America by Meteor

For a year of my childhood, a huge 1966 Meteor sedan was my window on a continent. ...A journey through 1960s America

It was enormous. Because North American cars were, then. Folks liked their cars big, with engines to match – great lazy V8s that would not look out of place in a small freighter. Today, many Americans are quite happy with European-size cars, and even the big ones are not really that big anymore. Fifty years ago it was different. The befinned extravaganzas of the late 1950s had gone, but many quite ordinary cars were still land yachts so vast that the driver peered out over a massive forward flight deck the size of a small African republic. The other day I passed an ancient Chrysler in the street. It startled me. 

*

I am surprised my father bought a land yacht. We had lived in North America before, in the late 1950s, and he had owned a quite modest Plymouth station wagon. He was unusual in this. There was the odd Beetle around, of course, and in the 1950s Americans could even buy a Morris Minor, though I don’t think many did. But most disapproved of such un-American devices. A few even had bumper stickers that read “Stamp Out Small Cars”. (A friend of my father’s, very unusually, had an Isetta bubble car. It had a sticker reading “Stamp Out Large Dogs”.) Still, the modest Plymouth had carried us from Columbus to Colorado and to Miami and back, although a wheel came off somewhere in Georgia. I do not remember that. I was only two and must have slept through it. Then in 1968 we returned to the Americas, this time to the Canadian capital, Ottawa. My father again bought a car. But this time he decided to go large.

In British Columbia (Wikimedia Commons/Colin Keigher)

His new aircraft carrier on wheels was Canadian, and was almost certainly built at the Ford plant in Oakville, Ontario. Ford had built cars in Canada since as early as 1904. It still does. The car was a two-year-old Meteor Rideau 500 Sedan, a 1966 model that had Ford Galaxie underpinnings but got its front and rear styling from the US-market Mercury S-55, also introduced that year. There were three engines, starting with a 4-litre inline six. This had 150 HP (148 BHP) – not bad for 1966, but it must still have struggled in a car that size. Most Canadians will have chosen a V8; either the 4.7-litre small-block V8 with around 200 BHP, or – at the top of the range – a completely different V8 lifted from the Ford Thunderbird, which was just over 7 litres and produced about 340 BHP. As my father intended to drive us all over North America, he will have chosen a V8. I don’t know which.

He was clear why he’d chosen a Meteor, however. US-market cars were not only enormous; they were very softly sprung, and in corners they wallowed like whales. Canadians, it seems, liked stiffer suspension and better handling. They also liked subtler colours than their southern neighbours. Ours was a discreet mid-blue metallic. The interior was blue too, and – a novelty for me – it had a radio. There was a metallic feel to the upholstery, and a metallic smell – not unpleasant. (Actually all cars have a distinctive natural scent inside. If you blindfolded me and sat me in a 1950s Morris Oxford or Minor, I would know at once from the warm smell of the carpets and upholstery. Old estate cars used to smell of wet labrador. All smelled of cigarette smoke. Modern cars have an anodyne, chemical odour.)

Within a week or two, the Meteor took us south into New York State to see the fall colours. And almost every weekend that winter, it carried us across the Ottawa River to Quebec, past the francophone city of Hull and into the Gatineau Hills, where we would ski – sometimes downhill, but more often on trails. In the week, it took my father to his office in Ottawa. At night it sat in a communal garage, partly underground, where an electric flex ran from the wall to each car to keep the engine warm. It was easy to see why. In midwinter the temperature could drop to minus 6 deg F (about minus 14 deg C). You did not want to wait for a huge 7-litre V8 to warm up before the heater started working.

Then in spring it was time to drive further.

*

That car was my window on a continent. We travelled south through New York State and Pennsylvania, the rain beating down on the huge flat hood almost all the way until we arrived in Washington DC in a burst of sunshine. We would stay for a week in Arlington, Virginia with a friend of my father’s who worked for NASA. They would go to the office together and talk endlessly of remote sensing and photogrammetry. And the rest of us would sight-see. It was April 1969. We swept past the Tidal Basin with its cherry blossoms and onto the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the entrance to Arlington Cemetery ahead. As we crossed the bridge, my father made the sort of slight grunt he made which meant he was about to say something important and we should all shut up.

