OLD JEEPS

Early one evening, after a summer rain shower,
We coasted along the mainstreet of downtown Lyons,
Where in the yard of a ramshackle house there reposed
A row of old Jeeps in wistful disintegration,
Like soldiers mustered out for their last roll call.
On the end was a CJ3A in pitiful trim,
All rust and ruin with several pieces missing,
And a sign telling passers-by that it was for sale.

I asked my son to pull over. "Let's have a look,"
I said. In high school half of a century ago,
I owned a pristine 3A, and in truth, that Jeep
Was the only car I've loved with consuming passion,
The way at the age of eighteen a boy loves a girl.
I know this sounds odd, but it was quite typical then.
Nowadays cars are impersonal and so complex
That it takes a computer to know if they even exist.

"Hell," a shade-tree mechanic once pontificated,
A Jeep is only a motor, some gears and wheels,
Wrapped up in a tub of dented and rusty steel."
On another occasion that same mechanical genius
Said, "Pound with a ball-peen hammer on whatever moves
Until it falls off, and that will usually do."
So I did and it did, and we two, my Jeep and I,
Became what amounted to legend in my little town.

But broke and down on my luck I sold the Green Beetle
(That was the name I had painted over its cowl).
It rolled down the street and out of my life forever,
Transformed over time to become an icon in dreams.
Alas, I grew up (so to speak), at least on the surface.
A wife and four children, a house, a mortgage and all
The accoutrements of the vaunted American Dream
I can offer as evidence that I'm a proper man.

Proper indeed! I've read Horace and Andrew Marvell,
And I know full well that a man can never go back,
That the past is utterly gone as sand through one's hands.
But knowing and wishing are surely quite different things,
And hardly a day has gone by when I haven't thought
About those sweet and shimmering, free-hearted years,
With me at the wheel of my Jeep up in timberline country,
In summer, with food box, and fly rod, and blankets and time.

So, now that forlorn little Jeep from Lyons lies scattered
In my shop where I'm carefully, lovingly resurrecting
Its phoenix from out of the ashes of fifty-one years.
(Yes, yes, I know it is I whom I seek to restore,
Blithe spirited boy who's ensconced in an old man's life.)
Although I know I can't have my life over again,
I'll yet wear bomber goggles, my cap on backwards,
And with the windshield strapped down, I'll urge my 3A

Up trails in the mountains, higher and higher, so high,
Until there'll be nothing before me but bright summer sky.


John Wickersham

Frances