Suburban For Sale

Autoliterate came across this 1988 Suburban parked by a West Texas highway with a For Sale sign on the windshield. 

If AL didn't already own two trucks of the era, we would have to consider buying it. But, since we do, we're not. Haven't been out that way for a couple of days now, but the truck may still be there. The engine appeared to be the tried & true 350. It's a 2WD truck. Paint looked original, and the rubber looked good. If you're interested, give the seller a call. (See below. Local area code is 432). It looked to us like a very strong machine that has probably spent its life in high, dry West Texas. (There's a San Angelo dealer emblem). No rust that we could see. Don't know the mechanicals, have not driven it, or started it, or spoken to the owner---but everything we saw was in excellent shape, and had been well maintained. Immaculate interior--it looked like no one had ever sat in the back seat(s). People who maintain the body and interior usually take good care of the internals (engine, trans., etc.) too.

Offcenterharbor.com

There is an astounding depth of the saltiest boat-knowledge back in our home town of Brooklin, Maine and this year a lot of it has come together on the videos at the offcenterharbor website. OCH is five Brooklin guys

who, if you left them on an island on Penobscot Bay for a month or two with a couple of axes and a Swiss Army knife, could probably build you a schooner. Or at least a Friendship sloop.  Teach you how to sail the thing, as well. And show your six-year-old how to have huge fun rowing the dinghy. Offcenter harbor has developed a series of great lively videos packed with authentic know-how on a bunch of salty, boat-oriented topics, including this one, on teaching kids to row.

No better introduction to do-it-yourself boating, sailing, building.  If you can't make it downeast this summer,  a trip to offcenterharbor could be the next best thing.

West Texas Wide Tracks

I have been tracking a couple of Pontiac convertibles. The 1964 Bonneville is part of the Food Shark fleet, and on days when the Shark is serving, the B'ville can be found parked on Highland Avenue or El Paso Street. Hector Sanchez pulled some major dents and repainted the car this year at his shop at the west end of town.

Out towards Chinati this evening, I was glad to see a 1963 Catalina that I've had my eye on for a couple of years. Both these Pontiacs are survivors and seem to be mostly original. My favorite kind of ride. The Catalina has an issue with its top, which I hope gets resolved before the rains return to West Texas, if they ever do.

The interior is rough--but why oh why did Detroit stop making cars this cool?

I was passionate for Ponchos as a kid. My father had a 1959 wide-track Catalina,

and a 1962 Pontiac Laurentian.

 Pontiacs, and especially 1959 Catalina steering wheels, were somewhere near the source of my car obsession/fetish as a kid. (I've written about all that in an essay, "Love Cars", which you can find here.)

Most of the Pontiacs generated since @ 1975 were terminally dull, including some spectacularly ugly ones (remember the Aztek?). And now the "brand" is extinct. Though I guess no "brand" is ever beyond re-inflating, and I suppose Pontiac will be revived by GM at some point as a "brand" if not as a Division that once produced some wonderfully sleek chunks of automotive machinery.

40 years later this was someone's idea of a Pontiac.

Texas Dodge 200

We're in West Texas for the winter. Looking around town I've seen a bunch of trucks to admire. Old trucks tend to last out here, because it's so dry. And the Texas highways are smooth. I like what sunlight does to old trucks. It fades the paint, of course, buffs it down to a matte that I find appealing. And I like the layering of paint, primer, and surface rust. (Don't like the word patina, but there it is.) Winter light here in the high desert is a beautiful instrument, and the air is so clear that dusty old objects often own a kind of sharp self-possession that makes the act of looking a delight. So here it is: the male gaze, focused on aged machines rather than youthful females. I admire the blue in this Dodge 200, which I estimate to be a 1970 critter.

