Road Trip

My son and I could have taken the Interstate home Saturday, after a pre-senior visit to the University of Minnesota. We didn’t. We drove Wisconsin 35 south, along the east bank of the Mississippi.

Dams make the river vastly wide through most of the 120 or so miles from Prescott to Prarie du Chien, where we turned east to look over the unexpectedly elegant campus of UW-Plattville. (Of course the school was deserted on a hot Saturday evening in late August, but we still learned something by stopping there. Banners hanging from lampposts read “Celebrating 100 years of Engineering.” Son Joe, a budding mechanical/automotive engineer, perked up; Platteville just might do for him in the  fall of 2010.)

The point of a road trip is to see what you might see and do what you might do. It can turn out to be a bore. But on this trip, the curving, climbing, falling two-lane blacktop engaged us. Long, noble vistas across the river impressed us, as did the grand rocky bluffs above us. Old river towns, nestled and vertical between water and rising sandstone, charmed us. Serendipity delighted us, twice.

At La Crosse, we wandered into Rudy’s Drive-In, where adorable, smiling teen waitresses skated orders out to cars. The Beach Boys used to write songs about such girls.

At Diamond Bluff, Wis. — a wide spot with a tavern, a pier and a block or two of cottages — a crude sign advertised a classic car show. No need for that; the vintage Roadmasters, Impalas, Barracudas, Galaxies and so on were in plain sight from Highway 35. We stopped and spent over an hour examining them, even though light rain prompted owners to close up the ragtops.

Joe loved the muscle cars and the Corvettes. A hot-rodded ’53 Cadillac, painted with blue flames, made us both smile. I liked the everyday cars from the 1960s — ancient artifacts to Joe, but I could exactly recall the long-ago feeling of high school car lust for an unattainable, spanking-new 1967 Chevy Impala.

The show-stopper parked in the damp Diamond Bluff grass was a 1964 Studebaker Hawk GT. It reminded us both of the elegant Pininfarina Ferraris from the ’60s we’d seen a couple of weeks before, except for an abundance of chrome ornamentation that made the Studebaker unmistakably American. I wasn’t surprised to find that Milwaukee’s own Brooks Stevens, the most influential industrial designer of the age, gave the ’64 Hawk a facelift. (It was too little too late for failing Studebaker. Just 1,484 Hawks sold before Studebaker folded in 1964.)

We took a drive, we kept our eyes open, we found a rare gem. What’s better than practicing the art of living with your teen-aged son?

Photo by Joe Strini