26 November 2003

Syclone in the Pines

It is the Thanksgiving Day weekend. I should be supervising a new position we have established in the Homeland Security Operations Center up on Nebraska Avenue. I was eloquent in our proposal to the Government that I would be a hands-on Project Manager and we won the contract. I should have been there, since the Government people were tired and wanted the holiday off themselves.

I was conflicted. I had a long-standing commitment to my folks, and to my truck.

Accordingly, I rose on Tuesday and looked blankly at my computer. I needed to write something and I needed to be hundreds of miles away before the darkness came. There was a new contract proposal to be done and there are some vignettes to craft for someone else. Nothing was coming off my fingers and onto the keyboard. The sun was coming up, the light flooding the Boulevard below. Finally I said the hell with it and threw some things in a bag, made a couple sandwiches and poured a thermos of coffee.

By ten o'clock I had left the Potomac and was cresting Town Hill, elevation 1,250 feet and plunging into the hill contry of Western Maryland, bound for Pennsylvania and points west. I was at the leather-padded wheel of my 1991 GMC Syclone, the World's Fastest and Least Maintained Pick-Up Truck, from Virginia to Michigan where I intended to place it in heated winter storage.

The truck is a blunt shiny black missile that belonged to my Uncle,the famous bomber pilot. It was his utility vehicle when he had to take things to the dump and did not want to drive his Corvette.

I recovered it from his house when the family was sorting out the estate. No one knew quite what it was worth, a peculiar little experiement that GM had done at the dawn of the SUV era, cramming the soul of a race car into the the sheetmetal skin of a little utility truck. They only built fifteen hundred of them, so it is an odd duck, with low miles, and I was determined to save it for posterity.

I nursed it down from the mountains of Pennsyvania and did the necessary work to stabilize its disintegration. I replaced the racing tires with new original equipment and flushed the transission that provides proportional power to all four wheels.

I had the fenders and fuel tank replaced, since the roadsalt of the Pocanos had partly eaten them away. It looks nice, but it needs some tender care. Today, mostly I poked along on the new big racing tires and worried about the oil pressure guage. It is not the greatest expressway vechicle since it was designed to eat Mustang Cobras off the line at stop lights all across America.

I bought one of the black t-shirts that commomorates the original sales pitch: "Syclone: 0-60-0 in 4.4 seconds. In the rain." Someday I will have the money to restore the black rocket, but not now. The key is to stop further deterioration. Sitting in the parking lot of my building in Arlington the black gel-coat of the sleek camper-top was starting to fade. The interior is flawless. I need to keep it out of the sun and out of the salt bath of the Northern Virginia winter.

Pennsylvania was boring. I have swept up and down these hills so many times I know them like the back of my wrinkled hands. I swept through the Hole in the Wall under Alleghany Mountain, and past the crash site of Flight 93. There was a new bill-board that offered charter tours. The high plateau of central pennsyvania brought winter and the dusting of snow. Then past Pittsburg and the big construction zone that occupies the last thirty miles to the East Gate of Ohio, where the land becomes flat and featureless. That is normally where I fall asleep, but I had my tunes and I had my cell phone and I yakked and tapped my toe and gazed hawk-like at the oil pressure guage.

There was no point in looking at the fuel guage, since that hadn't worked since the tank was replaced. I had to keep track of the fuel level by the push-button trip guage and made a point of refueling with high-test every two hundred miles. I was not sure how big the replacement tank was, and was not interested in finding out to the liter how much it actually held. I calculated the average highway mileage and re-filled every two hundred miles, whether I needed to or not.

The oil pressure was something else to watch. It had a tendancy to go crazy when I operated the truck in rapid acceleration mode and I did not know what it might actually mean. It could mean that I would blow the seals on the 4.5 liter six-cylinder engine. I needed no breakdowns here in trackless Ohio, no holiday with a surly mechanic interfering with his dinner and mine a state away.

Most of the 700-odd miles I kept it at the lowest possible RPMs and for the first time in my life actually did the speed limit on the Pennsylvania and Ohio Turnpikes.

