Doc Searls Weblog

An English Ford Consul, such as the one above, was the worst car I’ve ever owned. I got it after rolling my parents’ ’63 VW bug in the summer of ’66. I did that on a backroad outside of Greensboro, North Carolina, when I was about to turn nineteen and trying to get my grades up a bit after my freshman year at Guilford College. As Consumer Reports said of the ’63 bug, “Slight understeer changes abruptly and unexpectedly to unstable oversteer, to the limits of tire adhesion.” That happened. It rolled over three times, and I walked away. The car was towed away. My parents had bought it new for $12oo. It sold at auction, as junk, for $425. The Ford Consul cost me $300 or so. I should have been paid to take it.

But this post isn’t about that. It’s about a wrong road I took with the Consul.

That road was a long-abandoned path off of what is now Sand Pond Road on Hamburg Mountain in Hardyston Township, in New Jersey’s lumpiest terrain, in its northernmost county, called Sussex. While Hamburg Mountain is but 1470 feet high at its peak (which isn’t), one does gain a thousand feet of altitude on a short drive to the part of the top we were aiming for: the 245-foot tower transmitting the weak signal of a nothing FM station called WLVP, named by and for Lou Vander Plate, who built it. (That’s the red marker on this map here.) We had no reason to go up there other than to contemplate a fantasy I had at the time, of owning my own radio station.

I don’t remember what we did or saw when we were up there, or who was with me. What I remember was driving back down.

The road all the way up was only suitable for a jeep. It was stupid of me to try the Consul on that road in the first place, and even more stupid to take a wrong turn on the way back.

See, the course of the road was so unclear that I turned left at a fork in it, thinking that was the way I came up. That it wasn’t became clear after driving about 20 feet and realizing that this was more of a gully than a road, consisting entirely of large loose rocks, roughly rounded by the glacier that had left them there. The path was steep, and with rear-wheel drive there was no traction while attempting to back up. If there was a way out, it had to be forward. So down we went, crunching and rattling our way toward an end we hoped would be Rudetown Road: the paved one we left to attack the mountain.

The gully hit smooth ground after a final turn into the backyard of a house, where a group of people sat around in chairs, hardly expecting a car to come out of the woods. The path across lawn to driveway was clear, so we waved to the people in the chairs and took the driveway to Rudetown Road and then to the rest of our lives.

The gully we took had probably been a dirt road in the first place. But many rains and melting snows had removed the dirt and made it into a stream bed. That I was surely the last one ever to drive it was a bet was made by the faces of the people in the yard.

I don’t think that trip damaged the Consul any more than it already was. Really, the thing was not a sincere attempt to make a working automobile. Parts—generator, starter, distributor, carburator, muffler, wheels, engine mounts, door handles, you name it—all fell apart or fell off in the year or so I had it before a tow truck finally took it away.

I don’t think I sold it, and surely paid for the final tow. But at least it finally paid off with this story.

And here is one more. In 1973, four years after I graduated from college, I got my first job in radio: working for WSUS, which is what WLVP became after Peter Bardach bought it from Lou Vander Plate. The whole station—studios and transmitter—were still atop Hamburg Mountain, and Peter had the road improved enough to make it traversable by ordinary automobiles. He also had a Jeep ready for when it snowed or got too muddy. Every time I drove up there, I looked at that gully off to one side and remembered how I was once stupid enough to take it.

Later, Peter moved the studios down to Franklin, and in ’74 I moved to North Carolina and the rest of my life, with many more stories to accumulate and perhaps eventually to tell.

Bonus link: All My Rides. Which I’ve been updating since first posting it in 2007.