Jack Wheeler wrote:
A *wonderful* anecdote about a 5000 mile trip in a TR-3, ending with:
> I believe it is memories like these which keeps me restoring
> and driving old british sports cars. Can anyone relate to this?
Oh, Jack, *can* I...
It was 1985, and I'd owned my first British sports car -- a Blaze Red
1974 M.G. Midget, still showing 24,999 miles on the frozen odometer --
for about two years. My wife and I lived in the Los Angeles area then,
and our best friends had, not long before, moved up to the Napa Valley,
about 700 miles away.
Well, that summer, said friends split up. One weekend when my wife was
working a trade show (back when she was still in the computer biz
herself), I put the barest of necessities into the trunk of the Midget
and headed north. Since I was destined for a weekend with friends, I
took the straight and boring path, Interstate 5, and got there fairly
quickly and without incident.
Spent some time with each friend separately, had a lovely weekend with
the sound of that car's gearbox and Ansa exhaust rattling off the grape
vines, and on Sunday morning I packed up the car and headed south from
the Calistoga area (the northern end of Napa).
Somewhere north of the Golden Gate Bridge, where the long yellow Sonoma
County fields gradually climb up to the lion-colored coastal hills, I
got the idea to take the long way home -- Highway 1.
Now, California's Highway 1 is a legendary road, and for good reason.
Most of the way up and down the coast, it snakes at the very edge of the
Pacific, a grey ribbon of asphalt chipped piece by piece out of the
native stone of the coastline. Nowhere is it straight for more than a
few hundred yards. It climbs, it drops, it sinks, it loops, it curls
like the tail of a Chinese dragon, where the folds you can see only
serve to hint at those you can't, lurking always out of sight behind
clouds, crags and the dragon's own great scaly bends.
Don't like the scenery? Drive on a few miles, it'll change. One minute
you're covering gentle, rolling fields that stretch down from the
redwood-covered hills to your left, all the way to the blue ocean at
your right. Then the road will round a point that traps the offshore
winds, cool and damp, in a different way from the stretch you just left,
and it'll all be different: you'll be *in* those trees, Spanish moss
dripping from the branches, French broom sticking up from the side of
the road with its mustard-yellow flowers on stiff, ragged branches.
Next you may climb up, passing through forests of madrone, its bark
looking like poured chocolate under a flutter of grey-green palmate
leaves; and then you reach the redwoods, whose needles winnow the
dampness out of the air and drip it in splashy bright sparkles on you,
the road, and the car. And then it's back out to the bare coast itself,
grey basalt chunks interspersed with outcroppings of orange rhyolite,
where only a few grim strands of vegetation cling to the cliff face,
making their own soil out of the raw volcanic skeleton of the earth
itself.
Open to all the elements in a British sports car, you feel the changes
in microclimate intimately as you pass through them. Head into the
golden valleys of sycamores and short, bushy live oaks and the warmth
soaks into your skin as from the arms of a lover. Downshift, shoot up
and over a switchback and burst out into the grey chill of the Pacific
breezes and suddenly it's damp, a chill clinging to you like a sodden
shirt. It's impossible to dress appropriately for a trip down the
Dragon's Tail, but then this trip isn't about protection, it's about
living.
And the car! One moment you're hard on the brakes hard as you approach
a place where the road goes up, hinting at a sharp left-hander across
the little hillock; you blip the throttle, select second gear, and as
the road falls away you steer into it, get traction, and then point the
car at the next apex, off to the right where the red earth of the verge
has been kicked up over the margin of the tarmac. Revs climb, you stab
the clutch and snatch a higher gear, throttle-foot back down to keep the
speed building; there's a high spot in the road, the car goes light for
a second, and then whumps down on the Armstrong lever shocks just as you
need to kick the wheel over first to one side, then another to keep it
between the lines on the pavement.
We played this game for hours, jinking out when safe to pass the
inevitable RVs ("we're spending our grandchildren's inheritance")
covering a lane and a half while -- and who can blame them? -- the
owners dawdle to admire the scenery. Stopped for gas in Santa Cruz,
where the road gets fairly boring for a while -- mostly straight, though
with gorgeous views -- as it heads into Monterey from the north. But
the real joy comes south of Monterey, in the country called Big Sur.
