Hasn't everyone? Now meet the guy who says he lit the fuse.

Editor's note: Wired found the following tale posted on the Web, originally at a site called cardhouse.com. According to its author, the story has garnered thousands of emails, some filled with praise, others with doubt, delight, sympathy, or suspicion. After a series of cagey communications with the writer, we reprint the piece here in the spirit of "all of the above."

Fast Foreword

The first thing you should know about the Legend of the Rocket Car is that it's been around longer than most people think. It started years ago, as a vague rumor passed from one guy to the next by word of mouth, usually in bars or during lunch-break bullshit sessions. The kind of story someone hears from a friend who read it in a magazine a long time ago. It's a story that comes out of nowhere, gets passed around for a while, then dies out. And whenever it flickers back to life, it seems to spread like a grass fire. I used to think it was funny how it managed to spread so fast purely by word of mouth, but now that it's become a subject of Internet interest, its popularity is downright spooky.

If you've never heard the legend before, here are the bare bones of it: Once upon a time, in some out-of-the-way part of the country (take your pick of locations), a maniac took a rocket of some sort and mounted it on the back of a car (make and model depend on the automotive trends when the story is told). The maniac then sped down a deserted stretch of highway, and when he reached an appropriate spot, lit the rocket (which was either a JATO bottle, a surplus ICBM engine, or an experimental shuttle booster). The car reached an incredible speed in a matter of seconds (somewhere between 150 miles per hour and warp 9) at which point the brakes and steering became ... ineffective. This development would've been bad enough on a straightaway, but through some error in planning or navigation, the maniac found himself hurtling toward a sharp curve. When the car hit the curve, pilot and car flew like an arrow (for a distance limited only by the imagination of the person telling the story), before crashing into an inconveniently placed mountainside.

Nifty.

I don't have much interest in urban legends. I only pay attention to the rocket car story because I'm 99 percent sure I started the whole thing.

I'm sure this sounds pretty ridiculous if it's the first time you've heard the Legend of the Rocket Car, but that's because I didn't go out of my way to make it sound good. Most people try to make the story convincing, embellishing it with all sorts of facts and details to make it easier to swallow. I've personally heard a dozen versions over the past 20 years, and I'm amazed at how the story grows, shrinks, and generally mutates with each retelling.

I'm sure I notice these changes more than most people. I'm not a car expert or an aerospace engineer or anything, and I really don't have much interest in urban legends. Even if I did, from an intellectual point of view, this story isn't as entertaining as some of the others that have come and gone. The one about McDonald's shoveling worms into the grinders that produce Big Macs, for instance, beats it by a mile. I only pay attention to the rocket car legend because I'm 99 percent sure that I started the whole thing in the spring of 1978.

Now, before you draw any conclusions, I don't want you to get the impression that I, myself, claim to be the maniac who drove the rocket car into the wild blue yonder. I'm saying I was probably responsible for the rumor, not that I actually performed the test flight. As far as I know, the flight in question never happened. Like all legends, some basics of the story are true, but once the tale started circulating, the truth was lost in the embellishments. If the Legend of the Rocket Car survives, my great-grandchildren will probably end up talking about a guy from Lunartown who nailed an antimatter pod onto an old Apollo moonrover and flew into the side of Tycho Crater.

That's how it goes with legends.

But like I said, I'm not a rocket scientist or a motorhead. I'm a high school biology teacher. And the fact that I'm a biology teacher is relevant to the extent that it's responsible for my writing this story down.

Two years ago, a week or so before Thanksgiving, I was taking my class through some of the particulars of evolution ("How human beings were raised from monkeys," as one of my students phrased it). We were discussing Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species when one of my students asked me how Darwin's research ship ever got the name HMS Beagle.

Since I've been teaching this subject for 11 years, it's rare when a student asks a question I can't answer. But this one was a real pisser. Anyone who's ever taught in a classroom knows that sometimes you get a student who likes to play Stump the Teacher - a kid who asks questions he doesn't really care about, just to see if he can find a gap in the teacher's knowledge. Usually these questions are pretty easy to evade or ignore, but sometimes one will catch my interest. This was one of the latter. So I told the student I had no idea where the ship's name came from, but I'd find out.

Ha. I couldn't find the answer anywhere. My reference books concerned themselves with headier subjects - the Scopes trial, genetic mutations - than the name of Darwin's boat. I looked through every book I could find, but came up dry. After exhausting all my research options, I was thinking about conceding this particular round of Stump the Teacher when one of my kids asked if I'd looked for the information on the World Wide Web.

I said, "Of course I looked there. It's the first thing I checked. Go play in traffic."

Truth be told, I not only hadn't checked the Web, I didn't know how to check it. In addition to being a non-rocket scientist, I'm not (or at least I wasn't) very interested in computers or the Internet in 1998. I know this is a shameful thing for a teacher to say, but it's true. I kept meaning to take a look at the Internet-connected computers in the school library, just to see what all the hoo-ha was about, but I simply hadn't gotten around to it. So the next day I went to the library during my free period and asked the librarian for help, feeling like Crocodile Dundee asking how to work the bidet. The librarian had obviously dealt with the situation before. She gave me her 10-minute "Internet for Stupid Teachers" course, and as soon as she left me alone with Netscape and a search engine, I typed "Darwin" in the space provided.

When the results of my search started filling the screen, the first thing I noticed was that there were more than 2 million sites listed as Darwin-related. The second thing I noticed was that none of them seemed to pertain to Charles Darwin, the most famous naturalist in history. Instead, they all seemed to focus on the Darwin Award, an honor (posthumously) bestowed on people who've done the most good for humanity by removing themselves from the communal gene pool.

This was my very first encounter with the story of the rocket car in writing - a description of a 1995 Darwin Award winner.

The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve....

It seems that a former Air Force sergeant had somehow got hold of a JATO unit (or Jet Assisted Take-Off) that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra "push" for taking off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed, and fired off the JATO!

The facts as best could be determined are that the operator of the 1967 Impala hit JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 3.9 miles from the crash site. This was established by the location of a prominently scorched and melted strip of asphalt. The Impala quickly reached speeds well in excess of 350 mph and continued at full power for an additional 20 to 25 seconds. The soon-to-be-pilot experienced g-forces usually reserved for dogfighting F-14 jocks under full afterburners. The automobile remained on the straight highway for about 2.6 miles (15 to 20 seconds) before the driver applied the brakes, completely melting them, blowing the tires and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface. The vehicle became airborne for an additional 1.3 miles and impacted the cliff face at a height of 125 feet leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock.

Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable; however, small fragments of bone, teeth, and hair were extracted from the crater, and fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece of debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel.

As I said earlier, I'd heard plenty of stories like this. But the Darwin Award version was different. It was chock-full of numbers and specifics, which is always bad news for a legend. Oh, initially it might make the story more believable, but throwing in a lot of facts and figures also gives the nonbelievers plenty of details they can use to refute the story. In the case of the Darwin Award version, I'm surprised that anyone, anywhere, believed the story well enough to repeat it. Ask yourself this, for instance: If this story is true, why has nobody ever produced pictures of the crash site? And how about the unfortunate "pilot"? Nobody was ever able to attach a name to this person?

If you want to explain these questions away by blaming human error or police indifference or whatever, that's OK. But if you look at the physics of the story, you'll see that the whole pile of bullshit is impossible, regardless of the human angle. For instance, when the Chevy left the road with its rocket still going full blast, why did it go in a straight line? Mount a big rocket on a '67 Chevy and it may go straight as long as it's on the ground. But once it got airborne, the weight of the engine would immediately pull the nose down. And if the JATO was still blazing away, the car would drill itself into the ground like a tent spike before it got 50 feet from the ignition site.

But the real question about this insane tale is simpler than all that. The real question is, How did such a story ever get started in the first place?

Just Desert

When my friends and I set out to build the vehicle we test-fired in the spring of 1978, a real-life, jet-powered, road-traveling car was exactly what we had in mind. Craig Breedlove was busy breaking land speed records in the Spirit of America, Evel Knievel had graduated from "biker" to "payload" while attempting to jump the Snake River Canyon a few years earlier. And rocket-powered vehicles were a pretty popular notion. Unfortunately, machines like those required a lot of time and money and engineering skill to build and operate.

My friends and I had none of the above.

