2 Fast, 2 Splinker Sprock

Requiem for a Galaxie

The Monday Night Car Show returned to downtown Lapeer, which means that for a few hours every week this summer, the city once again became the unofficial capital of men explaining things they absolutely needed to explain, but they get to point at cool things and high five strangers with cool machinery.

I know this because I came back. It took an entire year. Partly because of winter being a cold frigid asshole of misery, but mostly because, holy shit, those people like to talk and my social battery isn’t at full life these days.

A year ago I wandered into the same stretch of sidewalk with a Canon A2e and a complete inability to identify almost anything I was looking at. I photographed anyway, nodded a lot, and left feeling like I had accidentally attended a meeting for a club I would never fully understand. Twelve months later I returned with a Ricoh 500G rangefinder, Arista EDU Ultra 400 in one pocket, and Kodak Ultramax in the other. Different camera, same problem.

I was more confident this time, though not in any meaningful way. I still don’t know anything about cars. I just look more comfortable being wrong now, and felt more adept with a rangefinder and my ability to talk to strangers because of all the podcast conversations.

The moment I stepped into the street, I was immediately swallowed by conversations already in motion.

Original carburetor.

Numbers matching.

Factory option.

Three-speed.

Don’t tell the wife.

These phrases drift through the air like a language everyone else agreed to learn at birth. I don’t understand most of it, but I respect the commitment.

One man spent a long time explaining a modification he had made to his engine. I nodded at the appropriate intervals, squinted at the right moments, and tried to look like someone who could distinguish between admiration and comprehension.

“Wow,” I said.

He seemed happy with that.

I was too.

The strange thing about coming back after a year is that nothing really changes except you. Downtown still looks the same as it has since 1994, and the same lawn chairs appear in the same places. The same New Balance sneakers move in slow circuits through downtown, farmers tans glowing from people who have spent decades outdoors without sunscreen or regret, and might have never heard the phrase melanoma.

(Note: I wanted to cover bike night this year, but a few old people and one complete asshole restaurant owner complained about the noise, so they took it away.)

The same wives from last year, and maybe a few new ones, stand nearby listening to their husband’s exact same stories twelve times. The husbands have built a mythology and routine that the wives are all too familiar with. It’s all a part of the show.

At one point, someone asked about my camera. I held up the Ricoh like it meant something. He stared at it. I stared back. We both waited for the other person to provide context that never arrived.

“It’s a rangefinder from the ’70s,” I eventually said, as if that clarified anything at all.

He nodded politely

“Like a Leica?”

Sure, man, I guess. In the way that a Ford Escort is a Mach 1 Mustang, but alright, it’s like a fucking Leica.

We reached full understanding: mutual confusion, but acceptance of each other’s weird ass obsessions.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I realized I’ve spent the last year listening to photographers talk in exactly the same way. This must be what it’s like when people hear us talking about shutter speed, ISO, Reciprocity Failure and the phrase “Chapter 11 Bankruptcy”

From the outside, it’s all indistinguishable, and so is this. It’s all code words and secret nods.

The only real difference is that their obsession smells like gasoline, and mine smells like fixer. I might trade those smells if I had the chance, but it’s a toss up. I do love me some gasoline and dying brain cells.

I worked through the rolls of Arista EDU Ultra and Kodak Ultramax, wandering past cars that ranged from perfect restorations to things that looked like they had survived multiple economic recessions and refused to die out of spite. This is Michigan, and there is an ample amount of rust to go around, but we just pretend like inspections aren’t a thing and keep firing down the road at 90 mph.

The perfect ones were impressive, the broken ones were interesting. That’s usually how it goes with everything, isn’t it, even with cameras?

At the end of the night I still didn’t know anything useful about engines, transmissions, or whatever a crankshaft is supposed to be doing down there, but I had seen enough to understand the important part was never really the cars.

It was the stories and the community, and I’m not sure that’s any different from anything else I do. In fact, I’m positive it’s not.