From Border to Border: Crossing the Continent by Land Rover

Introduction

Starting an expedition requires planning, faith, and ignorance. When I set off on a trans-continental expedition in a vintage Land Rover, I was strong on the second two.

In 1998 I went on an expedition to celebrate Land Rovers 50th anniversary which too me across Canada, south to Mexico off-road, and back to the East Coast of the U.S.. I was 22 years old and had as co-drivers my brother, father, and girlfriend. Along the way I traversed some of the continent’s most spectacular scenery, discovered that ghost towns don’t have to be old, and found camaraderie with a group of people as varied as the landscape. I spent a good deal of time under my truck trying to keep it alive, and spent every last drop of luck which almost got me to the finish line. I could say it required bravery to undertake such a trip in a truck older than me and laughably unprepared for the strains that would be put on it, but ignorance is a wonderful thing.

Chapter One – In Africa

Expedition: the word is evocative to anyone who has seen safari shows on public television, and central to the expedition is a Land Rover laden with adventure gear bumping through golden savannah grass on the African plain, while giraffes lope against a backdrop of acacia trees.

I grew up in that very image as a young child. When I was three, my father became the bureau chief for Time Magazine's East Africa section, based in Nairobi, Kenya. So in the late 1970s, our family moved to Kenya. I was so young that I have only snapshot memories, indistinguishable from the faded square photos with the rounded corners we have tucked away in an album. I remember our housekeeper Elizabeth amazing my brother and me by putting a lit match all the way in her mouth and extinguishing it with her breath. These are the things that stick with you years later when you tell someone you lived in Africa, not the magnificent scenery or rich culture. There are pictures of our family camping beneath acacia trees with snowy Kilimanjaro floating in the distance, yet I only remember our local swimming pool, a meniscus between two worlds of sky and water. I like to think that despite my threadbare memories of that time, somewhere deep in my psyche I was absorbing everything—the sounds of the African plains at night, the surprised stare of crowned cranes, the way my brother carried a chameleon on his head and terrified local tribesmen who thought he was a witch—and that these buried experiences shape me today.

Our vehicle at the time was a white two-door Range Rover which, despite seeming the natural choice in a former British colony, was constantly breaking down. Once after it spent weeks in the shop in a convalescent fog, it was finally ready for pickup. My mother drove it out of the mechanics’ shed only to have it sputter to a stop in a busy traffic circle a few miles down the road. In the sanitized version of the story she tells, she attempted to beat it into scrap metal with her clog, but I suspect there were more fireworks to which the family has never been privy. However the Range Rover survived only to suffer much heavier abuse. On one of our camping trips, a mother elephant and her baby came strolling into camp and started sniffing around the truck. We huddled in our tent and peered out the tent flap while the mother nudged the side of the truck a couple times, doubtless enticed by the peanut butter sandwiches in the cooler, then managed to open the rear liftgate with her trunk. While she reached in for some food, the baby managed to get hold of a pressurized gas canister and popped it into her mouth. If it burst and the baby were injured, the mother would have looked around in a rage for something to trample, and our billowy canvas tent would have fit the bill nicely. We would then have been nothing more than residue between mom elephant’s toes, to be scraped off on some savannah grass. Luckily, the baby was just teething and dropped the canister without incident and the elephants left. I don’t know if the trunk lid was ever the same after that, but it would make an excellent slogan for Land Rover, Push-button technology easy enough for an elephant.

My father also had a dark green five-door Land Rover in which he would bounce all across East Africa on assignment. I have a black-and-white picture of him sitting with his friends by a lakeside with feathery acacia trees framing a cozy camp with the trusty Land Rover right in the middle of things. I also have another picture of them standing around the Rover with the bonnet up and my father lying in the dust underneath, undoubtedly swearing. Maybe it was my destiny to get in that picture, to break the tether of civilization with a truck as rugged as the countryside. I’ve no doubt my time in Africa planted a seed in my mind that bloomed seventeen years later.

