Counting the cars

‘I like driving in my car, it don’t look much but I’ve been far, I like driving in my car even with a flat tyre’ was aptly sang by Madness in 1982 as we chugged the road to the Castlebar festival… more on that later.

Such a time I’ve had with cars lately and all I want is something that moves around the locality with me in it, a ‘runabout’ as it’s called.

The Americans had a whole different attitude to their cars, an expression of freedom, independence, power…

Visionary Henry Ford built his first car at his home in Detroit in 1896. He brought mass production to make automobiles available to… the masses. Long story short, the Ford Motor company went on to become one of the largest and most profitable in the world, even surviving the Great Depression as other companies and individuals went off window ledges.

Ford famously declared, “History is bunk.” It’s an attitude about looking forward that harks to the wagon trails seeking out new opportunities and lives in the large expanse that is the USA.

Route 66 became the latter-day symbol of that adventure, starting in downtown Chicago and ending 3,940 kilometres later at the Santa Monica pier in California. A runabout wouldn’t cover it!

It was famously celebrated in the Nat King Cole hit Route 66 waaay back in 1946, ‘Won’t you get hip to this timely tip when you make that California trip – get your kicks on Route 66’.

In Good Will Hunting, after the handsome tortured genius, played by Matt Damon, got a quick fix at the head garage from mentor Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), the movie symbolically ends with him driving cross-country to commit to his babe Skylar (Minnie Driver). The American Declaration of Independence includes the unalienable rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.

The USA is a vast expanse. For goodness sake, there’s a five hour time zone difference between New York and LA. The car is a huge part of American culture, reflected in many songs and movies.

Bruce Springsteen tapped into that power, more than once. If you’ve been to a Boss gig, you know the feeling, ‘Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair, well the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere’ (Thunder Road).

And the girls loved those boys in their overalls dancing and polishing the 1948 Ford De Luxe convertible in Grease… ‘Go, greased lightnin’, you’re burnin’ up the quarter mile, Greased lightning! Go, greased lightnin!’

In the 1960s, Elvis Presley was tired of playing shows and famously sent his gold-plated Cadillac off on tour. He didn’t go with it and people flocked to see his Cadillac. It went on a number of tours and the fans went along to stare. Paul McCartney said it was a ‘brilliant’ idea that inspired The Beatles to come off the road and head to the recording studio to make the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, often polled as one of the greatest albums of all time.

As Simon and Garfunkel sang their anthem, ‘Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America…’, amiable Val Doonican sat in his chair, replete in a sweater, and regaled us with O’Rafferty’s Motor Car, to accompanying beeps and toots, ‘Now two of the wheels are triangular and the third one’s off a pram, the fourth is the last remaining wheel from off a Dublin tram, the number plate’s in Gaelic and the plugs won’t even spark and the chassis came off a tinker’s cart that collapsed in Phoenix Park …’

We identified.

There were no T-birds around these parts. My first car was a Simca 1100 and as long as it got to the Gap ballroom of a Saturday night and the eight track played ‘Bat out of Hell’, all was well with the world.

In ‘82 we headed to that festival in Castlebar. The jalopy was more Wacky Races than Hot Rod Fords. We hit off from Gortin through Letterkenny to lift Barney who worked in a bank. The scraping noise was remedied with his tie, by McKenna who slid along on his back and tied up the exhaust pipe. As long as it didn’t hit the road it would ‘do rightly’… and anyway the craic was mighty!

Madness played at that gig, appropriately enough. Water squirted through a hole of the floor on the front passenger side when it rained. Great fun! I know of a man from the Lowside whose bonnet flew off his car as he made his way along the Loughshore. There was another lad who had a plank which held the engine up. At a British Army checkpoint, a bemused squaddie called his mates over to have a look.

Police and security forces had more pressing things on their minds in those days than throwing tickets out like confetti for mechanical misdemeanours. As the young soldier said to my uncle as we crossed the border in ‘81 at 3am with 16 dodgy calves acquired in Ardee, “Some moo cows in the back! Go on.” He couldn’t have cared less about documentation.

My car’s back on the road. I’m old school, as long as it gets me from A to B and Coalisland to Omagh…