In 1978, I was 22 years old and still living with my parents, in a place I won't specify except to say it was somewhere in the desert. My father owned a scrapyard, 22 acres of barren scrub ideally suited to having junk thrown on it. To be brutally honest, the main yard looked like a cross between Sanford and Son and Apocalypse Now. The yard was a salvage smorgasbord, covered with everything from dead water heaters to junked airplane cockpits. And since we lived near a major US Army storage facility, a lot of the scrap my father bought and sold came from government auctions. He would go to the auctions held at the post from time to time, bid on pre-marked lots of God-only-knew-what, then send me out the next day with the big flatbed to collect his latest purchase.

Plenty of people who went to these auctions ended up with nothing more than tons of unusable junk that was worth less than they paid for it. The lots for sale were usually measured by the ton, and if a lot had a few items you were interested in, you had to buy the whole mess. But my dad always seemed to find the lots that contained valuable stuff. He also knew plenty of people who owned military surplus stores and had some idea of what was in demand and what wasn't. Still, he ended up with an amazing amount of unusable military surplus, things like gas masks and vehicle parts that were worthless in the civilian world.

And from time to time, we also ended up with weapons. No, we never bought a pile of crap and ended up with a crate full of M-16s or a Shrike missile. But every once in a while we did end up with stuff we weren't supposed to have.

The army had a very strict policy toward scrap dealers who found munitions: You had to give them back. No two ways about it. Before even being allowed to place a bid, dealers at an auction were required to sign several forms, one of which stated that they'd return any "explosive, ordnance, fuse, detonator, or other chemically viable part or assembly of a weapons system." I remember that paragraph well, since it's the only part of the army red tape that ever directly pertained to me. The penalties for noncompliance outlined at the end of the paragraph sounded pretty scary (five-figure fines, possible imprisonment, et cetera), and were enough to make my dad return the smoke grenades I once found in a crate marked HEATER ASSEMBLY, though not the blank M-60 rounds he'd found once himself. These he judged too trivial to warrant a drive to the base, and he kept them as decoration draped over a file cabinet in his office.

Of course I'm telling you this because it's how I managed to get hold of the JATO bottle we used for our rocket car. Actually there were four of them, each one lying in its own long, hay-filled crate with BARREL ASSEMBLY stenciled on the side. Even though I didn't know what the hell they were at first glance, I knew they weren't barrels for anything. The JATO bottles were round metal cylinders about 4 feet long, and less than a foot in diameter. Painted on the sides in red were the words M-23 JET ASSEMBLY UNIT. And rather than the sort of valve assembly you'd see on a gas cylinder, the ends of the bottles had an inverted funnel shape to them, with a rubber plug at the funnel's bottom. They were obviously rockets of some sort. And judging from their weight - it took two people to even budge the things - they were still full of something.

Beck must have spent the rest of the night staggering around town, looking for a donor to contribute some hardware to our cause.

I decided I had to call Jimmy.

Jimmy and I met in the third grade (or thereabouts), and were best friends for most of our growing up. His family lived just down the street, and his father ran an auto-body shop in town. On more than one occasion Jimmy's dad and my own traded parts or services, and our families were pretty close. But while I went to work for my father after graduating high school, Jimmy went to college to study mechanical engineering. He had a natural talent for figuring out things in the physical world, though he was never much good at putting them into practice.

The campus where Jimmy took classes was almost 150 miles away, so he spent his weekdays in a rented room and only came home on the weekends. Since I found the JATOs on a Wednesday, I had three days before I could show them to Jimmy. More than enough time for me to cook up the idea of the rocket car. As a matter of fact, as soon as I realized what that dull metal cylinder represented, I thought about attaching it to a car and taking a jet-propelled ride. The principle seemed simple enough. Nail the rocket onto one of the junkers in my dad's field, point it down a straight stretch of road, and light the mother up.

When Jimmy came over to the house on Saturday morning, we drove to the yard and I showed him the rocket. He immediately knew what it was, or at least what it seemed to be: a solid-fuel rocket, the kind they'd used in Vietnam to give cargo planes a kick in the ass when they needed to take off from short runways. Very simple, very straightforward. Also very dangerous. I described the idea of the rocket car to Jimmy, and at first he was pretty enthusiastic. But after thinking the thing over for a while, he made me promise I wouldn't actually do anything with the JATO until he had time to check a few things out.

The following weekend, we sat down at his kitchen table and Jimmy explained precisely why the car wouldn't work.

The main problem was control. The JATO bottle would produce something like 2,500 pounds of thrust (albeit for a very short time), which sounded like more than enough to ensure a fun ride. Unfortunately, this huge amount of thrust would not only be unstoppable once it was started, it would probably have to be applied to a point on the car that wasn't designed to handle such force. Under normal circumstances, a car gets its forward thrust from the back axle, by way of tires against pavement, which means that a normal car will never exceed a certain amount of thrust.

Jimmy described the whole thing using top-fuel dragsters as an example: When the driver hits the gas, the back end of the car tries to lift into the air due to the sudden force applied to the rear axle. But as soon as the ass end starts to lift, the tires lose traction, and the thrust decreases. The back end drops, thrust is restored, and the process starts all over again. The fact that a car uses driven wheels creates a self-damping system that ensures the wheels will stay on the ground. The limiting factors are the weight, the distribution of the weight, the size of the tires, and the torque applied to the wheels. The only reason dragsters and funny cars pop wheelies is that they use oversized tires that screw up the relationship between torque and traction. A rocket car would have no such fine adjustments. A massive amount of thrust would suddenly be applied to a point on a car that wasn't designed to handle it, and there's no telling what would happen next. Maybe the front end would lift off the ground. Maybe the rear. Maybe the ass end would slew around sideways. The only thing certain was that the car would not go in a straight line, and would continue to not go in a straight line at a very high rate of speed.

Naturally I asked how Craig Breedlove managed to drive the Spirit of America at 600-plus miles an hour, but I knew the answer before I even spit the question out. He hired a team of aerospace engineers and rocket scientists to design a car that was built to have a jet engine sticking out its ass.

Jimmy didn't even have to outline the rest of the reasons why my idea wouldn't work, but he did anyway. There was the fact that store-bought tires couldn't handle the sort of acceleration a rocket would provide, which was why all land-speed record cars used custom-made solid-rubber tires. Simply spinning a regular tire at rocket-car speeds would probably create enough centrifugal force to tear it right off the rim. There was the problem of stopping the thing once it got rolling. There was structural stress. And so on and so on.

I'd pretty much decided that the whole idea was stupid and suicidal, which was why I was amazed when Jimmy proceeded to tell me exactly how the rocket car could work.

Train of Thought

One thing that remains fairly constant in retellings of the rocket car legend is that it took place somewhere in the southwest United States. I've heard versions stating that the whole thing happened in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, western Texas, and southwestern California, and in each case, the location seemed to be a critical part of the plot: The rocket car would have to be launched on a long, flat stretch of road, away from prying eyes. What strikes me as incredibly silly about the Darwin Award version of the story is that the pilot chose to test his vehicle on a road with a curve in it. If you were going to test-drive a rocket-powered car, would you choose a section of highway 2.4 miles from a turn in the road bordered by a cliff?

I poured gunpowder into a small square of newspaper folded around a light bulb filament. Connected to a battery, it made an impressive flare.

After Jimmy was through demolishing my plans to build the rocket car, he pointed out that the control problem could easily be overcome if the car was actually a rocket sled, run on rails rather than asphalt. You see, fortunately, highways aren't the only long, straight thoroughfares through the desert. Mounting the rocket on a railroad car would not only solve the problems of control and traction, but if we used an abandoned stretch of track, we'd also no longer have to worry about traffic. And our area of the desert is covered with abandoned railroad track, most of it the old-fashioned narrow-gauge kind used for mining trains near the turn of the century. I knew of at least three such pieces of track within 5 miles of town. Finding a railroad car that would actually run on the old-fashioned track was another story, but by the time Jimmy finished explaining his idea, I already had a plan for solving that part of the equation.

The following morning I found myself bouncing across the desert in a battered four-wheel-drive pickup with the two hitherto unnamed members of Team Rocket Car, Sal and Beck. As kids, Beck and I were almost as close as Jimmy and I, but Beck had a wild streak in him. During high school it got out of control. Beck turned into "one of those dope-smoking degenerates" (Mom's preferred term), and he dropped out a year shy of graduation. Sal was Beck's younger brother, junior not only by calendar count but by any sort of IQ measurement. He wasn't retarded or anything, but people tended to use phrases like "not too swift" and "a few bricks short of a load" more often than usual when he was around.

So they weren't exactly Nobel laureates, but I didn't have much choice in my selection of assistants. I needed their truck.

