My previously described quest for Wonderful Cars has led me
down a number of avenues of research. I've started reading
books on various marques, I've been communicating on a couple
of mailing lists, I've visited various establishments and
read some club newsletters, and I've talked with individuals
who have mastered some facet of the history, technology or
other mysterious disciplines of various automobiles. It's
been an interesting experience, not so much for the knowledge
I've gained about cars from many lands, but for what I've
learned about the people who fixate on them.
A couple days ago, I turned to Kim and said, "I think I'm
going to go home and write a love-letter to the Britcars list."
Well, this is it.
Now, I'm sure that there may be a few jerks on this list; hell, I'm
pretty sure I've been one once or twice, when deadlines were too
tight or my car wasn't working or there wasn't enough blood in my
caffeine stream, or something. But the general makeup of this
list contains so many genuinely good people that I thought it would
be worth a non-car-specific letter to let you all know how you
stack up in the car-nut world.
I suspect that a lot of it is that we share the common misfortune
of being fixated on cars that have been the butt of jokes (and how
many times have we heard the one about Lucas refrigerators???) and
snobbery that we've learned tolerance. Also, being a more ecumenical
list -- for British cars rather than just for M.G.s, or Triumphs, or
Sunbeams, or Hillmans -- has opened us up to the common human experiences
that go into making these cars something more than mechanical devices,
something far more than jewelry, or status symbols, or collectibles.
I've met people who think of themselves as car enthusiasts, when the
most intimate they've ever become with their car is to sign the checkbook
to have repair work done. I've met people who can't mention a marque
other than the one they dote on without a veiled sneer, if not outright
derision. I've met -- well, you get the point. It's been a crash
course in the difference between enthusiasm and snobbery. An enthusiast
is someone who sees the good parts of everything, even if it's not his
favorite. A snob is someone who sees the bad parts of everything, as
long as it's not his favorite.
On the other hand, I suppose it's not surprising that these cars are
object lessons in moral virtue, given that they come from the land of
John Knox, Oliver Cromwell, and Queen Victoria. For the past several
years, I've suspected that British cars were part puzzle (as Berry
reminded me at lunch last week) and part test of character; if you
could put up with the cars' oddities, quirks, and anomalies, if you
had the strength of moral fibre to crawl under them weekly and tighten,
adjust, clean, lubricate, and otherwise manipulate the mechanical
components that keep this particular herd of metal kittens ambling
in the same basic direction, then you are rewarded with a bliss that
mere horsepower, solidity, or engineering excellence cannot begin to
convey. We all share that, whether it's in a Lotus, a Jaguar, or even
the most clapped-out Spridget that we've finally, just barely, managed
to knock into a semblance of a working automobile. The journey is more
psychological than mechanical, and I think everyone here should bask in
the knowledge that you're all very special for it. The concentration
of inherently good people on this list is higher than anyplace else I've
had the opportunity to visit, in person or in cyberspace.
My six-year-old daughter Torrey put it best. Last Saturday, she rode
with me in the M.G. up to a beautiful park on the San Francisco
peninsula. The park (Huddart, for locals) is well up the side of the
Santa Cruz mountains, in a wilderness area, right where the oaks start
to change to redwood and madrone. It's a breathtakingly challenging
road if you want to play Targa Florio, but with my girl in the car
and a self-imposed 3500 RPM redline till the rings get a few more
miles on them, we were just motoring, gliding under the green canopy,
purring in and out of dappled shade, splashing through brilliant golden
pools of sunlight. After about three miles of climbing "through the deep,
dark forest," as she later told Kim when she caught up to us at the park,
Torrey held her hands out above her head, the breeze winnowing through
her fingers, and shouted, "It's the best a kid could wish for!"
That's what it's all about, and that's not a bad description of the
people on this list, either. You folks are the best a kid could wish for.
--Scott "Even a kid who prefers gin and tonics to popsicles" Fisher
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