Untitled Document

12 January 2007

Resurrection

I was deep in the Shenandoah Valley on a cold winter morning. I'd left Arlington in the dark, using a flashlight to see if there was coolant in the reservoir on the truck. As the sun came up behind me, the air assumed a crystalline clarity. Still and heavy, it would have been a perfect flying day.

Far out west, over the first low range of hills, steam from the generating plants hung in vertical curtains above the stacks in the little towns.

If you have not passed this way, in this channel between the mountains, you are the poorer for it. The winter colors are muted. The mountains that cradle the valley are solemn and old, and the earth that has come from their gradual disintegration is rich and loamy.

These fields were the bread-basket of the Confederacy in the late unpleasantness between the several States. Phil Sheridan's boys in blue finally planted their boots deep in these fields after some of the little towns had changed hands fifty times. The place names still speak of it, Jackson and Stuart prominent among them.

I listened to the analysis of the Big New Plan on Iraq as I rolled along, watching the gauges. The new plan seems a lot like the old one, bulked up a bit. The Iraqis are tepid, the Brits are going to pull out, and I agree with Thomas Friedman, who says that if we are going to fight terror, the surge we ought to try is for all of us to do it, not just the beleaguered troops.

A floor on energy prices to ensure that investors will make a buck on alternate technologies is part of what the President isn't willing to surge, nor did he ask any of the rest of us to go out of our way with the 20,000 additional soldiers and Marines he is going to send to The Show.

I was momentarily uncomfortable that I was burning petroleum distillates this particular morning, but I had my reasons. The truck I was driving is rare, almost unique. It is worth saving, but it has rust cancer deep inside, some of it bad. It needs to be cut out if the truck is to survive. Discovering what parts need to be cut, and what parts can be saved, requires a special process.

It is a very much like sandblasting, but uses baking soda and water applied at enormous velocity to scour the rust away and reveal what is still strong and shiny.

Mac had the only soda-blaster available within an eight-county radius of Big Pink, and this was the first day of the new year he was available to operate it.

There was an expensive alternative to me driving to the Mountain. He could have brought the Mountain to the truck, driving the 156 miles from his place with a trailer to load up the black truck and haul it back to the Valley. He certainly knows the way, and that would have involved two round trips. Better to watch the gauges and hope that I made it.

Mac is a good and genuine man. Friendly, the way they are downstate. He has been putting his compact and wiry frame into the seat of long-haul trucks for thirty years in order to sustain his way of life on his mountain, venturing into the city madness, but living apart from it.

That isn't what he really does, of course. That is the working-to-live thing that is totally opposed to living-to-work the way people do in this obsessive city. Mac is in the resurrection business. He has a passion for old automobiles, taking them apart and stripping them down to bare metal, then painting the various pieces and putting them back together again. The chromium is shiny. The paint is comes in vivid turquoise and vibrant yellow and rich vermillion. It is so deep you can reach into it. Pristine.

Mac showed his resurrections to me as the soda-blaster warmed up, and the truck cooled down. The key is the preparation of the metal surface, the cutting away of the corrosion, and the banishment of the rust.

Neil Young observed cogently in one his reedy, screeching songs that “Rust Never Sleeps.” Our steel is nothing more than iron oxide, carefully forged, successfully turning back into its native powdery state. The chemical decomposition of your automobile is happening now, and happened overnight as you dozed, year in and year out until you must throw it away.

Down around Staunton there is a little guild of craftsmen who defy time and the imperatives of metallurgy. Together, they resurrect things of the past.

Mac has seven or eight vehicles being brought back from the grave stacked in the neat gray bays of his eight-bay workshop. Some are bare-metal carcasses, the superstructure held together with stainless exoskeletons so they will not collapse as they are strengthened and renewed. Others, like the '55 Chevy truck and the Ford Model A Roadster, rest complete under soft fabric covers.

The compressor on the soda blaster kept chugging, and after I had admired Mac's collection, we put the truck up on big jacks and removed the fat racing tires. Rust fell from the hubs in large and ominous flakes.

“This is going to take a few hours,” said Mac, frowning as he pushed the knit engineer's cap back on his forehead. “Do you want to hang around here?”

“They say is costs more if you watch,” I replied. “I had hoped to visit President Wilson's Library in Staunton, but that is eight miles away, and I would have to hitch a ride.” I shrugged.

Mac smiled. “Just take one of my cars. Got plenty.”

That is how I found myself rolling back up White Hill Road toward Stuart's Draft and the old railroad city of Staunton in an old BMW sedan with all the warning lights on. Mac said not to worry about them, and I didn't.

Before I left, he told me to take a good look at President Wilson's 1917 Pierce-Arrow Limousine at the Library. The paint had been done by a fellow who had lived just over the hill. He was dead now, but his son was doing a little custom work to carry on the tradition.

“You might want to stop at the Classic Cars Museum on the way,” said Mac as he pulled on his coveralls and laid out his respirator. “It is just down the hill and across the Interstate. Petie Havers and his cousin have so much money they don't know what to do with it. They store their cars there, and it might be worth a look, if you care to.”

I went into the big box of a building and a pleasant older lady took five bucks admission and said she would turn on the lights for me. It was a slow week-day, but I didn't get the feeling that there was much traffic, and Petie didn't care.

There are about twenty cars on display, just a stone's throw from the fast lane of I-81. They include the white '54 Corvette Petie's Dad gave him, and the black '49 Ford sedan that the Stattler Brothers quartette drove to some of their shows. On the end, in a prominent place was the last car Elvis ever bought, with framed letters to document the provenance. I peered hard at the 1976 Caddie, trying to imagine The King at the wheel.

It was a nice little collection. My favorite was an agile little white AC sports car with the enameled Cobra logo on the hood. It was the early model with the superb 289-cubic inch Ford engine, not the later beasts with the 427 jammed in. Elegant lines. The sign on it said it was the one that actress Anne Francis drove in the television show “Honey West” in the mid-sixties. I had to think hard, but I had a vague recollection of the show, the first one on network TV that featured a strong and independent female action character.

The public wasn't ready for the show, and it was cancelled after one season. The car went direct to storage, and its beauty did not require resurrection, like Anne Francis, or you and me.

On the way out, I stopped to fill up the tank on the BMW, since I figure that if a man loans you a car, you ought to give it back with a full tank.