Rivière-du-Loup
Dog
Mountain
Green Mountains
Old Orchard Beach
Lowell
...with children
The Journey
Lowell to
Old Orchard
Beach
Old Orchard
Beach to
Rivieredu-Loup
Old
Orchard
Beach
hen I read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road as an impressionable undergrad at the University of Calgary, I fell
under the spell of his hipster-hobo-shaman-searchers,
all “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” I read it again
20 years later, this time as a father. Kerouac’s bebop-influenced, breakneck prose still excited me, but I didn’t see road trips in the same way.
Extended periods in the car were now temple-throbbing negotiations
with small companions who were the other kind of “mad”: mad to be
bored, mad to be tired, mad to pee, mad that her brother ate the last
goldfish cracker, mad that his sister is looking at him, mad to be strapped
into a CSA-approved car seat against her will. (“Desirous of everything at
the same time,” however, may be common ground for Kerouac’s hepcats
and cranky toddlers.) Life is no longer a come-what-may journey. Life is a
series of manoeuvres executed with a precision that makes Navy SEALs
look like malarial surf bums.
If asked to sketch a Venn diagram of where “daddy-o” intersects with
“dad,” I would draw one small, cool circle on the left side of the page, and
a second circle on Mars. This second circle would have trouble speaking
in complete sentences, is always 20 minutes late and has what it hopes is
chocolate smeared on the shirt it just finished ironing for work.
Fatherhood and crazy kicks on the open road: mutually exclusive terms.
Or are they?
Rivieredu-Loup
to Green
Mountains
Green Mountains
to Dog Mountain
Back to Lowell
Maybe it was the news that On The Road had been adapted for the
silver screen. (The film played Cannes this past May, and will likely hit
Canada in December; see sidebar, page 23.) Maybe it was sleep-deprived
insanity. Whatever the reason, last summer my wife, Tine, and I packed
our 2004 Toyota Echo and set out to follow in the tire tracks of Kerouac’s
Beat Generation. Into the trunk (barely): tent, sleeping bags, foam pads,
clothes, coolers, folding chairs, strollers, toys, blankets. Into the backseat
(not that we didn’t weigh options): our two children. We call our talkative four-year-old “Fuzzy,” a nickname that’s stuck since she was in utero.
We call our silent two-year-old “Little Man.” Everything suffers with the
second child, even nicknames.
Kerouac’s 20-odd novels are basically memoirs with names changed to
protect the hep; On The Road was based on four coast-to-coast trips that
he took with his hard-living friend Neal Cassady (a.k.a. Dean Moriarty)
from 1947 to 1950. Attempting to recreate even a fraction of that treadmelting mileage was out of the question. We needed something more
manageable. I got wind of the very last road trip that Kerouac ever took:
Lowell, Mass. to Rivière-du-Loup, Que., and back again, a paltry 1,600
kilometres. Perfect.
By the way, in order to streamline this narrative, sustained periods (five
minutes or longer) of whining/squabbling/crying will be indicated with
an asterisk (*).
nineteen
ack Kerouac never wrote about that last road trip,
taken in the summer of 1967. It doesn’t even rate
a footnote in most biographies. The most definitive
account is in Gerald Nicosia’s 700-plus-page Memory
Babe, and even that’s just three short paragraphs.
(I’d only learned of this obscure journey through the
Ontario novelist Ray Robertson’s speculative What
Happened Later .)
By ’67, Kerouac wasn’t doing so hot. Years of alcoholism had worn out his body, a decay that parallelled
that of his career. Sure, he still sold books—enough
to get a new one published every year, at least, and
these new “hippy” kids were starting to dig into his
back catalogue—but the late ’50s bloom of his On The
Road mainstream fame had long faded. Even worse:
Critics still weren’t treating his work as capital-L literature. (It wasn’t until the ’80s that Kerouac became
academically acceptable. Almost as many Kerouac
articles have been published in the past two years as
during the entire 1970s.)
