Two-Lane to the Limit by Jeep Cherokee

From the April 1985 issue of Car and Driver.

Anatoly Arutunoff has relatives who built machines that were supposed to overcome gravity. Some of these survive in the base­ment of his home in Bartlesville, Oklaho­ma. The machines, not the relatives. He also owns his own racetrack, Hallett Motor Racing Circuit, and is the last man to win a national championship in a Morgan. For all these reasons, it’s always good to hear his voice on your answering machine.

“Just wondering if we could go through Akron,” said the recorded Arutunoff voice. His question related to his position as my co-driver on the Moosehead to Mardi Gras Run, a rally to be run on two-lane roads (or worse) from Montreal to New Orleans.

“There’s a Deutsch-Bonnet for sale in Akron that I’d really like to look at if it’s not out of our way,” the recording concluded.

A Deutsch-Bonnet, if you’re wondering, is a car. Sort of. It’s a forgotten example of nonlinear automotive design, a strange French roadster with front-wheel drive and a two-cylinder engine that appeared, brief­ly, in the 1950s. The finding of such a vehi­cle demanded that we go to Akron. And be­sides, with luck, we might even find time to go by Marion, Ohio, and look at the War­ren G. Harding memorial. In any event, with Arutunoff along, even Akron could be interesting.

Some of us, on rare occasions, have the good fortune to embark on journeys that carry us, on two-lane arteries, straight into the heart of America. Such trips are rightly considered a gift in these times, because they take you to the America where volun­teer fire departments still hold pancake breakfasts on the Fourth of July. And to towns that put signs at their city limits that say things like “Home of the Class B Cham­pion Marching Band, 1982.” And through villages that bear at least a surface resem­blance to the America of Frank Capra and Norman Rockwell. Places where we can hope that Sheriff Andy and Barney Fife are behind life’s flashing blue light.

The border-to-border runs used by American Motors to show off its Jeeps are such opportunities. Run loosely as a com­petition, with predictably incomprehensi­ble and ill-conceived rules, these are good-humored outings where good times take precedence over accurate times. Drudges who work for the Journal of Heat Transfer or Popular Glow Plug take these events serious­ly; wiser drivers use them to seek out the amusing and the unusual.

Thus, a week later, we found ourselves leaving Montreal, in a sunny Monday dawn, headed for Akron to look at a Deutsch-Bonnet. Three of us occupied a red Jeep Cherokee Turbo Diesel: in addi­tion to the bald, bespectacled Arutunoff, we were equipped with curly-haired, chub­by Mike Aberlich of American Motors, a man with the cheerful disposition of a lot­tery winner and the in-depth automotive­-product knowledge of Walter Mondale.

Rolling through the autumn beauty of upstate New York, only the insensitive can fail to find affection for some of the coun­try’s finest, least neonized real estate. And some of the best drivers’ roads you’ll find anywhere. Anyone whose driving curricu­lum hasn’t included upstate New York has received an incomplete automotive education.

By 10:00 p.m. we had left beauty behind and were groping through a rainstorm for the Akron Hilton. Built inside a huge grain elevator that once belonged to the Quaker Oats people, the hotel and its restaurants are awash in oat memorabilia. A gullible tourist would conclude that the tire’s con­tribution to Akron’s economy sank into in­significance beside that of cereal.

Rising early, Arutunoff called Myron Vernis, owner of the Deutsch-Bonnet, and got directions to his house. The Vernis home was ordinary enough from the out­side, but inside it bulged with Porsche parts, old signs, and assorted Matra bits—spoor of the true car nut. A Porsche 356 nested in the garage, the first of some 26 Porsche 356s to occupy it. The nattily dressed proprietor of this cornucopia of automotive keepsakes bore a strong resemblance to the young Groucho Marx in both appearance and delivery. He gestured at the red Deutsch-Bonnet roadster, covered with dust and minus its top.

”I’m asking $4800 for it,” Myron said, and then added shrewdly, “but I’ll probably take a lot less.”

During the test drive—a wheezing, brake-binding lurch of some 500 yards up and down the street in front of Myron’s house—we found that the tach and speed­ometer drives had been reversed, an adap­tation that produced truly strange instru­ment readings. Adding spice to the experience, the brakes worked only on whim, and the engine sounded as if its next detonation could well be its last. “He’s probably desperate,” I said as we clattered back into the driveway where Myron Vernis was hovering. “Wouldn’t you be?” asked Arutunoff, as the shifter knob came off in his hand.

“Offer me anything,” said Myron. “Re­member, I’m desperate.” For sheer, hard-nosed craftiness, Myron was right up there with Gomer Pyle. If Myron had been at Yal­ta, they’d be speaking Russian in Milwaukee.

