10-30
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You know, there is really not much that you can say about
the drive from Fort Stockton to Austin. Ideally, at least. Because if you’ve
got something to say – other than remarking on the steadily-improving landscape
of the Hill Country – it usually means that something catastrophic has
happened, or you’ve run into someone who was being a real asshole on the road.
Neither of these things happened to me today. The scenery did improve over the 5ish hours I was on the road. The supine plains of brittle golden grass gave way to questionably-shaped mountains, then those mesquite savannahs and limestone buttes so characteristic of the western Edwards Plateau region.
The most notable thing that happened throughout this interval was a point when traffic stopped to let a truck bearing a massive wind turbine blade cross the road. The winds of change (progress!) grow stronger.
From there, the landscape morphed into rolling grassy hills dotted with live oaks and junipers. Getting into this terrain is as good as being home, in my opinion. The gnarled live oaks, the gentle hills, the occasional rocky outcrop studded with erstwhile prickly pears, the vibrant textured quilt of shrubs and grasses of a dozen different variants – all of them shout “Austin!”, a constant background chant that grows louder and louder the closer you draw, until all at once you pop out back into the city proper, a disorienting wash of people and traffic and buildings and criss-crossing roads so wholly antithetical and yet so synonymous with the landscape of this town.
And after a dazzling, vaguely NASCAR-esque lap across town,
I suddenly found myself in front of my own front door. All in one piece, once
again delivered safely home by my most unlikely companion. Another trip in the
books, the ink dry and cover closed, more or less. I sat on my front doorstep
for a while, staring beyond the dust into the depths of Jane’s paint,
contemplating.
This year – this trip, this adventure, this arrival – it
marks 10 years since I first set out with Jane to see the world. An entire
decade, spanning nearly a third of my life (but only a sixth of Jane’s). Seeing
the world over the hood of the original American pony car has transcended
novelty and become tradition, hesitant beginnings and mad leaps of faith
morphing into well-worn habits as comfortable as a set of leather gloves,
supple and burnished in all the right places. I’ve been doing this for a very long
time – yet every trip yields new adventure, new sights, and new friends, always
in exactly the right amount. I’ve never been truly bored, even on the arduous
trek out of Texas (though I certainly reserve the right to complain about that
drive every year that I have to do it). And never have I wished myself anywhere
else other than the place I was right there and then (well, except for the time
a couple years ago when I got stuck down a washed-out 4x4 drive).
That is nothing short of incredible. And these days my
appreciation for what I have, the privilege of experiencing this country with
this car, sits solidly in the back of my head, popping to the forefront quite
often.
In ten years, I have become a different person – maybe the
blog posts don’t reflect it so much, but I can feel it in my bones, in the
reassuring hug of the seat around me and the steadiness of my hands on the
wheel, in the rueful chuckle that swells forth easily when something goes a
little sideways. Way back in 2014, I packed my nearly-untested,
recently-repaired 48-year-old muscle car with all of my belongings and took a
giant flying leap into the void. For that, the car punished me with a dead fuel
pump on the first day, causing an ignoble retreat back to home base before
leaving for the second time a couple of days later. An inauspicious start, but
one that became a hallmark of road trips with Jane – the first-day complaint,
the Bane of Jane, now itself enshrined in tradition. I took another leap, and
then another, and then another, and somehow ended up successfully driving from
coast to coast (and then some), logging 10,054 miles in 54 days. At the time, I
thought this was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, but then the next year… well, I
decided I should do it again, because it was pretty fun the first time. And the
second trip was pretty fun too, so I thought that next year I should do a
third. And so on. And somewhere along the way, I transformed from a nervy
novice, all brashness and barely-covered fear, to a seasoned road warrior,
confident in my car and myself and our ability to get anywhere together.
In those ten years, Jane has not become much different.
Sure, I’ve rebuilt the engine, and put disc brakes on the rear, and got rid of
the power brakes that always gave me so much trouble. But these are small
things unimportant to the essence of the car. Jane at her heart has always been
Jane – loud and bold and unabashedly free, demanding of respect, unafraid of
taking up space and knowing she’s worthy of it. That has never been a subtle
car. And sure, sometimes she’s a little grouchy, but she thrives on adventure
and tends to leave the bull by the wayside when there’s somewhere interesting
to be.
You may think this is going a bit too far with personifying
an inanimate object. But anyone who’s had a classic car for a very long time
will understand. Somewhere along the way, these cars pick up a soul. When I was
19, I bought this car and immediately understood it to be much more than that.
This car has shaped who I am as a person, and just as I’ve spent countless
hours smoothing out her rough edges, so has she spent the time smoothing out
mine. In many ways, I’ve let my life follow her lead – sure, I built this car
in part to learn a new skill, and in part to have a really cool car, but
somewhere in there was also a desire to build something that would remind me of
who I would like to be, and amplify that. When I first saw Jane sitting in her
former owner’s driveway way back in 2010, I saw what could be. Not just a
pretty classic car, but an incongruously gorgeous, flashy, rough-n-tough road
warrior that can take on anything with a sneer and a sly smirk. Not just a
teenage girl, but someone who could stand on her own two feet with full
independence, confident in her ability to make her own way even if unable to
see the path. These two things needed each other to be brought forth into
reality. And thus, our futures became intertwined.