The line started with a 100. The 200 was the 3/4 ton pickup. I don't know much about these trucks but should you want to learn more, start here. Autoliterate found one 1966 Dodge (with 24000 original miles!) for sale in Canada back in 2004 for $4200  (Dodge trucks were sometimes badged as Fargo trucks in the great white North):



There is a 1962 Dodge Power Wagon (the 4wd version of these trucks) up at ebay with a buy-it-now price of $2495.  My sense is that Dodge trucks are valued quite a bit lower than Chevrolets and Fords of the same vintage.

Autoliterate admires plain-Jane trucks and there's nothing plainer than the "Sweptside Special" trucks Dodge dealers were offering to commercial and fleet buyers in the early 70s. Much prefer them to the garish, optioned-and-chromed "Dude" editions offered by the same dealers, same years.

                                      plainest of Janes

And back to that West Texas light:

F250, CHAPTER 4

Notes from photographer Jarrod McCabe on the last leg of the epic Montana-to-Massachusetts road trip with his 1971 F-250.  All photographs are  ©2011 Jarrod McCabe
"We spent a full day in carbondale, illinois fueling up on biscuits and gravy and surprisingly good burritos and working on clementines custom flair.  meers, the blacksmith, was to do a copper repoussé on the gas cap for the main tank.

"I talked trucks with a machinist that meers knows and he'd noticed the differential was leaking a tiny bit.  nothing serious, but worth adding some thread seal tape to keep it from leaking when i got home.  he left for a while and came back with beers and some stainless steel screws and washers for my license plates as a parting gift.  folks sure do like clementine.  for a nightcap we took clementine down to the lake and lit off fireworks.  it was grand.

"We left carbondale in the early morning on the 22nd.  we had 21 hours of driving time ahead of us according to google maps.  plans to camp were soon reconsidered as the high of the road trip began to wear off.  east of topeka the roads felt a bit more like home, so we figured we might as well get there.  why not end the road trip with a bang and knock off the last chunk in one fell swoop?  i pulled the first 15 hours then handed her off to dom - he'd napped in the cab most of the day.  coca-cola's and hot dogs brought us all the way home after 25 hours of driving.  there was a bit of snow in the berkshires that turned to rain.  we sure did see it all weather wise.  

"It felt great to park clementine at home.  i took her out after a solid nap to try and find some VR1-30, a racing oil with high zinc and phosphorous content, that tobe, my mechanic in bozeman, said would suit her engine best.  the trip totaled up about 3,200 miles and she was due for an oil change.  it was an unsuccessful adventure given the proximity to christmas and most auto parts stores being closed.  

"Driving clementine around town was kind of nerve wracking at first.  i don't know why, but i was awfully paranoid of some wild massachusetts driver slamming into her sideways and putting some sad stake into the heart of my road trip.  it's a bit more congested here than kansas, colorado, wyoming, montana.  i think she likes it better on those back country roads.  so do i."---JM  

Re. zinc:  there are differing opinions on whether the zinc additive is needed for older engines. The current blend of SAE motor oil (SM, SN) that is available doesn't have it. You can buy the ZDDP additive online and add it to whatever oil you are using.

And Autoliterate shares JM's wariness of Massachusetts drivers. Every time we cross that Bay State line, the level of automotive aggressiveness and general road rage seems to amp up considerably. It was therefore odd to read a recent piece in the Portland Press Herald claiming that driving in Mass. is statistically safer than in Maine. This is apparently because the road net in Mass. is better than in Maine, which has a lot of crumbling back-country semi-highways. Hmmmm. Anyone driving in or around Boston, or on the Cape highway, may not agree.

Texas Toolbox

It is really a tackle box--see the fish head?-- but I use it to keep tools for work on the Custom Deluxe. Bought the box last year, for five bucks, at a junkyard on the east side of town.  I am slowly assembling a collection of Texas tools. I'm learning it doesn't pay to buy cheap tools: and when I was at Liberty Tool in Liberty, Maine a couple of weeks ago, I longed to gather a hoard of good quality second- or third-hand mechanic's tools...but shipping tools all the way to West Texas didn't seem to make much sense.

