Another Fine Mess Page 31
The American motor industry’s fall from grace can perhaps be traced to March 1948, a year after Henry went to the big scrapyard in the sky. Ernest Beech, the firm’s new president, was at a conference in Cologne when he rejected a proposition from Germany’s Allied military government, and in strident terms: ‘I don’t think what we’re being offered here is worth a damn!’ What they were being offered was the entire VW business – factory, Beetles, the lot. And they were being offered it for free.
Ocean Shores seemed like a belt-and-braces guarantee of full Pacific content. The town was certainly bang in my demographic, its broad and slightly bleak main drag sparsely flanked with pensioner inducements: Val-u-Food Grocery Liquidators, barn-sized budget motels offering full-board deals, a quilt show at the convention centre. Feeling numb and a little hollow I puttered past the Lighthouse Suites Inn. Buildings gave way to low, tussocked dunes and tarmac to sandy gravel. I dialled down the throttle, and Mike’s wheels whispered on to the beach. There it was, a faraway sparkle under the cirrus-streaked sky. The sand was firm; I picked up speed and swooshed seawards, down half a windswept mile of lightly peopled shoreline. Then dampness began to blot the way ahead, and I eased to a standstill. A crowd magnetically gathered.
‘You bring that here in a trailer? You didn’t? You drove from Virginia? You have got to be kidding me.’
‘I just want to touch this car, it’s sexy.’
‘I’m told Henry Ford was a cousin of mine.’
‘How fast does that go? What kind of gas you put in it?’
‘My name’s Doug Rufferson and this is my friend Brandon Drells. Mind if we take a photograph, sir?’
I would do my very best to take this wonderful, homespun courtesy home with me. How I’d love to answer my phone as Tim Moore out of Chiswick. I’d also come back with some mineral deficiencies and a deft touch with locknuts that might come in handy one day, probably after the apocalypse. Plus a dose of hypochondria from all those adverts. Could that be the first twinge of ulcerative colitis? How dark is a darkened stool? And which catheter was right for me? (Spoiler: pre-lubricated.)
A man in a wide-brimmed sunhat laboured up, both hands clutched around a wind-bent 20-foot fibreglass pole topped with an enormous Stars and Stripes.
‘My uncle had a Model T,’ he yelled, looking straight out to sea. ‘Me and my sister used to fight over the back seat, ’cos if you sat behind him, you got tobacco spit right in your face.’
After a brisk nod he struggled on towards the gentle breakers, flag slapping furiously on high.
When the most vocal elements of Mike’s little fan club had dispersed I hopped down, pulled out the back seat bolster and rooted about through the dead components interred beneath it. Beat-up greasy conrods, old copper gaskets, two hefty halves of a crankshaft. And there it was, a crumpled little bottle half full of beige and bitty Atlantic.
‘Good job, Michael.’ I patted his hot bonnet: 6,102 miles in eighty-one days. ‘That crankshaft stunt was pretty low, mind you.’ Then I walked over the damp, flat sand to a slowly receding waterline, and with an unpoetic crunch of thin plastic, topped up the Pacific Ocean.
I had seen a majestic nation unfold beyond the gunsight motometer on my prow, forever heading west at 32mph, reeling in a yellow dotted line with that golden warmth on my left forearm. The John Wayne bluffs, the eternities of ripening corn stretched out under a cloudless prairie sky, the old man rivers. Those vistas will stay with me for ever. So too the wooden judder through my feet and fingers, the smell of hot oil and old leather, the mechanical pandemonium, the days that seemed to last a month. Chocking the wheels in another motel car park, walking alone at dusk down another wide and desolate main street. Crispy grass piercing the sidewalk, garish commercial confidence fading on every wall and soap-fronted store front, another little Pompeii of small-town America’s pomp. Pulling back the thin and grimy motel curtains to see a face glinting back, chrome-ringed eyes and a big chrome gob, the shiny, eager surprise of the first night steadily dulled into weary, long-suffering acceptance.
I had learned that rustic American men really like breakfast and hate the government and never sit with their legs crossed. I had met the last queen bees of the Model T hive mind, the self-schooled, multi-skilled make-do-and-menders. Some as creaking and leaky as the Flivvers they loved, but all as dogged and gallant. Live slow, die old. Spending time with these doughty, demigod granddads had been a privilege and an inspiration, almost a religious awakening. Bring me home, Ford Jesus. And what a durable pleasure it had been to put my go-anywhere Universal Car through its paces just as Henry intended, motel managers watching on with wide eyes and slack jaws as I hurled my bags in the back and bucked away into the morning sun. I had lived the American Dream out on those wide-open roads, and in the small towns I had driven through its dusty, derelict graveyards.
Mike: Tim’s Lizzie. Beloved of all, from trucker to biker, honorary king of the road. ‘As a vehicle, it was hard-working, commonplace, heroic,’ wrote E.B. White of the Model T, ‘and it often seemed to transmit those qualities to the persons who rode in it.’ Cheers, E.B. I’ll take that all day long. Like the old claim-staking homesteaders, I had proved up. They call me Timmy Four-Balls.
On 4 November 1931, after three months and 9,000 miles, Dib Fewer and Tod Snedeker made it back to San Francisco, clocking their Mike at 50 on the final run up the Coastal Highway. Neither of them would ever leave California again. Dib kept Mike for a year, then traded up to a Chevrolet Landau and gave his old T to a jobless friend. Shortly after, this chap sold Mike’s engine to a guy who put it into a pleasure boat he kept at Lake Tahoe, and carted the chassis to a scrapyard in Brisbane, just south of San Francisco. That stencilled radiator made Mike a prominent fixture in the corner of the lot, and Tod and Dib would wave at him as they sped past down the Bayshore Boulevard. Then one afternoon Dib held up a hand and saw that he’d gone.
Ocean Shores wasn’t the end of our road, not quite. I would wave Mike goodnight through three more motel windows, and one thick swirl of sea fog. In Seattle we would meet a jolly and biddable MTFCA member called Howard, and learn that all the shipping firms had just relocated to Long Beach, California. Howard would ask me to breathe into a paper bag for a while, before hooking me up with a man called Freighter Jim, who had a very big trailer and an even bigger heart. Jim would take my car all the way to Long Beach, where a like-minded T collector called Kim would care for him until shipping could be arranged.
Three months after I came home, Mike was unloaded at Southampton Docks and trailered to Neil Tuckett’s farm in Aylesbury. As I write there’s snow on the ground, and it’s a struggle to picture myself bundled up in skiwear at the wheel of Henry Ford’s famous ‘brakeless carriage’. But spring will soon be here. Until then I visit Mike every other Sunday, with a bottle of his favourite oil.
Yellow Jersey Press celebrates 20 years of quality sports writing
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First published by Yellow Jersey Press in 2018
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