This piece originally appeared in the December 1983 issue of Road & Track.

While traveling in another of Britain's ex-colonies a few weeks ago, I had occasion to dine with a group of native journalists. Over coffee one of them said to me, "Are you chaps going back to driving those giant gas-guzzling boats now that fuel prices have dropped a bit, or are you coming around to more sensible cars?" In my best diplomatic nice-guy fashion I told him Americans were now pretty wary of temporary gasoline excess and we'd grown used to cars with improved mileage, so I don't see any real resurgence of big cars in the U.S.

The next day, we all went for a cross-country drive in a fleet of small, locally assembled sedans. As I took the wheel of my assigned car, the same gentleman leaned in the window and said, "I hope you'll be comfortable driving a car that's less than 21-ft long.''

I laughed with the same restrained gusto I usually save for very old ethnic jokes and told him I thought I could handle it. In truth, the man's tone was beginning to wear on me. His offhand remarks contained assumptions with which I was not entirely comfortable.

First was the inference that, as an American. I would be unaccustomed to small cars. In fact, I'd endured no less than 12 years of Volkswagen Beetle ownership, fighting sidewinds and up-grades heaterless in the dead of winter, blowing up an engine about every 50,000 miles whether I needed it or not. All this during the glory days of cheap fuel and huge comfortable cars with real heaters and cast iron V8s that lasted 200,000 miles if you changed the oil every two years. Furthermore, I'd spent three years of my tall life shoehorning myself into a Bugeye Sprite. I'd even owned an MG Midgel, for God's sake. Like millions of other Americans, I was well acquainted with the relative joys and hardships of driving small cars in a big country.

My friend's second mistake was in the tacit assumption that, as a civilized human, I would naturally find great big 21-ft long gas-guzzling boats deplorable. This was not quite the case. In fact, I was in some ways a closet aficionado of the big sled (closet is perhaps the wrong word; you can't hide a 1962 Lincoln Continental in most closets). I was the roadgoing counterpart of those gentle folks who eschew violence of all kinds, but keep a loaded .357 magnum or some other great honking weapon in the bedside stand, "just in case." Like the .357 or a close friend who moonlights as a bouncer, a big car was nice to have around when you really needed one. Some of my favorite cars have been huge beyond description.

One of the best was a 1965 Chevy Impala owned by my good friends, Lee and Paula Heggelund. Here was a virtual homecoming float of a car, done up in yards of sweeping sheet metal, with a trunk you could stand in while you loaded luggage. It had a 283-cu-in. V8 nestled under a hood the size of a small billboard. Lee bought the Impala with new recaps and new maroon paint from a used car lot for $750. The speedometer had been turned back to 120,000 miles to make the car irresistible. My wife Barbara and I shared with the Heggelunds a passion for mountain climbing and, as Wisconsin and Nepal are geographically dissimilar, we were forced to travel West to enjoy our sport. The Impala, for five years of hard running, was our faithful transcontinental flier.

At least once a summer we'd drag the Impala out of the dark corner of the Heggelund's garage like a secret weapon, dust it off, load the trunk with backpacks, coils of Goldline, tents, climbing gear, ice axes and great clumping boots. We'd throw a large Coleman cooler somewhere into the vastness of the rear seat, take off after work on Friday and drive like hell straight through to Wyoming or Colorado, stopping only upon reaching the Tetons, Wind Rivers or Grenadiers. The speed limit on I-90 was 70 mph, which meant you could drive 80 mph, so we normally crowded 90 mph and kept our eyes peeled. This in the crushing heat and corn-stoked humidity of Minnesota and South Dakota with the a/c going. Lee and Paula also owned a Volkswagen and a Triumph TR-3, but we were never tempted to use either of these cars instead of the Impala.

At around 200,000 miles the Impala began to burn (perhaps spew is a better word) some oil, not to mention some exhaust valves, so the Heggelunds replaced it with a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 4-door, bought for $75 from Lee's father who used it for deer hunting and standing on to get things down from high shelves in the garage.

This car took us faithfully Out West, Down South and Up North for canoe trips into the Canadian Boundary waters. It had acres of leg room and a rear seat so wide it could sleep two adults of indiscriminately mixed marital status without raising eyebrows. The rear window ledge was largely uncharted. On long trips we'd scatter ourselves around the car in various living-room sofa poses, like cartoon teenagers talking on the telephone. With the Galaxie, six adults could go out for dinner in one car instead of two, and many a disgusted parking valet was paid but once to take this hulk off our several hands.

I had a few of my own wonderful whales. One was a 1966 Ford wagon ($150) that towed race cars all over the Midwest for six years and asked for nothing but a set of brakes and a half­ gallon of STP. The other was a 1962 Lincoln Continental whose supreme moment of cultural fulfillment came on a warm summer night in 1982 when a whole carload of us piled into its red leather interior and wafted off to an outdoor movie theater to see The Buddy Holly Story.

All of this made me defensive of careless foreign barbs. The big American cars with their sprawling bench seats, cavernous trunks, vast expanses of sheet metal and long-lived V8s have lately come to seem less like a joke to me than a sort of national treasure. I wouldn't buy a new one, of course, and apparently neither would a lot of other people. In that may lie the eventual demise of the great sleds. With fuel over a dollar a gallon, they have to be cheap to be fun.

In everyday use, many of these cars remain uncomfortably ponderous, amazingly thirsty and a real handful to guide down anything resembling a winding road. But there has never been anything like them for towing the impossible, hauling vast multitudes or bombing across the Great Plains at 90 mph. And when they're gone, we'll never see their like again.

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