glitches

On another forum, the system has taken to sending me two copies of every message I get. This morning it sent me three copies of the same message. I deleted them all.

Now it tells me I have -1 messages. As in I need to get one more message to have none at all.

What's scary is I've been messing about with computers long enough this actually makes a tiny amount of SENSE to me.

Camp Cars

Today I was noticing all the muddy cars, trucks, and SUVs in the grocery store lot. More trucks and SUVs than cars, by far, but almost all were muddy.

Each year in January I look forward to visiting a couple of beloved family members to whom I am not related by blood; we chose each other. They live in California, in the Bay Area. I'm always amazed at how many cars there are, compared to trucks, and how clean they all are. I've seen it often enough that the opposite condition, here, starts impressing itself on me as the visit approaches.

The fact that the majority of vehicles here are (a) muddy and (b) truck-based is not a coincidence.

But there was a time, not long ago, when you had The Family Car and nothing else. Trucks were work vehicles only, and the SUV hadn't been invented yet. We had Jeeps, Army surplus like as not, but there weren't many even of those.

So if you went afield you went in the Family Car. And if you wanted to go down one of these two-tracks through the woods, you also went in the car. Whether you should have or not.

Dad's school district supplied him with Oldsmobiles. This was in the early 1970s, the low point of the US auto industry. When GM put out such miserable boats that even a motor scooter manufacturer in Japan could build better, but US divers hadn't quite discovered this yet.

Trust me, a Olds Delta 88 was not a good woods car. Things tended to fall off even when driving on smooth pavement. Yet Dad could creep that thing down the sand trails where I'd hesitate to take my 4WD pickup even now.

I remember one melancholy afternoon when he drove the big Olds up the state route to The Big Rock, and headed off down the two-tracks to find what had been a favorite fishing spot of his, on Canada Creek, back when we lived up here. But the state road had been rebuilt, sharp curves made broad and sweeping, pavement wide and smooth. He couldn't find the right trail.

"It was right here somewhere. You'd go down the trail, and there'd be a collapsed bridge at the end of it. There was a hole downstream of that bridge that was always good for a trout or two."

Many years later, working in Presque Isle County, I found what must have been that collapsed bridge along Canada Creek. The survey crew and I rested there, feet in the water. I ate my smashed sandwich-- generic bologna on white bread, with yellow mustard-- and I admit I shed a tear for Dad. Too bad he never found this place again. But it's still there. Perhaps it's in whatever Valhalla waits for would-be outdoorsmen who let duty and ambition lead them to accept one or two promotions too many, and thereby lost the woods they loved, the life they loved.

But I digress.

A good car would soon die if you drove it on those trails. Fortunately, the crap they built back then rusted out quickly enough that there was a ready supply of beaters to serve as camp cars.

The point of a camp car was that it was already so trashed that the woods couldn't do anything more to it. Having reached that point, they became almost immortal. You'd leave one at the camp, the squirrels and raccoons would nest in it, and then you'd go there, get the thing going somehow, and use it to cruise the two-tracks while the good car waited behind.

I can see it now-- the big cream-colored Ford with its sheet metal peeling off in huge scabs of rust. Cracked windshield, no wipers, cloud of blue smoke, no brakes likely as not.

What's amazing is that most of these deathtraps were still street-legal, or at least licensed for street use. That speaks to the fact that Michigan didn't require an automobile inspection. There was no need to, when a car would rust out in three years from the salt. But keep it off the paved roads, keep it where the road was never salted...

"Boy, cars don't rust out like they used to," Red Green said, with a nostalgic sigh. That's for sure. They don't.

But every now and then, wandering around looking for an oilfield compressor, I come across a wrecked vehicle. Hardly more than a mound of rust. I think that this was probably a camp car. It probably reached this remote point under its own power. And I marvel.