Another Fine Mess Page 27

  Andy shook his head gravely, jaws rippling. ‘The authorities have got us down as renegades and troublemakers now. CCTV cameras went up all over town.’ Since then, he’d stuck The Man the finger by riding his Harley across the Great Sandy Desert at 130. ‘In Oregon, if a speed limit sign just has a number and not the actual words “speed limit”, you can argue your case.’ His knowing wink seemed a little misguided. Ginger Tim had told me about the time he’d argued his case after being arrested while drunk on a bicycle, a strategy that had earned him four days in jail.

  For good measure, Tim’s Complete Auto Service was yet another stronghold of the hell-in-a-handcart, apocalypse-goading survivalism that had become a recurring theme. Late one afternoon Andy and Bald Tim began to riff in a tone of poorly disguised relish about the flooding in Houston and those encroaching wildfires, and where it was all leading. ‘Thousand-year record for rain down in Texas, and half of Oregon is in flames,’ said Bald Tim, eyes agleam. ‘You just never know what’s coming next. Like, we could have a sunspot tomorrow that would wipe out the electrics in every car and computer.’

  ‘That’s a total breakdown of society right there,’ Andy chipped in, with the makings of a smile.

  Tim nodded emphatically. ‘Or how about that super-volcano under Yellowstone? Heard that’s overdue to blow, and when it does half the US is going up with it.’

  I was forever blundering into these doomsday discussions, and the elaborate post-apocalyptic plans they reliably revealed. Trent in Liberal, Kansas: ‘When it all goes down you’re gonna likely lose your vehicle, so you need to think what you can carry if you need to bug out. A Thompson machine gun, that’s 11lb loaded. Too much, gonna slow you right down. You gotta think about this shit.’ Zander in Jordan, Montana: ‘We got an oil storage place where I’m gonna hole up. I can fix shit. I would do OK for a few years.’

  Andy duly explained that he’d taught himself how to make longbows out of tree boughs, and suggested that my Model T might make an ideal runabout in the new Dark Ages. ‘No computers, no electrics, and I bet that thing could run on all kinds of shit.’ (It could, too. Scott had told me about an Antipodean T enthusiast of his acquaintance who ran out of fuel in the desert, but made it to the next town on a can of citronella oil he’d brought along to repel mosquitoes.) As a Guardian journalist who attended a survivalist conference in Ohio pointed out, every scenario seemed suspiciously reminiscent of the US frontier era, a bloody, low-tech struggle for supplies and shelter. ‘The preppers and survivalists aren’t really imagining the end of America,’ he wrote. ‘They’re imagining it beginning again.’

  It sometimes felt as if the whole nation was on a war footing, what with all this talk of Armageddon, the worshipful cult of military veterans, and the gun craziness. Trump’s populist spidey senses tapped right into this, and as soon as he started whipping up panic about North Korea, everyone I met was suddenly ranting excitedly about ‘that little fat guy Kim Pong Poo’. I’m not sure if the surge of fundamentalist Christianity is a reflection of this eager fatalism or a primary cause, but the related statistics are extraordinary: 41 per cent of Americans now believe that ‘the Rapture’ – the second coming, Judgement Day, the end of all earthly life when the good will rise to heaven and the evil sink to hell – will occur within the next forty years. The Left Behind series, a sixteen-volume interpretation of the biblical apocalypse, has sold more than sixty million copies in the US since 1995. A frankly terrifying proportion of Middle Americans think the end of the world is nigh, which does a lot to explain their indifference to both the long-term personal consequences of gorging on deep-fried syrup, and our planet’s environmental future. ‘We’ll probably never see the bayou like God made it in the beginning until He fixes it himself,’ a Louisiana pipe-fitter told Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land, in reference to a horrendously polluted local creek. ‘And that will happen pretty shortly, so it doesn’t matter how much man destroys.’

  Add a paranoid suspicion of big government to this widespread belief in the supernatural and you can understand why even stoic old small-towners make such eager conspiracy theorists. A quarter of Americans think that Barack Obama might be the anti-Christ, and that US officials helped organise the 9/11 attacks. A third believes global warming is a federal hoax, and more than half suspect that a secretive global elite is plotting to establish a New World Order. Conspiracism went mainstream after JFK, when a shell-shocked nation struggled to accept that such a giant of a man, their living icon, could have been snuffed out by a single, pathetic loner. But there’s always been that streak in the melodramatic American character, a Wild West weakness for snake-oil salesmen and tall stories, for gut feeling over rational deduction. Even Jimmy Carter insists he once saw a UFO.

