Still No Signal
Eastman, Wisconsin. Ten minutes before the phones went off.
We parked in the field behind the old white barn. We had come the last fifty miles along the Mississippi, from La Crosse to Eastman, Wisconsin, and it was seventy-eight degrees, great driving weather. When Rachel and I got out of the car we could smell the hot oil from the 911, run hard the whole way. Cars kept streaming into the field, and people climbed out of them in ones and twos. It was both of our first time in the upper Midwest. Most of the faces were new. A few we knew.
We walked among the cars on our way to the barn. There were more French and Italian cars than I expected, and I said to Rachel quietly that it was a brave choice and I respected it. This was the Overcrest Rally. You apply by essay, why you want to come and what you'd drive, and they build the field from the applications. Nothing is timed and nothing is judged.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton.
We had barely started talking to the others inside when every phone in the place went off at once. Tornado warning. Some people laughed. One of them said, welcome to the Midwest.
I stepped out back to look at the field and talk with some of the other drivers. My friend Jonathan texted a screenshot of the warning. He was in the middle of driving in from O'Hare with a friend in a Mk1 Rabbit GTI. The sky started to turn a pink I had never seen. Someone yelled from the far end of the barn that we should get to the basement, and the hundred of us filed down into a stone cellar with a few dusty chairs. We crowded in close. Rachel and I found seats, and I told her she could not tell my mother about this. Then it started to storm, hard, and it sounded like there actually might be a tornado somewhere close. Nobody talked about being safe. They talked about the cars. Someone said, what if it hails, and my stomach turned over. Ten minutes later it was gone, fast as it came. We went back up into a light rain and then inside for dinner. Jonathan arrived and found us in the dinner line and hugged us both.
More than twenty-five years before, my buddy Jim had asked if I wanted to come to an event called Waterfest, a Volkswagen show we'd read about on a forum. That was all I needed. We skipped school and drove down to Englishtown on a Friday afternoon in his Rabbit pickup, windows down the whole way. We switched between FM stations that faded in and out as we went. We couldn't afford a hotel room, so we drove back to Bethlehem at nine that night to turn right around and do it all again in the morning.
In the morning we drove the rally route out of Prairie du Chien. In three miles turn left, Rachel said, reading over the noise of the Webers and the open exhaust. I shifted into second and reached through the Momo wheel and reset the trip counter. We swept through a long right-hander in open farmland, surrounded by cars that looked like a European comparison road test from 1985. I had put new plugs in the day before in the hotel parking lot, and the engine ran clean.
New plugs the night before the rally, in the hotel parking lot.
Three years before, this same car, a 1977 911S, had been a basket case. The wrong engine, paint flaking off in the wrong color, and an interior somebody had botched before me. Most of the work I did myself, nights and weekends in the garage. The carburetors, the brakes, an RS-clone 2.7 to replace the engine that didn't belong, a 915 shifter I rebuilt twice before I got it right. I paid some friends to do the bodywork, since I didn't trust myself with paint, and they brought it back to its original color, ice green metallic with the faintest hint of gold added. A friend of a friend stitched the seats, early nineties Volkswagen Recaros, the kind that came in a GTI, in black leather with tartan inserts, blue and green. I liked the idea of a hand-me-down seat doing this kind of work. None of it happened because I was planning on or could afford a finished car. It happened because this was the only complete aircooled 911 I could afford and I just couldn't stop working on it.
A gas station came up on the left with a lot full of rally cars spilling into the lot beside it, Citroëns, BMWs, Volkswagens, Ferraris, more foreign machines than the one-stoplight town had probably ever seen. I filled my tank that was still half full and stood around with the other drivers and their gas-station coffee, talking about the peculiarities of decades-old cars. Out of habit I reached for my phone to check on my daughters and remembered I had lost signal hours before.
A brief, perfect formation. Running together like you were always meant to share the road.
We stopped later that morning in Nelson at a restaurant still shuttered for the season and parked next to a green 944. Caravans kept funneling in until the lot was full, and people stood around in knots talking about the route. I ate a doughnut off a folding table, one of the best I have ever had. Rachel and I ducked into the gift shop in search of a scarf, so the wind would stop blowing her hair across her face. The woman behind the counter was about our age, and somewhere in the middle of ringing us up she asked, half joking, if we were introverts too. We both said yes, fast. She said running the shop had cured her of it, mostly, though she still felt like one underneath. I thought about how much easier it was to talk to strangers now, when standing next to a car, than it used to be.
Nobody had a mechanical problem. Somebody just stopped, so everybody stopped.
Later we fell in behind a tan mid-year 911 heading through a small town. A few blocks later, he pulled over to the side of the street, and we pulled over behind him, thinking he had some kind of mechanical trouble. He hopped out and walked back to us.
"Do you know where you're going?"
"Yes. My wife is navigating."
"Mind if I follow? I don't have a copilot."
"No problem."
He got back in and we pulled out. Rachel kept navigating using the paper route book. The road turned to gravel before long, and I was glad when he kept following. We came out of the woods into open fields, the road wide and dusty. At the next turn I punched the throttle and swung the tail out sideways. In the mirror he did the same. A few miles later we came to a stream. I crossed it a little too fast and heard my new paint scrape on something underneath. He came through slow and careful, the way you're supposed to, and we went on.
