It’s winter, 35 degrees Fahrenheit, and dumping rain… so I thought I’d write down some of the youthful car adventures that shaped my future endeavors, before I forget them. I am getting older, fast. Isn’t reminiscing the right thing to do in the winters of your life?
When I was about 13 a free-ranging kid, James, who lived a couple blocks away, learned how to weld. He welded a motorcycle front-end to an old axle and mounted some seats on top of the axle, creating a trike.
We’d careen that trike down the biggest hill in town, running cars off the road and blasting through stop signs. There were no brakes. I’d say this might be my earliest adventure, on the asphalt, that caused massive amounts of adrenaline. It only lasted several days before our parents found out what we were doing and we were banned from further summer luge runs.
Not long after that we were all driving, well before 16. Different times, I guess. I was allowed to take the truck out into the woods, by myself, to dump our yard waste. I liked driving, so it made the chore more enjoyable.
One friend had no restrictions for his use of the family’s truck. And what a fun truck it was, a full convertible Blazer with a lift. We were probably 14.
One summer day several of us kids took the Blazer out to Lake Britton; from his house you could make it there on dirt roads, mostly, which was good since we didn’t have a license and didn’t want to get the truck impounded. This a day when I thought I might die… three times.
Near the lake we found an open field and started spinning doughnuts/cookies/whatever you call ‘em. Suddenly we slammed fiercely to a stop. Everyone in the Blazer peered up at the power pole we’d just hit, hoping it didn’t fall on us. It didn’t. But I consider this incident one.
We drove over to the Pit River dam, which forms the lake. We climbed down the dam’s enclosed ladder and stood at the bottom of the dam. Next to us, water cannoned out of a five-foot-tall hole at an immense speed, shooting into concrete piers designed to slow the water as it entered the river. At the bottom of the dam the slope was almost level, but the face of the dam was a curve and the higher you went the steeper it got.
My friends scrambled up and over the hole blasting water. Why? No reason. I decided I wanted to stay well-away from the water, so I climbed even higher up the dam to avoid the cannon; only, the dam was steeper higher up and I started sliding down towards the water jetting out. A friend grabbed me and pulled me to the side as I slid, saving me from falling into the cannon of water and being splattered against a concrete pier downriver. I consider this incident number two.
Then, on the one stretch of paved highway we couldn’t avoid, my friend decided to pass a semi. There was also a semi coming the other way. Both semis missed that blazer by an inch. Incident three.
That was a day. I don’t even think of it that fondly, it would have been better without the almost dying. I do still like convertible Blazers though. Running a convertible Blazer around the sunny warm woods, blasting 80’s rock… that’s good stuff. As long as you don’t die.
Around that time, on a foray into the woods to dump the yard leaves, I came around a corner and James was flying the other direction in his family’s truck. I ran off the road to avoid a head-on collision. We got my truck pulled out of the burned-out rocky field I’d drove into, but it did have a new dent on its fender from hitting a log. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t ever admit to that dent and lived in fear of being found out for weeks afterwards. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure the crash was my fault. Still, I’d kinda crashed a car and I wasn’t even 16 yet.
We moved to the desert before I was licensed for the road. When I got my license my first truck was a 1967 F250. One day I drove it off a sandy bluff in Coors Canyon, with the wheels turned slightly; the soft sand grabbed the wheels and forced them to turn further, spinning the wheel inside the cab at an impressive speed. Unfortunately, my pinky was in the region of the steering wheel and some bone in my hand snapped (but stayed in place). They put a cast on it, but I cut it off later that day because it was hard to shift with.
That truck had two tanks. I was utterly incapable of remembering how much fuel was in the other tank. I became infamous, among my friends, for running out of gas.
A high school friend got a ticket in his 1976 Camaro. A big ticket. He started asking if anyone wanted to buy the Camaro. I said sure, but I only had $1200 in the bank. He laughed. Several weeks later, facing arrest, he asked me if I wanted the Camaro for $1200.
