I Need a New Pair of Shoes

This post will explore an excellent, favorite, and eternal question: Is it possible to take part in a Porsche road rally, remain competitive in it, and still find time (somewhere along the rally route) to shop for a new pair of shoes? That question came up during the recent rally I drove, when the accidental cellphone photo seen here - taken by my navigator while trying to view the phone's on-screen controls in bright sunlight, which causes many accidental photos like this - presented three feet, shod in less than splendid, more or less functional ordinary shoes, certainly not proper driving moccasins. In a Porsche, in a sanctioned Porsche Club of America rally, you need legitimate driving shoes, or at least reasonable facsimiles that look the part.

Suddenly we discovered that our shoes were too gauche.

I am not Imelda Marcos. According to some reports she had 7,500 pairs of shoes when she and Ferdinand were kicked out of the Philippines due to the massive corruption of the Marcos regime, but later Time Magazine set the final count at only 1,060 pairs abandoned then, plus 1,000 purses and similar quantities of other haute couture artifacts. I just need one pair of shoes that are dedicated to my Porsche so that the fashionistas don't point at my ancient brogues any more and giggle.

A new blue beauty. It didn't participate in the rally.

For me, with ordinary size 11 feet (45), proper driving shoes (in an old 911) are those that actually fit onto the pedals without getting tangled up in the wiring and sundry controls found under the dashboard. More than once I have had a white-knuckle experience when I couldn't extract my feet fast enough to get them onto the clutch and brake in an over-heated driving moment without undoing several of those wires and my shoelaces in the bargain. I survived those episodes, but my substandard fashion statement drives me to look at new shoes, rather than my need to continue to exist. There is nothing rational about this.

It's not easy finding suitable driving shoes. I mentioned moccasins above, but most of those are fashion above function, but then there are dedicated competition driving shoes that are fireproof, etc., and beyond my needs as a casual, scoot-around driver. So, 'driving' moccasins paired with casual slacks, or over-the-ankle, SFI 3.3/5 specification competition boots along with a full Nomex fireproof suit; there's your choice. There is little in between, at least in my search so far.

Maybe it was more than the inadvertent shoe photo, shown above, that got me thinking about both style and function. At the rally staging area I witnessed a 'look' beyond any pretense of actual purpose aside from styling, but I also saw raw purpose there that really looked gorgeous, however, in this case I'm not talking about shoes, but cars. Well, it was a rally and a Concours d'Elegance, so my shoes really didn't have much import at the time; I could have gone barefoot and nothing would have come to a grinding halt, except that I would have gotten my feet cold and muddy.

An example of the gorgeous is found in this car. Function and form, elegantly done in grey.

There is one thing that I have learned in my limited rally experience. Before the start everyone is told that this is not a speed contest. We are not to break any speed limit, ever, along the course of the rally route. We will obey all other traffic laws, and so forth. This means that no one should ever finish the rally early, because that would mean that they drove too fast somewhere along the prescribed route. This is not the World Rally Championship, after all.

A tuner car. Meh. What function? Plastic stylin' kit.

Bunk. People who arrive too soon, but are close to the correct time, do win prizes. In order to get close to the proper elapsed time, you not only can make no errors of navigation, but you must also make up for all the time you lose in traffic, at stop signs, waiting for school buses, or buying shoes. Which is to say that the winners drive like mad and everybody winks at the award ceremony. In a past rally, I have had another competitor blast past me going 85 (near 140 kph) in a 65 (105 kph) zone. That guy won. So much for precision average driving times.

So, next time I will put my foot to the floor and ignore boring speed limits, have time to buy some shoes, and win the rally. I won't tell you what country I plan to do this in, however. Oh, and the shoes I'm considering are made of bison hide - they will fit the bill, I think. Ironic. Well, this whole post is silly - or is it? The subtexts aren't terribly complex.

Now this is sweet, and it's the real thing. I like grey cars, most of the time.

How did we do in the Rally? We missed a turn, and although we tried to make up for it, we still came in over 4 minutes late because of not driving aggressively enough; but it was almost a podium finish. This doesn't mean that speeding was truly called for, but harder acceleration would help, along with heavier deceleration, and some luck with traffic, school buses, and very fast shoe shopping - too bad we didn't actually see a shoe store. . .

Would these do?

The Magdalen Boxster

When driving your Porsche on a certain archipelago . . .

There are places on Earth where it's a genuine challenge to find a Porsche automobile. Say, for example, Antarctica, or most of the countries in Africa, or a fair number in South America. Then, add in New Guinea and a majority of the small islands around the globe, and you will find that Porsches are extremely scarce. 

That's where this story takes place, on a small island archipelago with no evident resident Porsches. This is not to say that none showed up, however.

You can get to Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec (Magdalen Islands, in English, as I will refer to them), by way of ferryboat, or by air, or with your yacht, although it's not really a popular yacht-stop. We went by air; the landing strip is big enough to handle a twin-engine turboprop and we arrived on one of those. The Magdalen Islands are located in, roughly, the middle of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the world's largest estuary, a semi-enclosed sea covering an area of about 236,000 square kilometres (91,000 sq. mi.). This makes the gulf substantially greater in size than England, Scotland, and Wales combined, so as a body of water it's to be taken seriously.

Part of that seriousness is reflected in the fact that the Magdalens furnish the second most abundant collection of shipwrecks on the eastern rim of North America. Although there are around 400 documented wrecks around the Magdalen archipelago, estimates suggest that there are perhaps 1,000 if the undocumented ones are included.

A fair percentage of the 'homegrown' population's ancestors were shipwreck survivors who, upon finding themselves here, decided that they had had enough of travel by ship, so they stayed. They became fishermen. In greater antiquity, certain aboriginal hunters would show up seasonally to kill walrus, and these efforts contributed to the extinction of those animals on the Magdalens by 1799, but aided by white men's guns. Ribs of wrecked ancient wooden ships appear and disappear with the shifting sands and tides. One day there, the next, vanished again.