  ‘We just wanted to give a good impression of our town and help get you on your way,’ said Bald Tim, after an extended test drive demonstrated that my misfire appeared, at long last, to be fully cured. To be fair he now handed over a secondary motivation in the form of a $440 bill, which took me rather unawares, spoiled rotten as I was by all those miraculous months of pro-bono mechanical assistance. On the one hand, $440 seemed rather a lot for the simple eventual cure: a ten-buck ignition condenser off a Chevrolet that Andy had adapted as a replacement for my faulty VW original. But on the other, what a priceless pleasure to hear Mike running with long-forgotten sweetness, to feel him gain speed so eagerly, and maintain it with such confident ease. After my third night in Burns, I set off across the Great Sandy Desert with a recalibrated sense of expectation. I had 300 miles left, and with all mechanical fraughtness now behind me, I could tick them off in a mood of appropriate elegy.

  Looking through the photos I took that bright, hot morning, it’s clear that I was stocking a repository of representative farewells. Behold the sagebrush-clotted, smoke-fringed vastness of my final desert, flat-baked under a lurid blue sky. The rusted pumps and roofless stores of Millican, perhaps my swan-song ghost town. That guy in the pick-up with the ‘HE WON, GET OVER IT’ bumper sticker, very possibly my last hardcore Trumpite. From here to the Pacific, Oregon grew ever more blue, and though there was a red path to the coast it was both pale and slender.

  By noon I’d covered 120 miles up US-20. The sizeable town of Bend lay in sight: just west of it my map’s base layer turned from sandy beige to forest green, and thence to ocean blue. I’d never managed more than 250 miles in a day before, but this was surely the day to do it. Come sunset I’d have my front wheels in the Pacific. Hollow disbelief set in. I had somehow traversed this giant nation, 6,000 miles from sea to shining sea, up to the Canadian border, down to the Gulf of Mexico, over the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide, and I had done it in a ninety-three-year-old car with a lawnmower carburettor. Except I hadn’t, because 2 miles outside Bend, the crankshaft broke.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘Now there’s one club you don’t want to join, Teeum, and that’s the two-piece crank club.’

  Every T guy I’d met had spoken of this mother of all breakdowns, sometimes in a tone of jaunty bravado, more often with murmured dread. A bust crankshaft was a game-over grand slam, the Component Failure That Must Not Be Named. The crank converts up-and-down piston movement into a more useful rotational force, a procedure that requires an eccentrically crenelated metal casting of obvious vulnerability. Henry Ford’s team designed a car that farmers could fix by the roadside, but a broken crank was the T’s Achilles’ heel. No one could sort that on a hard shoulder. Few bothered to sort it at all: replacing a crankshaft meant a full engine-out rebuild that very rarely made economic sense.

  ‘How will I know if the crank breaks?’ I remembered asking Paul Griesse back in Ohio.

  ‘Oh, you’ll know,’ he’d replied, with a mirthless laugh.

  Well, he was right. A muffled, heavy-metal explosion shook Mike’s front end, a flagrantly terminal cataclysm that begat an instant and total loss of power and a death-drone into the sandy verge. Scott Conger’s prophe
cy had come to pass; I dully surmised that the brutal stop-start material stress endured over Stinkingwater Pass had pushed my fragile crank too far. Bend-bound traffic droned by. An electrical substation beside me buzzed fitfully. What a crushingly banal backdrop for our great adventure’s final act.

  I sat there with both hands on the wheel and tried to bully my features into the Stan Laurel face, but it wouldn’t hold, and presently crumpled into something even more pitiful and much wetter. Over the years I’d set off on umpteen under-prepared, over-ambitious journeys, none of which I deserved to complete but all of which I somehow had. For once, and at last, my luck had run out. This was the reckoning, my Judgement Day. ‘End of the road, Mike,’ I managed to croak. At least he’d got me across the Great Sandy Desert, I thought, and pondering this heroic final gesture had me off again.

  ‘Howdy. All good here?’

  I composed myself, looked up and met a sunny old face.