Chapter Two –Discovering the World of Land Rover

In my adolescence, my family had taken a driving expedition to the Great American West, but it wasn’t in a Land Rover. No, we drove out in a two wheel drive Volkswagen Vanagon, a model thankfully modernized from the wheeled water pipe of the 70s, but not much more powerful. Our bus took us out to Wyoming and back home with hardly a mechanical problem. Five people and all our gear fit easily, with my brother Seth, my sister Samantha, and I each having a spare seat to stretch out in the back. As we wound through the mountains and prairies of Wyoming it awakened that seed in me planted back in Africa. Our VW had comfort, space, capability, and most importantly, was self-contained with four tires below, a roof above, and some seats in between. There we were exploring fantastic scenery in a vehicle whose pedigree was carting around stoned hippies, not rock-crawling in Karakoram, yet it took us, as Bilbo Baggins would say, there and back again.

My first foray into vehicle expeditions was the budding of a romance and was brought to that germination stage by many books in childhood about exploration and adventure. One story stands out as the epitome of self-reliance and adventure: Scuppers the Sailor Dog. In it a dog realizes that his thirst for adventure can only be slaked at sea, so he gets a boat and strikes out on his own. Inside his little boat is a hook for his spyglass, a hook for his pants, a hook for his rope, a hook for his coat, a tiny sink, and a bunk for sleeping in. The illustration of Scuppers asleep in his bunk, snug under blankets while the emerald-green sea boils outside his brass porthole, instilled in me a love for the self-reliant adventurer. Properly provisioned, an adventurer only needs a proper vehicle, a level head, and a lack of fear that keeps most people in their houses at harbor while you strike out into the storm. Like Scuppers, I was born for a life in the great open, and a vehicle would be my ship, but the great question that consumed my early years was: what vehicle would be worthy? As a child I was convinced space travel would be commonplace by the time I got my driver’s license, and in my early teens I’d embarked on an ambitious plan to build my own airplane. But like Scuppers, none of these seemed right until that trip in the VW Vanagon, which narrowed my decision process down to wheeled vehicles. But how to choose?

In college, I was avoiding my classwork and stumbled across the personal website of Bill Wood, a quiet man from the Boston area who decided he needed a little more adventure, so he bought a Land Rover, outfitted it and drove around the Northeast. Where he went was not nearly as intriguing as how he gushed about his truck. He sounded like a mother with a young Little League champion who’d just won the spelling bee and was submitting college applications at age seven.

As I searched I began to uncover an enormous network of people throughout the world who, like Bill Wood, were fanatical about Land Rovers. There were scores of personal websites where people had pictures of their trucks splayed across the screen - Here's me and my Rover in front of our house, isn't it cute? And here's the two of us driving on the beach. Darling! I found electronic bulletin boards where people would talk endlessly about Land Rover minutiae. There were parts suppliers, restoration companies, classic Rover dealers, clubs, rallies, and on and on. The whole thing smelled of a cult, a group of people who couldn't do anything but talk about their trucks. And drive them around. And fix them. And take pictures, lots of pictures. What odd people, I thought. I want to be one of them.

When I get an idea in my head I gnaw at it like a starving chipmunk going after corn on the cob. After a brief glimpse at this passionate group of folks with bushy eyebrows, muddy boots, and greasy hands, I knew if I were going to buy any vehicle, it would have to be a Land Rover. At this point I was 50% interested in buying the vehicle, and 50% hooked on the idea of membership in this incredible fraternity of owners and enthusiasts. There is something to be said for being part of a group, and whether you put on a nylon jersey and scream at your TV on Sunday, or gather in the church basement every Tuesday night to talk about your porcelain doll collection, people love being part of something. I was at the age where I was trying to define who I was, and because of my love of the outdoors, adventure, and travel, I saw the Land Rover cult as my best shot at not being an outcast because I preferred muddy boots to polished wingtips.

One afternoon several weeks into my obsession, my older brother Seth and I were driving through the green wooded piedmont of Virginia, stuck in the car for an hour or two while arrow-straight highway disappeared behind us. I prattled on about NATO-type pintle hooks and Salisbury rear axle casings, having just learned these terms a few hours earlier online. He nodded and made the appropriate humming noises. I’d brought along a catalog from Rovers North, a parts supplier and hub of all things Land Rover. Based up in Vermont, Rovers North sent out a newsletter once a month with parts specials, classified ads, and short articles. I would read it cover to cover before I’d finished walking back from the mailbox, and scoured the parts lists like an archaeologist running his hands over inscrutable hieroglyphics. Like a hormonal teen who ventures onto pornographic websites, I wasn’t exactly sure what these things were, but I was dying to find out. By the end of the drive I knew I’d be buying a Land Rover or else I’d burst.

