Another Fine Mess Read online

  I stayed at Arco, which in 1955 became the first town in the world to be illuminated by nuclear power. This heritage was celebrated with some diligence along its silent streets. That overlapping-ovals atomic symbol was neatly painted on the flanks of empty shops, and the town’s dusty fire truck had ‘Atomic City’ emblazoned across its doors. I passed an ‘Atoms for Peace’ interpretation board, which didn’t find space to mention that the surrounding desert was once demarcated the Mass Detonation Area, and remains heavily pockmarked with giant craters. Opposite my motel, the conning tower of a nuclear submarine had been erected in the middle of a playground. (The robust bluff behind it was embellished from foot to lofty peak with vast double digits – perilously hand painted, the motelier told me, by every high-school graduation class for the last century. I can’t tell you how tickled I was to spot the class of ’24’s impressive effort.)

  The diner up the road, to which I now repaired for an early supper, advertised itself in neon as ‘Home of the Atomic Burger’. This comestible tribute to Arco’s radioactive heritage seemed a remarkable stretch of loyalty, and I walked in hoping to spot a greenish glow fringing the kitchen door, and perhaps a couple of Vladimir Putin’s enemies slumped face-down in their plates. Halfway through my disappointingly standard house special I chanced upon an online account of Arco’s unhappier claim to nuclear fame – on 3 January 1961, the world’s first reactor meltdown led three operators to a very unpleasant end. One of them went undiscovered for several hours; the 12-ton reactor he’d been standing on had been propelled 9 feet into the air, spreading him very thinly across a wide stretch of ceiling. I completed my Atomic Burger with diminished zest.

  Idaho was kind to me. I reeled it in for three agreeable days, a warm breeze sweeping off the open range, bringing swarms of yellow butterflies, moreish wafts of hot hay, the restful lowing of distant cattle. Every so often something remarkable would interrupt the khaki continuum: a plunging creek, a Sherman tank with a paisley turret, or a craggy black lava field, still shiny and sharp, like a trillion cubic feet of coal fly-tipped in the desert. Modest balls of tumbleweed bounced across my path, skittering off to the feet of colossal sand dunes. The enchiladas were toothsome, the motels appealingly antiquated, and the nocturnal freight trains emitted an especially urgent, plaintive whistle, as if the driver had just spotted a pram rolling on to the level crossing.

  But the state, it’s fair to say, proved rather harder on Mike. At full chat, the fractured muffler now let out a bygone explosive roar, like the bloody Red Baron’s triple-winged Fokker powering down a runway. Some internal flap of fabric had worked itself loose inside the roof, adding a thwacky backbeat to those under-floor collisions of old iron. The agricultural weld that held my tie rod together was riven by a spreading hairline crack, which didn’t look good to me, and looked a lot worse to the MTFCA when I posted a close-up photo on their forum in order to gauge opinion. ‘Frankly your demise is not probable but certain if you don’t get your shit together,’ wrote one particularly forthright member. ‘Hate me if you wish but you have been warned.’ These words, as you may imagine, cast rather a shadow over my progress – particularly as I didn’t even know what my shit was, let alone how to reassemble it. Every time Mike squirrelled eccentrically through a corner my heart seemed to rise about a foot, until I felt its beat in my throat and jaw. At least there aren’t many corners in Idaho.

  And that periodic misfire was now a full-time companion, a five-second fainting fit every mile. This malaise lacked the tie rod’s starkly lethal import, but it was much more frustrating. Until the welding fairy crept into my motel room and touched her acetylene wand to my fingers and snoring head, I couldn’t do anything about the tie rod. But at this stage of my journey, with 5,000 miles and twenty US states under the wheels, I felt I really ought to be capable of resolving a humdrum running issue.

  Since Scott’s dire prognosis I had certainly become much more closely focused on Mike’s well-being. At his suggestion I was now changing the oil every 300 miles, and topping it up three times a day. I had lowered my cruising speed to 30. Looking back, I appear to have confused this entry-level mechanical sympathy with technical expertise, because late one afternoon outside a motel in Mountain Home, with the digital thermometer outside the bank up the road showing 102, I decided that the misfire was a fuelling issue, and promptly embarked on an extremely ambitious programme of related works.