Rather than buy the Deutsch-Bonnet on the spot, Arutunoff elected to do a Smithfield and let the situation cure for a time. We thanked Myron and left him standing forlornly in his driveway, watch­ing his financial salvation drive away in a red Cherokee. Soon Myron was forgotten, for important matters were at hand. We were headed for Hazard, Kentucky. To see the goose.

In Hazard, there is a house built in the shape of a goose. This is important only to persons who consider it vital to know But­terfly McQueen’s birthplace (Tampa) or the name of Tonto’s first horse (White Feller). I am one of those persons. News of this curiosity had appeared in the New York Times, which had published a photograph of the peculiar dwelling. I had not been the same since seeing it. Further, in my adver­tising days, I had tried unsuccessfully to star the goose in a campaign for Lysol De­odorizing Cleaner (“No matter what shape your house is in . . .”). All this made the goose a must-see tourist attraction.

We moved south and east from Akron into the hard-scrabble mountains of east­ern Kentucky, a province of lean-necked men and women who work harder for their daily bread than just about any other peo­ple you’ll ever encounter. It is harsh, humorless land with a physical beauty scarred by an overlay of poverty. Yet its natural de­fenses have been breached by television: time after time, we rounded a turn on a backwoods dirt road and saw mobile homes armed with large white disc anten­nas, a combination that conflicts with the landscape. Mobile homes are unnatural enough, like seeing an alligator in the mountains; the disc antennas are like see­ing the alligator up there wearing a hat.

The winding mountain roads of Ken­tucky are wonderful unless you get behind someone from Indiana. It’s not for nothing that Indiana license plates have the word “Wander” on them: it indicates what the driver’s mind is doing. “When you get be­hind a car with Indiana plates and more than three AAA renewal stickers, you might as well stop for coffee,” said Arutunoff as he fumed along in a Wan­derer-induced parade.

Just before midnight we rolled into Haz­ard, its rain-blackened streets empty, save for a few late-night beer drinkers. Into the dim, musty Grand Hotel lobby we clumped, finding a huge night clerk sitting as motionless as the sailfish trophy that hung opposite him. Stirring into reluctant but friendly action, he assigned us to Ray­mond Chandler rooms that overlooked a street from Coal Miner’s Daughter.

“This is the kind of town that Dirty Harry would act real polite in,” said Aberlich, looking up the stairway as if expecting Nor­man Bates to burst forth shrieking and slashing.

The next morning, in sunrise fog, we drove to the suburb of Hazard where the goose house stood. Truth to tell, it was smaller than I expected it to be, but it was undeniably a goose and people were living inside. The house is built on an oval field­stone foundation, and the gooselike por­tions of it are formed of roofing material spread over a wood frame. The occupants had not yet stirred, so we contented our­selves with photographing their goose house before aiming toward Nashville.

“What do you call people who live in a goose?” asked Aberlich.

“Mothers,” replied Arutunoff. Because our interpretation of the rules dictated that we run up as many miles as possible (an interpretation that proved to be incorrect) while maintaining a southerly direction, we headed southwest from Haz­ard, a route that took us to the hamlet of Fairview (population 175). In Fairview, you’ll find the largest cast-concrete struc­ture in the United States, a 351-foot obelisk erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to honor Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.

“We had a pretty good year last year,” said the man who ran the elevator to the top of the monument. “About 5500 people came to see us.” That works out to about 450 people a month, not many.

“I’m amazed that that many people re­member who Jefferson Davis was,” re­marked Arutunoff.

“Who was he?” asked Aberlich. The ele­vator operator began to mutter.

We reached Music City close to the din­ner hour. Arutunoff’s old friend and our intended host, owlish Bill Pryor, was still on the West Coast producing Malibu Ex­press. Pryor’s wife, Ellen, was on hand, however, and hell-bent on leading a night reconnaissance in force, beginning with dinner at The Stockyards, a restaurant located in the restored brokers’ offices of the old Nashville livestock yards and filled with people wearing cowboy hats and looking like dress extras from the Grand Ole Opry.

Aberlich, meanwhile, was closeted in his room at the Sheraton, intent on watching the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. He thus missed Arutunoff’s attempt to turn off the headlights. Parking the Cherokee, Arutunoff turned off the light switch, a move that had no discernible effect on the lights. After pounding on the dashboard, raising the hood, and hurling invective at the hapless Jeep, Arutunoff headed for a telephone to call Aberlich and threaten to set his Jeep on fire. At which critical junc­ture the timer automatically extinguished the headlights, permitting Ellen to snick­er at the automotive expertise of her companions.

After dinner, Ellen herded us to a disco, where a publication party for Bob Allen’s book George Jones was getting up to speed. Because the book is an unauthorized biog­raphy, the country singer didn’t show up. More to the point, neither did Dolly Par­ton. Just a lot of people wondering if each other was anybody worth being nice to.

After staying up far too late among good company at the Pryor home (the Pryors live across the street from singer Porter Wagoner, who owns a Jeep Wagoneer with the vanity plate “PORTER”; jolly folks, those Wagoners), we returned to the hotel for a good night’s sleep lasting fully three hours.

