Another Fine Mess Read online

  For a wild moment I wondered if this was all some crazy plot, the first act in a catalogue of sabotage that would detain their bumbling pet Englishman in Deschutes County for ever. It wasn’t such a huge stretch to picture Ron going full Misery on my kneecaps with a pipe wrench.

  ‘See, nobody wants to bust a crankshaft, but you bust yours in the only place this side of the Rockies where someone had a right-size spare.’ Ron nodded sagely. ‘And boy, you’ve been lucky again, because the guy who makes the best vintage wiring looms in the whole damn country is a personal friend of mine, and he’s right down the road in Bend.’

  It meant more time, more money, another couple of hundred miles tooling up and down US-97, and further impositions on Ron and Marlene’s hospitality and his friends’ technical expertise. But how right Ron was. In any other scenario, I’d have been off the road for another week at least. But in the event, and looking through my photo archive I still can’t believe it, Mike was resurrected in twenty-four hours. Dennis and Jim even fitted him with brake lights, the better to alert hindward drivers of my forthcoming failure to slow down.

  The farewells were long and fond. Don Penington, whose roadside compassion had inaugurated this two-week festival of resourcefulness and the human spirit, turned up with his wife Karen, a sprightly presence with the poise and smile of a retired tennis professional. She handed me another ration pack full of trail mix and cookies; he placed a souvenir torque wrench on Mike’s back seat. With a crooked smile, Jim wedged a fire extinguisher beside it. Marlene gave me a maternal hug; I placed a hand on Ron’s substantial shoulder. ‘On the back leg now,’ he said, with that twinkle on full beam. ‘You’re all but done.’ What a great country for old men.

  As the sun dipped towards the vast conical bulk of Mount Jefferson, on show at last after so many days skulking in the smoke, Dennis made an extraordinary last-ditch offer. The road out of Culver was unusually lonesome; he had a cabin 30 miles west, and would lead me there in his Turd. Ahoooooooga! Off we went, in a cloud of waves and desert dust.

  With his burnished bare pate and Birdseye beard, Dennis was a distinctive face in the Deschutes old-car scene, and had a manner to match. He opened beer bottles in the slot of Turd’s spark lever, and kept a bottle of Tabasco in a holster on his belt (swoon). Dennis had been raised in California, and communicated in sharp, fluent bursts, a Tigger amongst the drawling Eeyores. ‘I’ve lived with city folk and country folk – wanna know the difference?’ he’d blurt. ‘In the city, when they tell you a joke, it’s like a story about a guy going down into a bar or whatever, with a punchline. In the country, they’ll say: “Look what I can do with a frog and a car battery!”’

  When the road threw us down the canyon I’d spent so many days on top of, I burst out laughing at the extraordinary spectacle, and its contrast with our puttering puniness: a violent, craggy plunge to a distant squiggle of blue, its upper flanks washed gold by the setting sun. The enormous scenery seemed a little less amusing when we rattled across a little single-track bridge at the bottom, and Mike cut out in a choking haze of gas fumes. Ahooga! Dennis reversed back, threw up the hood and effected a cure that left him drenched in fuel. He would reprise this performance twice before Turd and Mike creaked to a halt in the gloaming.

  Like all good things Dennis’s cabin was rude but cosy, alone in an outback plateau of pines and crispy brown grass, far from the piped and wired conveniences of modern life. ‘Careful when you sit down,’ he called out as I creaked open the outhouse door. ‘Pretty brave squirrel has set up home in the long-drop.’

  We fired up a rusty barbecue, threw on some hotdogs, and opened a couple of beer bottles in Turd’s spark slot. It warmed my heart to see him and Mike side by side in the long grass, a companionable, twilit gleam in those wide-set eyes. The stars and moon were soon full frontal, and the tepid breeze took on a chill. It felt like the last night of summer.

  ‘Can I ask you honestly what people in Britain think about Trump?’

  I drained my beer, the straight answer stuck in my throat. The faraway howl of a coyote drifted through the pine trees. I didn’t want to upset anyone. Particularly not right out here. A while earlier, admiring Turd’s many outboard luggage boxes, I’d asked Dennis what he kept in them. ‘Travelling light on this trip,’ he’d said, fixing me with a piercing blue gaze. ‘Just an axe and a shovel.’ Three extremely long seconds had elapsed before he collapsed in a fit of giggles.

