The way to San Jose
In 1967 right after she and my Dad split up, my Mom traded in the family car, an appallingly fuel inefficient Ford Galaxy, for a more practical and economical '65 Chevy Corvair. This would be the same vehicle immortalized in Ralph Nader's masterpiece of consumer advocacy, Unsafe at Any Speed.
That car was the shoddiest piece of crap you ever saw. We had to keep a collapsed cardboard box in the middle of my Mom's parking space in the apartment building where we lived because the damn thing leaked oil like a bullet riddled B-52 in one of those World War II movies.
Mom would take us to the drive-in movies in the Corvair, and the drive-ins were always engineered so you were parked at a slight incline so you wouldn't have to crane your neck to see the screen. Well, more often than not the parking brake would give out half way through the movie, and the Corvair would start rolling backwards. You wouldn't notice initially that the car was rolling because there was this big heavy speaker attached to a fat insulated cable that you'd hook onto the driver's side door. And the cable was attached to a metal post. That was how you got the sound for the movie. But the speaker cable could only hold out so long. Eventually the weight of the car would snap it.
Then popcorn would go flying, and Mom would start cussing like Lee Marvin as she grabbed the steering wheel and slammed on the brake pedal.
Mom's always had quick reflexes, though. She always recovered before we rolled into the row of cars behind us. But boy did we snap alot of those speaker cables!
If it was a double feature, the Corvair could take out three or four speakers, easy.
Oh yeah. You wanna talk about unsafe at any speed. Ralph Nader wasn't foolin'.
Incredible as it sounds, Mom drove us from Santa Clara to Anaheim not once but twice in this rattling, toxin-spewing device of destructive power.
I was too young at the time to appreciate my mother's courage in pushing a flimsy bucket of air-cooled steel and particleboard to the very limits of the laws that govern the Material Realm.
Heck no. I was too busy enjoying the ride. And what a great ride it was in those days! See back then there was no Highway 5, the freeway that everybody takes now to go down South.
Well, maybe there was a Highway 5, but it wasn't a freeway. Maybe it was a rural route or something. If you were going from anywhere in the Bay Area to anywhere around L.A. or San Diego, you took 101, and you'd pass by all kinds of beautiful natural areas and colorful, historically significant population centers, Salinas, San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, King City, Santa Barbara, Pismo Beach, Malibu.
When Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote that song about "Do you know the way to San Jose?" they were talking about Highway 101. Highway 101 is the kind of road you write songs about. Would anybody write a song about Highway 5? Hell no!
Well, maybe if it was a country song about your wife left you and now you're shoveling manure at the feed lot up near the Bakersfield turnoff. But a lounge standard? Absolutely not.
And can you believe Jeffrey had never done the drive on 101 before?!
So when I picked up Jeffrey at his folks' place in Rosemead on Monday, I insisted we take 101 back home. "Sure you save an hour or so on 5," I said, "but you spend the whole trip in a state of such sensory deprivation that you feel like you need to comment on every mileage sign and barnyard animal you see."
Plus, let's be frank,. On 101 you can pull over anyplace and have a cup of coffee or an iced tea or a jumbo slushy and not have to worry that you're going to find out when you get back on the road that it's 70 miles to the next rest stop. I don't know about Jeffrey, but at my age, that's important.
Kurt "big daddy" True
9 november 2005
