Somewhere south of Emporia Kansas, after Interstate 35 joins up with the Kansas Turnpike, you come upon the Flint Hills. It’s a sudden thing. You round a corner, and there you are–some place different. As far as the eye can see is nothing but the undulating hills of tall grass prairie. I have seen the Sandhills of Nebraska, found them beautiful, and judged these their equal.

When we came upon them, they seemed to stretch all the way west to where the sun was taking its final glance on the day. “We” was my father and I, mid last week, making a long run down to northern Texas to look at 1962 Ford Galaxie Two Door Hardtop.

If you enter these hills like we did, on the Turnpike headed south, then immediately when you enter them you can look to the west and find one hill, a few miles away, standing a little higher than its counterparts and with sharper features. Looking at it I realized hundreds of years ago Indians use to ride their horses to the top simply to say they did. Some years later the white man that replaced them did the same thing, for exactly the same reason. Today the descendants of that white man and, I suppose, the descendants of those Indians drive past and make the same journey in their mind.

The vast majority of these descendants don’t have a horse and wouldn’t know what to do with one if they did, but this isn’t what keeps them from the aforementioned hill. They don’t go because the vast majority of us believe we simply don’t have the time.

A 1962 Ford Galaxie Two Door Hardtop was the first car for my father and his brother, Jack. A man whom owned the car dealership in Winterset had bought one for his wife.  Then, in the middle of 1963, in order to compete in NASCAR, Ford came out with the Fastback. Today it’s referred to as a ‘1963 and a half.’ His wife wanted one of those instead. Her ’62 had a console and bucket seats. This was the cat’s meow at the time, at least before the fastback anyway, and Dad and Jack now had a car which sported them.

I had been looking for one for Dad, and I had some hope of finding one so he and Mom could get some enjoyment out of it yet this fall. I found several listed here and there online. This particular one I came across in a print ad in Hemmings Motor News. What caught my attention was the “new paint and interior,” as well as the price. The car was listed as being located in the town of Little Elm, Texas, forty miles north of Dallas. There was no picture.

I called the owner, who said he had just listed it, and he gave me all the information his ad already contained.

“This car has new paint and a new interior. Why, it’s ready to go.”

“What size of engine does it have in it?”

“A 390, I think. No, wait a minute. I’m not sure on that. It might be a 352. I can’t tell them apart. It has the console, though, and bucket seats.”

“How does it run?”

“It runs good, but it has been sitting awhile. That’s why I figured I ought to get rid of it.”

“Much body putty go into it before the paint job?”

“No.   Just a little, you know. Paint has a blemish or two. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty sharp. Why if you saw it, I’m just positive you’d like it. And the interior, why in my opinion that’s the sharpest interior Ford ever had in a car. Seats have never been sat in.”

“Could you send me pictures?”

“You bet. You got one of them emails? My son can send you pictures.”

The pictures came the next morning and seemed to support his previous testimony. It was 10 o’clock, and I called him back.

“What were you wanting for this car again?”

I had his ad in front of me, and he quoted me a price $500 below what was printed there.

“How would you want paid?”

“Well you could send a check, and I’d hold the car for you. You could come down and load it any time after it cleared. A cahiers check would be better, and of course there is always cash.”

“All right,” I said, as excited as a boy that got his date to the prom. I hung up and called Dad.

“Too wet to do much of anything today isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Come over here, I’ve got something for you to look at.”

When he arrived, I showed him the pictures, and we both agreed the old thing didn’t look too bad.

“Looks like the bumpers have some rust, probably have to re-chrome them. It would look nicer with some sharper wheels under it.”

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Well, we are not going to know anything until we see it. Let’s get a trailer, pack a bag, drive most of the way down there this afternoon and drive back tomorrow. It’s ten and a half hours away. We could make Oklahoma City by tonight.”

We got away at 3:00 in the afternoon, and made the outskirts of Oklahoma City by 11:30 that night. We ate breakfast early at the hotel, and the only company to be had was an elderly couple who were traveling from Pella, IA. I mention them because later that morning, thinking I was making good time to Texas, we were passed by a car with Iowa plates, and a couple of familiar senior citizens in it. Since I couldn’t beat them, we joined them, and followed them up and over the Arbuckle Mountains and into Texas.