The truck actually belonged to Beck's father, who used it in the performance of his job. Whatever that was. Nobody knew for sure what Beck's dad did for a living, but the truck was ugly and battered, sat on huge mud-grabber tires, and came with a massive 454 engine. Beck's father would drive the thing out of town occasionally, sometimes staying gone for days at a time. When he returned, the truck always looked as if it had spent the entire time driving around in the desert. If Beck knew what his father did for a living, he never said. But Jimmy and I figured the man used his pickup for transporting something back and forth from remote desert locations. Contraband vegetation arriving at an isolated airstrip was one possibility, and people desperate to become American residents without a lot of government interference was another. The only relevant fact is that the truck was very good for cruising the desert, which is why we used it that morning to visit an abandoned silver mine a few miles from town.

Beck knew what to expect when we pried off the old wooden planks covering the mine's entrance. Less than a dozen feet into the shaft was a train of three ancient bucket cars, the tiny railcars once used to haul ore out of the mine. They'd probably been parked for 40 years or more, but they seemed to be in reasonably good condition. Shit lasts forever in the desert. Beck dragged a towchain into the mine, looped it around the hitch on the closest car, then used the pickup to drag the whole train closer to the entrance. I used a 5-pound pony sledge to bash the connection between the last two cars until it came free, and Beck threw the pickup into gear and dragged the first two cars clear of the mine. The metal wheels screeched so loud I thought the noise would bring the shaft down on my head.

The first thing we did when we got the bucket cars into the light of day was turn them upside down and slop grease onto the axles. After a few well-placed whacks with the sledge, we got the wheels to turn. A few more whacks, and we had them turning freely enough to push the bucket cars up a ramp and into the back of the pickup.

Luxury at the Speed of Sound

An aspect of the rocket car legend that always tickles me is that no matter how much the story varies, the make, model, and year of the car is always specified. Sure, this is a nice detail to have on hand, but considering the details left out of the description, it looks sorta silly. In the Darwin Award version, there's no mention of which highway the car was on, or even whereabouts in Arizona the story took place. But the story does specify that the car was a 1967 Chevy Impala. I think the reason this detail is always supplied is because it's critical to make the listener think the test pilot at least looked cool when he flew into the cliff. You'll rarely hear someone tell a story about a guy in a rocket-powered Volkswagen Bug. It has to be a car that deserves to have a rocket attached to it.

Our car wasn't a 1967 but a 1959 Chevy Impala: bone-white with a red interior. Once a story starts to mutate into a legend, there's no telling which parts of the truth will stick. Obviously the Chevy Impala part made the cut.

But we didn't choose the '59 Impala for its coolness, or for its aerodynamics or structural qualities, but because it was available. My father happened to have one, resting on cinder blocks, in a forgotten corner of his lot. Engine, transmission, and wheels were all missing, sold to Jimmy's father at some point. The only reason this car was otherwise intact was that Chevrolet used the 1959 style for a single year, which meant the body parts would be usable only on another 1959 Impala.

After I'd cut the bodies away from the bucket cars, attaching the cut away railcar bases to the Chevy's suspension was pretty easy. Jimmy stressed the importance of getting the two sets of wheels precisely aligned, but it wasn't that hard. The old Chevy had plenty of places for bolts and welds, so picking spots where the wheels would line up was a snap. And since the Impala was already up on blocks, it was no problem to slide the wheel frames underneath and lift them into place with a floor jack. I'm sure that these days my students would laugh like hell at the thought of me laying underneath a car with an oxyacetylene torch in my hand, but the fact is, I learned how to draw a bead and cut metal when I was 14 or 15 years old. Growing up around a scrapyard did have certain advantages.

Within 5 miles of town there were a total of three sections of track long enough to run the rocket car on, and they were all dead losers.

The "propulsion unit" (ha!) consisted of a 5-foot length of steel water pipe welded to the Chevy's suspension. I plugged the end of the pipe facing the front of the car with a slug of scrap steel and welded it into place, and even cut the center out of a threaded cap to screw onto the exhaust end to hold the JATO bottle securely once it was installed. The end-cap seemed like a good idea while I was doing it, though Jimmy laughed when he came the following weekend and saw my handiwork. He pointed at the steel cap. "That rocket is gonna be pushing against the car hard enough to make it fly like a bullet, and you're afraid it'll fall out the back end?"

Tough Brakes

The night Jimmy inspected my work on the Chevy, all four members of Team Rocket Car gathered at a neighborhood bar to discuss the challenge of ... the braking system. Of course the lack of any way to stop the car was considered a very minor point with Beck. In his eyes, worrying about something as trivial as brakes was a sign of cowardice. He was perfectly willing to haul the car out to a long stretch of empty track, get in, fire it up, and hope he slowed down before he ran out of track.

He was out of his fucking mind.

The most popular idea among the rest of us was, naturally, a drogue chute. The Spirit of America used one, as did a few types of fighter planes, top fuel dragsters, et cetera. But like the optimal solutions to most of our problems, the question was where to find one. My father actually had six army surplus parachutes sitting in a storage shed near the office at the scrapyard, the spoils of a particularly good auction years before. Five of them were standard personnel chutes, and one was a massive cargo-drop canopy. But Dad also knew he had six of them. He'd started out with a dozen, and occasionally sold one to a sky diver or army/navy store. A good surplus parachute was worth upwards of $200. There was no telling what the cargo chute would be worth to the right buyer. If one were to turn up missing, Dad would certainly notice. Of course we might have gotten away with using a parachute, then returning it once we were finished with it, but even this presented problems. It might work OK for the first ride, but how about the second? I certainly knew nothing about parachute rigging. All I was sure of was that there was a lot of cloth that had to be stuffed into a very small pack.

Sal suggested outfitting the car with a huge anchor, one that could be heaved out the window at the critical moment. The rest of us suggested that Sal shut the fuck up and get us another round of beers.

I brought up the idea of stretching a cable across the track and fitting the rocket car with a tailhook to slow it down. After all, aircraft carriers had been using this system to stop incoming planes for years, and it seemed to work just fine. But before I could explain the idea, Beck started laughing his ass off, then asked if I wanted to use a rubber innertube to catch the car, or just tie a rope between two fenceposts. Here was a guy willing to strap a military rocket onto his back and sit in a rusty railcar while someone else lit the fuse, but he was laughing at my ideas. Unfortunately, he did have a point. Putting a tailhook on the car and catching an arresting wire was simple. But it sure as hell couldn't be a stationary wire. There would have to be some system to absorb the impact of a car moving at high speeds, and we couldn't come up with anything.

Jimmy pointed out that rocket sleds usually ended up in a pool of water, which both acted as a brake and cooled the whole contraption down. Beck pointed out that in the middle of the desert, pools of water are pretty tough to come by.

Overall, we were batting exactly zero.

I remember being pretty damned depressed when Jimmy and I left the bar that night, despite the fact that I was drunk. Jimmy tried to blow some optimistic sunshine up my ass while we walked up the street toward our houses, saying that one of us might be able to come up with something later, once we were all sober. I didn't consider it likely. Beck and Sal seemed to think better when they were drunk. If they hadn't come up with anything at the bar, chances are they never would. And Jimmy and I hadn't nailed the problem that day drunk or sober.

Anyway, there's no telling exactly how Sal and Beck spent the rest of their evening, but the next morning my dad woke me up by pounding on my bedroom door. When I finally peeled my eyes open, he asked me who was delivering me car parts in the middle of the night. Out on the front porch, tied together with twine and lying on the porch swing, was a bundle of four thick metal rods. When I looked closer, I saw it was a set of heavy-duty air-adjustable shock absorbers. Jammed under the twine was a note written in what looked like crayon on a crumpled paper bag.

Jimmy wasn't suggesting that we scrap the project outright, just that we perform a test run before trying it for real. An unmanned test run.

It said this:

Problum solved.

Call me later

Major Tom

Heat of the Momentum

Obviously Beck's creative juices hadn't really started flowing until Jimmy and I left the previous night, and he'd eventually come up with a solution to the braking "problum." He must have spent the rest of the night staggering around town with his brother, a bumper jack, and a crescent wrench, looking for a donor to contribute some hardware to our cause. I never actually asked Beck where the shocks came from, and he never volunteered the information.

His idea was simple, elegant, and easy to put into practice. I'd install the air shocks on the rocket car normally, just as if the car would be riding on pavement instead of rails. But I'd also bolt a pair of wooden beams onto the belly of the car, runners between the front and rear train wheels. Each runner would be thick enough to reach almost all the way down to the tracks, and the bottom would be covered with rubber cut from old tires. The effect would be that the car would roll freely while the air shocks were inflated, with the twin runners suspended inches above the steel tracks. When it was time to stop the car, the pilot would activate a release valve that would dump the air from all four shock absorbers simultaneously. The car would drop until its entire weight was resting on the runners, which would be pressing into the railroad tracks. The runners would function like two brake shoes 3 feet long, pushed against the track under the weight of the car's body, providing a huge amount of stopping power. And since the wheel flanges would also still be firmly on the tracks, the car would remain traveling in a straight line.