“This is a country at war,” he said. He paused, then added: “It is proving hard for them, and your opinions on the war are not needed here. Do you understand?”

An identical car (Wikimedia Commons/dave_7 Lethbridge)

I suppose I did, and I know my sister, who was older, will have done. In 1969 the United States was as deeply embroiled in Vietnam as it ever would be; the bodies were coming home and the war was deeply divisive. It had already done for Lyndon Johnson, who had ended his bid for re-election the previous year after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary. Richard Nixon had become President in January.

In that strange year of war and Woodstock, crew cuts and dope, Cold War and counterculture, a country drifted past beyond the Meteor’s windows; clapboard houses and white picket fences, small towns, great cities, country roads, Interstates. There were Holiday Inns – posh then – and quiet motels, basic but friendly; breakfast and lunch in diners bright with chrome and Formica and red plastic seating; my favourite drink (7 Up) and fries. Very rarely, a McDonald’s. My parents did not approve of McDonald’s. Aged 11, I adored them. I am sure they tasted better then, and the restaurants themselves were always classic roadside ones, complete with big Golden Arches. But the best fries we had were in Canada, in a remote roadhouse in British Columbia; a great wooden bowl of crisp fresh fries, washed down with Coke as the mist and rain cloaked the green wooded hills outside.

Near Cambridge, Massachusetts, we stopped at another friend of my father’s. (He worked closely with Americans for over 30 years. There were many such friends.) They had a 100-acre farm. We spent a wonderful day during which I was taught how to shoot a .45 that deafened me, and slammed back into my shoulder. We blasted away at Budweiser cans. The kids had a 1956 Buick Eight they had bought, as scrap, for a dollar. They let me drive it. Aged 11, I craned my neck to see over the rim of the steering wheel and bumped around a large field at 20 miles an hour.

We went to Vermont to visit the Baroness Maria von Trapp. Well, to stay at her ski lodge near Stowe. She was warm and welcoming but looked nothing like Julie Andrews, being rotund and rather jolly. My sister came in red and flushed after a day’s skiing. “My dear, you look very mountainous today,” boomed the Baroness. She found out it was my sister’s birthday and bore a big cake with 16 candles into the dining room, preceded by her sons in lederhosen. The trail skiing was wonderful. One night at dusk we skied around the Baron’s grave, a peaceful place on a forest path.

*

But the Meteor blotted its copybook. The old-fashioned automatic choke failed and my father spent some minutes in the snow outside the von Trapp lodge, holding it open with his finger so that the engine could warm up. It was not the first or last time. A week or so after he bought the car, it suffered some malady and went back to the dealer. (They gave him a rather smart new green Mercury coupe in the meantime.) One spring day as we cruised up the New Jersey Turnpike, the muffler (silencer) fell off with a nasty clatter; it was still attached at the manifold end. A New Jersey mechanic assured us he could fix it, then found that Mercury parts did not fit Meteors. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do; it’s Canadian,” he said mournfully. “I understand,” said my father, sounding as if he did. The muffler was tied back on with electric flex. Of course this burned through. The next garage fixed it with a wire hanger from the closet. This bodge got us back across the border. Meanwhile I had constantly to keep my legs away from the back of the front bench seat, as there was a wire that stuck out at knee level.

The Meteor’s various mechanical diseases frustrated my father. Yet it cannot have been that bad, for in early summer we hit the road again, and went further than ever – to the far west. For the first leg, the long journey across Ontario, the car was loaded onto a Canadian National train and we took berths with it, to be unloaded in Winnipeg in a warm summer midnight. The next day we drove south to the border and west into the Dakotas, across the Badlands, and tried to find a motel in a small town off the Interstate where the only option had swinging Western-style doors. The road signs on the way back to the Interstate were peppered with bullet holes; clearly target practice from a moving vehicle was the chief recreation here. On to Billings, Montana, and an overnight stay in a Holiday Inn.

