Mort's Shorts

MORT’S SHORTS

MORTON SALT

It’s been a long, hot drive, but it kinda seems like that’s part of gettin’ to where we do what we do; after two leisurely days and oh, about 12-15 hours on the road, a familiar vista appears in the middle of that little speedboat windshield; yeah. It was a vista that I’d seen more than a dozen times before and every time it shows up…… excitement rushes through me; the kind of child’s Christmastime anticipation of joy. Fulfillment is imminent. It’s undefined, but experience tells you that you will feel happiness and completion…..euphoria…..and it will be very soon.

So I downshift, and leg it.

Yeah, you drive around one of those last bends and there – between those descending foothills you see…..salt. Hundreds of square miles of salt. And even though you can’t see it yet, there is a dark spot somewhere down there – an undefined unnatural blemish - that is a cluster of the only other human beings on this planet that got what you got. It’s the pits taking shape for Speedweek, and all those turds beat you there.

But watch me catch up.

I downshift…… and leg it.

It’ll be another 30 minutes or so and you have this desperate urge to drive straight out to the track, but you know good sense says, ‘Register first. You don’t want to screw up your reservations.’ So we go to the Hotel and, fidgeting in the little line at the desk you think, “Don’t they know that I have needs? I gotta get out there!”.

Well, it eventually happens and you throw your junk in the room and sprint back to the roadster, light it and haul ass the 6 miles to Valhalla.

Heaven.

The Bonneville Salt Flats that you read about as a kid and then – at about the age of 40 – you came to the party. “I never been there…. and I don’t know why I shouldn’t forsake convention….and just go.” So I made my excuses and….went.

***

I had thrown a sleeping bag and an ice chest in the back of my deuce tudor and left. Stopped in ‘Vegas the first day just for the heckofit, checked in to a suite in the Imperial Palace, grabbed some food, cleaned up and went to the Collection. ‘Spent virtually all of my time there between the giant 150 year old hotel backbar, where they guy on duty demonstrated a developed talent for just the right amount of Jack over the rocks…and a splash of water…just a gentle splash so as not to bruise the booze….and the greatest number of Duesenbergs I’d ever seen in one place in my whole life. There was lots to study and appreciate. To internalize.

‘Studied the nuances of the Big Ones, appreciated the coachwork, the different ways designers expressed Style on identical chassis….........‘savored the visual………and the whiskey…..tried to hear them running at speed on wide, graded dirt roads in the Springtime…. somewhere in the mid west…... where a surprise industrial fortune had made such largess available to a guy who had grown up on a farm, maybe; a kid who had appreciated Model T’s and tractors and internal combustion farm implements.

Found myself at the Mount, My Brothers.

Finally, when all senses were on overload, went to the room, laid out and, as I was falling asleep, on the Cinemascope screen on the inside of my eyelids…I….what else….downshifted and legged it.

Next morning ‘went kinda the wrong way, not knowing the desert grace of Hiway 93 and all those now-familiar towns..Alamo…Pioche…Caliente et. al. (all of which I have vowed to stay-over in sometime…but I’m always in too much of a hurry to get there) so I drove right up 15 to Salt Lake City and checked in to a nice place to poise me and my Ford for the last 100 miles, that I’d undertake about 5:00 A.M. next morning. And I did.

It was a brisk pass accross 80, Westbound, figured about 90 miles and correctly figured that’s about an hour this time of day. The sun was coming up in my rear view mirror and, when the billboard said ‘Bonneville Speedway 6 Mi.’, I let out a holler. I turned up ‘Radar Love’…and I downshifted and legged it.

Pulled out near the bend in the road (yeah, they said it was like this) qued up with about 75 hot/street rods there who were waiting to have their picture taken (we went too and got one o’ those 6’ long pictures; even ran around to the other side so we got in it twice!).

And finally drove onto the salt (it was about 5 miles that year to the pits) and looked around. And drove around. Didn’t really know anybody and the cats in the various pits looked kinda long at that deuce…....and longingly; it was a pretty sumbitch and it seemed too straight and lacquered to be out there….. but there we wuz……anyway…………and it was about sound and reflected light and heat and speed, and people with a purpose..and grim pleasure in dealing with that purpose…...and did I say..speed an’…history? A short history, though, going back in large fashion only 40 years or so, but it was the history of the thing that had me. I was becoming whatever it is I became, sprouting from the seed of a ‘car guy’or a ‘street rodder’ and this was the soil and water and sun that, coupled with Don Montgomery’s books…had shown me the way. The way….to my metaphorical here.

Three days later I left. Obligated. Done-in. Hooked. Immersed.

***

So we leave the hotel this time, a little tight in the chest with anticipation, pull out on 80, get behind a gas truck,  pull left, down-shift and leg it. Offramp, don’t stop at the sign, don’t stop at the next one and dodge pot holes and go a little fast for the road; wish we could powerslide that right turn, but it wouldn’t look good. And just 50-60 plus out the final stretch – what is that 3 miles or what? – and show them the pit pass and drop gingerly off the end of the ‘pier’ (always a chance of strikin’ oil in this little bitch) and seek flat spots of salt to drive on.

Here we are again, same deal, although it’s quite a few years later, the main difference being that we know a whole bunch of folks out there now and it feels real natural to be there; and there’s – every year -  some new acquaintance to be made, some fresh look at the soul of hot rodding, reflecting from that white, dust-free womb of the whole gig.

And we don’t really get in the groove until the second, third day. Then we’re in the zone ……and later in the week…......it gets damned hard to leave. But we choke it down…knowing that we will be back; and so will the cats that make it what it is.

And now it looks like we might be entrants next year, after quite a few years of spectating and (spectating’s not a bad thing, ya know?) Nothing wrong with watching the other guys…..leggin’ it, but we really been wantin’ to wear that shirt whose motto says, “NO STRANGER TO DANGER.”

The only way we could wear the 100 MPH Club Costume…except to do it clandestinely when no one is watching..an’ we wouldn’t do that, now, would we? Naaaw….....is to go out and drive a flathead banger 100 in a timed run. So we ‘spect we will, or have a great time tryin’.

But if we don’t…it’s not the end of the world; we been faster out on the big hiway in street iron when we….downshift…...... and leg it.

See ya there, Baby!

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