  ‘Not really.’ My attempt at a manly sniff had way too much mucus in it. ‘Broken crankshaft.’

  ‘Holy mackerel,’ said the face, looking almost impressed. A smile and a teasing pause. ‘Thing is, I’m a Model A guy, and I’m pretty sure my mechanic knows his way round a Model T. Want me to go get him?’

  If you break it, they will come.

  Don Penington was back an hour later with his fixer, Mike Stenkamp, and a little packed lunch his wife had prepared for me. It was all extremely touching, though I struggled to mirror their optimism: the old boys’ shared instinct was that I’d suffered a much less calamitous fracture of my timing gear.

  A full diagnosis was deemed in order, so they lashed Car-Mike to the back of Man-Mike’s old Landcruiser, then hauled me around Bend’s deserty hinterland at terrific speed, which in combination with a 3-foot tow-rope and my negligible brakes made for quite an adventure.

  Hunkered up against a low, Flintstones-bouldered bluff, Man-Mike’s industrially proportioned workshop was an uncharacteristic shambles, bestrewn with machine tools, dismembered engines and teetering stacks of dusty radio equipment. There wasn’t room for even an emaciated Model T in there, so we got to work outside on the sand, amidst a sprawl of old tractors and unfinished projects sitting bonnet-deep in weeds.

  Don and Mike were proved right in two hours: after much fiddlesome prising we established that the timing gear, a hefty cog of acute importance, had indeed shed half its teeth. But in another thirty minutes, lying under Car-Mike with several oily bolts in one hand and a flashlight in the other, I was proved right too. A clean break through thick grey metal: I’d joined the two-piece club. ‘When the crank snapped it must have had a knock-on effect on the timing gear,’ said Mike, in a tone of mild curiosity that presented an interesting counterpoint to the funeral bell tolling deep inside my skull. The one chink in Mike’s armoury of measured calm was a toneless cackle that irresistibly recalled Robert De Niro in psycho-gangster mode. I saw and heard it now. ‘Well, I guess all my other work just went out the window.’

  These were the words that launched my journey’s most extraordinary repair experience, its crowning overhaul, the Daddy Fix against which all others would be judged and found wanting. It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t cheap. But it would never have happened at all, not for love nor money, without the benevolence, comradeship and boundless practicality of the men and wives of the High Desert Model A Club.

  My time in Bend came to feel like some real-life partwork magazine series, every new release packed with full-colour characters and helpful tips, and delivered with a shiny new Model T engine component stuck to the cover. Issue 1 of Crankshaft Hiatus opened with an in-depth guide on pulling a Model T’s gigantic engine and transmission combination out through its tiny mouth. Handy illustrations depict five old men and a slightly younger one going about this task with the dainty precision of medieval horse dentists. Fig. 10 portrays a Model T with a tragic, empty gob. Figs. 1–9 show a forest of crowbars and scaffold poles in wild and clumsy use. Fig. 7, in which the younger man very firmly introduces his skull to the steel arm of an overhead hoist is captioned, ‘Oop – heard a bad word there from an English mouth!’ On the centre pages we find the first instalment of a poignant photo-story, covering the after-hours adventures of ‘Sullied Tim’. This hapless character just can’t understand why he’s always turned away from Bend’s nicer motels and hidden behind pillars at downtown eateries, but he’s a big daft spoon because what do you fricking expect with Fagin’s fingers and desert dandruff and an ever widening hole in the ever oilier arse of your trousers? Affixed to the front of issue 1 in a plastic pouch is a box of .030” oversize piston rings. Bit of a let-down there. But as is the way with such publications, part 2 of Crankshaft Hiatus came free with part 1. And stuck to its cover was something much better, and an awful lot heavier. That poor postman.

  ‘This man set off across the whole country in a Model T he’d never seen before, by himself, never knowing what might happen around the next corner.’ Ron Alley clamped a meaty old hand to my shoulder and gazed around the Black Bear Diner in Madras, where twenty-eight members of the High Desert Model A Club sat in silence before their breakfasts. ‘Gentlemen, I say he’s got two sets of balls.’

  These were humbling words indeed from a man hardly under-endowed in the metaphorical trouser department. Ron was eighty-five and a fix-all force of nature. He’d been knocked off his feet twice while masterminding my engine extraction, but had leapt straight back up both times, and finished the operation with blood coursing down his left forearm. At his bidding I now stood and looked out at a sea of checked shirts and hearing aids, topped with a bobbing layer of trucker caps.