Continuing south the next morning, we agreed that not enough good things can be said about the quality of Tennessee two-­lanes. Not that they’re all sweetness and surface, not by a mile. But they are twisty, well banked for the most part, and great good fun to drive on. The surrounding mountain country creates a lush, luxuriant backdrop of trees and grass that just makes you feel good to be there.

In southern Tennessee, we observed further marvels: the twin cities of Difficult and Defeated; the somnolent village of Lynchburg, where Jack Daniel’s sour-mash whiskey is made; the hamlet of McBurg, where there’s no McDonald’s; and a barbecue restaurant whose motto is “Our pigs just dying for you to eat.” For entertainment, we shortened Aberlich’s life span by driving his Jeep over a condemned bridge to see if the highway department had acted hastily. It had.

Running from Nashville to Natchez, cut­ting through the northwest comer of Alabama and then heading southwest through Mississippi, the Natchez Trace Parkway of­fers flatland two-laning that’s as good as it gets. Winding through the tall pine forests of Mississippi, the Trace wafts you along the route once trod by Andrew Jackson and other frontier figures. The joy of driving the Trace, a federal parkway, is diminished only by its 50-mph speed limit.

After an hour or so, we left the serenity of the Natchez Trace and headed west across Mississippi, ending in Greenville, hard by the mighty Mississippi itself. The Father of Waters on that particular eve­ning, however, seemed to be falling on us rather than flowing by us. In a rainstorm that had frogs running for high ground, we sought refuge in the town of Leland, birth­place of Jimmy Reed and site of Lillo’s restaurant.

To Aberlich’s delight, Lillo’s had a large television set in operation, and Lillo’s rotund, jovial owner had pulled an easy chair into the restaurant itself, from which van­tage he was cheering on the Tigers. Fasci­nated at meeting people from Detroit who weren’t suffering from gunshot wounds, he delivered an entertaining lecture on Italian food and its effect on generations of the Lillo family. This diversion in no way diminished the quality of the dinner, an ex­cellent chicken cacciatore—cooked with white wine instead of tomato sauce­—washed down by good strong Chianti. Lil­lo’s can be found easily, on U.S. Highway 82, and is well worth a detour. It was our best meal of the trip.

The day following took us into the flat, endless cotton fields of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, also called the Delta. Here we planned to run up a substantial number of off-road miles, a move that would suppos­edly enhance our standing in the competi­tion. This worked well until we wandered onto territory turned into gray taffy by the preceding day’s thunderstorms. Finally, after escaping one hostile bog only by back­ing up and hitting the mud at 50 or so, we elected to confine our run to gravel roads and followed the east levee of the Yazoo River deep into middle Mississippi.

Just below Jackson, the city where I took my first lessons in life, we paused at my par­ents’ home in Florence. There we found written directions to a place near Laurel, where we would find the 1984 Lonesome Pines Bluegrass Festival. My brother Hal, lead mandolin for a group called the Ver­non Brothers, was performing there, be­fore a crowd that would include my parents.

After an hour on the silent back roads of southeast Mississippi, we turned off State Highway 28 into a grove of tall pine trees filled with trucks, trailers, motorhomes, and bluegrass fans. A stage built of rough pine boards, but with lights and a sound system, served as a backdrop.

Arutunoff and Aberlich reacted bravely to finding themselves deeper into the deep South than either had ever been. In no time, the rhythms of bluegrass, music al­most as old as the country, had them hyp­notized, and a cold beer or two cooled the evening heat.

We left the festival at nine o’clock and pressed on through the night, getting hopelessly lost before dragging into the Brookhaven Holiday Inn, 135 miles from New Orleans. Getting lost in the state where you were born and grew up, with a Yankee in the car, is not a pleasant experi­ence. That aside, we were almost home, due in the French Quarter during the next noon hour.

Beset by construction delays, a feature of Louisiana driving since the days of Jean Laffite, we lumbered onto a downtown pier ten minutes before the one-o’clock deadline. We had survived nicely. No tickets, no arguments, and no arrests. The Cherokee carried its combat record graphically, its front end a mudpack containing varieties of bugs un­seen since the formation of the La Brea Tar Pits. At the awards dinner, held at Antoine’s, we learned that our rules interpretation had been faulty. But we were at least lauded for racking up the most miles, over 3400 of them. We presented Aberlich with a handsome Day-Glo tin ashtray, a voodoo doll, a “Proud to Be a Cajun” li­cense plate, and other totems recognizing his contributions to our team, contribu­tions that centered on buying food and keeping his good nature intact.

A few days later, making the trip an un­qualified success, Arutunoff called Myron Vernis and bought the Deutsch-Bonnet for $2400 plus the steering wheel off a dismembered Porsche Speedster, staving off Myron’s attempts to take less.