When Beck finished explaining his idea, I stood there with my mouth hanging open. We'd talked about dozens of ways to stop the rocket car the previous evening, but nothing even came close to Beck's plan. By the end of the day, I had the shocks installed on the car and a pair of 3-foot-long runners made from sections of 2 x 4 bolted together to make them thick enough to reach the rails. All that was left to do was bolt the runners to the car frame and arrange the air hoses for the shock absorbers, and the car would be ready to test.

When Jimmy saw what I'd done to the car so far, he was impressed. I think he was also a little pissed off that Beck had come up with the idea, and not him. But here's a thought that never occurred to me back in 1978, and to be honest, I'm glad it didn't: We never really had any proof that it was Beck who came up with the idea. For all we know, it was Sal who dreamed up the notion of using runners to stop the car. Yes, yes, I know, it's a ridiculous thought. Like having your pet hamster wake up one morning with a revolutionary process for splitting atoms. After all, we're talking about the guy who wanted the pilot of the rocket car to hoist a goddamned anchor out the window to slow down. Still, you never know.

Anyway, Jimmy gave the braking system his stamp of approval, and I never had to admit to the team that Dad had a bunch of parachutes stashed in the shed. The only reservation Jimmy had about the system was one that should've been obvious to me from the start: heat. If the car were traveling as fast as we expected it to, rubber-coated planks pressing against metal rails would probably get hotter than hell. On the other hand, this was basically the same system used by every car on the road. Drum and disc brakes are essentially nothing more than pads or shoes pressing against moving pieces of steel to stop the car. The only difference between their system and ours was that standard brakes pressed brake pads against steel that was spinning, while ours used steel moving in a straight line. And even though our car would be traveling a lot faster than most, we had much more overall braking surface.

As far as the brakes themselves were concerned, all that was left was construction. Bolting the runners to the car frame was quick work, and even though it took a little doing to get the air-dump valve connected to all four shock absorbers, I had plenty of materials lying around the scrapyard to work with. After removing the valve stems from the air inlets to the shocks, I attached sections of air-compressor hose to the valves themselves. The other ends of the hoses ran to an air valve that started life as the door-opening lever on a city bus. With the lever in the "open" position, all four shocks could be inflated from a single air inlet near the dump lever. Once the shocks were pressurized, releasing the lever kept them inflated until the lever was pushed again.

I first tested the air-valve system on Tuesday afternoon, and when I saw that it worked the way it was supposed to, I immediately called Beck. He came to the yard with Sal, and the three of us took turns raising and lowering the car for almost an hour before the novelty wore off. Of course Beck was now more anxious than ever to "take the car for a spin," and he actually got a little pissed off when I pointed out that we weren't out of the woods yet.

See, aside from the heat problem - which didn't cut much ice with Beck - we still hadn't considered how we were going to ignite the JATO. There was a rubber plug in the end of the exhaust nozzle of the rocket I'd inspected, and it seemed logical to assume that some sort of igniter plugged into the hole. Probably an electrical fuse, something along the lines of the igniters used for model rockets. Whatever fueled the rocket (ammonium perchlorate, I later found out) was no doubt highly flammable, and shouldn't be too tough to ignite. But I knew I could come up with something better than a fuse.

A much bigger problem was the launch site. Beck got sulky and petulant when I pointed out that we had no idea where we'd actually run the car. So I put him in charge of finding a suitable spot. His dad's four-wheel-drive was the perfect vehicle for location-scouting, and he and Sal were more familiar with the surrounding desert than anyone I knew.

As Beck and Sal headed for the gates deep in conversation, I got back to work.

The last obstacle to running the car was gone. Suddenly the whole thing seemed insane and dangerous and illegal as hell.

The brake-cooling system I ended up building was pretty cheesy, I'll be the first to admit that. But since we weren't even sure it was necessary, I didn't want to spend a lot of time messing with it. I ran a length of garden hose along each wooden runner, near the point where the runner was attached to the car. Took the ends near the front of each runner and led them into the empty engine compartment. I tied off the ends under the car, then punched holes along the sections near the runners with an awl. Water entering the ends in the engine compartment would leak out through the perforations, soaking the runners and pads.

I told you it was pretty cheesy.

The only part of the cooling arrangement that even came close to sophistication was the result of a brainstorm that came to me while I was strapping a 5-gallon jerry can under the rocket car's hood. I started putting the sprinkler system together with the idea that we'd simply open a valve before launch, letting water leak out of the hoses and onto the runners for the duration of the run. But while I was attaching the jerry can, a better method occurred to me. Instead of attaching the garden hoses to a valve, I drilled a pair of holes directly into the top of the jerry can, and fed the hoses through the holes. Then I drilled a third, smaller hole, and connected another hose from the jerry can to the air-dump handle for the shock absorbers. I sealed all the hose connections with massive amounts of rubber cement, then called it quits for the day.

No word from Beck or Sal that night, so I assumed finding a launch site wasn't as easy as they'd thought it would be.

When I checked the rocket car the next day, the rubber cement sealant had dried to the consistency of a hockey puck. I filled the air shocks from Dad's portable compressor, then closed the dump valve. Filled the jerry can with water, and screwed the top down tight. Said a quick prayer, and hit the dump-valve lever. There was a slight hiss as the air rushed out of the shocks through the dump valve. But instead of being vented into the open, the last air hose I'd installed directed the escaping air into the jerry can full of water under the hood, forcing water out through the sprinkler hoses. I had no idea how much air the shocks and air lines would actually hold, but since it was highly compressed air, I'd hoped that when it expanded, it would be enough to displace the water in the can. When I checked under the car there was an impressive puddle forming and water still jetting out of the holes in the garden hoses. Eventually the spray trickled to a stop, leaving the jerry can more than half empty.

When Jimmy saw the whole system in action a few days later, he said he was "really impressed with my application of Bernoulli's principle." Hell, I didn't even know the Italians built rocket cars.

Pangs of Conscience

Before I go on, I think I should take a minute to explain why this whole story is getting so lengthy. Actually, my wife says I should issue a formal apology for inflicting such a long-winded pile of shit on anyone who reads it. And I halfway agree with her. But I want to make you aware of one thing: I did not plan it this way. When I decided to write down the story of the rocket car, I figured it would take all of two pages, maybe three. Four at the outside. That's because I was working from a set of 20-year-old recollections, and a lot of the details were missing. I didn't realize that once I started dredging up these old memories, all sorts of bits and pieces would start to fill themselves in, whether I wanted them to or not.

Besides, the technical details of the whole project turned out to be more involved than I initially remembered. When I started writing, I recalled a simple 1-2-3 process that took place over the course of a few weeks. But as I wrote, I realized I had to supply a lot more detail than I'd originally intended to show that we actually thought about systems to make the car work and to keep the story from sounding completely stupid. Of course, I'm still not sure I've accomplished the not-sounding-stupid part. Even though the project was executed one step at a time, it had a goofy, ill-planned, Little Rascals feel to it. Because basically it was a Little Rascals undertaking. The only thing missing was a sign saying HE-MAN ROCKET KAR KLUB over a treehouse door. If someone had been hurt or killed, or if we'd been caught trying to run a homemade rocket car through the desert, I'm sure we'd all have ended up in the pokey. And even if a judge were willing to overlook the instances of theft and trespassing and illegal possession of military fireworks, we'd have probably been charged with something, just on principle. Conspiracy to Commit Flagrant Stupidity, maybe. But nothing like that ever happened.

Having said that, I'd now like to issue a formal apology for inflicting such a shitty, long-winded tale on you.

Location, Location, Location

The idea of the rocket car sitting on cinder blocks in the scrapyard, just waiting for a place to run it, was driving Beck crazy. I have to admit, I was getting anxious to take it for a test run myself. I didn't hear anything from Beck for the rest of the week, and I assumed it was because he hadn't found a suitable launch site. It was actually because his dad had taken the four-wheel-drive out for one of his mysterious desert jaunts, and was gone for the rest of the week. That left Beck and Sal with only one option, driving Sal's beat-to-shit Ford Falcon, a car that barely held its own on pavement, never mind the desert.

Meanwhile, the rocket car waited in the field.

