You need to know about how in 1962 I was a half-wild country kid of sixteen
in the wilds of King George Country, Virginia, and drove a derelict ’53
Chevy that shouldn’t even have started but in fact went places that
would have terrified Rommel’s panzers at their brazenest. (You may think
you don’t need to know this. Well, you do. It’s like, you know,
real history, and American.)
Now, that Chevy was brown like two colors of dirt. It had six cylinders but
ran on three, perhaps saving the others for emergencies. The closest it came
to compression was a sort of ancestral memory, and the tires showed more fabric
than rubber. But it was built like a tank. It had to be. Kids then were hard
on cars.
It is a little known fact that a rural boy of sixteen can bond with a car—can
come to love it. His mo-sheen (the correct word, as in “baaad
mo-sheen,” which paradoxically means “good mo-sheen” and
carries implications of nonexistent speed and virility) represents dependability
in a hostile world, at least if it usually starts. It is codpiece, heraldic
emblem, home away from home, bar, love nest, salon, even at times transportation.
When parked on a frigid January night in the wild woods, it is warmth, safety,
and escape if need be. It is independence and manhood, or at least the southern
fringes thereof.
The county was mostly woods and fields with towns far apart—King George,
Colonial Beach, and Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory on the Potomac, where
I lived. Cars consequently were our life. On Saturday nights we drove interminably
through the dark forests, just driving, moving, rapt with the night and freedom,
without the sense God give a crabapple. The times were different. We’d
park for hours with our girlfriends in empty fields glowing with moonlight.
We actually liked our girlfriends because we knew we probably weren’t
going to get laid anyway, so we might as not do it with someone who was good
company. It didn’t seem to hurt us.
We learned things only known to teenagers. Don’t park under a mercury-vapor
light because it makes zits turn purple and green. Sheldon’s Country
Store would sell beer to an eleven-year-old. Don’t chug a bottle of
Wild Irish Rose to impress your friends. It will, but it isn’t worth
it. Your father is probably smarter than you think he is: If you disconnect
the speedometer cable, he’ll count the bugs on the windshield and know
you didn’t really go to the movie three blocks away.
Truth is, the Pluke Bucket—my tired Detroit dragon—was not of
high consequence. The best cars had phone-flow. This refers to a gear shift
of four speeds, located on the transmission hump. (“Four on the floor”
to the uninitiated.) Below in the scale came threenatry--three on the tree--meaning
a shifter of three speeds on the steering column. The Pluke Bucket had an
automatic transmission, which was prestigious as a venereal disease in a convent.
But she was mine.
Our dream car was a fitty-sedden Chev 283, bored-and-stroked, ported and
polished, with two four-barrel carbs (“dual quads”), magneto ignition,
solid lifters, Isky three-quarter cam, milled heads, Hearst narrow-gate phone-flow,
3.51 Positraction rear end and tuck-and-roll Naugahyde. But this was like
saying that Ursula Andress was a hot date. Wasn’t going to happen. Not
to us.
A great advantage of knowing about cars was that you could talk for forty-five
minutes without saying a thing that your mother could understand. Apart from
technical argot, we said things like, Baaad-ass fitty-eight Ford,
cam lope wubbwubba, udden-udden, popped it, sceech….tachin’
two grand…” with gestures indicating power-shifting and the like.
Lots of times we got into sort of half-trouble, which is about right for
teenagers. Harry Burrell was a farmer noted for being irascible. He lived
on the hills overlooking Route 301 and came out with a shotgun after anyone
who drove along the dirt road that crossed his fields. I remember that he
held his pants up with a piece of rope. He was that stingy.
Anyway one dark night after the spring rains my girlfriend Rosie and I wanted
adventure and roared in the Pluke Bucket along his road, blowing the horn.
It was like poking a hornet’s nest with a stick, though I guess dumber.
If Harry had shot us, we probably would have deserved it, but that was true
of most things that the boys did. Anyway, sure enough, the lights came on
in Harry’s place and he came after us on his tractor—so help me—just
about the time we came to a stretch of serious mud. Our tired chariot began
spinning out and fishtailing back and forth toward the ditch.
We began to be scared. Harry wouldn’t really shoot us (we thought)
but we might wish he had. He was rough. However, the Bucket and I had been
in worse places and I knew how to surf in mud. In deeper places the trick
was to speed up, bump, whrrrr, and spin through without quite breaking the
axle. We speculated that it would work better if the tires had tread on them,
but this was an alien concept.
But Harry had a tractor. We hadn’t thought of that.
We came to where the road, which is an optimistic designation, dropped down
the side of a hill to a narrow creek and then went back up. The tractor was
gaining. Not good. We shot down the declivity, crossed the creek on momentum,
and then…stopped, tires spinning helplessly on the upslope. Things were
deteriorating.
Americans are capable people, though without judgement. I leaped out to push,
and Rosie took the wheel. Picture it: Cold mud over my shoes, raw exhaust
blowing hot over me, tires spraying mud, and tractor lights appearing at the
crest of the hill. Darkness. Wetness. Our bodies would never be found. I made
a superhuman effort, seeing no plausible alternative. The Bucket moved a little,
and a little more.
Rosie was a country girl, and understood mud. She knew that if she stopped
to pick me up, the Bucket wouldn’t go forward again, but spin out. She
slowed, I ran. I leaped in the door and we went up hill, not very fast but
faster than a tractor.
That’s why Americans got to the Moon and occasionally win wars. They
never ask whether a thing makes sense until after they’ve done it, and
then you can’t take it away from them. I mean, can you imagine a Frenchman
in a Lamborghini escaping Harry Burrell? Nah.
This originally appeared in shorter form in The American Conservative
