky Races scale, we had made the journey from Anthill Mob to Arkansas Chugabug.

  The American Dream was alive and well, or rather old and rich, in the Black Hills National Forest. Silvery couples pootled along in gleaming pension-mobiles, pausing in lay-bys to photograph the colossal elephant-hide outcrops. Though they hadn’t really come for those, nor for a ride on the Black Hills Steam Railroad, nor for a shoot-out round of Deadwood Mini Golf. They didn’t even seem particularly captivated by a 1924 Ford Model T Touring. Everyone was here to pay homage to four all-American heroes hewn monumentally into the living rock. We had come to see Mount Trumpless.

  I think you may have to be American to appreciate Rushmore fully. Those around me certainly did, staring up in reverential silence. Yes, it’s a work of dumbfounding scale and ambition, realised through fourteen years of blood, sweat and dangly, explosive derring-do by 150 miners. Yes, the stats are extraordinary: the 450,000 tons of mountain that were blown away and jackhammered off, the 20-foot noses, the project’s remarkable death toll of zero. Yet from the distant Grand View Terrace those faces just didn’t seem that big, famously an issue when things are quite a way off. And as a global sightseeing icon it felt so familiar, so entirely unsurprising. It was just up there, hewn into that granite outcrop, looking exactly as you’d seen it in a thousand films and photos, exactly as you expected it to look.

  Mount Rushmore was conceived by sculptor Gutzon Borglum in the year of Mike’s birth. In 1924, America stood in a giddying here-and-now: so much already accomplished, yet so much potential to realise. The nation was living through Henry Ford’s ‘historic today’, making its own remarkable history on the hoof. Despite the long-dead faces hewn into that cliff – though Theodore Roosevelt, the line-up’s right-place/right-time B-lister, had only pegged out in 1919 – Rushmore was less a celebration of America’s past than its mighty present. A loaded, cocky nation giving itself The Big I Am, carving its name into the Black Hill granite in the spirit of General Custer.

  The project was completed when Bob Kirk turned seventeen. Except it wasn’t really completed. Borglum had intended to carve full torsos for his four presidents, and underpin them with a vast panel commemorating civic icons in eight-foot-tall letters: the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and Petherfenny, his imaginary mechanical uncle. (One of these intentions has been questioned by academics.) But the money had run out. And maybe so had that wellspring of patriotic hope. Since work had begun, America had struggled through the Depression and the Dustbowl. It was about to be drawn into another world war. The future didn’t look quite as heady as it had. Carving giant heads into a remote mountain began to look a little self-indulgent. If not arrogant. If not an act of hubristic folly.

  Rushmore is perhaps the closest thing there is to an American pilgrimage. The awed old worshippers around me bloody loved their country. You could see it in their stiffened spines and shining eyes. They loved Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, maybe even that fifth Beatle, the guy with the pince-nez and the ’tache. They loved the boundless ambition and self-confidence that had carved them all into that cliff. But all that was then. Theirs was an elegiac patriotism, slipping away in the rear-view mirror like an ailing Model T. They had come here to give it The Big We Were. And with that sombre thought in mind, I went back to Car Park 5, threw open Mike’s bonnet and tightened the manifold bolts so resolutely that one of them snapped off.

  The Black Hills were behind me, a brief interlude of activity and scenic drama, and those empty khaki plains yawned out anew. I roared across them in good, loud com
pany: the world’s largest motorcycle rally had just finished 20-odd miles away in Sturgis, and half a million bandana-headed old bikers were thundering home on their Harleys. Almost every one threw me a peace sign or the devil horns, or returned the too-cool-for-school languid finger-lift that had become my own favoured greeting. ‘Now, us boys don’t usually care for cars,’ croaked one ponytailed ancient when his burbling phalanx pulled alongside at a set of lights in Belle Fourche. ‘But that old T is kind of a missing link to the motorcycle. You’re getting the wind in your hair, and boy is that thing LOUD.’

  I looked down and read his T-shirt. ‘I’ll keep my FREEDOM, GUNS and MONEY – you can keep the “CHANGE”.’ Beneath this slogan was a circled photograph of Obama with a red line through it. He gunned his throttle. ‘Know your left rear wheel has a wobble?’

  ‘I do now.’