I worked at the scrapyard, as I always had. More than once I thought about what I'd do if my dad suddenly got a buyer for that 1959 Chevy Impala, but there was really no point worrying about such things. If it happened, I was simply screwed.

A brake failure would mean the car simply flew into an abandoned mine. We could declare the experiment a failure and call it a day.

I did take care of one minor detail during the delay: building igniters for the JATOs. I removed all the taillights and turn-signal lights from the Impala (no matter what became of the rocket car, signaling for a turn wouldn't be an issue) and soldered two wires to each bulb. Next I carefully cracked the glass on each bulb, leaving the filaments intact. The bare filaments would heat to white-hot when connected to a car battery, but simply lying a hot filament inside the JATO nozzle didn't seem like it would do the trick. Maybe it would have, but since Beck and Sal still hadn't found a launch site, I had time to come up with something better. So I pulled a dozen of the blank M-60 rounds from the ammo belt my father kept in his office as a decoration, tore off the skinny end of each shell, and dumped out the powder. I poured a little into each of seven squares of newspaper, folded the newspaper squares into packets around the filaments of the light bulbs, and trussed each one up with masking tape. When I connected one of them to a battery to test the idea, it made an impressive little flare.

When Sal and Beck still hadn't reported finding a launch site by Friday morning, I even went through the trouble of putting an old car battery on the charger at the shop, installing it in the rocket car, and wiring it to a switch on the dashboard.

Jimmy came back from college again that weekend, just about the same time Beck's father came back from who-knows-where with the four-wheel-drive. During the week I'd had high hopes that we'd be able to launch over the weekend, but when everyone gathered at the scrapyard on Saturday afternoon, I knew it wasn't going to happen.

While Jimmy inspected the rocket car and told us what he'd found out about my JATO bottles (which turned out to be very little), Sal and Beck told us about the launch locations they'd scouted out over the week. And the news was bad.

Within 5 miles of town there were a total of three sections of track long enough to run the rocket car on, and they were all dead losers. Beck and Sal knew the area well enough to realize that most of the modern wide-gauge tracks had been laid either directly on top of, or very close to, the places where narrow-gauge tracks had once existed. So naturally they had started their search at the switching yard near the city limits. There they'd found an excellent set of narrow-gauge tracks roughly paralleling a shiny set of wide-gauge rails. The old-style tracks stretched for miles - but they ran right through a busy switching yard. Not a good place to test a jet-propelled boxcar.

Another possibility was a set of rails that started in the desert, continued for five miles or more, and ended in a soft dirt field that would have been ideal for cushioning any crash that might happen. Unfortunately, this set ran directly through the middle of town, and the field at the end was the Jaycees softball field, right across the street from the police station. Even though Beck must've realized we'd never go for that idea, it was obvious he liked it. I imagine he wanted to set the rocket car on the tracks across from the police station in the dead of night, then blow the horn and scream until a dozen cops came running out of the station to see what the ruckus was. At that point he'd hang a moon out the window, then light off the JATO and blaze out of town.

The last location Sal and Beck found was even worse. The Mystery Mine was a bargain-basement tourist attraction a few miles from town that promised to show visitors the "inner workings of an authentic silver mine." People who paid the $2.50 admission were loaded aboard an ancient, rattling mine car and hauled through a few hundred feet of cavern, while a tour guide in a hard hat and goggles pointed at rusted pieces of machinery and chunks of rock. We'd all been on the Mystery Mine tour at one time or another, and everyone agreed that the only thing even vaguely interesting about it was wondering if a cave-in would trap you in the bowels of the mine, forcing you to eat the other tourists to survive. There was an old song that used to play on the radio that described this scenario, and there was a popular joke around town about being trapped in the Mystery Mine and having to eat your way out. A discreet sign near the mine's entrance proclaimed that it was inspected for safety by the US Bureau of Mines on a yearly basis, but everyone knew that ancient mines tended to cave in whether the US Bureau of Mines said it was OK to or not.

Of course, the fact that the Mystery Mine was a tourist attraction presented us with a couple of difficulties. The land around the Mystery Mine did have plenty of narrow-gauge track, but it also had lots of fences, lots of lights, a couple of security guards, and a handful of vicious Dobermans that patrolled the grounds at night.

The prospects of finding a decent place to launch the car were definitely looking grim.

Then at 6 that Sunday evening, I got a call from Jimmy asking me if I wanted to take a ride with him to "discuss a few things." He told me to drive over to his house, and when I got there, he was already in his car. He signaled for me to follow him. When he pulled to the side of the road near the abandoned mine shaft where we'd liberated the two ancient bucket cars, he got out of his car, opened the trunk and took out a tire iron, then headed toward the mine entrance without a word. When I asked what we were doing, he held up one finger in a wait-a-minute gesture. I shut up.

Jimmy stopped in front of the boards we'd renailed over the mine entrance. Even though the sun was almost down, there was still plenty of light to see by. I thought he'd brought the tire iron to pry off the boards near the entrance, but he started walking down the tracks away from the entrance. Ten paces later he'd reached the point where the tracks ended, buried in sand. He took a few more paces, then bent over and jabbed the pointy end of the tire iron into the sand.

You know what it looks like when you shoot a paper clip with a rubber band? One second it's between your fingers. The next it's ... gone.

To my surprise, it clanked.

Jimmy looked at me with a goofy little smile on his face, and when I realized what he was doing, I smiled myself. He pulled the tire iron out of the sand, walked a few more paces, then stuck it into the ground again. No clank this time. But when he stuck it in again, a few inches to the left, he got the same metallic clank. He was now standing a good 50 feet from the mine entrance, and at least 20 feet from the spot where we all assumed the tracks terminated. He looked up at me, with that dumb smirk still plastered across his face, and said, "So, how far out do you think these tracks actually go?"

Safety Second

Why none of us had thought to take a look at the tracks coming out of that abandoned silver mine before this is anyone's guess. Beck and Sal and I had stood right on top of them when we got the bucket cars, but none of us considered the possibility that a long section of the track might still be there, underground. As a matter of fact, "underground" is a pretty drastic term for what we found. The tracks seemed to be covered by a fairly thin layer of drifted sand and dust. The outcrop around the mine shaft broke the wind enough to keep the tracks clear near the entrance, but beyond that, the rails must have been a good place for drifting sand to pile up and eventually cover the rails.

When we got back to the cars that night, I realized Jimmy had asked me to follow him in my own car because he was going back to school directly from the mine entrance. But there was still a matter he wanted to discuss, that matter being the first run of the rocket car. Without a good launch site the matter could wait, but since it seemed as if we'd found one, Jimmy figured we'd better discuss the whole thing immediately. It turned out that he was very worried about the first run of the car, particularly the idea of having a person inside when we fired it. Of course I already knew there were plenty of things that could go wrong, since I'd built the thing in a junkyard. But when Jimmy started to lay out the possible ways a person inside the car could get hurt or killed, he made it sound a little less safe than going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

First, we were dealing with a highly volatile chemical propellant we knew nothing about. We didn't know how old it was, where it came from, or how it was supposed to behave. There was actually a very real possibility that the JATO could explode like a bomb, reducing the car to flame and shrapnel in a split second. But even if it did work as expected, the rocket was held in place by a length of water pipe welded to the bottom of a car that was almost 20 years old. If any of the welds didn't hold, there was no telling what might happen. Then there was the matter of the brakes. All we had was a setup that sounded like it might work. But if someone inside the car found themselves going 100-plus miles per hour and the brakes didn't work ...

Jimmy wasn't suggesting that we scrap the project outright, however, just that we perform a test run before trying it for real. An unmanned test run. Rig a system to activate the brakes at some point after the JATO had burned out, point the rocket car down the tracks, and let it run pilotless the first time. After all, it wasn't as if we needed a man at the tiller while the car was moving. The person we'd been referring to as the "pilot" would actually be the "passenger" anyway, his sole duty being to hit the dump valve before the car ran out of track. And since we had four JATOs, wasting one for the sake of safety seemed like a prudent move.

I had to admit, he made a lot of sense.

I pointed out that Beck would probably have a bird when he found out we weren't going to let him drive the car on its maiden voyage, but we both agreed that it wouldn't be a major problem as long as Beck got to drive it on the first manned run. We'd just take a second JATO along, and if the car ran successfully the first time, Beck could take it out the second time. If the car ended up a twisted lump of smoking metal, Beck would be happy we decided to take the precaution.