The Magdalen Islands

The map at left may give you an impression that the islands consist of very little substance, strung together with skinny strips of sand. This is correct. But the main road, if driven from one end of the place to the other is 100 kms long. Cars, and sport bikes especially, really open it up insanely on that long straightaway. The archipelago has 385 kms of shoreline, and 60% of that is sandy beaches. Going off the road almost anywhere guarantees a face-plant in the sand if you are riding a bike.

Three hundred million years ago, when Pangaea was the only place to go shopping for anything, a sequence of events caused what was to become the Gulf of St. Lawrence to collect an enormous precipitation of salt. The bottom of the gulf is now lined with a 5 km thick layer of salt, the entire gulf. The Magdalens are on top of bulges in that salt, and when some clever person poked a hole down there the Magdalen salt mine was born. It's not table salt (there's some clay in it), so this mine supplies all the winter road salt for Quebec, other maritime provinces of Canada, and parts of New England in the States.

So, your rusty Porsche, if you live up here somewhere, can be linked directly to the Magdalen Islands. They ship out millions of tons of salt, consistently, and of course it does its job in a variety of ways.

The economy of the Magdalens consists of fishing, salt mining, and tourists. There is no significant enterprise in fourth place. 

Then a couple of Porsches showed up. The first was a grey Boxster, standard issue, some years old, and parked at a tourist trap; I'm sure it came over on the ferry boat from elsewhere in Quebec. Nothing special, except to its owners, but it was our first sighting of such an unexpected vehicle on these fishing islands. The winter is brutal here and you otherwise see small SUVs running around, along with random sedans and such (there are new car dealers for 5 or 6 marques), but no sports cars regardless of manufacturer. So, the Magdalen Porsche was an ephemeral thing, something nobody recognized or cared much for; another tourist, hopefully spending money. What agony.

To survive, the enterprising residents of the Magdalens treat tourists to a broad variety of services and local products, as well as entertainment. Above all else, I preferred the fish smoking barns with their extravagantly complex 'rafters' upon which thousands of salted fish are hung for a fume-induced metamorphosis into pungent and preserved, and mainly brown, chewy morsels that taste now more like smoke than fish, but they retain enough fishiness to remind you of what they are. On the earthen floors of the barns, hardwood fires are set, quite simply, and sawdust and/or wood shavings are poured over the fires to cause them to turn smouldering and smoky, and the barns become filled with tangy toxins. There are 'cold' and also 'hot' smoking methods and consequently a variety of resulting products - more than you would think.

Note the blue circle.

One of the Magdalen islands is named île du Corps Mort.  "Corps Mort" means 'dead body'. You would think this an odd name for a beer, but I have consumed it, and I have a bottle of the stuff in my fridge. I'm not sure who's body is being referred to, but the beer is flavoured with smoked herring and other similarly 'wild' ingredients, so says its maker. This is not a weak-kneed beer; its flavour is robust (to say the least) and it is 11% alcohol. Expensive, too, and the brewery produces a broad palette of products.

In a rather isolated location there is a popular nightspot that is packed with mainly local revellers on the weekends. We joined them to listen to the fiddle music - and a great deal more, they were really jamming - and at this place you could get a 'sampler' of a half-dozen flavours produced by the brewery responsible for "Corps Mort". I ordered one.

I don't recall if it was the second to the last, or that last sample that struck me as noteworthy, but it wasn't Corps Mort. I said to my significant other that it smelled like cat pee. She appeared to be personally offended, as if she had some close connection to the brewery, but I was being as accurate as I could. Then I tasted it. It tasted like cat pee, as far as I could guess. As it happens it is not available anywhere off the islands, so you are safe.

When it was time to fly home from this magical place, we didn't. The airplane was broken, and the rules required that a certain type of technician was needed to examine the problem, but there wasn't such a technician to be had. After waiting for many hours we were informed that the airline would have to fly in a technician from Halifax, Nova Scotia, another province of Canada! We were offered hotel rooms, because it would be during the night that the tech would arrive to patch the plane, and we were told to be ready for pick-up at the hotel at 4:45 the following morning. Groan. . . I was not aware that there was an actual hotel on the islands, but there you have it.

It was twilight and the view from the hotel was spare, but agreeable. I'm a 'visual person', so I look at everything, but it was a sound that caught my attention. A snarling, throaty, resonant rumbling came rolling down a small valley to the north. An honest-to-god Porsche Carrera Turbo, in yellow! It was winding its way up a little road through an area of neat, modest, brightly coloured houses - which describes almost all of the houses here - with the driver dutifully rowing through the gears, carrying on into the sunset.  

From the Web, sorry, but it looked exactly like this. Image slightly adjusted.

I would be very surprised if the owner of that car lives on the Magdalen Islands. The car surely must have arrived by ferry, because, from what I was told nobody makes enough money on the islands to buy such a thing (nor would it make any sense to own one on the islands), but it could belong to the owner of an upscale 'getaway' vacation house, since those are starting to pop up on the islands, making real estate prices climb. Not a wonderful investment in my view. With global warming the weather is changing, the sandstone cliffs and other parts of the islands are eroding at the rate of one meter per year in certain areas. In mere moments, geologically speaking, the whole place will have vanished. 

The Magdalen Islands are not a place where you can enjoy driving your Porsche in a spirited way, lest you wind up in salt water, but if you enjoy walking for endless kilometre after kilometre on broad sand beaches with no other people on them, pack your bags.

Cruising Chittenden's Back-Side

The Green Mountain Region of the Porsche Club of America did a drive/eat a while ago and it was my first 'event' of 2014. Aside from previous tentative excursions in my extended neighborhood it was something of a test for my car's functions, because the drive was 300 miles (483 kms), which was enough to get all the car's juices working and the kinks identified, if not sorted out. As an example, one on-going issue that has not been sorted out, because I don't know what I'm doing, is the matter of gear shifting not being as smooth as in a modern car. Maybe my car shifts similarly to other Porsches of its era, but I am uncertain of that possibility due to lack of experience with comparable vintage 911s. Regardless, I'm working on it, and my changes to the position of the clutch release lever and such might have made some small improvement. But, this post isn't about that sort of business.  (Later a Porsche mechanic remarked about how smoothly my car shifts, as compared to other 911s of its era. So, there you go.)