The Beartooth Pass (Wikimedia Commons/Phil Armitage)

The next day was a magical one that is still in my mind over 50 years later. Billings is on the plain. Actually most of Montana is, despite the name. But as we left the town, a line of silver appeared on the horizon, and drew slowly clearer as we passed through gently rising land, the Great Plains turning to orchards and farms. In due course we reached the foot of the mountains, and started the steep climb to the 11,000ft Beartooth Pass. The ground dropped away to the right of the car, the road twisting this way and that as it reached for the sky. Some time after leaving the hot summer plain below, we came out on the summit to find people skiing in June. Then the road dropped slightly and we came into Yellowstone, and a world of bears. We stopped and sat awhile above the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, forty miles long, a thousand feet deep; a spectacle dwarfed only by the Grand Canyon itself. After that, on to the Grand Tetons, one of the most beautiful places in the Americas. Then on across Wyoming, its great grassy plains dotted by nodding donkeys; there was oil here – and finally to Boulder, Colorado, where my father had business. Then back north through nameless small towns of white fences and flags, to Glacier National Park.

Day after day the swaying of the enormous car, the burbling of the big engine, the tangy smell of the upholstery, the endless horizons beyond the bonnet and the towns and hills and plains through the window became the rhythm of my life. One day we drove north through Idaho. The towns and villages were smaller and poorer here, the houses a little unkempt; elderly cars stood in the front yards, sometimes on bricks. Then we crossed the Canadian frontier near Grand Forks, British Columbia, and suddenly there were narrow roads and high hedges and green fields and a woman in Wellington boots driving a herd of cattle to milking down a country lane, as she might in Devon – from which, indeed, she might have come. We turned left and drove for a day and reached the Pacific. Then we turned back to Penticton in the Okanagan Valley, with its semi-arid climate and its cherry orchards.

Later the Meteor carried us across the Rockies as far as Banff Springs, where we met relatives staying at the palatial Banff Springs Hotel. Some time in the afternoon of July 20, I walked through the lounge, where many people were watching TV, despite the sunshine outside. Suddenly there was a flurry of applause. A dim, ghostly figure in a space suit moved on the screen, planting the Stars and Stripes on the surface of the Moon.

*

The Meteor’s last task was to take us back to Ottawa, where my parents would arrange their affairs before returning to England; my father’s work in Canada was done. On this last, longest journey from Banff to Ottawa, we thrummed steadily for what seemed like days across the Great Plains, passing Regina and Winnipeg, stopping but briefly in roadside motels – I remember little of them. At last we left Manitoba and crossed into Ontario, leaving the plains behind for endless pines, skirting north of the Great Lakes, a long journey that made one understand what Siberia might be like. The scenery continued to move past, but now it was monotonous. We were on the Trans-Canada Highway, over 4,800 miles of road. In 1969 it was not quite all sealed yet; around Sault Ste. Marie we ran for miles over gravel, at a steady 15-20 MPH, following other cars at a wary distance to avoid the plumes of dust. Around there I remember noticing an odd Canadian habit: on a long journey, younger children would sleep on a sedan’s parcel shelf. We crossed north-east to the mining city of Sudbury, with its enormous monumental nickel coin on a plinth; and finally we arrived at Ottawa.

I do not remember when I last saw the Meteor. Some time in mid-August my sister, mother and I left for Montreal, where we boarded the Empress of England for the voyage home. My father, who hated ships, followed us a week or so later by air. During that week he must have disposed of the car; perhaps he took it back to the Mercury dealer. I can’t imagine that I expected to see it again.

The voyage home was rough and I was as sick as a dog. We tied up in Liverpool’s Gladstone Dock in the pouring rain. A few weeks later I was back at school, and there were no more turnpikes and towns, cities or shacks, mountains, plains, bears, nodding donkeys, deep gorges, huge trucks, mile-long trains or McDonald’s, all seen from a huge blue car. There was only the family Vauxhall Victor and a smaller, meaner world.