With his present so crummy, Kerouac retreated
into his past. In ’67 he moved back in with his beloved
maman in the Massachusetts textiles town where she’d
raised him in a French-speaking home. (She called him
Ti-Jean, basically Li’l John, and he didn’t learn English
until he was six.) There, he resumed work on a novel
he’d abandoned 10 years earlier, this one about the generation of impoverished Quebecois potato farmers, his
forebears included, who relocated to New England in
the late 19th century. Problem: He needed to do some
research at the family parish in Quebec. Problem: The
King of the Road, by most accounts, had never gotten a
driver’s licence. Solution: Kerouac tapped the goodwill
of Joe Chaput, car owner and upstanding member of
Lowell’s French-Canadian diaspora.
Details of the ’67 trip are scant, but at least Tine and
I know where to start. Today, the entire town of Lowell
is deemed a national park because of its place in the history of American industrialization. In fact, Lowell was
the birthplace of numerous manufacturing innovations,
and a very nice park ranger is boring me all about them
when I have no choice but to blurt my way to freedom:
“What do most visitors want to hear about?”
“Well, our No. 1 questions have to do with Lowell’s
trolley system and its canal barges. You see—”
“That’s so great. Anyway, what’s your second most
popular question?”
“Where’s the restroom.”
Like a genie summoned by its magic word, Fuzzy
materializes out of nowhere. Her big blue eyes shine
from behind her thick glasses. Her long blond hair is
a little sweaty, a little sour, from the hot car ride. She
demands to be taken to this toilet she’s only just now
heard so much about. When we return, I launch a pre-
emptive strike against Ranger Trolley-Barge:
“Third most popular question?”
The ranger shrugs and exhales in the way people do
when a big meanie’s not letting them talk about mulepowered cotton spindles. He points down the street.
“Kerouac’s typewriter. Last building on the left.”
Tine and I herd the kids. It’s only four or five blocks,
so we reach our destination in a trim 45 minutes.
I stare in confusion at the sign identifying the building
as the former boardinghouse for young women who
worked in the textile mills. My ears burn at the idea
that the ranger has tried to trick me into learning.
We wade through German exchange students and
hesitantly ask a tour guide about the typewriter. “Oh,
sure!” he says. “We’re busy right now”—he waves at the
gangly Germans—“so I’ll take you up the back stairs.”
And there it is: Jack Kerouac’s Underwood. The
holy relic sits in a Plexiglas display case. It’s okay, I
guess. But next to it is something that takes my breath
away. His knapsack. The bag isn’t anything special,
just olive-drab canvas. Maybe army surplus, maybe a
souvenir from Kerouac’s short stint in the merchant
marines. But, oh! The things he neatly fit into its
small confines! Clothes, a sewing kit, a sleeping mask,
a corkscrew, water bottles, wallet, notebooks and a
whole mess of pots and pans. With a shudder, I think
about the unholy jack-in-the-box that is the trunk of
our Toyota. Whatever I need is always, always trapped
beneath stuff that I can’t remember why we packed in
the first place, or even own. I return to the Zen simplicity of Kerouac’s knapsack. My vision blurs. I press
my cheek against the Plexiglas and contemplate those
efficiently nested, battered tin pots.
Kerouac was a genius.
twenty
he Memory Babe account of the ’67 road trip tells
us that Kerouac spent the first leg getting blitzed
on cognac and amphetamines. By the time Chaput
stopped in Maine, Kerouac was in a chatty mood and,
writes Nicosia, “made a big hit with the French people
in the local bars.”
The exact location of this bonhomie isn’t known,
so we have to improvise. It’s not hard. We’re right in
the middle of Quebec’s Construction Holiday. And,
if you’re looking for Francophones in Maine during
the Vacances de la Construction, your best bet is Old
Orchard Beach. It’s been the Quebecois’ go-to middle-class resort since 1853, when the southern leg of
the Grand Trunk Railroad connected Montreal with
the closest all-season Atlantic harbour. It didn’t take
Quebec beach-seekers long to figure out that if those
Maine waters were warm enough to stay ice-free all
winter, they must be pretty sweet in summer. And so,
for two weeks straddling July/August, that little spot
on the Maine coast becomes the Quebec Riviera. Tine
consults the vintage road map we bought on eBay (to
increase the odds of actually covering the same blacktop as Kerouac). It points us up the I-95.
The drive up the coast is only 140 clicks*, just barely
long enough for me to retell the plot of the new Winniethe-Pooh movie 57 times. I’d taken Fuzzy to see it a few
weeks earlier, and now it’s a point of obsession (hers, not
mine). If, as Joan Didion has suggested, “We tell stories
in order to live,” I’d add that we retell cartoon stories in
order to live through car rides with small children.