Rather, it's about new people, old friends, new to me cars, roads I haven't driven before, decent food in a place owned by a PCA member, and agreeable chat with interesting folks. These are the reasons that I belong to the PCA and I've said this more than once before on this blog, so it might be close to the truth. It was a cool day, and my windows were up causing the interior of the car to be limousine quite - vintage Porsche style, which probably means 100dB - Porsche music, some say. Bunk. I wear ear plugs. 

Still cool, 58 years later

At least the temperature was nice in my mobile 911 terrarium, and I only got lost once or twice along the way, because I had looked up the destination on Google Maps owing to the fact that my GPS couldn't find the place, and Google's route suggested its own logic over sanity. That, or there is a sense of humor built into that Google function. I know someone who invents programs for Google; I'm going to ask, but I don't expect an answer. I'm too lazy to use a paper map any more unless I have to, so perhaps I'm an easy mark for the joke.

Since I left home late, wasted time crossing the US/Canada border, got lost twice, and had to drive more slowly than I would have preferred, I was the first car there. I get ridiculed by people who have a looser notion of time for my fervently sincere need to be punctual, but when people say 9:30 a.m., I believe they actually mean 9:30 a.m., so I show up then and become the butt of jokes for it. I'm on the wrong planet, but at least when I'm late for something, I can always say it truly isn't my fault. The other guy who arrived within moments of me drove the oldest and slowest car to appear at the activity; being prompt in this context doesn't mean crazy speeding, it means crazy something else. 

Once, very long ago, a woman asked me to come over to her place for dinner. "Come over at 7:00," she said. I showed up at 7:00. She was in her underwear, and not for some seductive reason, either. She was ironing her clothes for the evening, and she asked me what the Hell I was doing showing up at 7:00. "Nobody shows up on time!" she said, "you are supposed to be fashionably late." That relationship didn't last very long. I'm still out of fashion, evidently. Wrong planet. Everybody's crazy here.

Eventually 15 or 16 cars showed up containing around 30 people; I didn't properly count. The usual greetings were made between known faces and cars, and the new ones were treated as equals, under suspicion. With maps and written driving instructions distributed - neither of which would do me much good since I was alone and couldn't refer to them while steering my car - we set off into the hinterlands of the back-side of Chittenden county.

The customary group photo

One of the organizers of this event had gone to a lot of trouble to scout out Chittenden's obscure rural roads, and I honestly appreciated that effort. I didn't know that there were any rural roads in the place...  Chittenden contains Vermont's most urban collection of towns and cities and has the state's greatest population density, but somebody from Philadelphia, or similar, would imagine that they were in the Gobi Desert for all the space to be found there. But, no, this was [sub]urban Vermont and its rural roads mainly have a speed limit of 35 mph (56 kph). The countryside was lovely, but in your speedy Porsche (along with this type of activity's typical temptation for actually using that speediness) 35 mph was the equivalent of simply parking the car. It turned out that parking the cars at the end of our drive was one of the event's most entertaining operations. Some people got lost (in the parking garage!), others were abused by road-raging Prius drivers spewing sanctimonious proclamations that were way too rude for tree huggers to spew (in the parking garage!), while we were all called upon to park on the roof where our cars' colors faded from the fierce sun as we ate lunch. We parked up there because nobody else did, they being in their right minds and more prudent.

But the lunch was nice. The food was good, the setting was comfortable, and conversations of some depth were actually possible although too brief for some, while others left early to tend to real life. . .

All That Jazz

It was a peculiar business to drive across the state in order to then drive around it some more, to be followed by driving home again. "You're a crazy person," my significant other said, then she found that she unfortunately had another engagement that day and couldn't attend. Crazy, as a concept, seemed to fit in from a variety of perspectives, and driving my 40+ year-old Porsche all over the place was one of them. But, what else are you going to do with it?    
      

The Ultimate Porsche Enthusiast

You already know that there are many ways to define such a creature, and I will add my view to the mix, because, well, the more the merrier. If you think I get it wrong, let me know.

To begin, here is a quote from an article about the 1984 Porsche Carrera that appeared in the February, 1984, issue of Car and Driver magazine. It is a bit over the top, but it's a start:

"It is the evil weevil, the rock-solid, steely-eyed grim reaper of sporting cars, the para­gon of knife-edged incisiveness and buttoned-down insanity. More than any other factory-fresh passenger car available here today, the Porsche 911 Carrera is the abso­lute embodiment of clench-jawed, tight­fisted, slit-eyed enthusiasm run amok, a car for making the landscape pass with explosive fluidity. Strange that a car so serious can bring such unadulterated joy, but there you are, sporting an enormous, cheek-splitting leer when you unstrap and step out. You devil, you."

The above euphoric POV is action-packed, sure enough, but that's good, because whatever I say following it will seem sober and believable.

No matter what, the whole point of owning and feeding a classic, air-cooled Porsche is to have fun with it. How and why you have fun is the matter in question here, and when I provide my stance on the question you may have another view, which you are free to offer and I hope that you do. 

The first mid-engined race car, of which Ferdinand Porsche was a co-designer. 1923  © Porsche (?)

When I mention feeding, of course I am speaking of Do-It-Yourself repair, maintenance, modification, massage, and activities of a similar kind; not only gas, and oil, and insurance, and the like. Plus, for me, I being a DIYer, 'checkbook restoration' - using the term in a widely inclusive way - excludes Enthusiasts. Sorry, but unless you occasionally get your hands dirty, your checkbook Porsche is a pampered artifact of another stripe entirely. Some will say that plopping down a check is okay; after all, some people are very excited about their elderly Porsche but simply have no manual skills, or no place to perform work. I respect that, but for me they are once-removed from being hard-core enthusiasts, otherwise they would find a way to approach the beast in a hands-on fashion, because there is no other way to gain the real depth of requisite knowledge and appreciation necessary to become an Ultimate Porsche Enthusiast.

