They are misfit and strange in our new day,
In Sixty-One they were not quite so strange,
Before the Fords, before the day of the Fords.
Before the Fords, before the day of the Fords.
Stephen
Vincent Benėt, John Brown’s Body, 1927
Abraham Lincoln said “the best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.” Of course, that's only until it stops coming at all. Then -- if you’re anything like Lincoln the Emancipator -- you belong to the ages.
What then of Lincoln the Navigator – Ford
Motor’s Columbiad of an SUV? Reports are mixed. Some say that Ford
CEO Alan Mulally is intent on having the truck-based four-by join the Lincoln
Town Car in belonging to the ages; while others hold that it's only this generation
Navigator (around since 2007) that's about disappear into the annuls of automotive history.
Both reflect the trouble the Navigator has had in drawing buyers away from Cadillac Escalades and Land Rover Sports. Left to wallow in the back channels of uncool truckdom, the Kentucky-built Lincoln must now chart a new course if it’s to sailor on.
While Lincoln the Emancipator famously dreamed of his demise, Lincoln the Navigator doesn't seem to have a clue. With its turbocharged, direct-injected, 3.5 liter V6 ticking down the BTUs, the $73,000 SUV stands tall in the drive, its angular look redolent of a time when vinyl roofs enclosed opera windows and rear decks could serve as helipads. At its bow, the truck's split-wing grille stands out as a new signature feature, while aft, its taillights extend across the power liftgate's full width. Other than that, much of 2007 remains in the Lincoln's lines -- lines that reflect elements of Ford styling that go back to the post-war years.
I ought to know, for while my friend's fathers were driving their Mercury Montereys and Pontiac Bonnevilles under Sputnik-swept skies, my dad was still negotiating cloverleaves in his 1951 Ford Custom Fordor. A midnight-blue sedan powered by a flathead-eight producing 100 horsepower, the Ford seated six and featured power-equipped nothing. With its dual-bullet grille separated from winged chromium taillights by an 114-inch wheelbase, its styling followed that of its much heralded 1949 predecessor -- a car thought to have foretold an era of Populuxe modernity.
By the early Sixties, with populuxe modernity in full flower, dad had sufficiently fallen under its sway to add a late model Arctic-White over Apache-Red Ford Custom 300 to the family lineup, its three-digit suffix lending mute testimony to our arrival into polite society. In response to this glittering purchase, I began regarding the old Ford with a secret sense of proprietorship -- and it would be only weeks later when I, a high-school age Civil War fanatic armed with a learner's permit and a desire to see something of the Lincoln War firsthand, stole the keys to the old Custom and set out on a journey leading from the Bronx to the Battle of Antietam.
I can't say what I was thinking. I'd already been picked up once for car theft. Now while my parents thought me asleep in a back bedroom, I was tearing down the Jersey Turnpike in the old sedan -- its humped profile back-lit by Rahway's cracking tower inferno.
Eventually highway yielded to byway, where the Fordor's instruments glowed amber as the risen moon as its radio
whistled and crashed in concert with some far-off storm.
In the same car in which Mitchum outran the law in "Thunder Road," I was beginning to feel less like a duck-tailed outlaw than a seriously spooked kid. My hands tight on the wheel, I was stiff with fear that any one of these blackout curves might launch the car down a mountainside like a Marmon in an old gangster film. With the fear upon me, I sought what comfort I could from whatever noises emerging Custom's radio that didn't sound like banshee howls. It was then that something of a miracle happened: "This is Lee Moore, your Coffee-Drinking Nighthawk coming to you from WWVA, WHEELING, West Virginia," declared the suddenly becalmed Philco. It was a late-night announcement I'd heard countless times before while secreted under blankets back in the Bronx. Now, at last, I was in the magically remote realm from which Moore and his Jamboree originated. With my coffee-drinking nighthawk providing comfort from the dash, I drove along to the music of such Jamboree regulars as Flatt and Scruggs, Hylo Brown and Hardrock Gunter. Amid ads for prayer shawls, miracle waters, tent revivals and the honkey-tonks where bands like Power in the Blood would be playing come Saturday -- these artists would play their bluegrass and rockabilly standards.