With my limited funds, I knew I could only afford one of the old Land Rovers, the legendary Series trucks. If you’ve seen any nature show set in Africa, you’ve seen a Series Land Rover. If you’ve seen magazine copy of a safari-ready truck emerging from a muddy river with a mustachioed manly man at the wheel, you’ve seen a Series Land Rover. Though it looks at home in dripping jungles and cresting sand dunes in the Sahel, it was made in the genteel countryside of England by some blokes who likely wore moleskin trousers and tweed hunting vests. After World War II, brothers Maurice and Spencer Wilks thought some English farmers might like a vehicle like the American Jeep they’d seen driven by GIs. Their first attempt, the Series One, was built from aluminum, which was collecting dust in massive heaps in post-war England, now that the demand for fresh Hurricanes and Spitfires was dwindling. Perhaps they’d couldn’t decide on a target market, or maybe saw this truck as more of a tractor, but they made the startling and unorthodox decision to put the steering wheel in the middle of the truck, thus inconveniencing drivers on both sides of the pond. Fairly soon they realized their mistake and moved the wheel to the right side, evincing a sigh of relief from terrified farmers trying to overtake lorries. Those first series Land Rovers were painted Army green, not because it was the color of 1947 and was trending well among 18-24 year olds, but because there were warehouses full of leftover paint from the warplane manufacturing industry. And it was okay if the paint job was less than thorough because the truck’s bodies were aluminum and would never rust. These two design decisions born from necessity were lucky moments of happenstance that would lead to the world’s greatest truck.

The first Land Rovers were built in Solihull, England, a place to Land Rover fans as Maranello is to Ferrari aficionados. The Wilks brothers envisioned a small utility truck that was a tractor in car’s clothing and the first Land Rovers sported a power take-off, a way to use the truck’s small petrol engine to power everything from a harvester to a portable saw mill. Today you see power take-offs on tractors and utility trucks, not off-road machines capable of the Dakar Rally. Nowhere in the first Land Rover advertising were there lines that sang of the Land Rover’s rugged looks and off-road pedigree, penned by ad men who exuded aftershave and nicotine. The early trucks were meant to be tools, like an pneumatic brad nailer or a tire iron, something to be used as a means to an end. Yet once Welsh potato farmers found they could drive off the farm, ferry across the Channel, and continue unchecked across Europe and Asia to the colonies in India and Siam, things changed. A Land Rover became THE vehicle to take you anywhere. The reason people think Land Rover is the safari truck is because it is, full stop.

Starting in 1947 with the Series One Land Rover, the Series Land Rovers family spanned almost forty years and set the gold standard for utility trucks, and until 1984 each new version of the truck progressed through the Series II, IIa, and finally the creative Series III. After the Series III, there was a short-lived Stage One, then came the excitingly-named 90 and 110. These English farmers didn’t know marketing from a hole in the wall but they absolutely dominated the field of off-road vehicles. By the early Seventies someone thought it might be good to, terribly sorry chaps, perhaps put a name on the newest truck in development, a radical departure from the blocky Series trucks in that it looked more like a tall car and had coil springs and luxury refinements. Their technologically superior and brilliantly designed truck was dubbed the Range Rover, a name it keeps to this day. After 50 years of building trucks, Land Rover only had four model families: Land Rover, Range Rover, Discovery, and Defender. Please compare this with the test-market whizzes at Toyota who can vomit out a dozen names a year that remind one of mono-named supermodels with large sunglasses and mile-long legs: Cressida, Venza, Previa. The Land Rover Series III, however, has a name reminiscent of the Mark VIII Spitfire, a rugged war machine built with rivets and hammered aluminum, by workers with stogies clamped in their teeth and sweat pouring down their backs. Who can argue that Series III is a good deal more intriguing than car model names that sound like Esperanto throw-aways: Elantra, Camry, and Cee’d?