I made it to Ann Arbor and saw my older boy. We dined at the Fleetwood Diner, a disreputable establishment downtown that has been poisoning patrons since before I went to school there. I almost caught my younger son as he was headed out the door in East Lansing, headed for the holiday with my ex in-laws, but that was the just the way things worked out. Holidays suck sometimes.

His ride was just pulling out as I rumbled past the smokestacks of the Micigan State Universary power plant. There was no reason to stop there now. I kept the truck's blunt black nose pointed north. I found National Public Radio on the dial and listened to All Things Considered. Noah Admas or someone like him was talking to the Surgeon General about public health issues.

It is a small darn world back there in Washington. When the Surgeon General talked about his life and goals it was just the same as he sounded in person. I used to talk to Rich Carmona about improving public health readiness all the time. But it was different hearing through the speakers of my truck talking about trying to cut back on French Fries. He is a Surgeon General who wears the unifom proudly, and I think he is the poster-boy for a renewed sense of mission in the Public Health Service. It is very surreal to hear people you know on the radio. I'm sure this is just one of those times of life when that happens and sooner or later everyone will be a stranger again, the way it is supposed to be.

NPR faded as I rolled through Alma, where there is a fine little college. Lady Bird Johson's legislation banning bill-boards along the interstate system did not affect this route, and there was advertising aplenty for sport outfitters and outboard motors and boats and snowmobiles. I kept the Mackinac Bridge on the nose, and kept my eye on the oil pressure. But as I headed north in Michigan I got tired of the aggressive SUVs and sedans passing me. I was north of the Special Enforcement Zone at Clair and rolled past one of the offical-only access cuts through the pines. No cop was there, and there wouldn't be another place for one to lay in wait for a couple miles or so.

So on that lonely stretch of US-127 before it joins big Interstate-75 my foot got itchy.

I was close enough to my destination that I was pretty sure I could coast in to the bayside village of Petoskey, if I got the knots up high enough. I tromped the accelerator and the truck leapt forward with a snap. I got to 95MPH and held it there. The pines along the side of the road disappeared in a blur of green and the road narrowed to a point of black asphalt before me. The dials on the turbo-boost shot up into the +15PSI range and the tachometer racing north to 4,500RPM. I held my breath, wondering if everything would hold together.

It seemed to. I slid back down arond the speed limit and surveyed things. It was all working fine. I ran it up again, back pressed into the contoured racing seat. Then I went for it. From a flying start the little truck shot forward, dials racing around, the whoosh of the inter-cooled engine combining with the roar of the turbocharger. The red speed dial arced sharply up, 80, 85, 90, 95, faster than you can read it, pinning me to the seat. Then over a hundred, the magic number and I held it there for a several seconds. It was a strange dreamy feeling, alone in the cone of hurtling empty roadway, measuring the sense of it, 105, wondering about the physics of it, the cams and parts and bearings spinning faster than thought, the feel of the road through the tires and the struts and the shocks. Straight and level. Comfortable. The instrument panel was calmer than I was. All the other needles, oil pressure, temperature and ammeter stayed constant.

I eased my foot off the gas and the individual trees became distinct once more. The black rocket slowed down through the 90's and to loaf along at 2000RPMs, sedate at the speed limit.

So I am assured that it retains the quickness for which it was built, and the excitment that shoots up nerves to the brain from foot and wrist.

So into my Father's garage goes Syclone. He has vowed to start it every week and move it so the tires don't get flat spots. Sooner or later I will get back to it, in this lovely little village by the Big Water.

When I shut the garage door and the truck's agressive little snout disappeared I was reminded of the words spoken by one of the last skippers of the battleship Iowa. He said at the decomissioning that it might not be the last time she would be needed.

"Rest well, yet sleep lightly" he said. "For your Nation may need you again."

That is the way I feel about Syclone. Somewhere out there there is a Mustang that needs to be eaten for breakfast. Maybe in the Spring.