Moore - Another Fine Mess: Across the USA in a Ford Model T

Lacking even the most basic mechanical knowhow, Tim Moore sets out to cross Trumpland USA in an original Model T Ford. Armed only with a fan belt made of cotton, wooden wheels and a trunkload of wise-ass Limey liberal gumption, his route takes him exclusively through Donald-voting counties, meeting the everyday folks who voted red along the way.

He meets a people defined by extraordinary generosity, willing to shift heaven and earth to keep him on the road. And yet, this is clearly a nation in conflict with itself: citizens tooling up in reaction to ever-increasing security fears; a healthcare system creaking to support sugar-loaded soda lovers; a disintegrating rust belt all but forgotten by the warring media and political classes.

With his trademark blend of slapstick humour, affable insight and butt-clenching peril, Tim Moore invites us on an unforgettable road trip through Trumps America. Buckle up!

Tim Moores writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Sunday Times and Esquire. He is the author of Gironimo!, French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps, Nul Points, I Believe In Yesterday and You Are Awful (But I Like You). He lives in London.

ALSO BY TIM MOORE

The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold

French Revolutions

Do Not Pass Go

Spanish Steps

Nul Points

I Believe in Yesterday

You Are Awful (But I Like You)

Gironimo!

To M8 and P8

No blasphemy. Say piss and tits all you like, but no Jesus Christ or God Almighty. Im serious.

Ross Lillekers pan-flat Derbyshire tones hung portentously in the bright blue Virginia morning. Oh, and dont use the C word. Theyre not big fans of that one over here.

It was the first Sunday in July, and we were outside a big white house in the manicured woodlands of Charlottesvilles deepest suburbia. Behind us, on a driveway delicately strewn with pine needles, stood a tall, thin, black motor car of startling antiquity. It had been a while, though much too short a while, since Ross reversed this frail relic out of the 30-foot trailer he now walked back past, en route to the huge, squat pick-up that towed it.

Drink plenty of water, you get really dried out driving them old things. Ross paused by the pick-ups door. Sixteen years in Texas had done nothing to blunt that Chesterfield accent. He climbed in and lowered the window. Right, reckon youre all good. Ill be off, then. Then he winked with his good eye, the one that hadnt been taken out some years back by a rivet gun, fired up a brutish diesel engine and eased the colossal rig away.

I watched it disappear over a tree-topped brow, then listened as the roar faded, leaving me alone with birdsong and the distant drone of a lawnmower. That pick-up was the manliest vehicle I had ever been in, its crew-cab rear seat cluttered with greasy wrenches and boxes of rattling ironmongery, one of which Id gamely attempted to employ as a pillow on our non-stop drive through the night. Fifteen hours earlier, Ross had picked me up outside an airport motel in Newark, New Jersey. By then hed already driven almost 2,000 miles from Texas, having collected that tall, thin, black motor car from its previous keeper, just south of Houston. Bob Kirk was ninety-three years old, and so was the car he had owned for the last fifty-one of them. A 1924 Ford Model T Touring, now gazing warily at its new custodian through wide-set, chrome-lidded eyes. It looks like its about to start talking, my wife had said when Id shown her a photo Ross had emailed over some weeks before. Perhaps it might start right now: Hey, Charlottesville! Thought Id just let you all know how much Im looking forward to this candy-ass Limey clownshoe trying to drive me six thousand miles across the whole damn country. Piss and tits, my friends, piss and tits.

Our journey was to begin here by bureaucratic misadventure. Some states allow foreigners to register cars, some to insure them, but none permit both. In desperation Id contacted Miles, who lived in the big white house behind me. The partner of my American cousin Patricia, Miles had made two critical mistakes. His first was to mention an interest in classic motoring during our first and only encounter, in London the previous summer. His second was to live in Virginia, extremely close to the east coast, which was my intended starting point. In any event, Miless consequent feats of trusting generosity had sent him to the brink of reckless blind faith. Id bought the Model T (for $14,000), but in the eyes of the law and the GEICO insurance company, it was his. Learning to drive a T in confident safety was a process that by general consensus demanded a full year or a thousand miles, whichever came first. Any mishap during my protracted apprenticeship would have profound negative consequences for Miless future insurance prospects. Even for his future liberty, in the worst-case scenarios that now luridly suggested themselves: a steaming tangle of old black metal wrapped around a bus stop, with a dozen elderly legs twitching beneath it; a tall, thin hole in a schoolhouse wall.

Anyway, Miles and Patricia were on holiday in the Bahamas. Id been let into their house by a teenage nephew, and walked out of it with an insurance certificate and a set of licence plates: 286GQ in an angular vintage font, with ANTIQUE VEHICLE VA alongside in smaller letters. With dry lips and a fluttering stomach I now bent down and screwed them on over Bob Kirks battered tin plates. 24FORD TX on the rear, just beneath the spare wheel bolted to the cars upright back end. On the front, behind the starting crank that drooped from the radiator like a thermometer from a patients mouth, his poignant novelty plate: Too old to work, too young to die, so here we sit, just Mom and I.

The dewy grass sparkled, more unseen mowers joined the symphony and a pair of ponytailed women in lilac vests and shorts jogged smoothly past. This Pleasant Valley Sunday was the calm before the storm, and I spun it out with a detailed appraisal of my aged charge. Old man Kirk was clearly a bit of a showman. The spindly wire wheels had been painted dark purple, girdled in flashy whitewall tyres that lent the little car an unlikely touch of the Ant Hill Mobs. Curlicued red coach lines embellished the doors and those leaping front fenders. The black paintwork had been buffed to a gaudy shine, and the outboard chrome headlamps winked in the morning sun. So too did the scripted Ford logo, making a jaunty tombstone of the radiator.

My personal effects were packed in two holdalls. I heaved one on to the rear seat, and wedged the other into the iron storage trellis that sat on one of the running-boards, its latticed sides recalling the concertina gate of an antique elevator. Then I walked slowly around the car, struggling to recall key points any points from the brisk tutorial Ross had delivered before he left. As a global authority on Model Ts, and the veteran of several mammoth tours in them, Ross was the best-qualified tutor I could have wished for. But the forces of exhaustion and jabbering panic had been fighting it out in my head as he spoke, and very little had been retained. Something under there had to be oiled daily, something over here greased weekly. I pulled aloft the left-hand half of the hinged bonnet and frowned intently at the cast-iron, red-rubber innards. There wasnt a lot in there at least. The most conspicuous component, a big metal carafe bolted on top of the engine, was the horn. This let forth a tremendous