                                                           Shadow dancers, W. Texas

Maine to Marfa

We're in West Texas. Finally. At seven-thirty in the morning, the sun is just up, the sky is pale blue edged with pink, and it's a chill high-desert 27 degrees out there. Yesterday by noon it was 60. A couple inches of snow are possible for the weekend: Marfa is only fifty miles from the Mexican border, but it's also 4500' above sea level and in the West it's usually altitude, not latitude, that matters when it comes to cold.
            A few weeks ago we abandoned our original plan to drive the 2700 miles from downeast Maine to far-West Texas in the fifteen-year-old Volvo, with the five-year-old aboard. We flew instead. It still felt like a long haul.
           We left Brooklin, Maine on Monday afternoon, and drove three hours to Freeport for a Christmastime dinner with BB's family. Spent the night in Freeport, and woke up at 3:45am.  Basha's generous papa drove us to the Portland Jetport (not airport, mind you: jetport) for a six a.m. flight to Chicago. The three of us were groggy. BB and HBB managed to sleep but PB could not: he is @ four inches too tall to comfortably crank his legs into the space allotted to an economy seat, let alone snooze in one, so spent the flight reading a book he'll be reviewing for the Washington Post: James Barret's The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City, the newest vol. in Penguin's History of American Life series.
           From Chicago we caught a flight to El Paso and arrived in Texas around noon Mountain Time. We had arranged for the community Trax bus to pick us at the airport and take us to Marfa, three hours to the southwest. The Trax is used by people in the Big Bend area--Van Horn, Marfa, Alpine, Presidio--to get to El Paso, for shopping trips and (mostly) doctor appointments. We spent two hours waiting outside a medical clinic for one lady so the last leg of the trip wasn't exactly speedy. But West Texas sunshine was having its usual positive effect, so even hanging about outside a medical clinic in the drear exurbs of sprawling EP was okay; at least for the first hour-and-a-half. Fellow passengers on the bus were three ladies from Van Horn, Texas ,and the French artist Wilfred Almendra, who is in Marfa with Field Work Marfa,  which is a joint project of three European schools: ESBA Nantes Métropole, HEAD-Genève, and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. 

                                                    l'equipe  Fieldwork Marfa  

Almendra is a sculptor interested in studying how humankind impacts the environment. “Marfa is like a lab for me,” he says in an interview in the Big Bend Sentinel, as translated by our Parisienne/ Texan friend Valerie Breuvart Culbertson, who is the project's Marfa liaison and project manager. “My interest may be to contrast places like the Sunbelt with the authenticity of a place like Marfa.”

                                          Marfa, The Horses AcrossThe Street

The bus dropped us off at our Marfa house around 730 pm Marfa (Central) Time, which made it an eighteen-and-a-half hour travel day. HBB dozed most of the last couple of hours, but kept waking up and demanding to know when he was going to see his Marfa copain, Victor.

                            Les gars avec leur poulets

PB immediately caught a ride on the bus over to Ricky Rojo's house to grab our Marfa wheels. Ricky has been babysitting the Custom Deluxe and rebuilding the transmission: the truck is in good shape, and we are contemplating a truck-trip to Austin sometime this winter.

                                                          Icy Morning, West Texas

But right now it feels great to settle in here. The three of us went out to lunch yesterday at the Food Shark, which we dream of when in Maine, and saw a bunch of our Marfa amigos. BB is setting up her winter studio at Wrong, Buck and Camp's gallery, downtown: she'll be fabricating and selling her gold and silver jewelry at Wrong this year.
   
P.S. PB's interview with Shelagh Rogers on her CBC Radio show The Next Chapter originally broadcast on CBC1  December 19 will air again at 4pm December 24th, on CBC1. Here's the podcast. PB did this interview at the early, Vancouver stages of a massive transcontinental head cold, which is why he sounds like he is talking from deep inside a snowdrift.