Some people race, some prefer auto-cross competition, others rally, or compete in a concours d'élégance now and then, but the majority simply enjoy driving their 30 or 40 year-old cars on sunny summer days when it isn't raining. They often visit fellow Porsche owners to share chat and something to eat, while others are more daring and drive in the snow, but they exist in very small numbers because their cars are all rusting to dust from the road salt. I guess there are some who really enjoy just working on their cars. I hope they have a lot of fun doing this, because the main reason Porsches exist is for driving, not anything else. I've said this before, in an earlier post.

I used to know some builders of Experimental (home-built) aircraft who could actually fly, but didn't because their true passion was crafting airplanes. There is room for everybody. 

Nevertheless, it is rewarding to creatively address problems and equipment issues, even design shortcomings, with novel solutions that tread new ground. Which is to say that I don't consider a Porsche to be a sacred object to worship - keeping it all as the factory intended - rather, it's a car, that's all. A car that is perfect need not evolve; Porsches evolve. Darwin knew cars.

I'm not into hot-rod Porsches. For me there are too many of them, and too often they follow a dogma that rigidly dictates the genre's parameters. Many are nicely crafted and all; I just don't want to do this to my car.

Type 64  © Porsche

The notion of a sports car predates Porsche's sports cars by many decades. Ferdinand Porsche began in the last years of the 19th century by designing electric and hybrid cars for practical use, as an employee of the Lohner coach works in Vienna. They were, in essence, rough horse wagons with novel propulsion devices, and not very sporty. That said, though, the Lohner-Porsche Mixte Hybrid set an Austrian Land Speed record for the time, of almost 60 kilometres per hour (~37 miles per hour), plus with Ferdinand driving the front-wheel-drive model, the car won a rally. It was easy to add two more electric motors to the rear wheels, thereby making a four-wheel-drive version - so much for Porsche selling out when it introduced the Cayenne.

Ja, sehr gut

F. Porsche joined Austro-Daimler in 1906, but his subsequent career was dizzyingly convoluted, although he did noteworthy work for Mercedes-Benz (the SSK, and others). Briefly unemployed during the Great Depression, he formed his own company in 1931 at the age of ~56. During all of this time he was a great race car designer, even designing and constructing race cars when he had no customer for the car - he was an Enthusiast. You Porsche types know all of this, but I'm trying to make a case. . .

Sure, today's Porsche AG is in business to make money, but they do so with cars that possess tremendous capability, plus they continue to build and field top-tier race cars. That's their thing. Porsche is not a company that attempts to sell econo-boxes that are cheap enough for the masses; others do that. Porsche builds exciting cars.

Beetle prototype, 1937, Ferdinand looking on.  © Porsche

I'm going to skip the part involving Hitler being an automobile aficionado, and Porsche stealing - essentially, and it was proven in court - the idea for a rear-engined, four cylinder air-cooled people's car from Hans Ledwinka of the Czech company Tatra (and others). That car became the Volkswagen Beetle, and later Porsche sports cars sold to ordinary citizens throughout the 1950s and into the '60s were pretty much hot rodded VWs. As of the model 911 they very much were not VW hot rods any more, at all. 

This is not a detailed Porsche automobile history lesson; it's a simplistic overview meant to establish the idea that enthusiasm and invention have always been at the core of Porsche production and ownership. I believe that the majority of Porsche's sports cars that have vanished from the face of the Earth have done so because they were wrecked while being driven beyond their limits (or the driver's) in competition. Not all, obviously, but a substantial percentage. Anyway, that's my theory. The rest are still on the road. Competition = hard use = inventive involvement to keep them going. There are many ways to be an enthusiast. 

So, how and why do you have fun with your classic 911? My 911 is a hot car. I mean it is hot in there when summer arrives; it doesn't have air conditioning. The car is like a terrarium, all windows and a small top with no sunroof, and inside I'm sweating and there is flora growing. With the windows all the way down it is cooler, but of course it is also much louder that way, and the aerodynamics are such that not a lot of air blows on me. My car lacks central dashboard air vents and the rest of its complicated 'ventilation' system doesn't take up the slack.

As I said, it's just a car, not a sacred object, so I scare off purists when I experiment with solutions to problems, sometimes. This is not a big thing, but I'm playing around,  building a silly gadget to duct more cooling air onto my perspiring carcass as I drive. It does nothing to cool me when I stop, but neither does the car. My first prototype, proof-of-concept version blasts me with welcome air, which is better than no air, but I want to make it smaller and less obtrusive, and maybe more efficient, too. 

My first prototype air snorkel  © Me

This simple gadget is often the subject of dumb jokes and the like when Porsche types see it, but, really it's a useful concept. The idea is to enjoy the car through the act of creatively seeking solutions to its assorted problems, thereby making the car more agreeable to use. In other words, it's not necessary to bow down to a tightly focused Porsche dogma in order to have fun with the car.

The above project is only an illustration of an attitude; it's not meant to be some sort of central focus of this post, since I invent things continuously. However, any other car as uncomfortable as mine (noise, heat, complex and obsolete maintenance, bumpy, harsh, et al) I would get rid of. I put up with the raw nature and hard edges of my car because it isn't like other cars. It doesn't sound like them, doesn't drive like them. It's a Porsche. It's got a heritage, and it has a unique history of real enthusiasm on the part of its builders.

Notice that a central snorkel air intake, for cooling the driver, was fine on this '70s Grand Prix racer.

So, I enthuse over all of it, warts and all. Air cooled. DIY. Dirty hands. Don't be shy about being creative, because it's a lot of fun and it sometimes works.  

Driving Arizona

Saguaro National Park. Saguaros live 200 years and can reach 78 feet (~24m) tall.

On a recent trip we went to Arizona, mainly. Up here in Quebec there was snow on the ground when we flew off to Arizona - there still is some here at this writing - and I imagined that Arizona, which borders Mexico, would be warm and snowless. But no, there was snow on the ground there, too, at least in the mid to northern part of the state, and it was as often as not quite cold. This would be an ideal season to drive an elderly Porsche like mine, which is not equipped with air conditioning although it has heating, but we saw (almost) no Porsches on the roads of Arizona.

