Peter Behrens's Blog, page 547

Handmade African Land Rovers

Our neigbours in NL are Dutch diplomats who have done spells in Africa. They keep a Land rover penned in their front yard in Wassenaar. They keep a Land Rover penned in their front yard in the Netherlands..
And they have these wonderful L-R's made by African craftsmen, using scrap metal, shoe polish tins, etc. The white L-R is from Kenya, the green from Mozambique.

Chevrolet Volt & Berlin & The Autobahn

 Our road trip to Berlin in a Chevy Volt is up here on chevy.com

Mercedes Benz 508D & L319

I noticed this decommissioned fire department truck in the Frankfurt suburb of Niederrad. Couldn't get much boxier, could it? But boxes make sense for hauling stuff. My son has a toy one of these. I find something very appealing about the no-frills shape of medium-size Mercedes truck and vans. Form follows function. Like the 207D van posted on AL a while ago. Not sure of the era of this unit: late 1980s, perhaps?  

The M-B van that started it all was a beautiful thing: the 1955 L319. 

Mecedes Benz 230 TE

I'm in Germany, so I'd better do a Benz post. It is amusing to visit the Rest of the World and notice that M-B means more than the hyped-up luxury-brand image it fights to maintain in the US.  That is why those big Mercedes vans are sold to Fed Ex in the US as Freightliners, with not an M-B star in sight. People would think they were paying too much if Fed Ex delivered the goods in a Mercedes.
If you watch CNN you know that wherever refugees are in flight--Syria, Iraq, Africa--there are always a lot of Mercedes sedans in the dusty line-up. Usually diesels, and usually piled sadly high with family belongings.
I know in Lisbon, and certainly here in Frankfurt, pale yellow Mercedes are the standard issue taxicab. And Mercedes Benz is a huge presence in the big transport truck market here in Europe and in the R-o-t-W.
I've never owned a Benz but I'd like to one day: nothing fancy, maybe from the 80s, low-mileage, diesel, durable. Like this 230 TE wagon I saw along the Mainkai here in Frankfurt.

MGB GT

These cars lost their blythe spirit when they had those monster black bumpers slapped on them in 1974. This car which I'd guess in 1967, would have had the slender chrome bumpers, but even these have been deleted, which makes the car look ever more nimble. MGB-GT was an unfortunate name; it sounded like an acronym for one of the secret police services in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The owner of this car, I notice, has gotten rid of the "BGT" on the badge in back, leaving just MG. That British Racing Green always works. There's a story called "smell of smoke" in my upcoming story collection (Travelling Light, House of Anansi, May 2013) that is about learning to drive in an MGB, and a few other things, too.

The Dutch Chevy Silverado 1500 Pickup

Okay, they are following me. I leaving The Netherlands tomorrow, heading to Germany for a few days then home.  But for six months I have been living around the corner from the only old Chevy pickup in the Netherlands.

chevy.com & the truck thing

In our family, sadly, trucks were a guy thing. B, my wife, did not share the truck trope. B is a professional stylist who chooses the props, settings, models and layouts used in those clothing catalogues that arrive in your mailbox weekly. She has an eye for clean design and for handsome, simple objects. Her eye will pick out the right wallpaper, the classic motor launch, the understated English garden, the perfect linen slipcovers and the model who will somehow look elegant in those rubber boots being sold on p. 26.But trucks? Not B’s thing. Too large. Too loud. Too…truckish...                  You can read the rest of my piece about the home fleet on Chevy.com 

dutch landscape

I'm saying goodbye to The Netherlands and my Fellowship at NIAS this week. I shall miss many things about this country. One of them is the beach at Wassenaar. Always astonishing light out there, summer or winter; rain, shine or snow.
'I prefer to take "landscape" as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.'  Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways

Landscape: a definition

                                
'I prefer to take "landscape" as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.'  Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways
              The photographs arrived this winter week from Hilary Johnstone in LaRonge (northern) Saskatchewan.                                                                                                             ©2013 Hilary Johnstone

1988 F-150 and West Texas

from our man in far-West Texas, Don Culberston, who always has an eye for a Ford. "The real deal. Mr Madrid bought this new and it's been a farm truck on the Rio Grande for years."--DC
Oh lord I miss West Texas. Lately I have been reading the wonderful memoirs of Ben. K. Green,
a cowboy, cattle buyer, and writer who started out in the cattle bidness in 1929 and has things to say about ranching and cowboying that are unromanticized and accurate and goddamn true. As well as colorful. My experience was very limited in time and place to the hill country of Alberta (Sundre, Dog Pound, James River Bridge) in the mid-70s, and I was about as far as you could get from being a top hand and still be on a horse, but what Mr Green has to say about the life sure rings true. Have a look at his Wild Cow Tales. Miles better than the usual folksy bushwa on the subject.