That's where the Dragon really comes to life, where the road takes on a
character and a personality of its own, playful and light-hearted on the
surface, but with a temper like a big cat, ready to snap and claw you,
perhaps fatally but certainly permanently, if you touch it the wrong
way.
Along about five P.M., I was shifting up while climbing a gentle rise
and I noticed the exhaust note change. Dropping down a gear, the tach
died between shifts, then the exhaust poppled hollowly as I let the
clutch out. I coasted to the side of the road, found a wide spot, and
got out of my silent little car.
Nothing obvious presented itself to my inspection under the bonnet; it
had just... quit. We'd ridden the Dragon, clung tight to the scales and
skated the spines, and now we were stopped. So I snapped the hood down
on the windscreen and started walking north, back the way I'd come.
I had seen a dirt driveway heading down the cliff face a hundred yards
or so back, leading what looked like about a billion feet down to a pair
of homes right near the water's edge. As I stood at the crest of the
drive, there were two mailboxes. One, labeled L. Pauling, registered in
my memory. Could it really be Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner, living
down in that ranch-style house with large satellite dish and blue
swimming pool, a bizarre captive lozenge of artificially blue water just
yards from the great, wild Pacific? (It was, though I wouldn't find
that out till much later.)
And then I saw the other house, an A-frame style cabin with some
outbuildings, and more important, three old Toyota Land Cruisers and a
pair of VW vans, spotted with rust and primer. Ah, I thought, *these*
people have old cars, they'll know where to send me.
I trudged down to the house with the old cars, was challenged by a large
but fundamentally friendly black dog, and then welcomed by the folks
inside who were just preparing a stir-fry. They handed me the local
Yellow Pages and a glass of red wine, told me that Cambria Auto Repair
and Towing was the place to go, and passed me the phone.
Wishing I could have stayed longer, I drained the wine, thanked my
hosts, and made the climb back up to where my little orange car lay
unmolested by the side of the road. (Considering the, ah, aggressive
passes I'd made on a few people earlier that day, I was half wondering
if I'd come back to find it had been pushed over. But no.)
About six, when the shadows were long and the sun was nearing the far
edge of the ocean, a tow-truck arrived with a young man behind the
wheel, short blond hair waving over a tan, smiling face. I described
what had happened; he hooked me up to his jumper cables and we could
*almost* get the car to turn over. "Sounds like your battery's just
gone," he said. But it's new, I thought, replaced only a couple of
months before; oh well.
He carefully wedged my little car onto his hook, blocks of wood
protecting bumper and tailpipe, more cautious than the last couple of
dentists I'd used had been with my gums. We climbed into the cab and he
towed me the 26 miles to Cambria. For those unfamiliar with the area,
Cambria is the coast town nearest to Hearst Castle, the famous monument
to the power of the press erected by William Randolph Castle. Or
something like that.
Riding in the cab as the sun set, I was struck by how completely and
utterly dark it was, and how suddenly this palpable darkness had set
in. We could see Hearst Castle, its twin towers illuminated from
beneath with an eerie, greenish light, appearing to float in the middle
of the sky -- there was no clear delineation between the tops of the
hills and the black sky beyond. At one point, a stab of blinding white
shot across the road in front of us, then swept up to illuminate
brilliant green to my left, picking it out of the otherwise total
darkness. "That's the Dragon Point lighthouse," I thought I heard the
driver say, and the gooseflesh climbed down from my neck to my wrists.
(Later I'd find he actually said Ragged Point, but as I'd been thinking
all day that I'd been riding the Dragon's Tail, my imagination filled in
the name that my ears couldn't quite make out over the clatter of the
truck's big diesel.)
We stopped at an A & W stand some time before pulling in to Cambria,
where a family with two attractive teenage daughters -- the eldest about
the age of the tow truck driver -- caught our masculine eyes. He
grinned at me, raised his eyebrows, and I jokingly said, "This trip
might be more fun than I thought!" He snickered at that; I bought him a
root beer and we made our way back to the truck.