This lack of Porsches was puzzling, considering the very active Arizona Region of the Porsche Club of America; perhaps we frequented the wrong neighborhoods. Where we were, 85% of the vehicles were pickup trucks of vague vintage, except for the tourists' cars and the like. In my perspective the exciting parts of the state mainly reside in the Navajo Nation, where a utilitarian truck is the obvious option. Sports car? No. Most of the Navajo Nation is located in Arizona; it sits in three states and it is the largest land area assigned to a mainly autonomous Native American jurisdiction within the United States.

Anyway, driving in Arizona, in any sort of 'car', was a real treat to me, even in my small rental Ford. The paved roads are deliciously smooth and sinuous, the landscape is stunning always, the scale of the spaces is humbling, the air is mainly clear - unless there is a haboob happening, which is routine, but it was simply very windy when we were there. Back home the frost-heaved highways keep the speed of all travel modest, and your Porsche's suspension gets mercilessly tested by those Quebec roads, but slowly. Mine is still in my shop awaiting dry dirt roads, instead of mud.

Arizona offers a surreal and curiously spiritual experience to the visitor, and I don't even regard myself as a spiritual person.   

The first sentence of Albert Einstein's wonderful essay An Ideal of Service to Our Fellow Man is the following: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious—the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty." This says a great deal about how you might feel upon first seeing Monument Valley, or Antelope Canyon, or the Grand Canyon, or Canyon de Chelly. They overwhelm, but they are real and directly before you even though they are part of the 'other' as they stand alone, timeless, and alive. And unfathomable, and beautiful. Etherial is an overused word and is somehow unexpected in this case, but it works, never mind the stone and colossal scale.

Click on any image for a larger version.

Spider Rock (800 feet or ~244 meters tall) in Canyon de Chelly is considered a center of the Navajo spiritual universe. 

Going to all of these places during the heavy tourist season would result in another impression, but if you aim your camera away from the gawkers you may be okay. The heavy tourist season hadn't started yet; we were okay.

Monument Valley

But, speaking of driving, you are permitted to drive your own vehicle into Monument Valley, for a fee. It's a poor idea to do this. The Navajo Nation is happy to collect your money, however, they have no interest in the type of vehicle that you are driving. Pay and go, and if the bottom of your car gets torn off you will be reminded that there is a 'rough road' sign somewhere. We saw plenty of low-slung cars crawling along and zig-zagging while crunching and scraping noises escaped from underneath to accompany the grimaces of the drivers. Also, without an official Navajo guide you will not be told where to drive, nor what you are looking at. Find a good tour in a closed Suburban or Jeep; this is much more comfortable and you will be able to hear the guide more easily - and ask questions when you want to.

You can drive into Canyon de Chelly, too, but there are restrictions as to the type of vehicle permitted, plus there you must be accompanied by a Navajo guide. This is better all around if you feel that you have to do your own driving. Forget any Porsche but a Cayenne in these places, and note that all-wheel drive vehicles are not allowed in Canyon de Chelly. Maybe that excludes the Cayenne, too.


More of the sublime before we get to the ridiculous. Antelope Canyon is a sublime 'slot' canyon in Navajo land on the northern edge of Arizona. I was told that there are about 150 slot canyons on Navajo land, but south of Interstate Highway 70 in Utah there are over 1,000, also they exist all over the world. None are as commercially exploited as Antelope is and there is a mixed blessing and also curse in this. It is said that Antelope is the most dramatic and exotic of all; of course this is subjective and self-serving as an appraisal, since this description was provided by one of the mandatory Navajo guides in upper Antelope, and the Navajos know which side their bread is buttered on. They know too well about commercialization, but also not well enough.

A slot canyon is a narrow canyon, most often narrowest on its top (maybe 3+ feet - 1 meter) wide up there, but getting a good deal wider down in the depths. As a result, light is always dramatic as it bounces down the sculpted walls, and the colors change with every passing wisp of cloud. The forms to be seen are beautiful beyond belief and it is impossible to take an uninteresting photograph in the place. The blessing with Antelope is that it is easily accessible by 4x4 from Paige, AZ; the curse is that the Navajo Nation evidently enforces no limit on the number of awed viewers that get packed into the canyon every day, which means around 1,700 people per day in the peak season. It's only about one-quarter mile (402 meters) long and the interesting part is mostly in the middle! Oh, and the average width is around six or eight feet. The drive to the canyon follows a deep-sand dry wash, and it's fun to churn along in a jacked-up truck with huge tires, but then that's the ten-year-old in me.

This visitor density results in the sardine syndrome, with tourists photographing each other's heads if they are not careful, and all of them are rushed through like herds of animals on the way to market. They will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Okay, those visitors are not there because this is yet another over-hyped, mediocre roadside attraction - it truly is stunning to see. But, if you go to see such a thing, consider doing a bit of research on alternative slot canyons, especially if you are up to doing a little 'canyoneering' that might get you muddy.

That said, the place is sublime. Click on any of these images of mine for a larger version. It was worth what it took to make these photos of tiny Antelope.


The Mother Road

Before the building of the Interstate Highway System ten years after WWII - a project championed by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower - the roadways across the U.S.A. were small, slow, sometimes unpaved, spottily marked, and unevenly mapped.  Eisenhower envisioned a high-capacity, well-marked, and fast system of roads connecting all areas of the United States, so that even remote parts of the country could have access to improved transport, commerce, and easy freedom of travel.

Nevertheless, the first single highway that reached from the east of the country all the way to Los Angeles on the west coast, and that was paved all the way, was U.S. Route 66.

The road signs were individualized by state. 
This one has rare glass reflectors in the '66'.

Known by several names throughout the years including the "Mother Road," "Main Street of America," and the "Will Rogers Highway," Route 66 served travelers for a half century, before totally succumbing to the 'new and improved' interstate system. 

