The Cast of Players
Chris and Tom: My wife's sister and her recently retired husband. Tom worked at Sears, and knows what happened to Roebuck, but he ain't saying. Chris is a librarian whose first, and usually correct reaction to every problem is maybe we should get some ice cream. Quietly, of course.
Beth and Dan
: My wife and I. Beth is a bureaucrat, a municipal planner who can organize an outing more thoroughly than Hannibal. I'm just a retired mechanic looking forward to leaving a trail of brokenhearted diner waitresses across this great land.Joan and Joanie
: Sister number three and her daughter. Arizoners, living the life.The Tale
They say standing on mountaintops leads to thinking, and it was while Tom and I were standing atop Pikes Peak it occurred to me I should write about this journey. The reason we Michiganites find ourselves out west at all is our niece Joanie's high school graduation in Phoenix. My brother-in-law and I have seized upon this opportunity as an excuse for a grand road trip. Beth and Chris don't have the time for such high adventure, and cast their lot with our nation's splendid air travel system instead.
But what should we drive? A road trip car should be more than just a comfy place to sit until your destination decides to appear. No, there will be no insulated prairie ark for us - this will be an old school windows-down drive with America flowing through the cabin.
Ideally this should be done in something like a Rambler station wagon, but we must select from what we have available. There's Ratso, my 65 Corvair, and Tom has a 73 MGB that has yet to earn a name. The B is a nice car, but it has a thinning clutch disc, so Ratso wins. Why the name? I bought this Corvair a year ago in kit form – just an empty shell and a basement full of parts. Wanting to get it on the road as quickly as possible and not caring for showcar paint, I sprayed on some cheap low gloss black enamel, what's known in car circles as a rat rod paintjob. It doesn't much care if it's clean or not, and I can touch up scratches with a Sharpie.
What's a Corvair? A compact car built in the 60s by Chevrolet, air cooled, with the motor in the back. It is remembered mostly for leaking oil like a supertanker on a reef and a heater that varies, depending on the level of abstruse maintainence, from almost adequate to brimstone poisonous. Yes, Corvairs are the only cars ever made with a heater that can actually kill you; even so, they and I have been on friendly terms for decades. There is an international club for these oddities, and many still survive in the hands of True Believers who bristle at the least criticism of their little road oilers, so stray from the Orthodox Corvair Catechism at your peril. Also, we owners of the Waterless Wonder are renowned for a Scroogian level of thrift, preferring to replace worn out parts with used stuff that's only half worn out, and always on the lookout for a way to stretch those elusive nickels. For instance, when putting Ratso together I saved a cool twenty bucks on an off-brand brake master cylinder.