The driver had radioed ahead to the Cambria Pines Lodge to reserve a
room for me, and after we unloaded the Midget from his truck he drove me
up to the Lodge, at the top of a winding road appropriately lined with
large pine trees. We shook hands, I went into the bar which doubled as
the office, handed over a credit card to secure a room for the night,
and about 10:30 or so I called home (from the bar -- there were no
phones in the cabins), where my wife had returned and would probably be
wondering where I was, now a couple hours overdue.
"I'm having a Car Adventure!" I told Kim on the phone. Breathless, I
described the day, the ride, the place, the happy conclusion, and there
was silence for a second or so.
"I want to have a Car Adventure too!" she blurted out. I gave her
directions to Cambria, the Lodge, and my particular cabin; she hopped
into the high-speed pursuit car some two hundred miles south of my
location, and about two in the morning I was awakened by a familiar
touch, scent, taste climbing in beside me. No, I don't think I'll write
about what happened after that. Don't suppose I have to...
The next morning, Kim and I went into the office where we found we had a
phone call from the shop. I'd forgotten to leave my keys with the truck
driver, and he was apparently on his way up to retrieve them. As we
stepped out from the office, the truck was just pulling up to the
parking lot.
"Need my keys, they tell me," I said, and reached into my pants pocket.
No keys. Other pocket; no keys.
"Oh, I know," I said; "I put them in my shirt pocket when I was still
sitting in the car." (It may be possible to reach into a pants pocket
while seated in a Midget, but I never learned the knack.) I turned to
Kim.
"Can you reach into the pocket of that shirt and see if my keys are in
there?" She did, retrieved the keys, and handed them to the tow truck
driver -- who was now stop-sign-red under his blond hair, grinning like
a loon, stammering out an unintelligible greeting as he fumbled for the
keys. Kim was confused, but the whole picture came to me in an
instant; he got into the truck and drove off, still making noises like
Mortimer Snerd.
"He's the same driver who dropped me off here last night, alone, and now
here's a beautiful woman with me, *wearing my shirt*, the next morning."
"You mean he thinks you got lucky with me last night?" Kim said, a huge
grin breaking out on her face. "Neat!"
"Well, I did, didn't I?" I asked. "I got to have a fabulous Car
Adventure, and I got to have you come visit me!"
We walked up and down the picturesque streets of Cambria the rest of the
morning, while Cambria Auto Repair worked on my car. The diagnosis: the
voltage regulating unit in my alternator had gone out, and was putting
out more than 18 volts. Combined with the warm summer weather, this had
boiled all the water out of my battery, which burned through part of it
and effectively crippled my car's electrical system. They sent a driver
down to Morro Bay to pick up a new alternator for me; the whole bill
came to $200 even, and we drove home in formation, me in the Midget, Kim
in the high-speed pursuit car. On one stretch of road where I opened it
up just to be sure there was no additional damage, Kim tailed me, then
caught me as we slowed for approaching traffic. "You were doing 90 back
there!" she said.
I would spend everything I've spent on British cars, before that day and
since -- every cent, every scrap of skin and drop of blood, every night
with ibuprofen and a heating pad on my strained shoulders from lifting
the transmission into place, every cancelled credit card and drained
bank account, every lost friend -- to have one more day, just one more,
like that.
And when idio--er, friends and co-workers who have never actually
*owned* a British car but whose cousin's brother's fiancee's
hairdresser's roommate used to have one in college, "and it was ALWAYS
in the shop," say they'd always be afraid the car might break down on
them when they were alone on a trip somewhere... I think of that day, of
what happened when my British car broke down on me when I was on a trip,
far from home, alone at the very precipice and brink of the world. And
I smile, and nod, and think how narrow and crabbed life would be if our
lives were shaped only by the confines of our fears.
Anyway... Mark, *that* is the heritage and tradition and mythology that
you're stepping into by bringing out a certain Not Quite Spitfire at the
end of the month. And I thank you.
--Scott Fisher
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