Established in 1926, road signs began to be erected the following year, but, it would be several years before the 2,448 mile (3,940 km) highway would be continuously paved from Chicago to Los Angeles.

Running through the states of Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, the highway became one of the most famous roads in America. For decades, this historic path served thousands who were migrating west, especially during the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930's.

Over the years, the road underwent many improvements and realignments, changing its course and overall length, and moving its endpoint farther west to Santa Monica, California. (The preceding five sentences are paraphrased from the website Legends of America.) 

As happened with the earlier trans-continental railroads in the U.S., and Canada, towns sprang up along 66's path, businesses were invented to service those towns, as well as travelers passing through them. Some of those businesses were a bit goofy. There is a lot more info on the Web about this road, so let me get to my recent experience of artifacts left along its path.

Today, many of the small towns along the no longer official Route 66 are shabby and somewhat derelict, at least in my limited experience. We wound up in Holbrook, AZ, one evening. Basically it fits this description. Here we found the Wigwam Motel #6, one of three remaining of the original seven 'Wigwam Villages'. It is a quintessential example of vulgar Americana and, therefore, fits nicely into the experience of visiting run-down small towns along a defunct piece of roadway, fruitlessly looking to spot at least one Porsche in Arizona.

Chester E. Lewis built #6 in 1950, which makes it the last to be constructed, maybe, as there seems to be some confusion over the final franchise built vs. the last Wigwam Village built - that was not a franchise. In any case, it's based on the design of Frank A. Redford, who built the first example in 1933. Lewis purchased rights to Redford's design, as well as the right to use the name "Wigwam Village" (although it's identified on its sign as 'Wigwam Motel') but with a novel royalty agreement to use the name: coin operated radios were installed in Lewis's Wigwam Village, and every dime (10¢) inserted for 30 minutes of listening would be sent to Redford as payment for the name's use.

The concrete 'wigwams' (better identified as tipis) have a door with two skinny, curtained windows, and two small diamond-shaped windows at knee height, one of which is filled by an air conditioner. In other words, you can't see out. There is a bathroom, but the mirror above the sink is mounted onto the sloped wall, meaning that you must squat down in order to see up into it. You take a shower on a slant, too.

Old cars and other junk that Chester favored are scattered around the motel to give a sort of time-warp effect, bringing you back to the '50's and '60's when this place was newer, in a time preceding the Interstate Highway, which later bypassed Holbrook. Chester's daughter, Elinor, still presides at the registration desk of this family-run relic of 66's heyday. I enjoyed it for its pure silliness.

 

The Porsche Pimpmobile 

Finally, I did see one, and only one Porsche in Arizona. It was a Cayenne, and I saw it on the south side of Tucson, near the airport. I'm sorry, I'm probably insulting the owner of that SUV, but it looked for all the world like a pimpmobile. I thought I was in Chicago, or New York where such vehicles regularly run around. Maybe not Porsche pimpmobiles in those places, so this must have been unique to the environs of Tucson.

I apologize to you, too, but I don't have a picture of the 'car' because I was driving and that Cayenne scooted by at too excited a pace to grab a photo, but there was no mistaking it. Pure pimpmobile. This means extra, extra wide whitewall tires, so it didn't have the current, trendy low profile rubber seen on giant diameter wheels that are ubiquitous, but it did seem to have chrome wheel spinners, along with absolute tonnage of other chrome bits. There was a massive hood ornament, plus other shiny gizmos attached up there - little fins and things; of course the windows were blacked out, and that 'mobile' was a bright bronze, almost copper color. I might carry on, but I'm sure you can imagine it and I hope you aren't ill.

Poor Arizona. That state is filled with natural and cultural wonders, but I'm unable to include a brazen pimpmobile as being culturally significant, even if it was a Porsche. Perhaps that's my mistake. My innocent 40+ year old 911 was there to greet me when I got home. That was nice.

There was much more to Arizona, but thanks for reading as much as you did. Maybe some day. . .

Porsche Physiognomy

"Physiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from his or her outer appearance, especially the face. The term can also refer to the general appearance of a person, object [such as a Porsche 911, I add], or terrain . . ." Wikipedia. When people are generally understood to be of a certain character because of their appearance, they typically behave in the manner expected of them - toward the person(s) who appraised them in the first place. 

I knew a guy who owned a 997 GT3. He was given a ticket for speeding, and on that ticket the police officer wrote, "It looked as if he was speeding." When parked a GT3 looks as if it is speeding. Duh. The Porsche owner questioned the ticket before a judge, and the judge had no idea what a GT3 was, nor what it looked like. So he accepted the officer's appraisal and the ticket stood. If it looks like a sports car, it probably is a fast car, and people speed in those things. To the cop, speeding was the expected behaviour, therefore the driver must have been speeding. It's that simple, even if the GT3 driver was unaware of the lurking traffic cop's preconceived idea and, though irrelevant, innocent of it. I know, in some states the traffic police are trained in speed estimation and their expertise will stand in court, but in this instance no approximation of speed (?) was indicated for the ticketed driver, so the whole thing was iffy and a bit peculiar.

Prejudices are rampant all over the world, all of the time. Many wars occur because of them, never mind if anyone is guilty of anything - except within the erroneous perception of someone else. So, if you drive a Porsche, you are perceived as being guilty 95% of the time, no matter what you are doing. You are guilty for owning a Porsche, because - no matter that it is a 35 year old junker that cost less than a used Hyundai - it is a $ PORSCHE $, and you must be a member of the thieving 1%, and that's why there are jokes about the differences between a porcupine and a Porsche. So there.

Very well, if you own a Porsche, you already know the above to be the gospel truth, or you will soon know it. But, it doesn't stop there, with speeding.

You are also understood to be intensely interested in drag racing with tricked-out little rice-grinder cars with sewer pipe exhausts and out-of-proportion 'spoiler' wings on the back, along with other junk. Just ask the driver of one of those cars, who is revving his engine at a stoplight, and he will tell you that it's true, but that you try to hide it because you don't want to be embarrassed when he blows you off the road. Is that part true? And you are rude, vain, aggressive, plus being generally offensive, all without necessarily opening your mouth, at all.  