I picked up speed, seeing all as guideposts on the road to Harpers Ferry, where the abolitionist John Brown tried to foment a slave revolt in 1859, and, three years on, A.P. Hill and his men rode at full gallop to save Lee's bacon at Antietam Creek. Nearly a century to the month from this second event, I was at full gallop too, running the length of smokey hollers and moonlit hamlets, all darkened save for the juke joints still open on outskirts of towns. Drawn in by the strings of colored lights on its cornices and posts, I pulled into one of these.
The shanty opened into a room that was bare other than for pool table and a juke box playing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Gene Pitney's gunslinger lyrics couldn't help but add a note of drama to my silhouette's arrival in the doorway; and regardless of whether I looked like trouble or the tenderfoot I was to them -- the trio at the bar looked to me like the somehow-surviving veterans of Chickamauga.
The old-timers regarded me suspiciously, but it wasn't long before narrow stares gave way to toothless smiles. Although a rank outsider, I was soon accepted as an admirably crazy kid by this small gathering of locals. Hollis, or Clem or Ephraim wanted to buy me a beer, but the others objected -- so I eagerly accepted their offer of a coke and ham sandwich. As I ate, we talked: cars, the Civil War, George Wallace, school. One fellow had met Eleanor Roosevelt, while another obligingly emptied the remaining slosh from his gas-can to the Custom's tank. When it came time to go, I was reluctant, but the place was closing anyway, and so with a wave to my grizzled friends and saviors, I fired up the Fordor's eight-banger and headed out for another league of cold foreboding and night.
The ensuing route threaded its way through woodland hollers studded with sleeping cabins, clapboard houses and shuttered filling stations -- their darkened Esso and Kendall signs prompting me to sweat having enough gas with which to greet the dawn. In the dead of night I'd deliberately cast myself into this alien world; but with its galleon moon adrift among the cottonwoods, dead-of-night West Virginia was a place with the mountain wildness, raw character and sense of antiquity to which I'd long been drawn. In an odd way, I was coming home -- wild as John Brown and fueled by a wish to see something of the Civil War's ghost firsthand.
Now long past adolescence and fueled by a need to review the Lincoln Navigator, I regard it critically. A luxurious seven-seater that burns six gallons of gas per 100 miles of material world traveled, the SUV well reflects the age it inhabits. Other than for the name on its engine block, it's quite unlike the Ford I drove on that spectral night long ago.
For one thing, it's ill-equipped for piercing any mystic veils of time.
Even so -- I took it to Antietam.
Both reflect the trouble the Navigator has had in drawing buyers away from Cadillac Escalades and Land Rover Sports. Left to wallow in the back channels of uncool truckdom, the Kentucky-built Lincoln must now chart a new course if it’s to sailor on.
 |
| Oh captain, my captain: The 2015 Lincoln Navigator |
While Lincoln the Emancipator famously dreamed of his demise, Lincoln the Navigator doesn't seem to have a clue. With its turbocharged, direct-injected, 3.5 liter V6 ticking down the BTUs, the $73,000 SUV stands tall in the drive, its angular look redolent of a time when vinyl roofs enclosed opera windows and rear decks could serve as helipads. At its bow, the truck's split-wing grille stands out as a new signature feature, while aft, its taillights extend across the power liftgate's full width. Other than that, much of 2007 remains in the Lincoln's lines -- lines that reflect elements of Ford styling that go back to the post-war years.
By the early Sixties, with populuxe modernity in full flower, dad had sufficiently fallen under its sway to add a late model Arctic-White over Apache-Red Ford Custom 300 to the family lineup, its three-digit suffix lending mute testimony to our arrival into polite society. In response to this glittering purchase, I began regarding the old Ford with a secret sense of proprietorship -- and it would be only weeks later when I, a high-school age Civil War fanatic armed with a learner's permit and a desire to see something of the Lincoln War firsthand, stole the keys to the old Custom and set out on a journey leading from the Bronx to the Battle of Antietam.