It was settled, then. I would buy an old Land Rover that rattled like a war machine and looked as if it’d fought back Rommel in North Africa then went on to deliver milk to Northumberland farmers for a half century before coming into my ownership. There was one small catch. Land Rover stopped importing the series trucks into the United States in the mid seventies, and it was the late nineties. The newest truck I’d be able to find would be as old or older than me. Never mind that it was easier to find a recent-model Land Rover Defender in Ougadougou, or Cairo, or Sumatra, than it was to find one in the largest car market in the world. Never mind that I’d not so much as changed the oil in a car, and didn’t know the difference between a distributor and alternator, other than one distributed and the other alternated. In love, who is to say that practicality has any place? I was smitten by the Series III Land Rover’s lunchbox shape, surprised-look round headlights, tire on the hood, and sliding windows.

But how to find such a vehicle? Through several phone calls to the local Land Rover dealership, I eventually found someone who actually cared about the pedigree of what he was selling, and he put me in touch with a guy who helped run a local Land Rover club. His name was Dave, he lived within a half hour of me and told me he owned a Series Land Rover. I could practically smell the axle grease and warm ale through the phone. We talked at length about buying old Land Rovers and he gave me lots of good tips like checking out the starter solenoid, banging on the frame with a hammer to find cancerous areas of rust, and other important things that I wrote down in a notebook and promptly forgot. Plus, I didn’t know what a starter solenoid was or what it did, so I knew my purchasing decision would be made mostly on looks and feeling, just like any hopeless summer romance ought to be. Ignorance: check.

Chapter Three – Falling in Love

Finally my moment came to see a Land Rover up close. When Dave, a member of the local Land Rover club, recommended that I come look at his truck, I was out the door before he hung up the phone. I parked in front of his house and waited for him to arrive, slicking down my hair and checking my breath like a prom date. It was a big moment, my first chance to see a Series Land Rover since I’d lived in Africa. Returning to my metaphor about a teen finding internet porn, looking at pictures online is nothing like seeing it in person, and when down the street rolled exactly what I imagined yet more than I could have hoped I thought, I’m all in. Dave’s truck was a light pastel green lunchbox with a narrow two-section windshield, a blunt square body, all sorts of things bolted onto it and knobby tires connecting it to the road. In today's world, we get used to cars that are slick and shiny with no protuberances, like a used bar of soap. But Land Rovers are like hobo backpacks. The more that you can bolt, strap, glue, or otherwise tack onto the exterior, the better. This truck that I saw looked like a working truck. It could have just driven straight off the savannahs of East Africa. I was in love.

Dave was a couple of years older than me and seemed like a real mechanic, mostly because his hands were always greasy, his fingernails black crescents that acted as prybars and screwdrivers. He spoke slowly and with determination, traits useful when you drive a heavy truck with only eighty horsepower. We poked around his truck and he showed me the things that he had done, obscure mechanical things I absolutely had to check when buying a Rover, and other details which flew unobstructed through both ears. Then he offered to take me for a ride. As he and I drove beside the Potomac River in his Land Rover with the engine humming, the front vents open, and the windows slid forward, I couldn’t stifle the huge smile on my face. We were in our own little bubble of expedition-land.

As we drove around, he described how one operates a series Land Rover. For one thing, there were four levers sticking out of the transmission tunnel. It brought to mind Han Solo’s Millenium Falcon, a utilitarian rust-bucket that, much like a Land Rover, was operated by pulling on a variety of levers and cursing, and which spent most of its time not working properly.

As we bounced through Northern Virginia, he noticed a shimmy in his right front tire when we went over bumps. Whoa, that doesn't feel right at all. I didn't notice it – to me, the whole truck shimmied, but I didn't have the Rover-owner diagnostic skill of discerning certain rattles and bumps from others. He seemed worried about it and wanted to stop at a friend's house to check it out, and said he had just redone the wheel bearings. He might as well have said he had realigned the nuclear distribution armature. I nodded and said he might be right, could be the bearings, but I doubt he heard me over the engine and the roar of the tires. If he’d said he needed to drive down to Florida to pick up a part I would’ve happily ridden along. On that summer day in the safari truck, I would have gone anywhere.

We pulled into a long driveway with two old Land Rovers squatted at the end. Just seeing the Rovers parked together made me smile, like seeing