(CAPT Ahab’s good ship Pequod. Painting by J Dillon).
I have a lot of scrambling to do today to get on the road to the Little Village By the Bay. There is that book I am supposed to be editing, and now that the Annual Meeting of the Professionals is over, I am on the hook to deliver the copy for the Spring-Summer issue to the lay out people.
I have to be somewhere else tomorrow, a long way down the concrete alley that leads to the Wolverine State, and have resigned myself to a day at the office trying to get things unscrambled. As part of girding my loins for travel, I have decided to call myself “Ishmael” for this voyage.
You know the story, and I won’t belabor the parallels with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I do not expect to meet the Great White Whale on this trip, I will, however, keep my eyes peeled for the Great White Cruiser of the Ogemaw County speed trap.
Hell, I may be driving a Great Whale. In Moby Dick, Ishmael is setting out from New Bedford in hunt of the great sea mammals. I am setting out as a mammal myself onto the great concrete river. For Ishmael, it begins on a dark-and-stormy night at the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford. You will note that the Pennsylvania Turnpike runs through Bedford, PA- and it will take me to the great state surrounded by all the fresh water in the world,.
There is a cautionary tale in the first chapter of Melville’s masterwork: As was the custom of the day, Ishmael agrees to share a bed with an absent stranger. When his bunk-mate returns to the Inn, he is revealed as a heavily tattooed harpooner named Queequeg.
Both are naturally alarmed, but it works out OK, I guess, although there are plenty of pages to turn before Ahab meets his fate- and I think I only read the Classic Comics version. Nonetheless, I am going to be on alert at the Super Eight, just in case. Not that there is anything wrong with it, of course.
Islmael’s ship was the Pequod, which in this tortured extended metaphor would be the likely name for the vehicle I am going to flog across the waves of the Interstate. In the book, of course, the voyage of the Pequod pivots on a foggy Christmas day, the last holiday I saw the parents alive, Ishmael sights pots dark figures in the mist, which I find evocative of the fog that would roll in over us all over the next five days.
The Hertz people were kind enough to set aside an Infiniti FX35 Cross-over SUV for my exclusive use for the trip. I tried to get another Caddie- the SRX I rented last year was a blast to drive, but they were sold out. Besides, I have already written a review of that 1,900 miles behind the wheel. I don’t think I figured out the bells-and-whistles until I was approaching Rockville on the way home.
What attracted me to this version of an automotive Pequod was the size of the cargo payload. I have no idea if there is anything I want to bring back, but there will certainly be a ton of crap to haul to the dump, or to Goodwill, or to storage. I am steeling myself to let stuff go. We will see how well I do on that.
(Generic 2012 Infiniti FX35 at rest. I specified a big white one. Photo T. W. Benjamin.)
The FX35 seems to have some possibilities. I curled up the the Car and Driver review before I mashed the button to reserve this precise vehicle. They say: “It looks brawny… in the bulging, muscular fashion of a Dodge Viper rather than the square-shouldered idiom of a Caterpillar tractor. Moreover, its greenhouse is tidy, rakish, and sleek, and this particular FX35 didn’t even have four-wheel drive. Instead, it funneled every bit of its 280 horsepower to its rear tires.”
I think the snow is done for the year. Hope so, anyway. The last few trips have mandated All Wheel Drive. But I think Spring might have arrived in the Northland. It is supposed to be 53 up there tomorrow. Plus, it rolls pretty well:
Zero to 120 mph: 39.1 sec
Street start, 5-60 mph: 7.2 sec
Standing 1/4-mile: 15.5 sec @ 91 mph
Top speed (drag limited): 137 mph
My great thanks in advance to Mr. Hertz for letting me explore the possibilities.
(DOHC 24-valve V-6, aluminum block 213 CU engine. Aluminum heads, Nissan engine-control system with port fuel injection- and probably starboard, too. It generates 280 Brake horsepower at 6,200 RPM. We will see how it does in Ogemaw against the Great White Cruiser. Photo T. W. Benjamin.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra