The Path to Somewhere

One man’s trash…

This all started innocently enough. I grew up around old cars, wanted an old car, built an old car, and drove the old car. I’m not sure if it was the doing of the thing that so many had told me I could/would never do, or I simply inhaled too many fumes along the way, but an old car irrevocably changed the course of my life.

In my teen years I had grown obsessed with the idea of owning a ’69 Camaro. Every Tuesday I’d stroll into the local quickie-mart for a new Auto-Trader and thumb through the black and white adverts in hopes of finding a Camaro that was complete enough, cheap enough, and close enough to convince my dad to go look at. At that time, Camaros were still relatively available and affordable, but I never managed to bring one home.

After several years of this, my dad led me outside to open my Christmas present. It was wrapped in a tarp and sitting on his trailer. He had paid a buddy $400 for a 1969 Chevelle project that had proved a little too daunting for the man’s thirty-something son-in-law. That should probably have been a sign.

What remained was the definition of a basket case. The doors and fenders were sitting in the body, not a single piece of glass was where it was supposed to be, and there were several boxes haphazardly folded shut and stuffed under and around the shell on the trailer. It wasn’t a Camaro, but it was close enough.

Start your engine

The car had come with a four-bolt main small block, but that was it – just the block. My uncle donated a crank and connecting rods that we had to fish out of a corncrib at my grandparents’ house. He had coated them in axle grease and stashed them twenty years prior, but a good cleaning and polish was all that was needed to bring them right back to life.

A friend’s dad bought me a set of pistons as a thank you for replacing his daughter’s starter in a college dorm parking lot. The cam, intake, and carb I bought with my once-yearly discount at the parts store where I worked. Before long, I had a solid chunk of mechanical motivation bolted to an engine stand.

Restoring a car from a catalog hadn’t fully materialized at that time, and the parts that were available in those glossy pages were usually out of reach for me anyway. So, my dad and I journeyed from one junkyard to another trying to salvage what we could. Eventually, my dad found one that ended up being the motherlode.

After a full day of scouring, scraping, wrenching, and avoiding snakes, I had filled the bed of my little S-10 pickup with many of the parts that I was beginning to fear I’d never find.

I also began to realize that I would need to up my skills if the thing were to ever wear paint, so I managed to talk my way into a job at a local hot rod shop. There I would learn the basics of high-end paint and bodywork and meet a couple of lifelong friends that helped me believe when I found myself doubting.

As a full-time student living away from home, I struggled to find time and cash to pull it all together, and three years passed before we finally put spark to fuel. A few weeks later, I was spending long, hot hours tidying up loose ends, selling what few possessions I still owned, and preparing myself for departure.

We gonna do what they say can’t be done

By the time Bubba, as the car had come to be called, moved under his own power, I was exhausted. I had missed my proposed departure date by several weeks, and felt, deep in my soul, it was now or never.

My dad asked, “Have a plan?” I didn’t. Then, “Where do you think you’re gonna go? “ “I dunno,” was all I could say, “North, then west, I guess.” I had no idea what I was doing when I threw a tent, sleeping bag, and duffle full of clothes in the trunk, and, looking back, I’m sure it was obvious. I don’t know why I wanted to leave, to be honest, but I knew I needed to. I had grown up in a small town, a child of parents raised in a small town, and none of us had ever wandered very far. Why did I think it should be different for me? I’m not sure.

When I pulled out of the driveway and watched my hometown disappear slowly in the rearview, it was looking out across that cowl-induction hood that kept me moving forward. It was a feeling I had longed for, and suddenly, there it was. I just wanted to drive.

Two months, twenty-six states, and ten thousand miles later, I finally coasted to a stop in the opposite corner of the country from where I began.

And everything had changed.