Here’s the movie’s plot in strokes far too broad to
meet the Fuzz’s approval: Pooh runs out of honey,
schemes to get more. Complications ensue courtesy of
the Backson, an unseen beast credited with all manner
of ills. Owl says the Backson scribbles in books. Tigger
says it makes you sleep in. Eeyore says it gave him a
cold. But Kanga, the group’s only parent, sounds the
heaviest note: “The Backson steals your youth.”
Aside from being a popular topic for car chatter,
Winnie-the-Pooh has provided Fuzzy with her first
running joke. In the middle of a conversation, she’s
taken to stopping mid-sentence, feigning an exaggerated look of deep thought, then asking, “Hey. Who’s
the Backson?” Sometimes she holds her deadpan expression a little longer, but it always ends with a chuckle
eruption. We hear about the Backson. A lot.
opular wisdom holds that southern Maine is a
hotbed of bilingualism, in service of the mighty
Quebec tourist dollar. This is either a lie or our campground is the exception. Twelve years of living in
Montreal improved my Prairie-boy French considerably, but my conversational comfort zone is still narrow. As a result, I celebrate successful comprehension
with wildly exaggerated enthusiasm and gestures. I fear
my neighbours and local shopkeepers know me as a
guy who is extremely passionate about saying good
morning and not needing a plastic bag. I hope they’ve
concocted an exciting backstory to explain my cognitive defects, but they probably just think I hit my head.
All of which goes to say that if it falls to me to act as
a translator, then we’re in deep merde. Yet, again and
again I feel obligated to intervene during comedies of
error between Francophone campers who want to buy
two cooked lobsters at the poolside snack bar and the
cheerily oblivious American clerks ready to ring up
eight uncooked lobsters and a bucket of slaw.
At the beach, a small plane trails one of those
banners-for-hire that I didn’t think existed anymore:
“Rocco’s has the Best Poutine.” That pretty much
sums it up: Hey French people, we know you like a
certain food, so here’s a sign in English to tell you all
about it.
he Fuzz has made no secret of wanting to roast
marshmallows. So, that night, as the sun goes down
on Old Orchard Beach, we set about building a campfire.
When I reflect on my years as a Boy Scout, three
things stand out. The first was my campfire prowess: I wasn’t much of a scout when it came to earning badges, but boy could I get a pyre ablaze. The
second was the annual, end-of-year weekend campout
in Dinosaur Provincial Park, which saw a bunch of
hyperactive near-teens scrape their knees raw while
scouring hoodoos for overlooked fossils. The third?
Eternal embarrassment.
Belvedere Parkway Elementary School gymnasium, Thursday night: A meeting of Calgary Boy
Scout Troop No. 159 always began with roll call. We
stood in a circle while, in best pseudo-military fashion,
Scouter Les alphabetically barked out surnames:
“BERGMAN!” “Here!”
“JONES!” “Here!”
“KELLY!” “Here!”
“MARTIN!”
This is when things went south.
Scouter Les expected to be answered with wellenunciated, crystal-clear confidence. A mush-mouthed,
eyes-to-floor “Here” was immediately admonished
with a booming “I. CAN’T. HEAR. HIM!” In theory,
this was meant to build character. In practice, it was
terrifying: I was a mumbler. As the alphabet marched
on, I broke out in a cold sweat at the prospect of again
being on the business end of Scouter Les’s ire. And
yet, even with adrenalin flooding my body, I could
never meet his standards:
“MARTIN!”
“Here!”
“I. CAN’T. HEAR. HIM!”
Then—lungs full, shoulders back—a second try:
“HERE!!!!”
It was just before the end of my last year that I
finally realized Scouter Les wasn’t busting my chops—
and he wasn’t saying, “I can’t hear him.” Rather, he
was simply doing his best to pronounce the name of
the African kid who had the misfortune to follow me
in roll call.
And this is why, every week for two years, I would
loudly shriek a second “HERE!” whenever it was poor
Chima Nkemdirim’s turn to answer. Totally steamrolled
him. Nobody ever acknowledged my serial outbursts.