  Another group of bikers were drinking beer on a bench outside the lobby of the Belle Fourche AmericInn when I dragged my bags past them. We got talking, and they explained that their hobby’s advanced average age was yet another reflection of fiscal demographics: ‘These bikes cost $40,000, and we’re just ridin’ them for fun. Younger guys can’t afford to do that. It’s kind of a shame as these things weigh 700lb, and keeping one upright at a stop sign isn’t an old feller’s game.’ Death and frailty was culling the Sturgis attendance, they told me; until recently, over a million had turned up. ‘Though if that idiot is still in charge next year I’m staying at home.’

  I stared at the chunky old dude who’d made this pronouncement. ‘Which idiot?’

  ‘Donald goddam Trump!’ he yelped. ‘Every time he opens his mouth I just … Oh, man.’

  He took a soothing draught of Coors Light.

  ‘We’re Canadians,’ explained his neighbour.

  ‘Still in shock,’ added another.

  I knew how he felt. But how very confusing it was to hear such words from men who by age and bearing I was now conditioned to associate with fiercely Trumpist rhetoric.

  ‘Guy I met at the rally told me something real interesting,’ said the Coors drinker. ‘“You fellers all make the same mistake. You listen to what the man says. But it’s not about what Trump says, it’s about what he stands for.”’

  We considered this sombrely for a while, outsiders in a once familiar land. Then, to communal relief and amusement, someone let forth an emphatic belch.

  CHAPTER 14

  ‘I was six years old when I first drove one of these.’ A wistful chuckle echoed frailly around Ken’s shop. ‘My pop told me to take our T truck out into the wheat field. Boy, I was shaking like a leaf!’

  The AmericInn’s splendidly biddable manager had led me to Belle Fourche’s pre-eminent old-car guy, and would shortly be returning with a selection of washers and gaskets pinched from his janitor’s hardware collection. Ken’s task was to rectify my cacophonous manifold, a process that began with extracting the cindered remnants of the cardboard Charles Toyne out of Sedgwick had sealed it with. A correct set of ring gaskets, supplemented with a few janitorial offerings, was duly sourced from a deeply oxidised T Fordor that Ken had recently acquired. ‘Belonged to my old schoolteacher. She bought herself a Model A in 1932 but nobody wanted her old T. Sat in an aircraft hangar for eighty-six years until I took it out.’

  Such was the fate of many a Model T. Henry Ford might have invented modern consumerism with his $5 day and his super-cheap cars, but he was appalled by the disposable culture it swiftly fostered. He couldn’t really complain when competitors began to launch technically superior rivals (though he did anyway – heaters and wind-down windows were for sissies). But as a proudly practical engineer, what really got his goat was the ever-tighter focus on style over substance. How it must have pained him to find that the Model T’s robust, utilitarian simplicity was no longer sufficient for the fickle, fashion-conscious consumers he had inadvertently created. They wanted more comfort, more speed, more panache. They just generally wanted more of everything, and for a century, they got it. Then they didn’t, and everything went to crap.

  By 1924, the US car market was saturated: if you wanted a car and could afford it – a pretty low bar by then – you already had one. In 1917, there were 21.8 Americans per registered car; by 1924, the ratio was one in eight – a level of vehicle ownership that Europe wouldn’t match until the 1960s. Alfred Sloan, boss of General Motors and Henry’s nemesis, calculated that the easiest way to sell people a new car they didn’t need was to make them ashamed of their current one. Under his aegis, GM pioneered built-in obsolescence, a brazenly cynical ruse which at minimal cost rendered last year’s model dowdily redundant, and this year’s gleamingly irresistible. A tweaked grille, different headlights, a glitzy ad campaign and of course a new name. At $525, Sloan’s 1925 Chevrolet Superior Series K cost over 50 per cent more than the Model T, and on paper wasn’t remotely worth the extra – all you got was a three-speed floor shift and six additional horsepower. But it looked better: sleeker, lower, flashier. You could get it in more colours, and plump for a two-tone paint job. You could add disc wheels and bumpers. It had a sun visor. And, you know, this was a Series K! So much more desirable, more now than the embarrassing old 1924 Superior Series F, with its, um, very slightly larger radiator.