  The first stage decorated my corner of the parking lot with surprisingly tiny bits of lawnmower carburettor, dispersed during a silent explosion as I gingerly detached its fuel bowl. The last, conducted several hours later under the surgical glare of a security light, left the under-Mike asphalt blotted with reeking pools of gasoline and a glinting chaos of tools. I didn’t expect him to run any better after all that, and I was right. Frankly I was just delighted he ran at all.

  Geese were flying south as I sputtered into Oregon, which I guessed marked summer’s death knell. With my rattlesnake thermometer still north of the three-digit line it didn’t make sense, and nor did the snowscooters that now sheltered in every barn. After long weeks of ranchland and industrial corn I finally passed through some proper patchwork fields, rectangles of salad crops, onions, and sunflowers with heavy, bowed heads, awaiting execution. In the spirit of harvest I finally submitted to a haircut, intrigued to find that my motel in Ontario boasted a resident barber. I feared the worst after being ushered into the chair by a young man with a lot of ink on his skin and elaborate sideburns. But I needn’t have worried, and twelve minutes later walked out looking like Heinrich Himmler.

  ‘Boy, are you in for some fun.’

  Eastern Oregon’s irrigated greenery had given way to steep red rock, and with Mike coughing his guts up I’d pulled in at the aptly titled Oasis Diner in lonesome Juntura. My noisome arrival had drawn a stubbled oldie out into the pitiless sun, and he was now offering a plain-spoken overview of my forthcoming challenge.

  ‘You got two passes ahead up US-20, Drinkwater and Stinkingwater. Both pretty big pulls. No gas, no nothing for sixty miles.’

  He scratched his neck and leaned back against one of the battered ice freezers that flanked the diner’s entrance. ‘Name’s Charlie. I kind of keep everything running round here. Order me a tunafish salad sandwich and I’ll take a look under the hood.’ I agreed to this deal with some alacrity and made for the door. ‘White bread, no relish, cottage cheese,’ he drawled over his shoulder, flicking the bonnet clips.

  Charlie was back inside before his sandwich made it out of the kitchen. ‘That carb was running rich as all hell. You’ll be golden now.’ He sat down at my table, slapped two very aromatic hands on the Formica and showed me five teeth. ‘Guy I knew used to step out in front of Greyhound buses, take a hit and get a big insurance pay out.’ How I’d come to love these dramatic non sequiturs. ‘Worked pretty good for him until the last time. Ha!’

  Charlie’s confidence was founded on many decades of competent all-round mending. As I left he was climbing up on the diner’s roof to sort out their air conditioner. But his two-minute fix seemed too good to be true, and on the squiggly lower reaches of Drinkwater Pass the misfire duly returned, with a stuttering, spluttering vengeance. Mike’s engine died for long seconds, bucked violently to life then died anew, the sound of a stricken Spitfire about to arc vertically into the Channel. A complete stall on a steep incline didn’t bear thinking about – the futile yank on the handbrake, the inexorable gathering of rearward momentum, the death-or-glory bail-out with a wheel chock in each hand – so I thought about little else. The derelict single-track railroad beside me occasionally wandered away to vault some rocky void on a tumbledown trestle bridge. A sign warned that I had entered snake country. The cars were twenty minutes apart and the phone signal had long since died. I was in a bad place in every sense.

  All those months ago, as I sat behind the wheel of a Model T for the very first time in a damp Buckinghamshire farmyard, Neil Tuckett said something that had stuck. �
�You’ll always have problems with a T. When you’re good, you just learn to drive around them.’ How long had I been plagued by this misfire? At least 2,000 miles, on and off. I had clearly learned to drive around it, and was therefore clearly good. Right?

  That morning, in a fate-tempting breakfast audit of my remaining distance, I’d established that just 400 miles separated me from the Pacific coast. A forkful of yolk froze at my open jaw. Four hundred miles! If Mike could just hold it together, if I could just drive around his problem with a little more forbearance, we could be there in two days. Call it three to be safe. In the grand scheme of my 6,000-mile trip and this great big country, you could safely round that down to sweet fuck-all.

  But what had seemed so close at breakfast now seemed so very far. For the first time since that dreadful debut night in Ordinary, fundamental doubts began to crowd my mind. Only now my fear wasn’t that I’d go to pieces, but that my car might.

  ‘Come on, Michael. Come on, son. COME ON!’ Shuddering up the scree-walled switchbacks, I dispensed encouragement first in a muttered wheedle, and latterly through the wild bellowing of a drunken race-course punter.