  But then I thought: Sod it. I’d bitten my lip for almost three months, and sometimes a man had to say what a man had to say.

  ‘Well, as you’re asking honestly, Dennis, I’d say that by general agreement in my country, Donald Trump is an embarrassing stain on the fabric of the universe.’

  His fluffy white beard nodded slowly in the moonlight.

  ‘Now that’s a pretty bold statement to make in this part of the world,’ he said, and I waited for him to lean forward and slam an opened Tabasco bottle up my nose. ‘But it’s one that I happen to agree with.’

  I guessed it was those formative years in California. With that Dennis clapped his hands and stood up, reluctant to dwell on the farcical tragedy that had befallen his nation, and marooned him amongst people who rejoiced in it.

  CHAPTER 18

  It was a stupendous, pin-sharp morning, with brazen sun and a nose-numbing nip in the air. ‘OK, I’m gonna take your top off,’ announced Dennis, when we’d packed up. After five effortful minutes, a very different Mike stood in the golden grass: canvas roof hauled back and battened down, out and proud. This was a topless T to be see in, as driven by Henry Ford off the production line in all those landmark publicity shots, as driven by Laurel and Hardy through all those sawmills. ‘Now that’s a Model T tourer,’ said Dennis, hands on hips. ‘Let’s go do some touring.’

  Mike suffered repeated fuel starvations; after the third, Dennis spliced an extra filter into the gas pipe, which seemed to do the trick. We crossed a hillside of pines reduced to charred flagpoles by a recent wildfire, then plunged ever deeper into a primeval, red-trunked forest. ‘While since I’ve been this way,’ murmured Dennis when we stopped at an unfamiliar fork. While since anyone had. Both gravel tracks were pierced with saplings, and neither showed up on his map of forestry trails. Dennis picked the left one and I followed his orange dust.

  Soon after, the forest abruptly parted and presented us with a dramatic prospect: the 10,000-foot snow-topped volcano that was Mount Jefferson, spearing the heavens above a rolling sea of green, like the label on a bottle of mineral water. I found my appreciation of this remarkable vista compromised, however, by the steepling granite abyss from whose crumbly brink we surveyed it. The trail, now little more than a rockery strewn with pine cones, at once dived eagerly down this appalling eminence, made more appalling by roofless, hyper-panoramic exposure. Ahead Dennis skittered down the rubbled switchbacks, lost in a gritty cloud. I did my best to keep up, rocks thumping into the floorboards and pinging off the chassis rails, Mike’s squirrely jiggles amplified into gravel-scattering, rally-car power slides. Don’t leave me, Dennis. So far away, then a little nearer, now nearer still … How considerate of him to slow down, I thought, dispatching a gobbet of dusty mucus to eternity as I sawed away at the wheel, plunging forth in a semi-controlled slalom. But gosh, there’s now something taking shape in that cloud that looks very much like Turd’s rear end, and it’s really quite close to my front. I wonder how that can be when I’m pressing the brake down so firmly. Perhaps I had better jam the pedal right to the floor with all my might. That’s better. Actually, no – no, it isn’t. My bonnet is now six inches from Dennis’s spare wheel, and I’m gaining speed. How uncommonly vexing! Well, I suppose I ought to say terrible things extremely loudly, ram my blanched fist against the horn, and welcome Brother Homer Looper of the First Pentecostal Church into what remains of my life.

  ‘That’ll do it,’ said Dennis, crouched by Mike’s rear wheels a memorable moment later.

  I had come to rest at a rakish
angle, 2 feet from oblivion and a lot less from Turd’s behind. On shaky legs I bent down and followed Dennis’s finger to the right-hand brake assembly, which hung distantly beneath the hub, its retaining nut bullied loose by the shuddering ordeal.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ I quavered as he retightened it.

  He looked up from his work and beamed radiantly. ‘Except if I hadn’t been here, then you wouldn’t be either.’

  A fair point. In respect of surface, steepness and isolation this road was the worst I had tackled, by an ugly margin, and under Dennis-free conditions I would never have come anywhere near it. If I had died, I’d have been absolutely furious with him.

  ‘Let’s give that a try.’