Not to mention the pick-up trucks, minivans, and big SUVs that tailgate you, blast past you for no fruitful reason on a crowded highway, and similar. You are a target, so why do you drive such a car and subject yourself to all of this nonsense? There must be a good reason, right? Oh, and you can never allow a valet to park your car, lest you have an unending supply of free transmissions available to you.

His Lordship, Bulwer-Lytton

There is only one reason for the abuse you unfairly receive as a Porsche owner and driver; the "Great Unwashed" (to quote Lord Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford) are envious of you to a deep shade of green. Deal with it, and avoid the porcupine thing.

Paradigm Shift

If you are reading this post via Facebook, simplify the link to:  www.ponderingporsches.blogspot.com (or .ca) and you will have easier access to my entire blog.


A poorly shifting model 915 transmission in an old Porsche is, frankly, a Royal pain, and it's tedious and time consuming to rectify the issue - in a way that suits a sporting automobile. Never mind, royals are synthetic potentates, anyway, who just model clothes, wear absurd hats, and they don't matter in this case. So, another perspective is in order.

Okay then, let's look at it this way. A 915 that must, of necessity, be shifted deliberately and very slowly can be understood as an unambiguous safety device. How can you fling your 911 through the countryside at verboten speeds that threaten life and limb, not yours, when the damned thing won't shift swiftly enough to allow you to select the next gear before you need yet another gear already? You get way behind in no time. Therefore, enjoy the scenery and be satisfied that you have not been arrested again.

Yes, my car.

There are many reasons for troublesome shifting, and as I mention in the post below, changing certain plastic bushings in the shift linkage is corrective step one (I have done this job this winter, and have no faith whatever that it will help anything), along with a new clutch cable (done already, too), followed by tiresome adjustment of these and other bits, ad nauseam. Considering that so many mechanisms are infinitely adjustable on a Porsche, it takes an infinite number of attempts to get them all working acceptably. This infuriating process is called a 'hobby' and we are meant to enjoy it.

An alternative is to throw cubic money at an 'expert' to perform these tasks, an expert on old Porsches, but then it is a challenge to find such a person, especially in a decidedly rural area. Who certifies the expertness of such an individual, anyway? Aside from unreliable 'testimonials' and hearsay, what do you have as a credential to look at? Self-taught 'experts' have been big trouble in my immediate experience. So, we DIY types find ourselves with a hobby. Might as well mess it up myself, rather than pay someone to do that. At least I'll know what went where and why, and this could shorten the time and effort needed to repair the repair. I can get creative with my 'upgrades', same as anyone else, so I might as well take credit when things go well, plus it's easier to forget my mistakes when they don't.

This is the bottom of the gear shifting device.

I'm obligated to do a lot of forgetting. 

To face the task of replacing a failed part, you essentially unscrew the old one and screw on a pinch-hitter, new or used. That may not always be easy, but it doesn't take a large dose of creativity to solve the problem. By the way, here is the difference between a new and a used part: 10%. Ask any auto dismantler; most cars getting 'parted-out' are worth vastly more money in pieces, rather than whole. 

But, it is the odd things requiring dedicated brainstorming that offer the real challenge when nursing an old car. Why is that hole there? Why isn't there a hole here? What was the rationale for installing this widget upside down, and backwards? Did these cars originally come with a siren? Oh look, a 5 kilogram radio-telephone transceiver, not hooked up to anything. Was this a cop car once upon a time?

Soon it will be Valentine's Day. I almost said 'St. Valentine's Day' but with the world wracked by heinous sectarian violence I'd rather leave off the religious origin and just get cozy with secularism. My moral theories don't fit any convenient template anyway, so who am I to offer myself as a martyr on the basis of (non-existent) membership in a reviled (by some) denomination of any sort? Somehow I don't feel any safer having said that. I beg your pardon, my thinking tends to go all over the place. 

My contention is that I don't get to spend enough time beneath my Porsche, deftly removing sirens and such, while no one else is aware that I ever come out from under there. So now I'm thinking, "What do I need to do to satisfy my amorous inclinations on February 14?" It ought to be something quite good that might involve emerging from beneath the car, if not actually getting up off the creeper (I'm old). That last phrase is a joke by the way. I'm starting to lose it, so I'd better get back to transmission shifting issues and leave delicate ephemera to others. I'll keep thinking about this, though.

The curious thing about my shifting issue is that the transmission gets harder to shift as the car gets hotter. By harder to shift, I mean that it gets physically more difficult to push the shifting lever out of one gear, and then into another. I'm not talking about gears crunching because of bad synchronizers, I simply mean that it is impossible to move that lever without difficulty. If the clutch is not disengaging for some reason - after the car gets hot, meaning at least an hour's driving - then the gears should crunch, but they don't. So, what changes with heat, causing this issue? Everybody scratches their head over this, possibly including you. 

Although the engine and transmission mounts are just three years old (bad ones can cause shifting issues), to me they look odd for a couple of reasons. There is a generous gap between the rubber of the transmission mount and its top mating surface, which is part of the car's 'frame'. As well, both the engine and transmission mounts are slightly more compressed toward the front, suggesting that the whole engine and transmission unit tilts downward in the direction of the nose of the car. I have to check to see if the shifting rod that protrudes from the front of the transmission is centered in the hole through which it pokes into the body's tunnel. If it's not, then those mounts are dysfunctional, virtually new, or not. The transmission is filled with first-rate, widely recommended gear oil.

As I nearly said, thinking outside of the box can be invigorating, and it certainly is necessary. 

Lemförder to the Rescue

The title you see anticipates my next effort, which will appear as soon as I crawl under the car in earnest to get into trouble monkeying around with the front suspension. That, or I'll report with an excuse for doing something else that's easier.

Later:  I have a proper excuse as it works out, so here I am reporting it:  Two herniated disks, and two impinged nerves that have nothing to do with them. A bad back on this scale is a nice gift that keeps on giving; it hurts and takes time to heal, so the delay with this post, or any other one here, will provide you with a little relief, too. I will have to figure out some light cosmetic jobs for the short term, perhaps flicking a feather duster in the car's general direction. Regrettable, but I didn't do it on purpose.