The car’d been painted by the prisoners, as a skills-development project, and was a little gaudy. Decades later I realized it had been painted to look like a Baldwin Chevrolet Camaro, a dealer package which upgraded 70s camaros. Day one I painted the bright yellow 80s IROC Camaro wheels black. Also, I had to clip the interior in because, apparently, the prisoners had not been allowed access to metal clips.
One night, with my friend Jamie, I decided to test the Camaro’s top speed on the lonely desert road-to-nowhere North of town. It wasn’t impressive. At about 106 mph the long hood started waving in an unbelievable way, and the car wouldn’t do a mph more. At some point, on the slow down, I decided to turn the car around by grabbing the e-brake and sliding the car around. Well, I successfully parked the Camaro about 30 feet out into a desert sand wash.
Jamie and I started a long walk back. An hour later we saw a trailer parked off the side of the road. We thought we’d see if they had a phone. We walked over and knocked.
Two shady grizzled middle-aged men opened the door holding shotguns. We explained the situation and asked if we could use their phone. They said we could have one phone call. Jamie tried to call Mike, a friend with a truck sufficient to pull us out. Mike’s kid sister answered the phone and said Mike wasn’t home. Jamie tried to explain the situation to her, but it seemed unlikely she understood the situation and where we were.
Then we were walking through the desert again.
An hour later a friend picked us up in a car. The sister had come through, although Mike hadn’t been found (we didn’t have cell phones yet).
We went back to Mike’s, eventually he showed up, and we headed out into the desert with tow straps.
An odd thing about the desert is you can see lights for many miles.
As we headed towards the car we could tell someone was there. But, long before we got there, they drove off on one of the side roads heading towards Coors Canyon.
The worst-case scenarios went through our minds. Surely, they’d gutted the car and lit a fire. There was a weird amber light flickering. We expected fire to engulf the car.
When we finally reached the Camaro it was sitting in the middle of the road with its emergency flashers on. The amber flickering was the emergency lights turning on and off.
Only later did we find out that Mike’s older brother had been home when we’d called and he’d went out and yanked the Camaro out of the desert.
Even then I had a problem with collecting too many cars. There was this cool looking convertible sitting in a farm lot South of town, so I went up and asked if I could buy it. They happily agreed, asking for only $50 dollars. I think they might have wanted the car off their property.
We pulled a chain through a pipe and connected the car to my truck. My buddy Chris agreed to drive the convertible.
Several miles down the road I was surprised to see Chris passing me. Only, he didn’t look like he was having a nonchalant drive in a convertible. No, he was furiously pumping a brake pedal that did nothing. He eventually ran the car into a melon field which succeeded in stopping it.
We did a better job reconnecting the car and continued on. A fifty-year-old tire disintegrated a mile from home and we dragged it on the steel wheel, shooting sparks, the last mile. There’s probably still a groove in the road leading to that house. I hadn’t anticipated the groove, and that’s another one I lived in some small fear of getting in trouble for.
Only later I learned I’d bought a Kaiser Henry J someone had cut the top off of. I thought I’d never seen a car like it before; that was true because there never was a Henry J convertible (actually, I saw just recently that there were several prototypes and it got me wondering). It was a cool little car with a Jeep four cylinder. I never did build it… my parents thought three old cars was excessive for a 16-year-old, so I sold it along.
That summer my friends and I also had to bribe a farmer on a backhoe to pull us out of the Colorado River when I took the old F250 out a little too far. We often blasted around in the shallower waters of the Colorado.
Once, we came flying out of a sandy wash to the river, all four tires squealing as we hit the asphalt, only to notice that a police officer was standing next to his car watching our show. Instinctually we turned back into the wash and disappeared down the sandiest backroads I could think of. Again, I had some fear that one would catch up with me.
Then there was roof riding. We’d all stand in the back of each other’s trucks, holding the roof, while they ran up and down the walls of Coors Canyon.
The old Ford F250 didn’t have the best suspension. My little brother recalls being tossed against the roof of my truck, more than once, during high-speed passes through Coors Canyon. It was a wonder I could keep my foot on the pedals, but I had learned how to brace myself into that truck.