With these details settled, I said good-bye to Jimmy and headed home. The next day I was busy at the yard sorting through the latest load of junk my dad had bought over the weekend, but I found time to rig the brakes for our test run. All I did was twist a screw eye into each brake runner, then run a length of piano wire through the openings in each eye and up through a hole in the Chevy's floor. I tied the ends of the wire to a short stick, and used it to prop the brake's dump valve in the up position. Then I looped a piece of rubber from a bicycle inner tube over the lever, and tied it under the valve box. The bike tube pulled the lever toward the dump position, but the lever couldn't move with the stick propping it up. I figured that once we found a good section of track, all we'd have to do was drive a spike into one of the rail ties at the point where we wanted the brakes to kick in. When the car passed over the spike, the spike would snag the wire, pull out the stick, and the dump valve would snap down, activating the brakes.

Now, if you're getting tired of hearing about all the Rube Goldberg bullshit I was adding to this machine, take a minute to think about how I felt while I was doing the work. By the time Jimmy suggested that we rig "some sort of automatic brake system," I was getting mighty sick of rigging and drilling and bolting and cutting. And I was tired of trying to figure out ways to make important things happen by using other people's garbage. I made up my mind that the auto-brake was the last piece of work I was going to do on the car. If what I'd built at that point wasn't good enough, I'd simply turn the whole mess over to Beck and let him drive the fucking thing into the Mystery Mine, or past the police station, or wherever he wanted to blast it.

Meanwhile, I'd at least assign Beck the job of clearing the rails. He accepted enthusiastically. With the help of Sal, he broke back into the abandoned mine, grabbed the last bucket car, and pushed it down the length of the tracks with the bumper of the pickup. Once the wheels loosened up, the bucket car worked like a snowplow and cleared the tracks with a single pass. When I drove out to the abandoned mine after work on Thursday, I found two rusty metal rails poking out of the hardpan, starting at the mine entrance and extending out into the distance. When I banged one with a rock, I heard plenty of good steel under the rust. And best of all, they were 2 miles long and straight as an arrow.

For me, this was the point when the whole project made the transition from theory to reality. I squatted next to those tracks and realized that the last obstacle to running the car had been removed. And to my surprise, it didn't feel good at all. Suddenly the whole thing seemed stupid and insane and dangerous and illegal as hell. But it was way too late to stop.

The front half of the car was crushed like a beer can, under boulders ranging from the size of a watermelon to the size of the car itself.

Counting Down

If the track had been ready on Monday, I don't think I could've convinced Beck to let the maiden voyage of the rocket car wait until Jimmy came in on the weekend. As a matter of fact, the only way I was able to get him to wait as long as I did was by agreeing to start getting things ready on Friday.

After my dad and I went home on Friday, I returned to the yard and found Sal and Beck waiting. We backed the flatbed into the weedy field where the rocket car was docked, set up the ramps, and hoisted the car onto the flatbed with the winch. I drove the flatbed out to the abandoned mine and down the slope to the tracks, scared shitless that I'd get the truck stuck in the soft sand. But I made it down the slope OK, and we lowered the rocket car onto the tracks, its nose facing the mineshaft.

It looked perfectly at home sitting on the rails. Like that's where it was meant to be. But we didn't have time to stand around admiring the thing. Even though we were 100 yards from a fairly secluded stretch of highway, the sight of a five-ton flatbed, a four-wheel-drive pickup, and a rocket-powered '59 Chevy on railroad wheels would've looked pretty peculiar to anyone coming down the road. So as soon as the car was on the rails, I climbed into the Chevy's driver's seat and Beck pushed me down the tracks with the pickup's bumper until the car was close to the mine entrance.

We pulled the boards from the entrance again, and Beck used the pickup to ease the Chevy in. Once it was all the way inside, he took me back to the flatbed and followed me back to the yard. I parked the flatbed where it usually spent the night, we loaded the portable compressor for the shocks into the pickup, and we returned to the mine to run a test of the rocket car's brakes.

Since we didn't have a tow chain with us that night, we had to muscle the car far enough out of the mine for Beck to get the truck in front of it and push it back down the tracks. When we got the car about a mile from the entrance, we let it coast to a stop. Beck jumped into the Chevy with a maniac grin on his face, and Sal maneuvered the pickup behind him. Beck gave us a jaunty thumbs-up, and Sal hit the gas. We picked up speed until we were doing about 50, and just before I was about to scream at Sal to stop, he hit the brakes. We watched the rocket car pull away at a goodly clip.

And keep going.

And keep going.

And just as I was wondering if the brake system might have malfunctioned, I saw the ass end of the Chevy pitch up slightly as Beck hit the dump lever. Sal and I both let out the breath we'd been holding. When we got down to where it had stopped, the car was resting on its runners, and Beck was sitting on the hood. Less than 20 feet from the mine entrance.

I thought he might make up an excuse for waiting so long to stop, that the brakes didn't work or whatever, but he didn't even bother. When I asked what the fuck was wrong with him, he just said, "Hey, I didn't feel like pushing this fucker all the way to its garage, so I let it coast most of the way. You have a problem with that?"

Whoever discovered the car sticking out of the butte didn't make a big fuss about it. The papers didn't cover it and the cops never came to visit.

The runners had scraped the rust off 10 feet of the rails, and when I looked under the rocket car, water was still squirting out of the hoses.

Leftoff!

The first (and last) test run of the rocket car happened on Holy Saturday, 1978. For the non-Christians in the house, Holy Saturday is the day before Easter, a day the faithful are supposed to spend preparing for the Easter feast and quietly contemplating the Miracle of the Resurrection. My family has been Catholic for about a thousand generations, so I suppose this put me firmly among the ranks of the faithful. Which means the Pope probably would've frowned on my spending the day before Easter experimenting with illegal military ordnance and trespassing on private property. But I'm also confident that nothing in the Bible specifically covers what we were doing that Saturday morning, so I probably had some wiggle room.

We assembled at the abandoned mine early in the morning, just before dawn. The story for my parents was that Jimmy and I were driving up to ... a big city in the area (you'll excuse me if I don't specify which one) and wanted to get an early start. Jimmy was using the same excuse for anyone at his house who was curious. Dad wasn't even going into the yard on Holy Saturday, so I had the day to myself. I went to Jimmy's house and found him waiting for me on the front porch, and we left for the mine.

When we arrived, Sal and Beck were already there, sitting on the hood of the pickup, which was parked near the mine entrance. They even had the boards pulled from the mine entrance and the car pushed out into the open.

Beck got in the truck and drove around to the front of the rocket car, then pushed the car out to the opposite end of the track, with the rest of us riding on the tailgate. It wasn't until the car was stopped at the end of the track that Jimmy asked what turned out to be a very important question.

He said, "So why is it pointing this way?"

Sal and Beck and I stared at the car for a minute, and although I can't speak for the other two, I was trying to come up with something to say. To be honest, I'd never given it much thought. I suppose when the car was first brought to my dad's scrapyard, it was towed in front first, because the front end was farther from the path winding through our yard. When we loaded the car to bring it to the mine, winching it onto the flatbed rear first was simply the easiest thing to do. And when we got to the railroad tracks the day before, I'd simply driven the flatbed to the end opposite the mine shaft and parked facing away from the entrance. It seemed like a good way to avoid driving the flatbed over the tracks themselves, which might have damaged them. When we had rolled the car down the planks and onto the tracks, it had ended up facing the mine entrance. Sure, we could've set it on the tracks facing the opposite way, but ... nobody thought of it.

So the three of us gave Jimmy a shrug, and I asked him what difference it made. He walked around the car looking thoughtful, and after a while said, "None. This is good."

Later on, I figured out what he'd been thinking. If something went wrong with the car (specifically the brakes), which way would we want it to be pointing? If the brakes failed while it was heading away from the mine, the car would eventually run onto the wide-gauge rails at the end of our narrow-gauge track. And with the flatbed back in the yard, it wasn't likely we'd be able to get the car off the tracks if it got stuck there. But with the car pointed toward the mine, a brake failure would mean the car simply flew into an abandoned silver mine. We could declare the experiment a failure, nail the boards back up, and call it a day. Of course, the equation looked a lot different with a passenger on board, but that's why we were doing a test run first.

Ah yes, the test run.

Once Jimmy was through looking the car over, I broke the news to Beck that the first run would be unmanned. He didn't like the sound of that a bit, even after I explained to him that it was in his best interest. He wanted to ride in the car on the first run, and it took a while to convince him that it wasn't going to happen. When he'd grudgingly accepted our logic, we took one of the JATOs out of its crate and loaded it into the pipe at the rear of the car. Then Sal drove me down the tracks toward the mine. When the odometer had ticked off exactly a mile, I made him stop while I got out and pounded an 8-inch spike into one of the wooden ties, which were still solid enough to hold the spike well. We drove back to the rocket car and found that Jimmy and Beck had already shoved one of my igniters into the JATO nozzle, attached the leads to the roll of field-phone cable with wire nuts, and were unrolling the cable away from the tracks. I told Sal to park about 50 feet away from the Chevy, with the broad side of the truck facing the tracks. I wanted to have the pickup truck between me and the JATO when it was lit.