  I wiped my palms on my trousers and started up. The trail ahead fell precipitously away, framed by spindly pines, towards the looming bulk of Mount Jefferson. Dennis glanced over his shoulder, hoisted a thumb, and called out a sentence that once heard would never be forgotten. ‘If the brakes go again, run into the back of me and I’ll do our best to stop us both.’ I frailly hoisted a thumb. ‘Might not be good for either vehicle but it’s better than going over the fricking edge.’ And in a ball of dust and profanity off we went, careering at runaway speed into the Paramount Pictures logo.

  Camp Sherman was little more than a rustic gas station in the forest, which we discovered had closed for the season two days before. I was so pleased to be alive and back near tarmac that I couldn’t have cared less. We lunched on leftover hotdogs and Karen’s trail mix on a camp table outside, then Dennis tipped his spare petrol can into my under-arse tank and gave Mike a farewell once-over. At some point in the morning’s excitements I’d lost reverse gear, so up came the floorboards and off went the transmission cover. Behold the hogshead: a Pandora’s box of drums, springs and oil-slathered fabric bands. Staring into this steampunk lash-up, I felt a ghostly twinge of the blank terror that had struck deep into my heart when Ross first laid it bare, one distant Sunday morning in Virginia. But a hundred wise old heads had now peered into it alongside mine, and just enough know-how had crackled across from their skulls to mine; I heaved the reverse pedal down with one hand, spannered the requisite adjuster with the other and the job was done.

  ‘Sure you don’t want to see that two-headed fish?’

  Dennis had been trying to interest me all day in his favourite regional attraction, a remote salmon hatchery with a notable collection of mutated freaks. ‘Last chance.’

  He smiled in hope; I did so with regret. We were parked up at the threshold of US-20, and I needed to make time: there was a big pass ahead, followed by many miles of nothing. I clapped Turd on the bonnet, shook Dennis’s hand and wondered if I was thanking my last senior saviour. Of the million indebted farewells I’d doled out along the way, this ranked amongst the most earnest. Dennis was the last link in that Deschutes County chain of heroes, and he’d gone the extra mile more literally than anyone else. Thundering up the lower reaches of the Santiam Pass, hemmed in by lumber trucks, it struck me that I might someday be grateful for that final off-road adventure: a grand last hurrah in the Model T’s natural habitat.

  The pass topped out just below 5,000 feet, then I hung a right up US-22 and wiggled gently downwards through dense forest. I finally came face to face with a wildfire, a monster that shot mighty plumes of white smoke a mile into the sky before me and necessitated a series of detours. The same brake came loose; I eased gingerly into a rest area and sorted it once and for all with a locknut. Come sundown I had additionally resolved a painfully shrieking fan (grease and adjustment) and a sudden electrical death (firm smack on the rewired terminal block). I was getting pretty good at this. Bit late, though. In Sublimity – a defiantly characterless grid of bungalows – I lay back on the motel nylon, unfolded a map of Oregon that Ron had pressed upon me, and sat up with a start and a tremendous rip of static. I’d crossed the Cascades, my final mountain range, and the coast lay no more than a 70-mile tootle away. Could that really be it? First night in Ordinary, last in Sublimity? Had I just slammed my last gas-station cheeseburger into a bedroom microwave? But one question was less rhetorical and more pressing: what of Mike?

  At least six times a day somebody asked what I’d be doing with the car if and when I hit the Pacific, and my answers had vacillated wildly, in tune with prevailing levels of affection and exasperation. Impromptu beach auction on a good day; impromptu beach bonfire on a bad one. More rational fates centred around the MTFCA’s classified section, along with broader online sale options. But something changed in Bend. All that emotional investment, those long days of aged toil and wisdom, and for what? A two-day trundle to the seaside? I couldn’t just walk away from Mike now. You don’t patiently nurse an ailing pensioner back to good health then bung him on eBay.

  A bolder, nobler scheme was hatched that night at the Rodeway Inn, and in a flurry of morning texts and calls the plan came into hard focus. I would take Mike north-west to Washington State, kiss the Pacific sand, then drive him back east to Seattle. There, yet another experienced and generous MTFCA member would help arrange for him to be loaded into a container and shipped to Southampton. My leathery old holiday fling was coming home with me.

  CHAPTER 19

  I ran through my bonnet-up morning routines with a light heart, a top-up here, a tweak there, whistling as I worked. As my knowledge base had broadened, so had my maintenance regime. It was no longer enough to dump a quart of Walmart oil in and check the wheels weren’t about to fall off: now there were brackets to tighten, nipples to grease, bolts to be re-torqued with Don’s convoluted wrench. Presently an aged eccentric on a beat-up bicycle wobbled across the motel car park.