  He didn’t completely ignore me. Thrice Mike coasted to a deathly halt, and thrice he did so on an almost level gradient. The first time I swapped the ignition coil, a moment of joyous inspiration which procured the usual three-minute false dawn of smooth running. The second time, at a lay-by zoned for the seasonal fitting of snow chains, I opted to drain the petrol. I had to do something, and someone, somewhere had suggested that ethanol-blended gas (now, thanks to Henry, almost universal in the States) corroded rubber fuel lines, and thus might have incited a blockage.

  That monstrous heat was now being delivered by an extremely stiff breeze, which made quite an adventure of this process. In the end I had to wedge the oil-drain pan on its side under the car to act as a windbreak, permitting at least some of the frail petrol cascade to tinkle into my bucket rather than fly three feet back down the tarmac. I was blowing out the fuel pipes when a pick-up truck pulled up, and a guy in denim shorts and mirrored shades leapt down from the cab. ‘Bet you could use a brewski, pardner,’ he called, proffering a can appealingly beaded in condensation. His manner was consistent with a footwell deep in empties, and being in no mood to join the party I mustered a polite refusal. ‘Your call,’ he shrugged, fiddling with his phone. ‘Mind if I take a photo? Might be the last one of you alive!’

  I’d just topped Drinkwater when Mike died his third death. The road was narrow; I put two wheels into the sandy gravel and coasted to a stop. Perhaps 4 miles ahead, the empty grey stripe of US-20 crawled up the barren, dune-like face of Stinkingwater Pass. It was gone five but still sweltering, and I was down to the hot dregs of my water. I gave the starter a couple of futile stabs, then sagged heavily against Bob Kirk’s beaded seat cover, which hurt quite a lot, enlivening the drawn-out obscenity I now delivered across the desert.

  Presently a police car drew up, disgorging a young sheriff who handed me a bottle of cold water. ‘It’s 104 out here,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna stay here and watch you drink that.’ When I very gratefully had, he said he’d be coming back this way in a couple of hours. ‘No cellphone signal this side of Stinkingwater. If you’re still here I’m taking you with me.’ I watched him go and gave my redundant phone a couple of wan jabs, feeling broiled, clueless and very alone.

  After the longest hour I have ever endured outside a classroom, a smart red convertible pulled in behind me. Its occupants were a middle-aged couple who will be featuring in my will, and perhaps a commemorative tattoo. Greg set about an under-bonnet diagnosis that left his crisp shirt heavily blotted with oily petrol; Kim gave me water, cereal bars and a heart scare when she leaned over a trickling fuel pipe and lit up a cigarette. On perhaps the twentieth attempt, with Mike’s battery in its death throes, the engine caught. ‘Just keep her running!’ yelled Greg. ‘We’ll follow you to the next town.’ It was a big ask: Burns lay 40 miles down the road. As I cranked down the throttle, Greg bellowed some big answers: ‘We were Allies! I named my son after Sir Francis Drake! Go, baby, go!’

  Mike ascended Stinkingwater in all sorts of distress, backfiring, misfiring, revving wildly, cutting out. I was obliged to tackle the climb in low gear, mashing that heavy pedal to the floor for an agonised eternity, hastily swapping feet whenever cramp set in. In my panicked departure I’d forgotten to zip up the holdall in the running-board cage, which began to sacrifice its contents to the fierce winds that swept across the head of the pass: a couple of plastic funnels, a hat, the waterproof overtrousers I’d never worn once. I crested Stinkingwater with an outpouring of relief that was curiously topped off by an almighty, five-second fart. But you know what they say: what goes up, must break down. A few miles into the scrubby void laid out beyond the summit sign, Mike abruptly fell silent and rolled to a halt.

  Greg pulled up behind and we established that the fuel tank was empty: by some calamity of mis-ignition, I’d got through 6 gallons of gas in 30 miles. Kim handed me the funnels and clothing the support crew had collected in my wake, then Greg helped tip the 2-gallon jerrycan reserve into the tank. ‘Hit it!’ he shouted when Mike stuttered to life, and I very loudly complied.

  The sun was going down and we had 10 miles left. Beyond steering I had almost no control over my charge, who raced and stalled and shuddered to his own mad tune: now a roaring din, now a deathly silence, each one bookended with a rodeo lurch so violent that I twice banged my head against the windshield. The backfires were truly explosive by this stage, machine-gun kangaroo salvos that almost shook the wheel from my hands, and sent roadside cattle lumbering away into the sandy gloom. I flicked on the lights and sent a sickly, flickering glow over the cat-black tarmac. Greg and Kim’s headlamps danced about in my mirror. Burns introduced itself with a distant little dome of fuzzy sodium glare, and as it did Mike once more droned to a silent standstill. I’d run out of gas again, 2 gallons half-belched and half-burned in eight miles.

