vrooooom!
Post-Thanksgiving. Hallelujah! The usual: too much food, big crowd of inlaws and outlaws, much champagne and laughter.
An old friend blew into town pulling a teardrop trailer as a portable home. She has already lived all over the world, now all over the U.S. of A. She and her husband follow wherever the weather or their whims call. I admire their gypsy spirit but don’t envy them. I love my little house with all its red-&-plum eccentricities; a week is the longest I like to be away from home.
But those two wanderers got me to thinking about the freest I have ever felt. It was in my spectacular silver-blue 1953 Austin Healey 100/4 sports car with navy blue top. Only convertible I’ve ever seen than looked like it was vroooming even when the top was up and the car at the curb.
And oh, what a thrill to drive. You’d slam that stick into the next gear and it would leap forward like a racehorse. Then, at cruising speed you’d flick a little switch and get another gear, electric overdrive. Want to blow past a car you’re passing? Flick the overdrive off, and now the car responded like a tiger with the most amazing, primal growl. Whew!
It had a few idiosyncracies, of course. Mainly it was the electrical system designed by Lucas “The Prince Of Darkness,” notoriously unreliable in all English sports cars of that era. I’d be tooling around town with the top down, huge Breakfast-at-Tiffany’s shades on, big lavender hat to keep my red-headed skin from burning, feeling SO glamorous, when the car would suddenly stop. The electric fuel pump had gone comatose again. Feeling considerably less stunning than before, I would grab the wrench I kept handy, raise the boot to the rear engine, and bang on the pump till it leapt back into tick-tick-tick life. Then, back to the driver’s seat to resume glam.
The Healey had navy leather upholstery and isinglass side windows. In a heavy rain it was a tossup whether more water would slosh in from the sides or the top of the windshield. This was a drop-down windscreen, so elegant that I guess the factory figured a little leakage was a slim price to pay.
And of course it was very VERY low to the ground, the chassis being below the back axle. You didn’t so much get in as fall in, and climbing out required a lot of push. I once asked the brilliant and flirty driver/designer Carol Shelby how I could gracefully emerge from that car, and he grinned and said, “Wear cute panties.”
I used to drive competitively in homemade gymkhanas—an empty parking lot with traffic cones to navigate. I often won, though the bathtub Porsche was tough to beat.
Fast-forward a few decades to 2000. I reverted to youth and decided I had to have another Healey. I found one only an hour from home, and Robert and I drove over to see it. Miraculous! It was the identical twin to my beloved Healey of yore. Fabulous job of restoration. After stroking and adoring it for while, I took it for a spin.
Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again. I discovered that the clutch gave me a semi-charleyhorse, the wheel was hard to turn, and the floor almost melted the bottom of my shoes. Ah yes, now I remembered: the heat transfer from the engine made the floorboards hot even in winter, and very very hot in the summer.
It’s great to return to yesteryear for a short visit, but as I drove back home in my Honda (with a stick shift!) I was serene in the knowledge that I didn’t, after all, want to live there even temporarily.
Tags: driving, sports cars