  Built-in obsolescence ran right against Henry’s grain, the antithesis of his one-size-fits-all Universal Car. ‘A market is never saturated with a good product,’ he argued, ‘but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.’ Noble words. In My Life and Work, released in 1923, Ford said: ‘We cannot conceive how to serve the customer unless we make him something that, as far as we can provide, will last forever … More power, more colours, more style and comfort are extravagances that feed insatiable appetites … A responsible manufacturer shouldn’t encourage such extravagance.’ By the same token he despised manipulative marketing, forgetting that his own sales manager, Norval Hawkins, had sold millions of Model Ts on the back of it. ‘Advertising? Absolutely necessary to promote good, useful things; bad when it’s used to create an unnatural demand for useless things, as it too often is.’

  But the trouble with sexed-up lifestyle advertising and its tarty handmaiden, built-in obsolescence, was that they worked. The Series K became the first car to outsell the Model T, and by 1927, the T’s final year, GM had left Ford in its dust. For years after, as Ken’s schoolteacher found out, you literally couldn’t give a T away. So ugly. So lanky, boxy, clunky. So then. How’s this for a tragic counterpoint to the Universal Car’s mind-boggling production figures: of the 11.5 million Ts registered in the US in 1927, more than half had vanished by 1931. Every single day for four years, 4,000 Model Ts were scrapped or pushed to the back of a barn and forgotten. I’d tell that to Mike next time he was naughty.

  By noon I was arrowing north up South Dakota’s Highway 85, through a Farrow & Ball landscape of muted tans and olives. Beyond the occasional stripy, wind-smoothed butte – which I was sad to find is pronounced ‘bewt’ – there was little to detain the eyes. Add both Dakotas to Wyoming and Montana and you have the combined population of Wales, rattling about in an area twice the size of France. I’d speed eagerly up to a settlement that was prominently marked on the map, my stomach noisily readying itself for Slim Jims and Rip It energy drink, then encounter nothing but a single farmhouse and a field of wrecked cars. Alaska excepted, there is nowhere more lonely in all the land.

  Ken and the gasket donors had done a stand-up job, and I fair flew across the washed-out desolation, topping 40 in relative silence on the beeline asphalt. Progress was excellent, and after a late start it needed to be. In two days, my wife would be landing at Denver. Keen geographers will note that I’d now overshot Denver, indeed massively so, but I’d be overshooting it further all day: the night before I’d booked the last available rental car in a 200-mile radius, which was now awaiting me at Dickinson, North Dakota. The 1,200-mile-round trip involved in bringing my wife back to meet Mike was not a challenge to dwell on for now. My much more immediate
concern was reaching the Hertz office at Dickinson before it closed, and to achieve this meant covering 185 miles in a little over seven hours.

  ‘That done broke.’

  I was backing out of a gas-station parking lot in Bowman, North Dakota, when my steering wheel stopped working. Two old men in camouflage caps and loud checked shirts were looking on, and one of them had just found out why. I jumped out and followed his pointed finger to the underside of Mike’s front end, where a metal bar was dangling in two freshly cleaved halves. One aged voice told me it was my tie rod. Another murmured that somebody up there must have been watching over me.

  ‘You OK, buddy?’ enquired the first. ‘Look like you got your sack caught in your zipper.’

  Half an hour previously, cresting a low brow on Highway 85, I’d been surprised by a considerable hump in the road, some errant billow of asphalt. The road had steadily narrowed since I’d left South Dakota, whilst its heavy-goods traffic had steadily increased. The hay truck stuck hard up my arse had been there for 10 miles, and another was steaming towards me at very close quarters. For a moment I thought I’d bridged the hump, a moment that ended when the wheel was snatched from my grasp. I grabbed it back but Mike had already veered violently across the road. The wrong-side rumble strip thrummed under my left wheel; I swung right, saw the oncoming world blotted out by a huge machine, heard and felt the blast of an air horn. Then a lot of flash-frame lateral movement, all breakneck tilts and skitters, and suddenly I was back on the straight and narrow, puttering blandly forth.

  My heart was still thumping when I pulled into the gas station. Now it almost stopped dead. The tie rod, transmitter of steering inputs to the front wheels, had quite obviously sustained its fatal injury in that traumatic episode. By every law of logic and material science it should have fractured there and then, leaving me rudderless at 42mph in a truck sandwich. Yet somehow it had held itself together until I was trundling about at walking pace in a gas station.