The first car I ever owned that I loved was an International Harvester Scout. The second, too. That one, I loved so much, I named my kid after it. It turns out a newly prominent American feels about the Scout maybe much the same way I do.
How’s that, you ask?
I was in college when I bought my first Scout—for $50 and a pair of high-top tennis shoes that my college roommate and co-owner coveted.
We only had that one, a ’78 Scout II, for a summer. Its combination of 13 m.p.g., a non-working gas gauge and a leaky tank didn’t deter us. Nor did the fact that the doors couldn’t be opened without the frame collapsing. And I actually felt extra cool, riding down the road with the roof off, casually contending with a foot of play in the steering wheel.
No, the landlord had it towed away, on account of it didn’t have any license plates.
I swore that when I was rich enough to have another car that wonderfully bad, I would.
When I was 30, I took a brick of cash out west with the same old college roommate, and peeled off $3,500 of it for a weary 1964 Scout 80, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My friend got jealous, and bought himself a brakeless 1970 Scout 800. In the answer to a math problem that’s too difficult to solve here (but can be heard on this episode of the podcast, True Road Trip Tales), he and I herded both those trucks, plus a new pick-up and two motorcycles from Albuquerque to Chicago, in two days, with only one vehicle on a U-haul trailer.
Determined to make my Scout my daily driver, I called Triple A eleven times that first year in Chicago, for a tow. I was banished from the premises of a half-dozen automotive repair shops by mechanics frustrated at the difficulty of aquiring parts and humiliated at their own inability to work out electrical problems. “International Harvester must have gotten a good deal on green wires in ’64!” one beleaguered mechanic bellowed. “All the goddamn wires are green!”
Eventually I found a guy who got it running more or less dependably, and I drove it through most of my 30s with sign on the doors: “Murray’s Freelance Writing,” along with my phone number. The business propositions I received were strictly off the wall. A church minister called to tell me he was involved in a love triangle and wouldn’t I love to write the screenplay. I pulled up in my Scout at the specified Denny’s at the appointed hour, but the preacher was a no-show. Love is fickle.
Driving that roofless Scout around Chicago year-round, I was up for anything. I felt anything was possible. I felt impervious, even in downpours or blizzards. My dad used to remark on my “nerve.” But it didn’t feel like nerve to me. It felt like life.
During this period, my wife became pregnant. We found out it was a girl, and there followed a month or two of tedious name-storming. “Rose” was the leading candidate, as I remember. Until one afternoon in a hotel room on a Scout trip into the countryside, I said, “What about … Scout?”
My wife looked at me.
“From ‘To Kill a Mockingbird‘?”
I might have just said, “Yeah.”
I remember thinking, “Yeah, but the truck, too.”
Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird is hard to live up to. But our kid turned out a lot like the truck: tough, strong, ready for adventure.
Once on a bike ride when she was six, Scout asked me, “Is scout a word?”
“Yep.”
“What does it mean?”
“A scout is someone who goes ahead of the group and sees what’s up there and comes back and tells everyone what to expect.”
“Why did you name me that?”
“I guess because that’s the kind of person I hope you’ll be.”
“Oh no, Dad!“
“What?”
“I’ll get lost!”
“No you won’t. You don’t have to go up ahead until you’re ready.”
“I don’t?”
“Besides, you’re already a scout. You’re already going ahead—you’re going to school without us, you’re going places in your mind that we don’t go, you’re riding your bike ahead of me all the time.”
“You’re right, Dad. I am.”
“Yes, honey, you are.”
And so she did—taking an untrod path in our family and becoming a Division I soccer player.
During her freshman year at Ohio University she came into a game and one of the ESPN announcers made me spit out my vodka lemonade when he said, “Fun fact about Scout Murray. Depending on which of her parents you ask, she was either named after the character in To Kill a Mockingbird, or after her dad’s old International Harvester truck.” The two announcers bantered on along that theme for awhile, until Scout made a run down the sideline and one of them muttered, “Well, she’s got more pace than your average International Harvester.”
By then I’d long ago sold my Scout 80—to my old college roommate’s brother, a great romantic who fantasized about driving it himself and then giving it back to my daughter when she graduated college someday. Or something ridiculous like that. Instead, he parked it outside his Cleveland home and let it sit for a decade, before his death. After which it sat for three years more. Until, with my daughter in college and an empty spot in my garage and in my heart, word came to me that the title had never been transferred out of my name and the moribund machine was mine if I wanted it.
At this writing, my Scout is at a service station in Cleveland, where the mechanic, after initially blustering that “anything can be fixed,” now seems to be procrastinating a bit. I’m not exactly breathing down his neck, because there’s no one week in my life when I want this rusty Tin Man—what no less a mechanical wizard than Oz called a “clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk”—back in my Chicago life.
But I dream about the Scout at least once a week. In my dreams, it’s always running surprisingly well. In one of the dreams, it could fly.
Meanwhile, my daughter will graduate college in a couple of years, and my wife keeps promising to spend what she saved us with her soccer scholarship on a car. She kind of likes trucks. And rumor has it that Volkswagen is coming out with a new EV Scout, any minute. Maybe we ought to have a look.
The last time my daughter was in a Scout was when she was four. I drove her to her preschool before embarking on the last long drive, the Lindbergh-ian solo to Cleveland.
“We’re gonna miss this stinky old truck aren’t we?” I said, referring to the noxious mixture of gas, oil, grease, antifreeze and exhaust that I smelled on my clothes for hours after a ride.
“It’s stinky. But it kind of smells yummy,” she said, and then fell silent for 30 seconds before adding thoughtfully, “It kind of smells like candy, or honey.”
And a tear came to my eye.
***
Well, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson: I never thought then that I might have the chance to vote for a fellow Scout-lover from my own political party to become vice president of the United States. But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret. I mean to use it.
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