Little Elm is only a few miles from Interstate 35, and I was convinced that I must have drove past the house, when we saw the rounded tail lights sticking out of an attached garage on a home right on the reservoir. As I pulled in, a man in his early 80s emerged to greet us.

“You guys have traveled a long ways. You’ve only got a few more feet to go. She’s right over here. Dad took the driver’s side of the car, and I took the passenger’s. As I rounded the rear corner, my heart sank. The passenger side of the car rolled like the Flint Hills of earlier. When he said it had only a little putty, he meant in comparison to all the putty that was ever made, he only used a five gallon bucket full. The new red paint was new 15 years ago, and it was ample enough to make me think someone had applied it with a roller. When I got to the passenger door, I opened it, and was greeted by a rusty vise grip attached where the window handle should have been, a much sought after option for 1962. Inside, lay various pieces of trim still not attached yet. Some appeared to have been missing all together.

The console was there, but it was recently installed.  To the steering column someone had affixed a piece of tin, hiding where the shifting lever had been.  The indicator was still there, and they had applied bright red paint to it in order to camouflage it with the rest of the interior.  It blended in as much as if I had smacked my thumb with a hammer, and laid its swollen carcass on the steering wheel.

My head emerged to find Dad about ready to pop the trunk. I joined him and found the missing interior trim lying next to the spare. He reached up and pulled the carpeting back near the passenger rear wheel well, and was greeted by a tarry looking goo, which I was certain I could put my finger through and check the tread on the rear wheel.

“I think we should let this car go,” Dad said. It seemed like the thing to do. I only wished we were letting it go off a cliff with the owner inside it, and yet for some reason there is always this desire to hide our disappointment.

By this time the car’s owner had pulled up his 4wd golf cart and told Dad to hop in. He wanted to show him the rest of the cars he had out back. His son was with him, and as the owner and Dad headed off, he stayed to visit with me. At some point I figured we had gotten to the part where they killed us one by one, hoped it was cash and not a cashier’s check in the pickup, put us in it, and rolled it into the lake.

My last meal was going to be a continental breakfast consisting of a dried up biscuit with cold gravy over the top. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it except hope to punch the guy before he shot me. But lo and behold, here came Dad and the owner back. Dad must have told him we had opted for the cashier’s check.

Now most would think a man would be disappointed right about now, but we were only mildly so. The car was a P.O.S. No man is afraid of buying a P.O.S. In fact a P.O.S. gives a man some pride when he relates to the story to others, for inherent in the story is the fact that he was smart enough to recognize it. No, what a man is truly afraid of is a lemon. This is a P.O.S. in sheep’s clothing, which he purchased anyway, and is now stuck with. That is disappointment.

We stopped for lunch at a neat little BBQ joint we had passed not far from the Interstate. We licked the wounds of whatever slight damage had been made to our pride while we ate. I suggested to Dad that we had an envelope full of cash and could always pawn the neighbor’s trailer for pistols in our boots, and begin a life of crime. He frowned on it. It seemed like the thing to do.

Driving home, no longer preoccupied with the car we hadn’t seen yet, it left one’s mind free to gravitate towards other things. Mine drifted to the armadillos, which always greeted me along the side of the road, four feet in the air, from northern Texas to central Kansas. I thought if they could tag them, the Department of Transportation might save some money on mileposts.

Many people think these armadillos are dead, but that’s because they don’t know the armadillo’s ancestry. Which is a shame, because it is really not hard to guess at. You can just look at one and see the armadillo is the result of a brief love affair between some ancient snapping turtle and a possum. From the turtle it inherited its armored shell, and from the possum its remarkable ability to play dead.

Stopping for gas, it let a local behind the counter know that I was wise to this little known fact.

“We’re from Iowa,” I said, “and boy I tell you what, I thought a possum could play dead, but they don’t have anything on these armadillos. How do you suppose they do that?”

“I think getting hit by a car has something to do with it,” he said.

Of course it does, I thought.  Aren’t the best performances always those after a tragedy?