I don’t want to think about who I would have become, had I
not bought that little blue pony car in that guy’s driveway. Not that I think I
would have become a worse person, or that my life would have fallen into ruin
or anything like that. I just know that it wouldn’t have been as good. Because
nothing could be as good as this. Not these crystalline, sun-drenched days,
wind whipping across endless miles of tawny plains to cascade over my car,
tousling my hair with the clean sweet scent of fresh air and warm grass, and
nothing but a serpentine ribbon of black asphalt stretching before us to some
as-yet unknown destination. Not these sharp, crisp mornings in the mountain
passes, winding our way amongst the craggy crowns of kingly mountains, reveling
in the joy of the handling of a well-built machine on roads that could only be
dreamed of by our forefathers. Not these twilight-tinged afternoons spent in
the redwood forests, watched over by towering giants that witnessed the dawn of
America and what came before it, the reverent hush of the groves broken by the
insistent proud rumbling of an old pony car that suddenly seems quite young.
Not even these blistering days in the deserts, shifting sands and scrubby brush
and proud saguaros rushing by even as striped yellow and red buttes loom
precipitously in that cloudless cerulean sky.
No, I don’t think I could have done any better than this.
Now, a decade after this all began, I find myself peering
into the future, trying to envision what it may bring (for all that that is a
futile endeavor). All things change, in time. When I first started these trips,
I was 23 years old, my life in flux and very little to tie me down. Free-form
road trips worked wonderfully – I could go anywhere, camp anywhere, see
anything, and go home whenever I got tired. These days, things require a lot
more planning, between constraints with my job (which has a pretty substantial
travel component itself) and the current state of outdoor travel. I’ve said it
before in previous posts – it has been getting harder and harder to plan and
execute these trips the way I would prefer. Our national parks are getting more
and more crowded, even as funding wanes, and it is getting harder to find
camping and in many cases nearly impossible to find accommodations without
advance reservation. But, I’ve turned this problem into a challenge for myself:
Can I still find the nooks and crannies of Outdoors America, the roads less
traveled, the paths not yet well-worn, the campgrounds not yet fully booked?
Can I find the places that are just as beautiful, only not as well-known – but
still accessible for the likes of a lowered 1960’s muscle car? A challenge,
indeed.
I consider this challenge, framed in the context of my life
(which has become quite full these days) and some things begin to take shape in
the murky future. Although I don’t think the days of our grand,
continent-spanning road trips are quite gone yet, they’ll certainly be less
common. Instead, I’d like to focus more on exploring a region in-depth, investigating
all of the little things that can make a place special. This year’s road trip
was a good reflection of that goal: less places, but more time-per-place
(except at Picacho Peak, where I spent exactly how much time I needed to spend
there and not any more, thank you very much). I think I’d really like to get to
know a place, instead of just scratching the surface for one or two days before
flitting on to the next destination. There’s so many spots I’d like to go back
to see more of – Washington, Oregon, northern California, Montana, Wyoming,
western Colorado, New Mexico – hell, it feels like I’ve barely even seen any of
those states, even though I’ve been going for ten years!
I’m getting older, sure, but as a career geologist I’m just
about the same as I ever was in my capacity for adventure, long hikes, and
longer drives. That’s lucky. And for a throw-away car that Ford intended to
last for a mere five years, my Jane – now nearly 60 years old! – has been aging
fantastically, which is even luckier. Parts availability for the Mustangs is
still quite good (albeit with a much-reduced quality in recent years), but the
classic car hobby has been losing members and their valuable knowledge to the
sands of time. Suddenly my knowledge – once considered middling at best, and often
viewed as erring a little too far on the side of redneck engineering – has
become a valuable resource to others newer to the hobby, especially those that
want drivability and long-term reliability out of their cars. I’m proud of
that, and I’m always happy to help out however I can. But I sure do hope we
find some way to make this hobby more accessible for younger generations, so
there can be many others to carry forward to vintage Mustang legacy.
The future is uncertain. The future of the hobby. The future
of the national parks and America’s wild spaces. Even the future of free-form
come-and-go travel. There is a lot to lose, and I see these little things
creeping in around the fringes, nudging ever closer to this life that I have
built. All things change, and I know that it’s a mistake to try to continuously
relive the glory days over and over again – and these ten years have been
glorious beyond compare. But that doesn’t mean I’m about to give it up. I’ll
keep finding my path, the way I always do – new roads, new destinations, new
ways of connecting with people and teaching them about the fantastic soul of a
vintage Mustang and how to maintain it. Fifteen years ago, that teenage girl
saw what that old blue pony car could make her. And now I have become it.
So what’s next? Well, first of all, I’ve got some repairs to
do. I’m hoping that after the Sedona rocker fiasco, I can just rebuild the
heads (which requires me to take them to the nearest reputable machine shop,
now a full 90 minutes away from my home, another reflection of the decline of
the classic car hobby). I’ve got a whole laundry list of other little items
that need to be tidied up as well – a rattle here, a squeak there, replacement
of the ailing radio antenna, new carpet for the fold-down seat, rotors turned, spark
plugs assessed – you know, just the usual. 2025 will also see me dealing with a
big home renovation that is bound to take up most of my time, plus a lot of
responsibilities at work I’ve accidentally taken on, and for some reason I’m
doing my PhD on top of all that. So the amount of time I’ve got for Jane (and the
person I get to be with Jane) is going to be quite slim. In fact, 2025 will
likely be the first year in ten years that I do not go on a road trip with my
old blue pony car.
You may be wondering if this is a sign of the end of an era.
Allow me to assure you that it is not. Part of the home renovation involves building
out a small workshop, with the goal of allowing me to store all of Jane’s “stuff”
– thus freeing up another garage bay for a potential future project car (never
to replace Jane as my road trip car, of course). So I’ve got no plans on giving
up any of this. But far more importantly: 2026 is the 100th year
anniversary of Route 66. So yeah, I’ll be out there. How could I not? America’s
Mother Road is calling… and we will always answer.
Until next time… Kelly signing out.
