29 December 2008
 
Detroit Iron


(Lincoln, with snow and parking ticket)

I have to say that if you are going to drive nearly two thousand miles on a Holiday Weekend, a big Detroit car is the way to go. The paper that was delivered yesterday to the house on the bluff above the Bay in northern Michigan, talked about General Motors shutting down the Pontiac brand. The rented Lincoln waited patiently outside in the light snow. I was not going to have the Hubrismobile dipped in salt water and slush and throw a couple grand on the odometer when the nice people from Hertz would rent me a gigantic piece of the Ford Motor Company for a week at a price less than the oil change would cost on the German machine. 

Pity the dinosaurs wont be around much longer. It was more than a bit piquant to be flogging it across holiday America. Part of the long farewell to a lot of things, the way I figure it.
 
The headlines was right there with the terror attack in Mumbai, which caught my eye, since my older boy stayed in the Taj Mahal Hotel just last year on his jaunt to the sub-continent. The al Qaida suicide squads would have made him a priority for murder, if the timing had been a little different.
 
Makes you think, and being behind the wheel, I did not have much to do except that.
 
Detroit Iron is a great way to travel America’s roads, and this gigantic sedan was clearly the last of the breed. Bulbous long flanks. Big tires. Bench seats of real leather, and a back seat you can lay right across. The trunk is big enough to hold a couple Jimmie Hoffa’s, and his adopted son Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien’s big fish tale all at once.
 
And with all that leather and power in that big chunk of Detroit iron, the passenger door didn’t close. I drove two or three hundred miles with it ajar, wind roaring, since it was so far distant from the driver’s side that I could not reach across without losing control and I was stopping for nothing except gas and coffee.
 
Traveled with a Blackberry lately? The office is right there in your right hand, all the time. They were working, as I drove, since the funeral happened on Monday, and there was a lot of really important stuff to be accomplished before their holiday.
 
It sucks. I answered office mail as I drove until the thing finally died and I threw it in the back seat. I think it bounced harmlessly. We will see next week.
 
That was on the outbound leg of the journey, climbing the long hill to the Eastern Continental Divide and down into the valley cut by the Monongahela and Susquehanna rivers as they join to form the mighty Ohio.
 
I thought about the death of great companies, hurtling through the city of Pontiac later in the week, sprawled across the bench seat of the Lincoln Special Edition. The car had Missouri plates, since apparently someone important had driven from there, one-way, and dropped it at Reagan National Airport.
 
Maybe it was some big-wig politico, someone in town to plead for the salvation of his local bank. Listening to the hysterical exhortations for shoppers to visit their malls in seven states, it seemed desperate enough that you might be offered a free bank with the purchase of a toaster. I don’t know. But I did wonder what the Michiganders thought as I swerved by them on the snow-covered roads in the Northland, the rear end fish-tailing a bit from the rear-wheel drive as I goosed the big V-8 engine to plow through the un-traveled left-hand lane.
 
It was a complex technical drive at the beginning of the homeward leg, and I have my spurs driving in snow and ice, won over decades of hurtling between the bottom of the mitten to the top. Still, you have to wonder what the terrified Wolverines might have thought seeing the Missou plates on the Town Car roaring by, throwing a rooster-tail of snow and slush.
 
They might have thought it was some mad resident of the Lake of the Ozarks might be behind the wheel, an unreconstructed Confederate lost in the pines, and determined to get out at any cost.
 
I figured this was a two-day journey, since there are only about ten hours of daylight, and just about 800 miles of pavement between Big Pink and the Village on the Bay. With the side trip to Bellaire, Ohio, for the burial, it was a good solid couple thousand miles.
 
Coming back, I should have stopped in Pittsburgh, like I had planned. The roads had dried off by the time I crossed the long Zilwaukee Bridge at Midland, and roared through the Tri-Cities of Saginaw, Bay City and Flint. By the time I hit Detroit I had a good head of steam going into the long straight-away to Toledo. A fuel stop, thank Jesus for the low fuel prices, and then the Turnpike to Cleveland, and then Youngstown looming, the light lowering, and the twisty nasty part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, going up to the big plateau of central Pennsylvania.
 
At that point, my night vision was just about gone, and I had to cut back on the speed. But the idea of spending another hundred bucks to sleep on someone else’s stale sheets did not appeal to me, and the glimmer of the Global Positioning module on my cell phone propped up on the non-functional ash-tray module on the dash told me it was only two hours to Breezewood, the village of Motels, and only two hours beyond down the big slope to the Capital Beltway, and my own little home and sheets.
 
The roads were dry and the traffic manageable.
 
Screw it. I hit the accelerator on the rental Lincoln and blasted on into the night. There was a lot to process in this holiday week, way more beyond the country music and the Christmas Carols on the radio. I’ll try to get to that tomorrow.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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