What It's All About: Old Car, Two Lane Blacktop, AM Radio
I’m normally pretty curmudgeonly about the inherent inferiority of old cars. A 5-year-old Camry will outperform just about every classic Detroit muscle car or Italian sports machine in nearly every category from comfort to acceleration. The windows fog up, you just push a button: problem solved. The asphalt gets rough, you don’t notice it: problem solved. Road trips in 60s cars in the pre-cell-phone era could turn particularly hellish; I’m trying to conjure up a sense of romance from my mid-80s memories of limping a Fairlane with a failing distributor down some godforsaken California Central Valley highway, in search of a junkyard with a Windsor-equipped donor car… and I just can’t do it. Yeah, the good old days were really pretty terrible. However, all that sensible real-world nonsense gets thrown right out the window when I go for a nighttime drive in rural America in a rattly-ass old car and a good song comes on the radio. Quick, get me a ’71 Plymouth Cricket and a stretch of two-lane!
Last time I was in South Carolina, I caught a ride from Kershaw to Camden with Tunachuckers team captain Mike, in his 1967 Volvo Amazon wagon. Here comes Warren Zevon‘s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” on the radio.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I remember firing up my 1983 (UK) Ford Escort after nearly a year idle underneath a tarp near my parents house (this was nearly 10 years ago). A little bit of tinkering and a new battery and she was underway. I couldn't afford a full CD player so I had one of those god awful CD to tape adapters plugged in - it was crackly but it worked. On my 350 mile first trip out in nearly a year the headlights decided to pack up - fixed with duct tape - the thermostat fan switch gave up the ghost - leading to a nice bubbly radiator in the middle of a motorway traffic jam, which was fixed by letting it cool down and then ignoring the rules and zipping down the shoulder to the next exit. About 250 miles into my trip I finally reached the Lake District during the evening. I put on my 'Muse - Origin of Symmetry' CD (to those crusties out there - they are what I would describe as Operatic-Rock) and hit the nighttime winding mountain roads. The night was clear, the stars were bright and there wasn't a soul upon the roads but me. The track 'Bliss' starts up as I hit a particularly fast stretch of road. I know this car, I know this music, I know this road... all of it flowing together into a single moment.
I love taking long highway drives, especially on northern summer evenings, when sunset and the following twilight lasts for hours. I put a lot of highway miles on my '87 Grand Am in only a few years during my university/internship days. A basic car but comfortable, reliable, and well-maintained, with a fantastic stereo system. I wish I could have appreciated everything I had at the time, especially my beautiful girl. But it just wasn't in my nature.