The Camel
HAD she been one of those clownish affairs so often sported by highschool and college boys of the late twenties, had she been a first-stripped-down-then-grotesquely-ornamented Model T, with electric doorbells, a siren, three horns, "The Road to Roam" or similar legend printed on one door and dice and gin bottles stenciled on the others, had she been one of those artifacts (like flapping galoshes, hip flasks, and raccoon coats) by which the young of John Held Jr.'s day tried hard to convince themselves and everyone else they were Flaming Youth - then one would hardly take the trouble to write about her. Too many of the same.
But The Camel, which fought its battles with undergraduates, the police, and the New England weather in the early thirties was, I believe, more nearly unique than most Model T's of any time. My roommate brought her home one fall day in 1931 from somewhere in the wilds of Vermont and promptly extracted $7.50 from my desk drawer as my exact halfshare in the purchase price. After we had registered her and written home, Darwin's father announced that, like it or not, we were going to carry liability insurance. A year's premium cost us three times our initial investment, a fact which bore witness to a deplorable lack of faith, on the part of the insurance company, in The Camel and the camel drivers.
But perhaps it is just as well that the agents never saw her in action, for TheCamel had no neutral. I mean, none whatever. It was possible, of course, to stall her (though it went against our grain to descend to that trick), or to switch off the ignition and come to a fairly abrupt halt, or to juggle the gears, first a little reverse, then a little ahead, then reverse, then ahead, and so on, keeping The Camel in a most uncertain and nervous state of equilibrium, but this hesitation-waltz was exceedingly wearing for The Camel, the local constabulary, pedestrians, and even Darwin and me.
Trying to start her and come through the process with no fractures was even worse. Self-starting was simply out of the question, especially in cold weather, and we could not park her on hills all the time (as it was, Darwin had to rescue her once from the clutches of the Hanover police who had hauled her off to the dump, presumably as a piece of refuse obstructing Route 10 traffic). Cranking was the only method left. It wasn't bad when someone was at the controls, but when either of us was alone the problem was almost impossible. Only a person bent on suicide would have cranked The Camel with no one in the driver's seat to put his foot on the reverse pedal.
Darwin, who was strongly endowed with Yankee ingenuity, albeit he hailed from Ohio, chewed this problem over in his English major's brain and concluded (nay, demonstrated) that the thing to do was to jack up one rear wheel, grab the thing by the spokes, twirl it, and away she would go. But supposing a fellow were alone, how was he going to pick up the jack? And anyway, we didn't have a jack; Darwin had borrowed a physics professor's (our landlord's) for the demonstration. What we finally did, of course, was invade the dramatic club's carpenter shop and build one of two-by-fours. It was six feet long, shaped like a somewhat flattened big dipper, with a slight bend at the fulcrum, jointed, braced, and bolted. Moreover it worked.
Starting The Camel now involved the following steps: (1) Place jack under rear axle and bear down until The Camel tilted back (and slightly up) on the jack's now upright stanchion; (2) retard spark and gas; (3) spin the rear wheel—forward, that is. When TheCamel, driverless, had started, and she very often did, one dove for the now toppled jack, wedged it firmly between the spare tire and the body of the moving Camel, vaulted over the back into the tonneau (no top, of course), took a low hurdle to the front seat, and corrected The Camel's direction before two wheels were over the curb. One wheel over the curb was par for the course.
To practice this technique, Darwin and I, with possible emergencies in mind, chose a street that separated his fraternity house from the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. But we had no accidents, and within an hour or two felt ourselves competent at solo starting.
The campus by this time was used to The Camel. Everyone had stared at it (as had others anywhere from the White Mountains to Copley Square where TheCamel had been ignominiously towed in circles behind a taxi until she consented to start). Everyone had stared at the hoodless engine, at the air-cooled radiator (waterless always when the mercury stood at ten or more below zero) and then had gone more or less quietly about his business. But with the new jack, TheCamel drew some unwonted, and unwanted, attention.
Alone I started her in our Ringling-Brothers-Barnum-and-Bailey style one March day on the straightaway in front of Dartmouth Hall and gained the wheel just in time to avoid head-on collision with that long, sleek, black roadster customarily driven, and certainly owned, by President Ernest Martin Hopkins. Who was driving it, I was never quite sure. Within a few hours, however, Darwin, whose name was officially attached to our license number on the college records, was summoned to the dean's office. He accepted punishment - removal of permission to drive for the rest of the year - with stoic calm, and of course never mentioned me. His ethics in such matters were beyond reproach.
I chauffeured Darwin a considerable number of miles in both intra-mural and inter-state traffic in the next two months. It was a beautiful spring.
Then with minor regret we sold her, still for $15.00, to a syndicate of California juniors looking for cheap transportation home for the summer, and let them take the license plates into the bargain. The last we saw of The Camel, she was loaded to the gunwales with boys and baggage, roaring away in the direction of Vermont's Rutland Mountain, where, so far as Darwin and I were concerned, she disappeared forever into the great Golden West. The world may have seen her like somewhere, some time, but if so, I have vet to hear about it.