Welding class was fun. We built a sled to pull through Coors Canyon. It was better in concept than reality. Pulling old hoods worked better.
In the same class we gutted a Ford Ranger STX from circa 1985 to make a pre-runner. My very multi-cultural class painted it to look like the General Lee, since it was a factory orange truck. Chris and I blew the radiator out of it running around the desert. Hoping to make it back to a canal, we both put pee in the radiator. I learned that the smell of burning piss is one of the worst smells on earth. Then, as we were driving back, hanging way out the windows for fresh air, a bee hit, and stung me, on the eye. Not my best day in the desert. And I recommend against pee in the radiator.
As I got older, cars became more of a tool and less of a toy, unfortunately. Still, there were highlights.
I went to college in Flagstaff. The group of us that had trucks had a lot of fun pulling sleds when it snowed.
One Navajo friend of mine bragged that he had me up to 45 mph when he was pulling me with his Blazer. I was on one of those $4 Walmart discs. I wasn’t impressed. Again, a Blazer and I was near death.
Back then you could go to Mexico without fear of drug lords, and on one such trip I found myself driving someone else’s massively lifted truck home from Rocky Point with a Hispanic friend getting some rest laying in the bed. I was pretty shocked when we crossed the border and they didn’t even ask for my license. I imagine they thought, “Only stupid American college kids would be dumb enough to cross the border like this”.
On the same trip, I learned that the air at a truck’s tailgate swirls backwards, into the bed… which is a problem if you’re trying to take a leak going 60 mph.
In college I had ½ ton Chevys (one truck, one Blazer). I drove one down to Sedona and followed the Pink Jeep Tours. That’s when I learned a ½ ton Chevy doesn’t have the same turn radius as a Jeep. Man, there were some obnoxious 15 point turns along that trail. And frustrated Pink Jeep tour guides, since I was holding them up.
The truck had a “bed kit” and camper shell. I spent a summer living out of that truck to save money. I’d shower at the gym and worked two jobs, only driving into the Flagstaff woods to sleep at night. But it was a dry summer, so they closed the woods for fire risk. I had to find places to hide the truck and sleep around town because vagrancy was illegal. That was a weird summer, more than once being woken up by police officers at 3 AM and being asked to move along. There’s a surrealness to being woken and asked to move along at 3 AM. I’ve never much cared for camping since that summer.
The Chevy truck was fun to run around the Flagstaff cinder pits. It was also good for shuttling mountain bikes; we had a lot of fun barreling mountain bikes down the hills behind Flagstaff without ever having to pedal up. Exercise is overrated.
The fastest I’ve went, which isn’t too fast, was in Flagstaff. A friend, Glenn, bought the hot WRX. The first small blue one that might be the best WRX. We took it up to 130 mph on the Flagstaff Interstate. I’m sure it had more but we feared elk. That was a quick car.
My Chevy(s) had an annoying quirk though. The shift linkage would break often, leaving me with no reverse. There’s an art form to driving a vehicle with no reverse. But one snowy night I did drive across someone’s lawn, at the end of an unexpected dead-end road, because my techniques had run out. There was guilt and fear of trouble.
I had to sell the Chevy(s) to help pay for a DUI crash. Don’t drink and drive, it costs you in all sorts of ways even if you don’t kill someone (which, thankfully, I didn’t). The felony charge was dropped to a misdemeanor, but I lost a full-ride ROTC scholarship and was required to pay back three previous years of tuition that totaled $60k. Between that, legal fees, driving class fees, the rest of my college, etc., that crash probably cost me around $80k.
But, thankfully, God did use it to get my attention, and at the end of my time in Flagstaff I had a great fellowship of Jesus loving friends that I miss to this day and still visit.
Getting out of college, I was poor because I was paying the Army over $1000 each month. But, I moved to Hawaii!
At first, I commuted by motorcycle, but eventually I got a hankering for a truck. So, after work one day, I bought an old Ford in Hilo, on the other side of the Big Island, where it rains… a lot.
