Click here to read this article within the magazine.

I put 650 miles on my pickup this weekend, driving to and from the family farm, three miles from Little Traverse Bay on Lake Michigan. I was alone both ways, and the weather was gorgeous, thus ventilating the mind and unrolling a series of images and notions and memories.

My 2003 Chevy Silverado HD 4x4 pickup only has about 12,000 miles on it. It has a nice paint job, and a lovely Borla cat-back exhaust system that emits exactly the sound you imagined when Daddy Warbucks was waiting on the secret dock for Punjab and the Asp to bring the stealth speedboat downriver to pick him up. Its sticker price was 33,000 grickles in 2003, but the out-of-pocket was nicely defrayed by my Chevrolet Suburban 4x4 diesel trade-in. Nonetheless, when some dealer tells me that my $33,000 pickup is now worth $13,000 I start looking for other ways to solve the problem of poor pickup fuel economy combined with astonishingly high prices for gasoline.

I thought about trading it for a Chevy HHR SS, which seemed like a pretty good compromise for a gent of a certain age who likes to drive enthusiastically and often, hauling luggage and dogs and stuff, but the dealer’s representative stopped me cold with his low-ball offer for my very handsome low-mileage truck.

Next thought: Why not find somebody who does really good work with Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) installations and convert my truck from gasoline to CNG? Pickups are ideal for this conversion, because they have lots of space in their cargo beds for the CNG tank and related hardware, and all I’ve ever hauled back there is birdseed, deer feed, dog food, and dead critters on their way to the meat-cutter/packer. This will require some research, and if there are any of you out there who have experience with CNG in pickups, please email me (ddavis@windingroad.com).

Driving alone always makes me think about my forty-year friendship with Brock Yates, and what an ideal companion he is on long-distance drives. Yates is one of the most agile and adept conversationalists I have ever known, able to salt an exchange about the future of the automobile industry with references to Judge Crater; the utter fecklessness of the French in World War II; the high mortality rate of Bell P-39 Aircobra fighter aircraft around upstate New York in the early years of that war (he claimed that the woods were full of twenty-foot-long coaxial propeller shafts standing vertically among the trees); and Tazio Nuvolari’s experiences in and around the 1936 Vanderbilt Cup race. The man is what the sports writers call a “Phe-Nom.”

Ken Gross, working with the men behind the very nice Saratoga automotive museum, organized a tribute to Yates recently, and Ken, Denise McCluggage, Sam Posey, John Fitch, William Jeanes, and my own sweet self were the ordained praiser-roasters. Dan Gurney was supposed to attend, but couldn’t make it, which was only fair, because Yates was supposed to help me present Dan for membership in the Automotive Hall of Fame earlier this year and Yates was nowhere to be found on the appointed night. I sat between William Jeanes and John Fitch, which is a pretty nice neighborhood.

At one point during the dinner, John Fitch, now a widower, paid my absent wife one of the nicest compliments she’s ever had. He said, “You are the only one of my friends who has the same kind of relationship with his wife that I had with my Elizabeth. She’s a great friend, and you have involved her completely in all the aspects of your life. Wherever I go, whenever I mention her name, people’s faces light up.”

John Fitch was a P-51 pilot in World War II and was one of the first, if not the first, to shoot down one of Germany’s astonishing ME 262 jet fighters. He also managed to shoot himself down when he made several passes at a German train, trying to blow the engine’s boiler. As he got lower and lower, the boiler finally exploded and a large fragment of the engine struck his Mustang, causing it to crash.

After a stint as a POW, he exchanged the P-51 for a series of racing cars and retired to the relative peace and quiet of a career driving for Briggs Cunningham and the Mercedes-Benz factory racing team. Any time John Fitch even notices my presence, I come to attention.

John Fitch is, like most surviving World War II heroes, well into his Nineties, and he is suffering a grave injustice at the hands of the Connecticut bureaucracy. Having found a patch of contaminated land on his home property in Lime Rock, Connecticut, he reported it to the local authorities. The contaminate was fuel oil from the distant past, and now the authorities are trying to force him to spend more than $300,000 to excavate the entire property. He is a good citizen, he has committed no crimes or misdemeanors, yet his life and his home are being cruelly invaded.

This is the sort of stuff I mentally thumb through when I’m alone on the road. I wish my friend John Fitch was having more fun as the days dwindle down. He deserves open-handed legal and financial assistance from the people he risked his life for in the Fifties, Mercedes-Benz, and a full-throated roar of support from the nation, state, county, and town for whom he risked everything in World War II.

I also wish that my friend Brock Yates could get over the dark depression that settled upon him when he was fired from Car and Driver magazine. He too, should be having more fun.

Click here to read this article within the magazine.

Magazine Issue: Winding Road Issue 36