The Long and Winding Road III

The Long and Winding Road III

Bonneville is the spookiest car venue in the world. Fortunately in our days there in August of 2004 it was cool and moist, though that made tuning for a run a nightmare. God had to have been laughing as you installed jets for 4800 feet and suddenly the sun came roaring out from behind a cloud, cooked your mind, and shot the effective density of the air up to about 8000 or so...in the middle of your run.

Funny, eh? Well, at least it was driving anyone with a carb intake system as crazy as it was us. But the spookiness is multi-dimensional. You are, after all, standing on a dried up lake bed that is over 20 miles long, on a crust of salt left over from the eons in which it was part of an inland sea. It is, or appears, totally flat, and I do mean totally. The nearest uprisings, which are deceptive looking mountains, appear both squashed down somehow and less lofty than they really are...and also seem to be close enough to touch.

It's all that sky...really unnerving. Makes everything seem tiny compared to that immense sweep of blue. The rain had left a small lake of its own near the start of both the short and long course (that one spans seven rather than three miles, and is for vehicles which exceed 175mph)...so the crew merely moved the starting lines...a mile! And yet the end of the courses were still nowhere near the boundaries of the lake.

As cool as the event is, the place truly gives me the willies.

But that might have been, in part, because our arrival at Bonneville was the culmination of a whirlwind of activities and feelings...which really started here: http://thunderbirdtahoe.org/. Cute, eh? And it, once again, involved John Lewis.

You do remember John, right? Sometimes, all these years later, the stories I weave about him seem so improbable I wonder if I have made up not only the stories, but John himself.

Anyway, I know I introduced you to John in more than one blog entry, including a discussion about his relationship as a young man to George Whittell, and I'm positive that somewhere or another I talked about the Whittell “cottage” on Lake Tahoe and the time John and I, along with John Boyle, went there so John could provide some amusing anecdotes for the docents to use when leading tours through this “Cabin in the Sky.” Well...that was not the only time John and I were together at the Thunderbird. He had somehow managed to convince the foundation responsible for the site to open it up to him and his guests for a birthday party celebration. While now you can rent the place for such affairs, at about ten grand a night, John was granted access for this party, with a couple of hundred guests, in recognition of his relationship to Whittell. Sherri came along with Adin, and of course Don and Alice were there as well. In addition to all the other festivities, on that earlier jaunt Boyle, Lewis, and I meandered down to the Carson City airport to speak with the world's leading experts on Grumman seaplanes to see if we could track down the Albatross Whittell had owned, and supposedly “crashed” on the lake.

Excuse me? Why the hell would those folks, along with their restoration facilities, be located in the desert? Yeah, I get it that nothing rusts in such a dry climate, but it is still...unsettling to drive by a line of seaplanes, including Pappy Chalk's fleet which he used to fly charters off the McArthur Causeway in Miami to the Bahamas during my youth. Really...strange.

As a kid I would watch these lumbar into the water off the causeway
Near the equally weird Goodyear blimp base
But they were a lot more elegant once airborne

We did not learn much about the plane, but John contracted with one of the pilots to bring a Albatross to the lake so Lewis could take clients for seaplane rides. When Denny brought this dinosaur down it literally stopped traffic completely around, and on the lake. No one could believe their eyes. It was as if the world's largest California Condor had just swooped in over the mountains. Like a hallucination or an LSD flashback.

One of John's clients refused to get on the thing...probably a smarter man than me...but when John then asked Sherri and I, in passing, if we wanted to go, we were in the Zodiac and scrambling onto the plane before he finished the question.

“You know,” I said to her as we started to taxi, “trying to get a 60 year old seaplane off of and then back onto this lake with all this wild and rugged terrain around is not exactly the smartest or most responsible thing we've ever done.” Oh well, the kids are grown and on their own now I suppose.

After the party Sherri and I parted for what was to be the longest period we have ever been apart. In my journal I wrote:

“I just flashed on the sight of that mind chilling vertical land of the Desolation Wilderness- turned to wallpaper out the side hatch of a Grumman Albatross- with a freezing wind blown straight into my face at more than hurricane force by the prop wash- Jesus, it's been a hell of a 24 hours- and Lord am I glad I got to share at least a part of it with those I love so much- Especially Miss Bright Eyes.

And that was before I saw that salt mirage!