Halfway home a horrific noise came from the rear end after I hit a puddle. I climbed out of the truck to discover the exhaust had split in two, where the years of rain water had trickled down behind the cab, the rear part of the exhaust falling forward and essentially working as a kickstand for the truck. I kicked and kicked that exhaust before it eventually came out. Also, the frame rails weren’t going to last much longer at the same spot.
I got back on the road, but now it was late at night, raining, and I was up on Mt. Mauna Kea in an area where you’re not allowed to stop because of a military base.
I hurried towards home. Only, the truck’s headlights kept fading and dying. Eventually it petered to a stop. This was before they upgraded the summit road. I spent hours waiting for someone else to come over the summit on a weekday at midnight. Eventually, the military police came. We called a tow truck and delivered the truck to my house in the morning about the time I had to leave for work… by motorcycle.
I eventually got the truck working but lived in fear of the frame splitting where all the rain had rusted it out behind the cab. I rattle-can painted it to look like a penguin, which a friend reminded me of… all the time.
I upgraded to a similar F150, but 4×4, not long after. It was a good truck for getting to hard-to-reach surf spots. It was so rotten that I had to warn the surfers sitting in the bed not to sit by the bed bolts since they moved independently of the bed (except for one).
Bouncing down jungle trails to surf spots was pretty idyllic. Even at the time I knew those were good days. Progress happens; the last time I visited one of those roads was well paved with a parking lot at the end.
I will say, the 5.0 motor in that truck was peppy. Even if the radiator was boiling over. The 1989 5.0 is a good motor.
Then the construction industry died and I moved to Portland. And I was still poor. I tried to restore a Honda S90 in my apartment. I was moderately successful. I could ride it around town, but I could never figure out how to get it to charge the battery. To test a dying battery, you have to ride the bike. I spent more time wandering around Portland pushing a Honda S90 then you’d probably believe.
I did have a big block F250 highboy in Portland. But it had motor issues and smoked like the proverbial chimney stack. Greeny Portlanders loved the truck, often saluting me with their middle finger when they saw the smoke it left behind.
After reading too much Peter Egan I decided I wanted a small sports car. I bought a MGB for $1500. It was a nice little car, and I had fun getting it cleaned up and autocross worthy.
At my first autocross I found out that my MGB needed a sway bar and a new gasket on the fuel cap. Every corner it would wallow way over and fuel would go flying out of its fuel cap. It was embarrassing.
Press Play to See the Race
I didn’t feel like a 1979 MGB was my forever car. Or, if it was, I needed to grow a pony tail and buy some denim jackets. I decided I don’t like denim and can’t afford more shampoo.
So I sold MGB and bought a project 1957 MGA. I loved that car. Not sure my wife and friends did.
Press Play to See the Car Just Before the Fuel Pump Died
The day I got it running the cheap Auto Zone fuel pump lasted about 15 minutes. I had to interrupt my wife’s Downton Abbey tea party to have her and her friends push the MGA home from down the block. Well, one of them drove and I pushed with the others. The way I see it, I gave them a truly British experience!
That wasn’t the only day the MGA was embarrassing. My friend Andrew went autocrossing with me. I went first. Unfortunately, my “rings” largely didn’t exist and I left a nice oil splatter all over the front of his car. And the door flew open halfway through my run.
Andrew’s Car at Far Left, Mine at Right
And I don’t think I had allergies before I cleaned all the rust off that frame and body. I had to keep the garage door closed because the apartment didn’t allow people to work on their cars, per the lease. Pretty sure archaeologists will wonder how all the rust got in my bones. It was the MGA.
Andrew and I took the MGA and his car out to a track day. That was awesome. I need to do more of that. I’m working on getting my current car (Locost 7) trackday ready.
I loved the MGA. When I sold it, I missed it so much I bought another one. I’m currently working on getting my second MGA going. I was going to clean the rust off outside, but the rain is making me consider doing it in the closed garage again, but I don’t think my lungs can handle it.
Well, I think that catches you up to where this blog began. Hopefully a little context helps. Or, perhaps it doesn’t. Maybe my automotive experiences are just weird. I’ve had fun… most of the time.