This is not, however, the scouting story I tell to The
Fuzz. (Chima turned out okay, by the way; today he’s
Mayor Nenshi’s chief of staff.) No, the story I tell her
goes roughly like this: “When Daddy was a Boy Scout,
he was the World’s Best Campfire Builder.” Unfortunately, this claim didn’t jive with reality.
“Dad,” she begins, “how come your wood isn’t
burning?”
I live for these kinds of teachable moments. Tonight’s lesson: Other people keep us from fulfilling our
potential. “The people at the store sold us a bag of
wet wood.”
Fuzzy is into expressing her feelings: “I feel like…
it isn’t wet.”
“IT’S WET.”
What little smoke I coax from the sad pile floats
directly into my eyes. I hear Fuzzy mumble (“Doesn’t
look wet to me”), but I let it go. Wiping away tears,
I sit back on my heels and am met by my daughter’s
glare. “This is a terrible campfire,” she declares, hand
on hip.
“No, no,” I protest weakly as I ransack the trunk of
the car. Unread newspapers. A roadmap of Ontario.
Blank (I hope) pages from Tine’s sketchbook. I wad
the whole lot underneath a teepee of fire-retardant
logs, light a match and the firepit erupts in glorious
flames. Handing my daughter a marshmallow hastily
impaled on a twig, I steer her by the shoulders toward
the fire with much urgency. I shout to Tine, who is
playing with Little Man nearby. We have two, three
minutes tops, before we’ve got a mountain of cold ash
and a pile of barely charred wood.
Not long after, as she picks gooey marshmallow off
her stick, Fuzzy stares down the road where a perfect
family basks in the perfect glow of a perfect fire. “Dad,
why can’t we have a campfire like that one?”
twenty-one
e get back on the I-95 North*, taking it to
the border crossing** and then hugging the
TransCanada up the New Brunswick border ********
until we hit the mighty Saint Lawrence River.
For reasons unknown, Kerouac found his family’s
homeland “depressing” and skipped the parish archives.
Instead, lured by the promise of the newly opened Expo
67, he convinced Joe Chaput to drive to Montreal.
Despite the fact that our Rivière-du-Loup experience was limited to sitting at a greasy, cigarette-scarred
picnic table next to the treeless parking lot of a big-box
grocery store (hunger tantrums necessitated emergency
rations of baby carrots and hummus), I wouldn’t call
Rivière-du-Loup depressing. But I totally understand
why Kerouac would ditch it for the bright lights of
Expo 67.
One of the perks of living in Montreal is seeing the
various remnants of Expo 67: the bright blue metro
cars running on silent rubber tires; the skeletal frame
of the old American pavilion on Ile Sainte-Hélène; a
few statues here and there. For the city, it’s a reminder
of the good old days. Me, it just feeds my 1960s fetish. I was born in 1970, and came of age in the ’80s,
but it’s the mid ’60s that are my golden era. The cars,
the music, the movies…. Once a year, I enlist a travelling Thai tailor to cut me a blazer to swingin’ Carnaby
Street specs. I used to explain away my obsession by
joking that I liked the world better before I was in it.
Then came Fuzzy and Little Man.
My own dad died when I was barely out of Boy
Scouts; he’s been gone longer than I ever knew him.
That, combined with Fuzzy’s own tentative existential angst (mostly confusion about where she was during family stories set before she was born), makes me
worry about my own demise with alarming regularity. I get a real kick out of my kids, which is fortunate
because they’ve wrung the enjoyment out of pretty
much everything else I used to like doing (sleeping late, reading an entire newspaper, taking more
than five minutes to eat dinner). But I’m finding that
even the many joyful moments have a wistful chaser:
What if I had died yesterday? What if I missed this?
And what if, by virtue of some all-knowing afterlife,
I knew what I’d missed? Well, this ghost would really
feel cheated.
And yet, I kinda sorta don’t think there is anything
after this life. Then, as Tine and the kids nap during the drive out of Rivière-du-Loup, it hits me: I’ve
latched onto the mid-’60s, and not the ’50s or ’30s or
1700s, precisely because it was the time immediately
before I existed. Maybe getting chummy with the void
that I know came before me, one scratchy vinyl LP or
two-inch suit lapel at a time, is really just a way to get
right with the void that I’m scared will come next.
ack Kerouac and Joe Chaput never saw Expo. For
reasons unknown, they got as far as Lévis, Que.,
about two hours west of Rivière-du-Loup, and began
the homeward leg of that final road trip. (Technically,
it was Kerouac’s last full road trip. The following year,
Chaput chauffeured a moribund Kerouac from Lowell
to St. Petersburg, Fla. In the fall of ’69, Kerouac returned
to Lowell in a body bag.