I can't say what I was thinking. I'd already been picked up once for car theft. Now while my parents thought me asleep in a back bedroom, I was tearing down the Jersey Turnpike in the old sedan -- its humped profile back-lit by Rahway's cracking tower inferno.
Eventually highway yielded to byway, where the Fordor's instruments glowed amber as the risen moon as its radio
In the same car in which Mitchum outran the law in "Thunder Road," I was beginning to feel less like a duck-tailed outlaw than a seriously spooked kid. My hands tight on the wheel, I was stiff with fear that any one of these blackout curves might launch the car down a mountainside like a Marmon in an old gangster film. With the fear upon me, I sought what comfort I could from whatever noises emerging Custom's radio that didn't sound like banshee howls. It was then that something of a miracle happened: "This is Lee Moore, your Coffee-Drinking Nighthawk coming to you from WWVA, WHEELING, West Virginia," declared the suddenly becalmed Philco. It was a late-night announcement I'd heard countless times before while secreted under blankets back in the Bronx. Now, at last, I was in the magically remote realm from which Moore and his Jamboree originated. With my coffee-drinking nighthawk providing comfort from the dash, I drove along to the music of such Jamboree regulars as Flatt and Scruggs, Hylo Brown and Hardrock Gunter. Amid ads for prayer shawls, miracle waters, tent revivals and the honkey-tonks where bands like Power in the Blood would be playing come Saturday -- these artists would play their bluegrass and rockabilly standards.
I picked up speed, seeing all as guideposts on the road to Harpers Ferry, where the abolitionist John Brown tried to foment a slave revolt in 1859, and, three years on, A.P. Hill and his men rode at full gallop to save Lee's bacon at Antietam Creek. Nearly a century to the month from this second event, I was at full gallop too, running the length of smokey hollers and moonlit hamlets, all darkened save for the juke joints still open on outskirts of towns. Drawn in by the strings of colored lights on its cornices and posts, I pulled into one of these.
The shanty opened into a room that was bare other than for pool table and a juke box playing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Gene Pitney's gunslinger lyrics couldn't help but add a note of drama to my silhouette's arrival in the doorway; and regardless of whether I looked like trouble or the tenderfoot I was to them -- the trio at the bar looked to me like the somehow-surviving veterans of Chickamauga.
The old-timers regarded me suspiciously, but it wasn't long before narrow stares gave way to toothless smiles. Although a rank outsider, I was soon accepted as an admirably crazy kid by this small gathering of locals. Hollis, or Clem or Ephraim wanted to buy me a beer, but the others objected -- so I eagerly accepted their offer of a coke and ham sandwich. As I ate, we talked: cars, the Civil War, George Wallace, school. One fellow had met Eleanor Roosevelt, while another obligingly emptied the remaining slosh from his gas-can to the Custom's tank. When it came time to go, I was reluctant, but the place was closing anyway, and so with a wave to my grizzled friends and saviors, I fired up the Fordor's eight-banger and headed out for another league of cold foreboding and night.
The ensuing route threaded its way through woodland hollers studded with sleeping cabins, clapboard houses and shuttered filling stations -- their darkened Esso and Kendall signs prompting me to sweat having enough gas with which to greet the dawn. In the dead of night I'd deliberately cast myself into this alien world; but with its galleon moon adrift among the cottonwoods, dead-of-night West Virginia was a place with the mountain wildness, raw character and sense of antiquity to which I'd long been drawn. In an odd way, I was coming home -- wild as John Brown and fueled by a wish to see something of the Civil War's ghost firsthand.
Now long past adolescence and fueled by a need to review the Lincoln Navigator, I regard it critically. A luxurious seven-seater that burns six gallons of gas per 100 miles of material world traveled, the SUV well reflects the age it inhabits. Other than for the name on its engine block, it's quite unlike the Ford I drove on that spectral night long ago.
For one thing, it's ill-equipped for piercing any mystic veils of time.
Even so -- I took it to Antietam.
To be continued . . .
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