Still later: No, no work has happened, but at least I'm thinking it all through too much as my back heals. This offers certain rewards and, of course, alibis to go with them. For me planning is a comforting thing; when there is a good plan of what needs to be done, and good solid work to go with it fully understood, then there you have half the pleasure of actually doing the thing already in your pocket.

Mark Twain understood this and he was the perfect paradigm for this philosophy. He said, "I love to work. Why, sir, when I have a piece of work to perform, I go away to myself, sit down in the shade and muse over the coming enjoyment. Sometimes I am so industrious that I muse too long." Letter to John T. Moore, July 6, 1859

Remarkably, Twain comprehended repairing old Porsches very well, because at another moment he pointed out that, "Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions." That would sketch out the whole process nicely, wouldn't it?

But I can't blame only Twain for all of this. Tom Clancy got in on this act when he said, "The difference between fiction and reality?  Fiction has to make sense." I rest my case. 

A good amount of time has melted away since the previous update to this on and off, multi-theme post, but that's okay, because a few things have actually been happening. With my Porsche, that is. To see it now you would think that I have been wrenching away steadily at the contraption, but this illusion is the result of a clever distribution of tools and parts left lying around the shop, to fool the eye, so to speak. If it looks like a busy workshop, then it must be such a place . . .

But it is, in fact - I'll stick in some pictures below to prove it. Here are some issues being tackled at the moment: Gear shifting has been unpleasant; stiff and stiffer the warmer the car gets, so the first attack on this frustration involves a new clutch cable, shifter bushings, shift coupler, and all of that. Then, there is a leak of air, road dust, and noise entering the car at the bottom corners of the rear window - the result of inattentive work when the car was repaired/updated at some prehistoric moment; I will be happy to seal this off. Plus, the trunk's gas struts, that hold up the lid, have expired and the lid hits me on the head while I'm rummaging around in there. Also, I am switching to 'turbo tie rods', seen above. Plus tune-up items, random small springs, seals, filters, new brake fluid, and a further list of doodads not interesting enough to mention - and there is cosmetic work, too. Oh, and I'm going to install a new third brake light. Necessary, all of this, if I want this car to continue to wow the locals, as well as be reliable, and actually fun to drive.

My back is a little bit better, and I'm even going to work out in a gym to regain faded muscles. With a trainer.

This first photo reveals the interior, minus the seats, carpeting, floorboards, and shifting mechanism, but the new clutch cable has already been installed.

The second image simply illustrates the process of adjusting the clutch cable. I moved the clutch release lever - to which the clutch cable attaches - one spline of rotation toward the front of the car, in order to put the adjustment nuts in the center of the threaded end of the cable, thereby giving me more 'fore and aft' adjustment. Therefore, the adjustment is totally off, and it will be black magic to get it correct when the car is back on the road in the spring.

The process of replacing the trunk's lid-holding struts is straightforward; remove the little clips from four pins, pull the pins out, and remove the struts.  Installing new struts is the reverse of removal, except for the miserable bottom pin on the left side of the car. You can't even see the silly pin, nor can you feel it, because your hand won't fit down where it is. Not even a dramatically long needle-nose pliers will do the trick, because of junk in the way. I'm going to have to read up on this.

Okay, reading up was no help, but I figured out a clever method, unfortunately I didn't photograph it. Here it is: With the strut out of the car, I took the pin that fits through it's bottom end into my hand and threaded a strong sewing thread through the hole in the end of the pin and tied it. Then I strung the thread through the bracket into which the strut fits, then through the bottom of the strut, then through the other side of the bracket. Being cautious to avoid tangling the thread, I then installed the strut into its bracket. It was then a simple matter to pull the thread, which pulled the pin through the bracket and strut. I cut the thread and it was installed, just like that. Then you slip on the clip that holds the pin in place. Prior to inventing this method, I had wasted hours on this simple little project.

There you have it for now. Next I'll rant about trying to seal the gap at the bottom of the rear windows. Not as easy as I had hoped, naturally.

A pickle fork is a crude fork-shaped wedge that is driven
into the tie rod-to-steering control arm joint to pop it apart.

March 4, 2014. Never mind the gap seal business for now. Finally I installed the Lemförder turbo tie rods that are pictured above. The one on the right side of the car was the easier of the two, so I did it first as a learning process, and all of the difficult issues that people mention are true. I had to buy a pickle fork tool to get the tie rod end off, because all of my penetrating oil and hammering failed to pop it out of the tapered hole in the end of the steering control arm. But once the tie rod end was off, the right side tie rod unscrewed easily.

You screw in the new tie rod (using some Lock-Tight), then the fun begins. Getting the new rubber boot that covers everything and its retainer spring into place involves some learning, ingenuity, tool fabrication, and a lot of cussing. I quoted the Pope. . .  At last I completed the job on the right side, but the left side offered an endlessly entertaining proposition. The reason is that on my car, the brake master cylinder and attendant jumble of tubing is under the car and beneath the left side tie rod, making access 'interesting'. 

In the photo below is the end of the new rubber bellows that encloses the steering rack and tie rod (I know it doesn't look new, but it is); it keeps dirt and water out of the rack, so that your steering doesn't fail. No human on Earth has fingers with enough joints in them to fit up under there, especially when it comes to fitting the end of the bellows onto the steering gear box, and positioning the tight spring that goes around the bellows-end. It looks easily accessible here, but it very much is not. 

The bellows' coil spring is in the middle here. Click to enlarge.

So, this is where the tool fabrication comes in. I invented a number of tools and they did the job, basic though it is. Not easy, however. I'm proud of those simple tools, so if anybody is struggling with this installation, send me a message via the "Post a Comment" thingy and I'll describe them for you.

Most of this stuff will get finished eventually, if I keep my cool. I'm starting to enjoy thinking outside of the box once more in order to create tools, and the like.