We turn the car southward* and head into Vermont’s Green Mountains. We stop in a quaint campground along a pristine stream. While Fuzzy drags Tine
on a washroom inspection, Little Man and I amble over
to the office. The owner, a sixtysomething man in an
“I LoVermont” ball cap, asks where we’re headed.
“We’re driving to Lowell because that’s where
Jack Kerouac—”
“Don’t know him,” interjects Mr. Campsite. He
says the words just a little too quickly, in the way that
people in the movies talk when they’re hiding a secret.
But the glaze of his eyes tells me he: (a) seriously doesn’t
know who Jack Kerouac was, (b) doesn’t care to find
out, and (c) is bored. I should take my cue to leave,
but I’m hooked on the rush of having a casual conversation in English, however mundane. Besides, Little
Man is happily sprinting up and down the wheelchair
ramp. So I run my mouth. The writer? On The Road?
There’s gonna be a movie even? Beats? Beatniks?
I throw out anything I can think of, but nothing sticks.
Finally, I bottom out.
“Well, he was in pretty bad shape when he took
this trip.” I have no idea why I offer this information.
I watch in wonder as my arm mimes the drinky-drinky
motion. “Died not long after.”
Mr. Campsite perks up. “If you’re into that, you
should drive up Dog Mountain. Fellow built a church
up there, then—” He raises a hand to his temple and
makes the shooty-shooty motion.
urns out Mr. Campsite was more or less right,
and also completely wrong. Right: Yes, an artist
named Stephen Huneck did build a replica of a 19thcentury country chapel on a grassy hillside in the late
’90s. Yes, he committed suicide in 2010.
Wrong: The entire point.
Huneck loved animals and, after a miraculous
comeback from the brink of death (lung infection), he
decided that kindred spirits needed a place to remember their deceased pets. He set out to build it and, over
three years, that’s what he did.
As Little Man and Fuzzy scamper around playful
carvings of doggie angels ascending to heaven, Tine and
I stand in awe of the little white clapboard chapel and
its immaculate pup-friendly grounds. The dog-shaped
wooden pews. The statue garden, where busts of noble
canines stand on eternal squirrel patrol from atop ionic
columns. The floor-to-ceiling stained-glass windows.
The hundreds of notes stuck to the walls by grieving
humans: “My world crashed when we said goodbye.”
“Your daddy misses you.” “My one true friend.”
Tine talks with Huneck’s widow, who sells his artwork in the gallery next to the chapel, and buys a welcome mat depicting one dog greeting another’s rump.
Little Man giggles while cautiously petting the dogs
Huneck left behind. Fuzzy pees in a toilet with a handcarved dog-tail handle. She flushes twice and her little hand is intercepted going for three. I stand in the
bright sunshine and watch all the people running with
unleashed dogs in the meadow. I can’t believe that we
almost missed this place. Then I get angry at how we
found it, that a life that created so much could be so
crassly summarized with shooty-shooty. Then I feel
ashamed: Or drinky-drinky.
On the final stretch back to Lowell, the Fuzz peppers Tine and me with questions about dead dogs we
have known. She makes us catalogue their names ad
nauseam. I don’t press her on the subject, but from
what I can figure out, this is the Fuzz’s take on death:
When people or animals die, they go somewhere else
but we can still see them and talk to them and play
with them when we want to. Works for me.
twenty-two
he U.S.-3 South* drops us back into Lowell, its
previously quiet downtown now in the riotous
throes of its annual folk festival. We park, then wage
an epic struggle to extract the strollers from the trunk.
We roll victorious into the happy crowd. A few blocks
beyond the core, the revelry now little more than a
dull roar echoing off the low brick buildings, we follow
(I kid you not) French Street until it dead-ends at the
eastern canal.