  ‘That’s extremely kind, Ron, but I don’t really have any balls at all.’

  Murmurs, a shifting seat, then a voice from the rear. ‘Can’t hear ya, buddy.’

  ‘I have no balls,’ I announced, more firmly. ‘In fact, I’m here to kind of borrow yours, in a way, because I’m hoping that one of you might, um, have a spare, ah, underground-sized …’

  Ron had heard enough.

  ‘God dammit, man needs a crankshaft, 10/10 ground undersize for a Model T.’

  It was 45 miles from Bend to Madras, and Man-Mike had driven me there in his brown Model A sedan. This vehicle was only five years newer than Car-Mike, but felt like some visitation from the far-off future. It went 60, and held that speed with quiet assurance. It had normal pedals, a stick-shift, an enclosed body with wind-up windows, four-wheel hydraulic brakes and even a heater. Henry really did hold on to his first love for way too long.

  When, in the Twenties, the Model T was overtaken by the competition – literally, and technologically – Ford remained deaf to criticism. He didn’t listen to city-dwelling owners who grumbled about that planetary transmission, a leg-cramping liability in slow traffic. He didn’t care that America’s steadily improving roads did the T’s flexible chassis few favours: a car built for muddy tracks felt woolly and wayward on smooth tarmac (tell me about it). His son Edsel began to state quite openly that the T had had its day; the rest of Henry’s original A Team concurred but were too scared to speak out. In 1912, while Henry was away in Europe, his designers had taken it upon themselves to craft a sleeker T: lower, longer, cleaner. On his return, they presented him with a scale model. Henry considered it from all angles, nodding thoughtfully, then laid the little car on the floor and stamped it to smithereens.

  After that 1919 shareholder buyout, Ford was a one-car, one-man company, and Henry hadn’t dubbed his Model T the Universal Car for nothing: this was the only vehicle the world would ever need, dammit. ‘The Ford car is a tried and proved product that requires no tinkering,’ he insisted to reporters in December 1926. The industrial historian Robert Casey identifies ‘a significant moral dimension to Ford’s attitude towards the Model T’, and the old man just couldn’t cut the cord with a creation built in his own image: practical, frugal, slender, hard-working, reliable, unpretentious.

  By 1926, seven out of ten Ford dealers were losi
ng money, and many defected to General Motors. So did Norval Hawkins, Henry’s visionary marketing supremo. The tide began to turn in popular culture, as comedians stopped laughing with the Model T and laughed at it: ‘A Ford is like a bathtub – you don’t like to be seen in one.’ By 1924, Ford was making just $2 on every T sold, and the company generated 95 per cent of its profit elsewhere: spare parts, accessories, investments, shipping. But only when sales fell off a cliff – from 160,000 a month in 1925 to half that in early 1927 – did Henry finally relent. In high dudgeon and irrational ill grace: after nineteen years and fifteen million examples, the T was summarily pulled from production with nothing ready to take its place. At an estimated cost of $250 million – $3.5 billion in today’s money – the entire Ford Motor Company had to shut down manufacturing and sales operations for the thick end of a year while its successor was designed and tooled from scratch. Judged against the T, the Model A was, as I’d discovered, a quantum leap forward. But judged against its contemporaries, the new car was no more than solidly conventional. It sold well enough, shifting almost five million in as many years. But it didn’t change the world.

  We returned to Mike’s car now, and set off on a crankshaft hunt that took us deep into the gravel-paved, high-desert outback, at the tail of a convoy led by Ron in the Model A pick-up that had been his since 1947. The day unfolded like the tale of Redneck Cinderella, as Mike knelt before a succession of rusty crankshafts, micrometer screw gauge in hand, on a quest to find The One. Give an old car guy a barn and he’ll never throw anything away. Men who’d never even owned a Model T would dig out a couple of old cranks for us from some spidery fundament. But we were looking for a needle in a haystack, and more literally than I am ever likely to. The moving parts in my engine had become married together in a very bespoke fashion during their ninety-three-year partnership, and as hinted at above I needed a crankshaft whose business surfaces were precisely ten-thousandths of an inch below their factory-fresh girth.