Tales from the Christensen Cruiser

I motored east and stopped in the town of Warren. It being Saturday, I decided that after a week I could spend the night in a motel, and checked in to the Elm Creek Motel, a great old-style motor court. I had the luxury of a shower and a meal at a little tavern close by and collapsed in bed and watched some TV for the first time in a week. The guy who ran the place had an accent right out of the movie Fargo. Nice guy, who helped me with his pesky internet connection. With all of the homogenization that is happening with all of the instant and worldwide communication, it’s heartening to hear all of the local accents as I move around the country.
Next morning I continued driving on Minnesota highway one. The road was very rural with beautiful farms throughout. By now it was apparent that my exhaust manifold repair didn’t work at all, so I was looking for parts along the way. I spotted a pile of mangled cars and trucks at the side of the road and pulled off. I wandered amongst the junk and was thinking that a lot of people died in these cars – they were just a mess, most totally smashed up. It took me a while to realize that whoever put them there used some sort of a loader with a claw on it– no death and destruction, just somebody that grabs them and stashes them in this pile. There were a few old Fords around and I saw a fine manifold on one, so drove to the nearest farm about a quarter mile away and asked about the parts, not wanting to get arrested or shot or something over some old car parts. There was a nice young man there who knew the guy with the cars and looked him up in the phone book. He got his daughter on the line, who then gave me his cell phone number. His name was Darwin and he said he would sell me a manifold for twenty bucks and I could “just leave it in the loader”. It was a nice afternoon, so I raised the camper up, put on some water for coffee and went to work. It came off easily and there were some other choice parts that I found, so I called my man Darwin and asked if I could pull what I wanted for fifty bucks. He said sure, and I got a bunch of other stuff. I heated up some chili, had a cup of joe and threw parts in the truck and was off. I never even met this guy. It was a great illustration of why things feel so different out in the country. I can’t really imagine that happening in a metropolitan area. That sort of thing is one of the reasons I love being out on the road in remote areas – people are different. Maybe we wouldn’t be comfortable talking politics, but on the level of one person to another, it’s just great; at least that has been my experience through the years. Being out in a junkyard on a nice day with the coffee on in the middle of nowhere was just great. Enjoying such a thing is in my DNA somehow. My mom used to remind me that when I was about three or four and we would be driving from Nahant to Boston, we would pass a huge junkyard and I would be ecstatic saying “Look at all the neat junk, mom!” Some things never change. I don’t know where that came from, but it has always been so with me.
I listened to a lot of country music on the radio out there – not that there was a whole lot of choice! There was a song that played shortly after my parts gathering episode about a guy just wanting to go on “some old back road”. It was a pretty cool song, as it talked about how an old back road cleared his head. There is something to that for me. There is immediacy about rolling down the road and having nothing but a rig and taking care of it and paying attention to that little microcosm. Compared to life in general, it is a much simpler thing. Of course there are problems that crop up, especially in a thirty-eight year old truck, but for me, that is part of the trip. Things can go wrong, but it creates opportunities to meet interesting people. (Or not, as in Darwin’s case) My friend Bob Patterson once told me, “Pete, you’re the only guy I know who will break something just so he has something to fix!” I see it just a bit differently, but I have to admit there is some truth in what he said.
This brings me to another thing. Why take such an old truck on this trip? My wife Sandy wondered that, like why I didn’t take my newer little panel truck or some such. I told her that anyone could take a new rig across the country, but that wasn’t my deal – that would be someone else’s trip. There’s no sport in taking something new, at least not for me, it’s just not as interesting. More importantly though, I think that machines, just like people, get more soul as they age. This sucker has been deep into Mexico. She has some miles under her. An older machine has earned a little respect, just as an older person should.
A little illustrative story…there was a time long ago, in the 1970’s when Ken Kesey was going to speak at the Evergreen State College in Olympia. A bunch of us decided to go down to see him, so we piled in to the Banana Boat, my 1951 GMC one-ton panel truck, to drive to Olympia from Tacoma. So I’m all excited, he being one of my major heroes, and have a load of hippies in the back, and as we are getting on to I-5 the truck just starts to run like hell, coughing and sputtering. People were a little nervous, but I spanked the old girl on the dashboard and told her to straighten up and fly right and she just smoothed right out. Purred like a kitten the whole way down and back. People in the truck were impressed, (as was I, to be honest), but more interesting than that was that in Kesey’s ramble that night, he talked about his ‘63 Mercury Comet that he drove for years and how that car got him places in part because he loved that car. His point was that love works with inanimate objects as well as living things. It’s the only part of his talk that I remember, and I really believe it to be true.
My parents were given a Chevy when they were married, and my mom named it, “Oink”. I remember from and early age her patting it on the dashboard and talking to it. We lived in the land of salted roads, so the typical East Coast rust took its’ life after a while. At one point, one of the fenders was flopping around loose from the rust damage, and mom got out there with a wrecking bar and ripped the sucker off. She drove it for a few more years with no fender. She loved that old car, and it got her where she needed to go for many years. Now, don’t get me wrong, this old junk and these old vehicles don’t rise to the level of my relationships with people, and the love is of a different sort, but it is there, and I think it is real.
So an old machine. Ibs’ truck was made when our country was still making the best stuff. Granted, the cars of the seventies slid pretty far downhill, but it took a few more years before the trucks followed. If you go back a few years earlier, back in the sixties, you really couldn’t buy a bad American vehicle. I don’t care what it was; they were designed well and put together nicely as well. We were full of ourselves, and riding high and it showed in what we made in the states. Not that vehicles haven’t improved since then – they have. Unfortunately, up until fairly recently, it was the Japanese and other countries who were building cars that were the best. I think that the American auto industry is on its way back, but there is a reason some of the companies almost went belly-up. The product wasn’t up to par. We used to make the best stuff in the world. Not so much anymore. Heck, we don’t make much of anything anymore. We need to get that back. We need to honor the people that can design and build good things and do it right here in this country.
Thinking along those lines and probably just to be a stubborn old coot, when I was packing up tools for the trip, I decided that there wasn’t going to be one metric wrench in the box – not one. Part of the reason for this trip was to refresh myself and to remind myself just what a great country we live in. I needed to get back into the heart of it and not listen to the pundits and naysayers – to see for myself how we are doing. So I brought tools from that era, when nobody needed any damned metric tools. And having an old soulful machine is a good thing in another way. It is a conversation starter – people want to know about it. They might think I’m a bit nuts, but they are curious. When one gets out and meets people one-on-one, it is invigorating to realize how many great people there are around the country. And a lot of them appreciate an old, soulful machine,