Originally Posted by
jclay
Dunno if the ‘69 Country Squire would serve the well adjusted modern fellow but it did remarkably well for a maladjusted, rudderless and irresponsible high school fellow with whom I’m pretty familiar. “Late bloomer” sounds so much better.
Turns out that equipped with radials, pressure dropped a little and piloted by a pretty fair MX racer who’s speed/power/momentum management in sand was a point d’honneur, it could serve as a fair jeep on the two-rut sand road down to the Bob Sikes Cut at St George Island, long before the “Plantation” was developed. My surf buddies and I figured conditions might be better a few miles down the "road". It wasn’t; of course it wasn’t...it’s homogeneous Gulf Coast beach break; I stopped just a tad too far over the crest of a dune...though in retrospect I’m not sure getting turned around was possible. Oops. Might as well get wet and deal with it later. Later involved not an air drop down the dune face (this was when we had real dunes) but a damn steep one going into a big sweeping left-hander, all at decent speed to get through the soft pack and onto the hardpack near waters edge. Nearly worked but sadly the battery bounced around, shorted out, smoked some wiring insulation and I killed the engine; didn’t want to try a restart. Luckily a fisherman was coming back from the cut in his 4x and gave us a tow. And suddenly it was time to call my father and fess up; as the British say, he was not best pleased. Being someone who’d been trained to grind on the starter when needs must, and who had used that approach to get a relight of his F4U over Korea one fine day he said “try it”; fired right up. Turns out that while some insulation was a little the worse for wear it wasn’t terminal. I drove home, my stock price in the toilet; any further ramifications I don’t remember but they weren't terrible. He was generally a chill guy.
Miki Dora’s book is entitled “All For a Few Perfect Waves”; this was a case of “All For a Bunch of Really Crappy Waves”. As it happens my Karmann Ghia was a much better dune buggy, but the waves were rarely much better on SGI. And then there was the episode one weekend evening on the displaced threshold of TLH 36 but that's a story for another time, didn't involve the Country Squire and due to a fortunate lack of planning it worked out none the worse...well, that part worked out ok. It was a while before my judgement improved adequately.
Everybody, well an awful lot of the male members of the species, do some pretty stupid shit but I'd put my originality and creativity in that arena up against anybody else's, any time.