  ‘Well, the only restaurant round here that serves alcohol is the pizza joint across the road.’ The manageress of the America’s Best Value Inn looked at me with an air of disappointment, then checked her watch. ‘It closes, like, now, so you—Hello? Sir?’

  It was an hour since the sainted Greg and Kim had taken my jerrycan into Burns, forty minutes since they’d returned with it refilled, ten since I’d bidden them farewell with a heartfelt, petrolly hug in the car park of the first motel Mike juddered up to. In another two I was putting the day’s soul-flaying ordeals to bed in time-honoured fashion. ‘You sure about that?’ asked the pimpled pizza operative after I placed a very long order that included one food item. ‘I gotta lock up in a couple minutes.’ That proved sufficient for everything bar two slices of pepperoni. I stumbled back to the motel, took a shower and watched polychromatic swirls of petrol sluice down the plughole. I took another in the morning and still stank like the Exxon Valdez.

  Burns was aptly shrouded in misty smoke, an eye-stinging, throat-rasping haze blown in from a distant swathe of spreading wildfires. I was frankly delighted when Mike failed to start, snatching away any temptation to tackle our next challenge without prior repairs: the motel manageress had warned me that the next town of note lay 130 miles away, across the Great Sandy Desert. The night before, Greg had returned from his gas-station mercy dash with a card from a recommended local garage, the irresistibly named Tim’s Complete Auto Service. I gave them a ring and a shonky black tow truck soon trundled to a halt in the motel forecourt. ‘I’m Tim,’ said the bald man who jumped out from the driver’s side. A jolly, plump redhead raised his hand through the passenger window. ‘And so am I.’

  How many Tims does it take to fix a T? None, sadly: a ponytailed young man called Andy did all the work. I watched him happily tinker about with Mike all morning in Bald Tim’s wreck-strewn, edge-of-town workshop, changing bits of carburettor and inserting a mysterious dialled pressure gauge into the fuel line. Then, after an abortive aft
ernoon assault on the Great Sandy Desert, I puttered and bucked 15 miles back to Tim HQ, and witnessed some frownier tinkering that would stretch deep into the following day.

  Andy conformed to a now familiar small-town stereotype, exuding an air of laidback, good-natured diligence that was punctured every so often with intimations of an alarming capacity for violent umbrage. The same easy, open-faced drawl that informed me about his motorcycle collection or what time the Safeway supermarket closed was also employed to reveal that he had once bulldozed a car full of environmentalists into a ditch. Andy’s granddaddy was a cowboy stunt shooter who had taught him to hit two targets with a pistol in each hand. ‘But I prefer to fight the old-fashioned way, and because I tend to win people now leave me alone.’ He had recently driven to Sacramento to settle a score in unspecified but deeply ominous fashion: ‘Drove ten hours through the night, did what I needed to do and drove ten hours home.’

  This tale inspired Andy to explain, with no little pride, that Burns was a hotbed of free-spirited defiance. This had accorded it national prominence in 2016, during a stand-off that stemmed from a dispute about the wildfires that are a routine menace. After two local ranchers set a backfire around their property – a common regional tactic to deprive an advancing wildfire of fuel – they were found guilty of arson and imprisoned. As martyrs to the anti-federalist cause, their fate attracted hard-core government haters from across the western US, forty of whom pitched up in a militia force. In an unlikely display of bravado, the self-styled freedom fighters occupied a federally managed wildlife refuge outside town, hunkering in for a month-long siege that ended in murderous chaos, with one occupier shot dead by police.

  Andy’s take on the affair was a familiar one: ‘We just don’t like being told what not to do, ’specially not by some guy in an office in Washington, DC, who don’t know nothing about us or our way of life.’ I’d heard this a lot. The central grievance of almost every old car guy I’d talked to was federal government ‘not letting people make the mistakes they need to make’. From their positions of exalted competence this must have seemed entirely reasonable. These men would never make the sort of mistakes that nobody needs to make, the ones that have the rest of us putting angle-grinders through gas mains or breaking up sheets of asbestos in our kitchens. (No? Just me, then.)