I filled the can under the Chevy's hood with water from one of the jerry cans, closed the hood, and rigged the automatic brake. The wire stretched between the runners was only 5 or 6 inches above the railroad ties, low enough to catch on the spike with no problem. Beck came over to watch the whole procedure, a little miffed that the unmanned test had obviously been planned out well in advance. But by then it was too late for him to raise any serious objections. If the car ran OK, he'd get his ride. If not, he'd be grateful we made the test.

Once the brakes were rigged and the water can filled, there was only one thing left to do: Light the mother and see what happened.

We all gathered around the truck, Beck popped the hood, and I cut the field-phone wire from the roll and stripped the ends. By then the sun had climbed over the top of the mountains, and we had a clear view of the entire track. I wrapped one of the wires around the corroded negative post of the truck's battery, and just as I was about to touch the other wire to the positive, Sal yelled, "Wait!"

He scared the shit out of me.

When I told my dad, he laughed so hard I thought I'd have to call the paramedics. He'd heard the tale, but he'd dismissed it as just another stupid story.

I said, "What? What? What's the problem?"

Sal looked slightly embarrassed. "Shouldn't we have a countdown?"

Jesus Christ.

Beck gave him a smack in the back of the head, but I told him sure, if he wanted a countdown, we'd have a countdown. So Sal counted down from ten, and when he reached zero, I touched the wire to the lead of the battery.

The events that followed happened so damned fast that I'm surprised my mind was able to record everything. But even though parts of this story have grown foggy over the years, the memory of the actual Flight of the Rocket Car remains crystal clear.

When I touched wire to battery post, we heard a little fizz. I knew what it was, since I'd heard it before: the igniter going off. I didn't expect to hear it, since I figured the rocket would light instantly. Instead, it hissed for a second, then stopped. But before I could start to worry if the rocket was a dud, there was a massive eruption of orange flame from the ass of the Chevy. Along with the flame was a huge, howling roar, something nobody had counted on. We'd all seen the Apollo launches on TV, and we knew that rockets were noisy, but nothing had prepared us for this. It sounded like ... like a solid-fuel rocket igniting.

I've been trying to figure out a way to put it into words, but the sight of the rocket car taking off is almost impossible to describe. You know what it looks like when you shoot a paper clip with a rubber band? One second the clip is between your fingers, and the next it's just ... gone. You can't track it with your eyes, because it moves too fast. All you can do is hope to shift your eyes to where it was going, so you can see where it hits.

Think of the same thing happening with a 1,500-pound car.

In the space of a second, the car jumped down the track, away from us, and we were enveloped in thick, chemical-smelling smoke. We all ran up the slope to get out of the artificial fogbank, but the roar from the rocket stopped as quickly as it started. Jimmy'd said the burn time on our JATO was 2.2 seconds. I staggered up the slope and looked down the tracks, to see that the rocket car was moving along at a rapid pace, toward the spike I'd driven in the railroad tie. And although it was moving damned fast, it was far enough away so that I can't even take a guess as to how fast it was going. My eyes were still burning from the rocket smoke, but I did see it pass the point where I'd planted the spike, and then ...

Something happened.

Intellectually, I know exactly what happened. The spike caught the piano wire, pulled the stick out from under the dump-valve lever, and the air shocks lowered the car to the rails. I didn't actually see the car drop, but it must have. Because a second later, more smoke started pouring out of the car. Only this time it was coming from under the car, and it was steam, not smoke. The runners had heated up, and the water shooting onto the hot brakes was turning into steam.

But the car kept going.

And going.

It didn't seem to be slowing down. It must have been, since the runners were obviously pushing against the rails hard enough to create a lot of heat. But the car kept moving, closer and closer to the mine. It never made it to the entrance.

Later on, Jimmy and I had a long discussion about what happened next, but we were too far away to have a clear view. Maybe one of the runners burned away and got caught in the ground. Or on the tracks. Maybe one of the old axles finally reached its breaking point. Or one of my welds couldn't take the strain. Whatever it was, the rocket car derailed about 20 yards from the mine entrance and continued moving toward the mine. Actually it was straddling one of the rails, going 60 or 70 miles an hour, screeching and screaming and kicking up a cloud of sparks.

And it was no longer aligned with the mine entrance, either.

The Chevy slid down the tracks, but instead of driving straight through, it went in at an angle with the ass end canted toward the road. The front end smashed into one of the huge timbers that outlined the mine entrance, cracking it in half. After a very short pause, the timber collapsed, immediately followed by the overhead timber it supported. Those timbers must have been under considerable stress, because a second later the entire entrance to the mine collapsed on top of the rocket car with a huge grinding rumble and a cloud of dust.

I just gawked. I remember that part clearly, standing there looking at the car in the distance, just before dust obscured the picture. My rocket car was sitting there like a busted Tonka truck with a mountain falling on it.

Moments later I became aware of voices shouting behind me. I turned around and saw Jimmy and Sal in the bed of the pickup, and Beck behind the wheel. They'd obviously had the sense to get into the truck and chase down the rocket car, while I stood there with my mouth hanging open. I jumped into the bed, and Beck floored it toward the mine entrance. Toward the former mine entrance. During the short ride, I wondered how we were going to haul the car out of the pile of rubble, but when we got closer I saw that it was a foolish idea. The front half of the car was crushed like a beer can, under boulders ranging from the size of a watermelon to the size of the car itself. Smaller pieces were still coming down when we got there. The only way that car was ever coming out was if someone torched off the back end and hauled it out with a winch.

Beck stopped the truck a safe distance from the wreckage, and we all got out to look. But there wasn't much to look at. The only thing not buried by the cave-in was the last 4 feet of the car. The trunk lid and rear bumper and rocket were visible, but the rest of the car was buried under boulders and rubble.

Jimmy quickly summed up our situation. At that particular moment, there wasn't much we could do in the way of damage control. The car was stuck. The JATO was wedged in too tightly to remove, too. And if we couldn't move it, then it was unlikely anyone else could. Not without a major effort. Fortunately, the only thing to show that we'd even been there was the piece of field-phone wire at the other end of the tracks, and the remains of the rocket car itself. Which meant that it was an excellent time to get the hell out of there.

We needed no more encouragement. Beck and Sal ran for the cab of the pickup, Jimmy and I piled into the bed, and Beck pointed the truck toward the road and stomped the gas. I guess he didn't have the four-wheel drive engaged, because the back wheels of the truck threw up rooster tails of sand as we took off up the slope. But we didn't get stuck. We shot up the slope, bounced onto the asphalt, and as soon as the rear wheels hit the asphalt they started burning rubber. Beck only stopped long enough for Jimmy and me to bail out and run to my car.

Then suddenly Jimmy ran back down the slope. I yelled after him. He stooped and grabbed something from the ground. When he reached the car he tossed the wad of field-phone wire in the back seat and jumped in. I punched the gas, spun the car around, and headed back toward town.

So that's the whole story of the rocket car. I never went back to the mine, and neither did Jimmy. We discussed what we'd do about the wreckage while driving back to town, but nothing we came up with seemed to make a lot of sense. If we went back to the site later that day, there was a fair chance we'd be spotted. And now there was a very obvious piece of forbidden military hardware at the site in plain view. The thing that kept repeating over and over in my head as we drove back to town was that paragraph in my dad's auction paperwork. The one about possession of controlled military hardware. It was then I decided the best way to handle the whole thing would be to not handle it at all.

And that's exactly what we did.

Actually, timing and nature lent a hand. The following day was Easter Sunday, and there was no way Jimmy or I were going to avoid spending it with our families. And even if we wanted to, it wasn't a good day to be screwing around out in the desert. Late Saturday night a windstorm kicked up, strong enough to make the local TV stations interrupt programming with traveler's advisories in our area. Nothing very odd about that, not in our area in the springtime. But this time I was thrilled to hear the reports. High winds and blowing sand could serve to obscure the signs of what we'd been doing in the desert that morning. If sand was blowing across the streets in the middle of town, it must've really been kicking ass in the desert. Later that morning I saw Jimmy at church, where we exchanged several Significant Looks.

