Peter Behrens's Blog, page 512

Miami Advanced Design

Javier Reyes caught this Advanced Design-era Chevy in Miami. AL has a thing for these trucks. See this post. And this one. Drove from Banff to the Big Bend one winter in Toby Clark's 1952 Chevrolet ex-grain truck, pulling a trailer with six canoes.

34 Ford Convertible Roadster (For Sale)

Always something, on the early morning drive to class here in Colorado Springs. Love the September light. High, dry climate= lots of old iron. Don't know how old this is, of course: there are a bunch of outfits manufacturing roadster bodies. But I like the cleanness of this car, the fenders and, of course, the nifty orange wheels. It had a very small For Sale sign up. It was parked at the K&S Automotive shop here in COS, so they might know something about it: 719-633-2895.

Don McKay: SONGS FOR THE SONGS OF BIRDS

“A Barbed Wire Fence Meditates Upon the Goldfinch”

More than the shortest distance
between points, we are
the Stradivarius of work.
We make the meadow meadow, make it
mean, make it yours, but till the last
insurance policy is cashed in we will
never be immune to this
exquisite cruelty:
                        that the knots in all our posts remember limbs
they nested and were busy in and danced per-
chic-o-ree their loops between,
that the fury of their playfulness persists
in amputated roots.
Remember us
next time the little yellow bastards lilt
across your windshield.  No one
no one is above the law.
                 -Don McKay  from his audiobook, Songs for the Songs of Birds

thanks to Kate Northrop for suggesting this poem for AL.
  

1948 International Redux

I first saw and posted this truck last fall  but it is such a wonderful machine I couldn't resist shooting more.

Postscript--Seamus Heaney

(This post, which includes a poem ("Postscript") by Seamus Heaney, ran  originally on August 2, 2013. Heaney died in Dublin on August 30. Check the New York Review for a series of NYRB pieces on the poet, published over the years. The only time I met Heaney was--lucky for me--in his hometown of Derry, in 1992, when he and Ted Hughes together gave a reading at the medieval guild hall. What a privilege to hear the man in that setting.)
Photo courtesy of Paul Lynch's iPhone, in West Clare. Lynch's debut novel Red Sky In Morning comes out in the US in November.
   And speaking of Co. Clare:


Postscript And some time make the time to drive out westInto County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,In September or October, when the windAnd the light are working off each otherSo that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stonesThe surface of a slate-grey lake is litBy the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,Their fully grown headstrong-looking headsTucked or cresting or busy underwater.Useless to think you'll park and capture itMore thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,A hurry through which known and strange things passAs big soft buffetings come at the car sidewaysAnd catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
                                                               ---Seamus Heaney

Citroën HY, Le Havre

Isabelle Chapman found this Citroën HY in Le Havre. 
"In French, it is called a "Tube". This one has been revamped by a vegetable & flower producer. Photos by Alain."--ICWe saw a herd of these last year in Amsterdam. And investigated the American version of the step-van in Colorado.

Wurlitzer Chevy 1941-46

Known as Wurlitzers because those were the only machines that flashed as much chrome up front. I thought it was one of these trucks that Sonny is firing up in the opening sequence of The Last Picture Show but it was actually a Chevy of the preceding generation, maybe a '38. Still an astounding movie, though.

1947 Dodge COE

Between paragraphs of the novel I gave myself 45 minutes to bike around the Patty Jewett neighborhood here in Colorado Springs. PJ-the-'hood is adjacent to the Patty Jewett Golf Course,"Third oldest public golf course west of the Mississippi." There's a bunch of AL posts on houses and streets in this district, including Franklin Street, Yampa Street. and Monument Street. And a bunch of intriguing vehicles including this 1947 Dodge COE. Needs work, but very beautiful in its blunt postwar style. Machines like this--trucks that look like trucks, not cartoons of trucks--speak to a time when things were actually made in the USA. One of these was for sale last year on the H.A.M.B.

Schooner LEWIS B. FRENCH in Eggemoggin Reach

Blue sky and a fair breeze here on the Rocky Mountain front, but poor sailing (no water). Was it only a week ago we met the Lewis B French in Eggemoggin Reach, heading for Jericho Bay? That's the Deer Isle Bridge in the b.g.

International Harvester Scout 800

On my way to class, cool light at 730am, saw this Scout in the Colorado City neighborhood.  These came with a steel top--usually painted white. This one was very clean. Vintage? I'd guess 1972.