*

I suppose I had a restlessness instilled in me by those journeys; the voyages across the Atlantic (I described them here) and the long hours in the back of the great blue car watching a continent speed past me. As a young man I did a number of media jobs in London, but never really settled. I wanted to be out in the world. In 1987, aged 30, I became a development volunteer in Sudan. But this is not the place to write of that. Save, that is, for one incident.

In August 1988 I and five colleagues made the eight-hour run from our base near Gedaref to Khartoum. It was the wet season, but the rains no longer reached Khartoum. That night would prove an exception. An hour from the city it was raining so heavily that we saw cars abandoned, at least one slewed off the road completely. The beefy diesel Land Cruiser managed all right as the water reached its sills; the exhaust was routed above the driver so that it did not get blocked in mud or floods. By the time we reached Khartoum we were bumper-deep; a long bow-wave came from the few cars left moving. One came towards us on the wrong side of the road. Our driver honked angrily, then we realised there was no-one in it; it was being swept away.

We reached our destination. But over the next week or two it was hard to get around in the aftermath of the floods, which had left a million homeless. Buses were always uncertain anyway; by the time the bus to town reached my lodgings it would be so full that I had to hang on outside the door, my rear exposed to any passing lamppost that came too close. Now they were more packed than ever, and all vehicles had to skirt the enormous puddles left by the floods. The Blue Nile was rising, and it was thought it might burst its banks, causing a further disaster. Every night I would go, alone or with a friend, to the May Gardens near the confluence of the Blue and White Niles and look at the water level. Day by day a small cargo boat moored there would rise and rise, and the water was just below the bank.

One day I hitched a lift to town on the back of a small pickup, the sort that carried everything from groceries to sheep. There were many people in the open rear, and I balanced precariously on the tailgate. We hit a bump and I grasped the metal hard to steady myself. As I did so, a very large metallic blue car crossed the junction ahead of us. It seemed unmistakeable.

For a moment I was taken aback, then told myself to be silly; the Meteor would now be over 20 years old and had certainly died, in Canada, a long time ago.

The driver's office (Wikimedia Commons/dave_7 Lethbridge)

That night, after dark, we went to the May Gardens as we normally did. The air was hot and close, and there was the usual smell of dust in the air. Several cars were parked beside the park. One of them was a metallic blue Meteor Rideau 500. It was too much of a coincidence. Even in Canada, they had been rare, sold in that exact style for only a year; I could remember seeing only one other, a pale green one – it had passed us in Montana and when we saw each other’s Ontario plates, we honked and waved. I never saw another blue one. I peered inside. Was it my imagination, or was there a wire sticking out of the front seat? I think there was.

Of course I can’t be sure. The car had been rare even in Canada, but it wasn’t unique. One of the pictures I have posted here shows an identical vehicle, albeit looking a little rough. But we’d never seen another quite like it that year; and it had been sold in Ottawa, the capital, where it could perhaps have been bought by a Sudanese diplomat and brought home to Khartoum. I have always believed that it was the same car. I wonder if it still exists. I doubt it; it would be 54 years old now. But it is possible. Ten years later I lived in Aleppo, Syria, where high import duty meant that cars were almost literally never scrapped, and the streets were full of beautifully kept Buicks and Dodges and Packards from the 1950s and late 1940s. A friend had a Studebaker from 1955. So I think the Meteor might still be alive, in a hot dusty land, far from home.

At that moment, anyway, I was convinced. I stepped back. The big car stood there in the half-light, its bodywork gleaming dully. Just for a moment I remembered the billowing Great Plains, the endless pine trees of Ontario, the Tidal Basin passing to our left with its cherry blossoms, Beartooth Pass with its vertiginous road, the snowy peaks of the Grand Tetons and the journey down to the Pacific. I looked at it for a moment or two, and then turned away. I never saw the car again.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

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