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell. He grew up in
Lowell. He’s buried in Lowell. But, as short as his life
was, he didn’t spend all that much of it in Lowell: Aside
from that one year in the late ’60s spent at home with
maman, his adult life happened elsewhere—and yet,
for all his vagabonding, Lowell seemed to resonate as
home. In The Vanity of Duluoz, published the year following that last road trip (and the last novel published
during his lifetime), Kerouac reworked his memories
of being Lowell High’s star quarterback, rhapsodizing
about the town. But, just as On The Road never got its
full due during Kerouac’s lifetime, it took a long time
for Lowell to love Ti-Jean back.
The Kerouac Commemorative Park opened along
the canal in 1988; aside from a simple gravesite in
the town’s cemetery, it was Lowell’s first public acknowledgment of its most famous son. It speaks to
Lowell’s rejection of Kerouac that, even then, almost
20 years after his death and well into his American
Original sainthood, the modest park was met with
resistance. (One teetotalling city councillor was particularly vocal in his opposition to remembering some
hopped-up beatnik.)
A series of curved stone benches encloses the
small, shady park. Inside the perimeter stand seven
red-marble monoliths. This evening the park is empty
except for a half-dozen teenagers on skateboards. One
by one, they build up speed, ollie onto a bench and
then grind its short curve before landing among the
monoliths. When we arrive, they’re loudly debating
style—“There’s no point riding if you just jump on at
the end!” argues one kid—but they go quiet when we
enter the circle. They keep skating, though, expertly
weaving around us. Fuzzy and Little Man stare with
open mouths, their slack jaws silently announcing:
“I want to do that.”
A sculptor named Ben Woitena made the benches
and the monoliths, inscribing each with a choice passage from one of Kerouac’s books. He arranged the
benches in a circle surrounding the monoliths as a
nod to Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism. The design
brings to mind The Dharma Bums, a novel Kerouac
published the year after On The Road, at the height of
his stardom. In one scene, the Kerouac surrogate asks
his buddy why he’s doodling a circle in the dirt road.
“I’m doin’ a magic mandala,” he’s told. “They’re the
Buddhist designs that are always circles filled with
things, the circle representing the void and the things
illusion, see.”
And so, as our kids clamber and skateboards clatter, Tine and I sit in the void and we read. The monoliths serve as a pretty good Kerouac primer: There’s
poetry, bits of the best novels, some self-styled Beat
“scripture.” But the words that give me pause are the
ones making up the gloriously breathless run-on sentence that ends On The Road:
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit
on the old broken-down river pier watching the long,
long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land
that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the
West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people
dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know
by now the children must be crying in the land where
they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out,
and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?”
I laugh. Sure, Jack, sure. But, hey: Who’s the
Backson? S
twenty-three
irector Walter Salles’ adaptation of On
the Road won’t be on Calgary screens
for at least four months, but considering
it’s taken Hollywood 55 years to film a
book that took three weeks to write, what’s
the hurry?
As soon as On the Road was published
in 1957, Jack Kerouac dreamt of Tinseltown
lucre and early retirement. It looked like
it was going to happen, too: On June 30,
1958, Billboard announced that MGM was
ready to begin filming, with Marlon Brando
in the lead role. That film was never made.
It wasn’t until 1980—when Francis Ford
Coppola, hot off the success of Apocalypse Now, paid $95,000 for the book’s
rights—that On The Road got back on
track. Sort of. Coppola blew through a
string of screenwriters, including his son
Roman (co-writer of this summer’s sleeper
hit Moonrise Kingdom). Nothing worked.
Then Coppola saw The Motorcycle Diaries,
Walter Salles’ 2004 take on Che Guevara’s
road-trip memoir: Finally, someone with
that elusive golden touch for transforming
books about fast-driving sexy twentysomethings into movies about faster-driving
sexier twentysomethings.
Yet a mystery remains: Why did that
1958 production fail, anyway? Kerouac
mythology maintains that his greedy agent
played hardball with the studio, and lost.
Could be. But there might be another reason. After Brando died in 2004, his estate
produced a 1957 letter, in which Kerouac
proposed a radical cinematic vision: The
entire movie would be shot from the point
of view of a moving car. The audience
would hear Brando, but all they’d see was
asphalt and hood ornament. Huh. So,
Mutiny on the Bounty or basically Knight
Rider with an Edsel? Tough call.
—James Martin