![]() Infected by the pioneer spirit that settled the High Plains, I began to tackle those cowboy creeks and the endless, tussocky wilderness with a soaring heart. Prairie gales wedged tumbleweed balls into the T’s tombstone grille and crickets blown off long-abandoned farmland pinged about like bullets in my open cabin. Terrific downpours sent waterfalls through the dash as I headed due north up the mighty spine of the country, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. I routinely pondered what a very different reception I might have been enjoying in an electric Toyota with my Mexican boyfriend. Over breakfast - the only small-town meal that seemed to matter - some sweetly bumbling old chap might suddenly ask why we should worry about climate change when the Lord would be rebooting Earth any day now. Warmly inspiring as this trip proved to be, I can’t pretend it didn’t offer up darker insights. In Texas, I was blessed at a Pentecostal service (“Lord protect Brother Tee-um and his antique vee-hickle”) and compelled to shoot enormous firearms by a doomsday prepper with a grudge against Prince Charles. The great green seas of the Midwest, the plump bluegrass hills, northern Tennessee’s mighty sandstone bluffs. Puttering southwest through the belts - Rust, Corn, Bible - I saw a big country getting bigger. In more fanciful moments, toasting my T through the motel net curtains with a plastic tooth mug of bourbon, I persuaded myself this had become their trip as much as mine. I was tapping into the hive mind of that last generation of self-taught, self-made action men, the small-town Henry Fords who had made the country great in the first place. I came to learn that rural Americans were reflexively welcoming, curious and competent. Salt-of-the-earth retirees across the land would sort everything from a dicky starter motor to a fractured crankshaft, often putting me up for days on end while doing so. ![]() ![]() On day three, a school-bus driver noticed half my braking system had fallen off, and bolted it back on. An off-duty military-drone operator brought my T back to life as I stood by its open bonnet on day two, wet-eyed and clueless. Both car and man broke down endlessly, and, when we did, kind-hearted, gently patronising concern and assistance were always close at hand. The combination of ailing national treasure and candy-ass Briddish idiot proved irresistible. His “Universal Car” put the world on wheels and catalysed the American Dream. The same America that had fallen for the Model T 100 years before, because Henry - a farmer’s son himself - pitched his Tin Lizzie squarely at rural communities. Rather, a coast-to-coast route through exclusively Trump-voting territory: the flyover states, those small towns, big farms and mega-churches of heartland America. Not for me the standard sunshine run up the Pacific Coast Highway, or a nostalgic cruise down Route 66. The onlookers who were showered in gasoline at my cack-handed early fill-ups may have sensed I wouldn’t be providing either. This frail antique was self-evidently a machine that demanded cautious respect and regular expert attention. My runabout had a single hand-powered windscreen wiper, a drive belt made from cotton and a 10-gallon fuel tank right under the driver’s seat. ![]() One of them - whoa, that’s the fella - sent the car flying backwards. The accelerator was a stick on the steering column and none of the foot pedals did what you expected. Last summer, I bought a 1924 Ford Model T Touring for £11,000 from an old Texan who’d had it for 50 years and was born the same year it rolled off the Detroit production line. I just kept my finger on the rewind button a bit too long. Sunday November 04 2018, 12.01am, The Sunday TimesĪn American road trip in a classic car is a pretty standard bucket-list fixture. ![]()
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