The tandem 911s started to remind me of another road, another time. I was pulling out of a gas station in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, in my 1980 Scirocco, reaching through the wheel to reset the trip meter, the Mapquest directions face-up on the seat beside me. Ahead of me were a friend and his father in two Mk2 Sciroccos. Behind me, a Rabbit pickup and a Mk1. The dew hadn't dried off my windows yet, and I was buzzing. Waterfest 2002, the first year at the new, bigger grounds.
The Scirocco S in 2002. Zender kit and grille, Borbet wheels and a cooling system that hated traffic.
Traffic stopped a mile out and did not move. My eyes kept going to the coolant gauge, sitting above halfway and climbing. I ran the heat full blast to keep the little eight-valve motor from boiling over. The dual side-draft Dellortos and the header had been a thrill on the way down. Now the car wanted to quit at idle. Watercooled Volkswagens of every year stretched out ahead of us and behind us to the horizon. I worked the clutch for the hundredth time and my leg ached. I had tools and a floor jack in the trunk and not much cash, and I doubted I could fix a cooling problem fast in a town I had never been to. I did not want to miss a minute of the show. A family sat in folding chairs on the corner, a couple of kids up on their father's shoulders, watching us crawl past like a parade. Eventually we reached the gates. On the left, a field of watercooled Volkswagens ran almost out of sight. On the right I could hear a VR6 tearing down the quarter mile.
We parked and walked the field. Strangers came up to talk about their cars before we'd said a word. That afternoon we sat in the stands with hotdogs and watched the quarter mile, calling our own odds on the cars in the lanes below.
One night at dinner, while I waited at the bar for drinks, Rachel sat down at a large table with three gray-haired men who were already telling her about their drive from California to the rally. The nearest on her left said he loved seeing Mount Rushmore but never wanted to cross South Dakota in a straight line ever again. In the window glass behind the table I caught my own reflection, gray coming in at the temples, right on schedule. I figured I had about twenty years before I looked like the rest of the table. The man in the middle, Ed, looked to be in his seventies and had ridden the whole way from northern California in the passenger seat of his son's old 911. His son sat down beside him, about my age. They had been doing this longer than I had, and it hadn't worn thin on them. They talked about other rallies the way young men talk about last weekend, the best roads, the worst hotels, how to read a small town before you're through it. Rachel was jealous they'd day-tripped to a Frank Lloyd Wright house. One of them joked that he'd move to North Carolina just for the eight-character vanity plates. I looked around the room. Every table had some version of the same conversation going, strangers an hour into being friends.
The Sport Shop and the Liquor Store were the same building.
We parked the 911 in pit lane on the last afternoon at the end of the rally, and a tech inspector went down his list and drew a white 33 on my window. I got in thinking, this is actually happening. I pulled forward next to a turquoise 911, two more behind us, and a father and son side by side in a VW Rabbit and a Rabbit pickup. We all got out and started talking about the cars the way you do with people you've just met. Someone noticed the tartan in my seats and asked about it, and I gave him the short version. Displacements, 2.7, 3.0, 3.2, 3.6. Injection versus carbs, black trim versus bright, the trick to flipping gears in a 915 gearbox. Somewhere down the row an electric impact wrench chattered against a stuck lug nut. I stood in the shade to cool off and watched them, men in their thirties, forties, fifties, from all over the country, laughing next to their cars like they'd known each other for years. I reached for my phone out of habit. Still no signal.
Two old Porsches sharing a quiet moment before their first drag race.
A few minutes later I was doing seven thousand rpm down the quarter mile against Billy in his turquoise 911, my first drag pass ever, at forty-three years old. At nineteen I would have tuned and retuned the carbs half the night, practiced reaction times, and driven to the strip without a spare tire or a second thought. Now I was doing the math on what a blown 915 would cost, and how far it was to tow the car back to Minneapolis the next morning before my flight. My body had started throwing a warning light or two by then as well, mostly knees, and a lower back that complained every time I climbed out of the driver's seat. The other guy beat me by about a second. It was still the best minute of the weekend, and I got back in line for a second run.
On the walk to the food stand I kept stopping to talk to people I had met on the rally. How did your car hold up. Tarmac or gravel. Turned out a lot of us were doing our first ever drag race. A man walked by in a shirt that read These are the good old days, present tense, and I couldn't help but grin.
That evening I fired up the 911 and we made our way back onto the road, the cars disappearing behind us one at a time in the mirror. At a stoplight, Rachel tucked the paper route book into a duffel in the back seat. Halfway to the hotel my phone buzzed in my pocket for the first time all day.
I pulled out my phone and read it. A whole day of notifications. At the top, my youngest: I just bought my first real dorm stuff. Under that, my mother: Happy Father's Day, son. Under that, a friend had sent the group chat a Marketplace ad for an S124 Mercedes wagon.
I turned to Rachel. "Next year," I said, "I think I want to bring a watercooled VW."
The Overcrest Rally runs twice a year in a different corner of the country. It is application-only. You write about why you want to come and what you would bring, and the organizers build the field from the applications. If you don't get in, or don't want to travel that far, the same thing exists at a smaller scale almost everywhere. If you can't find one, go to cars and coffee and find whoever has bugs on the front of their car. That person knows where the drives are.