  ‘Tuned into the old ways, man,’ he rasped approvingly, doffing a lime-green trilby. ‘I like it. Reconnection.’

  Words and sentiments I hadn’t encountered in 6,000 miles. I wondered if I’d already met my last Trumpite – my revised 260-mile route to the coast would take me through more blue than red – then stopped wondering and asked him outright.

  ‘Trump?’ A get-outta-here snort. ‘Dude has like zero intellect, not even any considered opinion on anything. Just a dumb rich kid who grew up wiping his ass on hundred-dollar bills.’

  A couple of hours up the road, lunching on stolen motel bagels in the L. L. ‘Stub’ Stewart State Park – what a fitting tribute for a lumber baron whose firm removed 300 trees from the Oregon skyline every day for forty years – I fell into conversation with a passing group of silver-haired ramblers.

  ‘London, England? Listen, we are so sorry about that idiot in the White House.’

  ‘Just remember that Hillary won the popular vote.’

  ‘By millions! Wasn’t even close!’

  I started to describe my route, retracing it in reverse, but didn’t get very far before they interrupted, faces puckered in disgust. ‘You been the other side of the Cascades? Well, say no more.’

  The Model T had granted Americans the run of their land, but a hundred years on they were still penned in. How remarkable that in the twenty-first century, a mountain range could still keep people so very far apart, in every sense. ‘I ain’t never been east of Kansas City’ was a standard boast in Bend, and Ron spoke of the west coast as an alien realm. ‘How will this play with Trump’s base?’ asked the hand-wringing CNN commentators every night, in a tone of fearful mystery that suggested a savage lost tribe hiding out in the uncharted toolies.

  I had lived amongst these people and learned their ways. Preposterous as it seemed, I probably now understood the flyover states – small-town keepers of the nation’s spiritual flame – better than many of the coastal Americans who lived either side of them. But these furious old ramblers didn’t want to hear another word about those deplorables over the hill, and wouldn’t have appreciated me telling them that this stubborn, hostile indifference was the principal explanation for the horrible orange president they’d been saddled with.

  The car guys I’d spent so much time with were kind, t
raditional, plain good folk, the definitive salt of the earth. Whenever one of them spoke up for Donald Trump I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt and let down, like hearing an old friend tell you he’s gone gluten-free or become a Neighbourhood Watch coordinator. Yet at the time of writing, Trump’s approval ratings are steady at around 40 per cent. That’s lower than any president has averaged since pollsters started compiling this data in 1945 – yes, even Nixon – but not by much. Indeed, that rating has barely wavered since he took office. The rust-belters and small-towners whose anger and resentment put Trump in the White House are still raging against the dying of their light. There’s been no populist backlash against Trump, just a frenzied frontlashing from everyone who already hated him. For a lot of his supporters that must seem sufficient reward in itself: all the people they wanted to wind up are being wound up, very tightly.

  But I had made my peace with Trump’s voters, however deluded or offensive I found some of their opinions. And because of that, I could not and never will make my peace with Trump himself. They had put their faith in him, but he would never return it. Because he doesn’t give a flying cow-chip about them, or anyone but himself. Where they were decent and honourable, he was ignorant and graceless. They were old-school; he was no-school. He will let them down, because he shares none of their values. But my guess is that the Donald’s base won’t turn him until they accept he has failed on his own terms, which may take quite a while. Nobody expects to Make America Great Again in a couple of years when it’s been in decline for more than thirty.

  For Henry Ford, the hero worship ebbed swiftly away when that farming downturn segued into the Great Depression. By then he was being eased away from daily operations and steered towards a figurehead role, Ford’s Ronald McDonald. But the public already suspected he was losing his touch. That stubborn refusal to update the Model T and the disastrous Fordlandia farce had been followed by an ill-fated dalliance with mass air transportation: Henry sank millions into developing the Ford Flivver, a lightweight, single-seat ‘Model T of the air’, then pulled the plug after a crash that killed his test pilot. People slowly grasped that the Model T – from conception to epic mass manufacture – was a one-off stroke of genius. When the car became a bit of a joke, so did its creator.