TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

I was in Detroit from the Fall of 1987 to Spring of 1989, a student at the Center for Creative Studies. I had decided on a college path I think when I was 16 or so, and I had to work hard to generate an art portfolio that could impress the admissions staff at CCS. My senior year art teacher at Rogers High School really had his work cut out for him.

The automotive design program at CCS was an extremely competitive one, with a large freshman class being whittled down each semester by scoring each student’s output at an end of year student show. At the end of the second year, I didn’t make the cut. I scored one point below the passing grade; the judges’ scorecard actually had me passing until they scratched one number off and dropped it by a point.

I did not gracefully accept that loss. I argued with the judges, and I got emotional. Angry, desperate, brokenhearted. What the hell am I supposed to do now?

I stormed out to the parking lot and got behind the wheel of my old blue ’74 Volvo and tore off into the city, absolutely thrashing the car, trying to break something, maybe someone, maybe me. But I managed to make it back unscathed, the Volvo was unbreakable, and I eventually loaded all my stuff, my art supplies and my failed portfolio into the car and drove back to Rhode Island.

That Summer in Newport was pretty good, all things considered. I worked as a maintenance guy at the Marriott hotel, on the night shift. The majority of the housekeeping staff were Irish girls that came over to work for the summer, and a bunch of them shared a house. I somehow ended up dating the sole English lass in the group. It was a heck of a Summer.

Within those months, I found the next Volvo in my progression, the 142E, and I rebuilt the engine in the basement of our house on Gibbs Ave. I have no recollection of how the hell I got the the cast iron lump down and up the stairs! It was my first engine build, and I remember using a tool from JC Whitney’s to grind the valves, attached to my Dad’s old Craftsman electric drill. Super high quality!

A plan was forged for a road trip that would take me back West to my birthplace in California. I had no idea what I was going to do next with my life, so some rambling seemed like a good idea. I would leave in October and land in San Diego in time for Christmas with old family friends.

I had taken the back seat out of the car and it was fairly rammed with stuff. For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to carry along a spare transmission, so I had an extra 4 speed in the trunk, an 8 speed Volvo! I didn’t need the 2nd gearbox, but I did have a few mechanical issues along the way…

Even though the car was a 142E, which denoted Bosch D-Jetronic fuel injection, I was running twin SU carburetors and I had some trouble with them on the interstate in Pennsylvania. Carb icing, I thought was the problem. I sputtered into a small town and stopped at a garage that had a dirt track racer in the doorway, and a couple of nice yokels gave me a half gallon of methanol to put into my water injection tank. (Yeah, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.)

Whatever, it seemed to work and I kept on going.

I spent a snowy night in my tent (the lead image above) and was awakened in the wee hours by the sound of footsteps crunching in the snow, coming right towards me. Friend or foe? It was a friendly law officer, checking to make sure I was OK. My first interaction with the police of the trip, and a good one at that. I didn’t even have to get out of my sleeping bag.

I had a much larger problem arise when I was passing through Cleveland. An engine noise developed that was very grim sounding. It turned out that I had broken a tooth off the fiber cam gear, and I had to wait for parts to arrive, so I got a room in a cheap hotel for a week. While I was there, I figured I may as well check out the Cleveland Institute of Art, which was one of the other two schools in the country that had a well regarded car design program. I think my Mom shipped me my portfolio from my time in Detroit, but I can’t recall how the interview went and I kept on moving west.

I did have a very interesting interaction with a neighbor at that cheap Cleveland hotel though. While I was replacing the cam gear in the parking lot, this guy started up a conversation with me and he shared his six pack of Budweiser. He ended up telling me his story, which was that he had been a mechanical engineer working on rail car design. He was on a project designing tank cars, one with very unusual design specs, for what he said was a biological agent. In fact, he said, it was intended to carry thousands of gallons of the AIDS virus, and he could prove it. He retrieved a three ring binder from his room and tabbed through the pages until he got the to Material Data Safety Sheet for the tank’s intended cargo, and explained how the data proved it was a bio weapon. He was in hiding, see. Fired from his job for threatening to reveal the story to the American people! Now on the run, while a dozen or so tanks of AIDS were rolling around the nations railways.

MMM, KAY!

Though the car ran fine for the rest of the trip, the road conditions were challenging. There was a memorable stretch of frozen highway somewhere in Nebraska, or maybe eastern Colorado, where it was a difficult to keep the car pointed straight and between the lines. I stopped once to have a look at a station wagon that had slipped off the road and rolled on its side, but was ordered to keep moving by the second cop of the trip.

In the Colorado Rockies, I camped in the vicinity of Pikes Peak for a night and impulsively decided that some mountain climbing was in order. So I picked a point on a nearby peak that seemed like a half day’s walk uphill and started out for it. There was patchy snow on the ground, but it was mostly an easy hike until I reached a short escarpment that required some actual hand over hand rock climbing. I was committed to making it to my destination, so up I went.

Ever hear the term, “false summit”? I learned all about it that day. Each time I thought I was cresting the last rise and would see the peak I was after, it was a fake-out. A half day had stretched and it became late afternoon. I kept going. A rock face separated me from the presumed summit, the last one surely, and I made some incredibly sketchy moves up the slippery, snow spattered boulders. I may have even thought for a moment, while dangling one handed and unsure if I could make the next handhold, “If I fall here, I’m going to die and absolutely nobody knows where I am.”

It was fine, really! I made it to my destination before it was fully dark and had enough light remaining to safely stumble down hill, back to the warm interior of my old Volvo.

I eventually found my way to Arizona and stopped at the Grand Canyon for a hike. Another walk that I completed in the dark, exhausted, and lucky to be upright!

Continuing southwest, I made it to San Diego in time for Christmas and had a heck of a good time with my old friends. We went drinking in Tijuana, camped on the beach, and generally acted like crazy kids.

Now that I’d made it to the end of my planning, I had no idea what was going to come next. I stopped again for another interview and a portfolio review with the folks at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the third and best known of this country’s auto design schools. They said that they would accept me, but they would not accept the two years of credits that I had earned in Detroit. Thanks, but no thanks.

I ended up a few years later at the Seattle Art Institute, but that wasn’t the best decision I ever made. The old Volvo and I had many more escapades through the 5 years I was in Seattle, and it was a sad day when I abandoned her to drive my Ford V-8 powered Volvo wagon back to the east coast.