The next day, Jimmy went back to college. I went back to work at the scrapyard, and I have no idea what Beck and Sal did. I spent the next few days trying to act as normal as possible, expecting a police car to show up at the yard any minute. But curiosity finally got the best of me, and I called Beck on Wednesday. We met that night at the same bar where we'd discussed brakes for the rocket car, and Beck told me he had been out to the mine, actually a couple of times. Once he even brought a camera and took a few pictures, because what he saw was so damned funny.

Funny?

He explained. The storm that blew through the area on Saturday night had indeed eliminated most of the signs of what we'd been doing. The tire tracks made by his dad's pickup were completely eliminated, and the railroad tracks were almost reburied. But the rocket car was still exactly the same as when we left, ass end hanging out of a pile of rubble with a rocket sticking out of it.

Beck pointed out what the scene must have looked like to a person driving toward the crash site: You're driving down a stretch of road, toward a butte that used to have a mine entrance in the side of it, but now there is no mine shaft - just the rear end of a car sticking out of nowhere.

And then, the twin skid marks on the highway where Beck's truck leaped onto the roadway. Skid marks pointing directly at the rocket car.

Aftermyth

Now, I have to admit one thing. I didn't start hearing rumors right away. Nobody did. I didn't see any articles in the paper, the cops never came to visit. All I can say is that whoever discovered the car sticking out of the butte didn't make a big fuss about it.

And I'm pretty sure someone did discover it. I saw Beck once more after our meeting in the bar, at a Memorial Day party a few weeks later. He was pretty drunk at the party, wanted to talk about the whole thing, and I had a bitch of a time getting him to a private spot so I could listen to what he had to say. He said he'd gone out to the crash site a few days earlier, and the rocket car was gone.

I said, "What do you mean, gone?"

But "gone" is just what he meant. He drove past the spot, couldn't see the car from the highway, and went down the slope to take a look. When he got there, he couldn't find any trace of the car ever having been stuck in the mine entrance. All I could think at the time is that the rubble pile must have eventually shifted to cover the car completely. Beck seemed doubtful when I suggested it, but like I said, he was pretty drunk. He said it looked more like the car was pulled out of the hole and taken away. But that's a bunch of bullshit. It has to be. To start with, none of us were there long enough for the scene to form a lasting impression. We looked at the wreckage for maybe 15 minutes before we were back in Beck's truck and hauling ass out of there. Maybe Beck saw enough so that he could tell if the car had been moved, but I wouldn't be able to tell.

Later on I started thinking about what would have happened if the county sheriff had driven by and seen the Chevy sticking out of a rockslide. Or even if someone had called the sheriff and reported it. See, the abandoned mine was far enough from town so that it probably wasn't inside the city limits, which means that it wouldn't be the business of the city cops. And folks who don't live in town learn quickly who they're supposed to call when there's trouble. Oh, I'm sure a state trooper would've stopped to check it out if he'd spotted it while driving past, but the troopers mainly stick to the interstates, occasionally pulling into one of the towns along the way for doughnuts or coffee. No, if some law-enforcement outfit stopped to investigate the crash site, it almost certainly would've been the county sheriff.

So what would he have done?

I honestly don't know, but the sheriff's office wouldn't have called the city cops unless they had to. My dad always hinted at animosity between the two departments, the city cops considering the sheriff's department a bunch of hick-assed Deputy Dawgs, and the sheriff's department thinking the city cops were a gang of self-important pricks. And neither group liked the state police, who, by all accounts, are self-important pricks. So I try to think of what the sheriff would've done if he'd come across the crash site, and it occurs to me that the first thing he'd have seen was what appeared to be a rocket nozzle sticking out of the back end of a car. If I were the sheriff, I'd have immediately called the army base where Dad and I got the JATOs in the first place. Who else would be qualified to deal with such a thing? Evel Knievel?

And if the sheriff did call the army, and they had some DOD people come out and take a look, anything could've happened next. The military bomb squad might have taken one look at the expended rocket, told someone at the base to send out a truck with a winch, and they may have yanked the car right out of the rubble and taken it away. After they determined that there was no corpse in the car, it wouldn't be the sheriff's business anymore. Or anyone else's.

Case closed.

But I never did any serious investigation of these possibilities, for two reasons. One, I didn't want to do any snooping that might look suspicious. Two, I didn't hang around town very long after that. Two weeks after the test of the rocket car, I drove to ... the biggish city I mentioned earlier and took the ASVAB test. That's the test they give you before you join the military. And a few weeks after talking to Beck for the last time, I shipped out for navy basic training.

Before you make any assumptions about my joining the navy to escape the repercussions of the rocket car incident, let me tell you that I absolutely did not. If the rocket car had anything to do with my joining the navy, it was just to give me a gentle nudge in a direction I was already heading. Hey, take a look at the situation I was in. I was 22 years old, living with my folks, and working for my dad in a junkyard at the edge of a shitty little town in the desert. Not exactly a Future With Promise. I guess college was a possibility, but Dad didn't really make enough to pay my way, and I didn't feel like repaying student loans until I was 100 years old.

Why the navy? Well, because of that song by the Village People, of course.

No, actually, there was never any question about which branch of the service I wanted to join. I joined the navy because I wanted to get as far away from the desert as I possibly could.

I went home on leave when I got a chance, and I always saw Jimmy whenever I went back. On my second visit, I found out that Beck and Sal had hauled stakes and split for California a few months after I'd left for boot camp. Not on foot, either. They'd stolen their dad's monster pickup, but rumor had it their dad never even swore out a complaint about the theft of his truck. Maybe he figured it was a small price to pay to get rid of his sons for good. Or maybe the truck wasn't empty when they jumped in and headed west. Their dad was still up to unknown hanky-panky out in the desert somewhere. Beck and Sal may have waited for an occasion where Dad brought some work home with him and headed for California with a few bales of Colombian contraband in the bed.

Whatever the case, nobody ever found out. The next update I got on that situation was the following Christmas. My dad told me that Beck had been busted in California for God-only-knew-what and had died in prison. The facts were sketchy, but I didn't press details. Dad obviously considered it a case of "good riddance" but didn't actually say the words, because he knew Beck had been a friend.

Sal was MIA, and as far as I know, nobody heard from him again. But without Beck to take care of him, it's doubtful that he came to a good end.

So that leaves Jimmy. He finished college, got his degree, and started working for a big company, designing various kinds of equipment. I don't want to specify the company, or even the exact type of equipment. Let's just say that you'd recognize the company name if I mentioned it, and Jimmy is head of the department that builds machines for making cold things hot and hot things cold. If that's not good enough for you, too bad.

My dad kept the scrapyard, continued going to auctions and making a profit, all the way up until he retired last year. He and Mom moved to Phoenix, where they're probably the only retired couple who don't complain about the heat. They came up to visit a few months ago, to see my wife and me and the kids, and while they were here I took my dad out one night to shoot some pool. I told him the story of the rocket car, not knowing what his reaction would be. He laughed so hard I thought I'd end up having to call the paramedics. Seems that over the years he'd heard various bullshit artists mention a car driven into a cliff, but he'd always dismissed it as just another stupid story.

I've stayed in touch with Jimmy over the years - he's met my family and I've met his, and we've exchanged the occasional phone call and Christmas card. He never forgot about the rocket car, and over the years he's taken great joy in tweaking my balls about it. Every now and then I get something in the mail to remind me of the whole thing, something Jimmy thinks I'll find funny. At first it was just the odd newspaper clipping or magazine article, but once VCRs became popular, he started sending videotapes. And even though there was never a note or explanation with a tape he sent, I always knew what to look for when I watched the movie. One was The Right Stuff, and I laughed out loud when scenes of the rocket-sled tests came on the screen. Another was more recent, a Charlie Sheen flick called Terminal Velocity. Sure enough, there was a scene where Charlie and some blond bimbo escape from the bad guys in a homemade rocket sled.

The one movie he sent that I didn't find very amusing came a few years ago, at a point where I hadn't heard anything from Jimmy in a long time. This was the third part of a three-movie series. And although I'd seen the first one a couple of times, I'd never seen the second part. So I had to rent Part II at the video store down the street, which I watched with my family one Friday night. The next day my wife took the kids to visit her parents, and I stayed home and put Jimmy's movie in the VCR. The part at the beginning of the movie, where Doc Brown and Marty McFly find the DeLorean in the abandoned mine shaft was bad enough. But toward the end, when they mounted railroad wheels on the time machine and pushed it down the tracks with the locomotive ...

When the movie was over, I got up close to the TV and read each and every name in the credits. After all, we never had found out what happened to Sal after he was left on his own in California.

PLUS

No, It Was a Red Camaro