I am hurting at the loss of a dear friend. John was large in girth, spirit and personality, and his death leaves a hole in my heart.
Make of this what you will, readers who believe in transcendent energy connections or that nothing is accidental or coincidence: while digging this weekend in the disorder of my files, I turned up a pencil draft, two decades old.
Here are those old notes, with little change, in salute and farewell to my friend, who would grasp the lesson I took from riding around in his world.
I made a recent visit to the car culture of Los Angeles, and came away with an increased appreciation for the value of small and subtle sources of knowledge and expertise –- which need not be complex or exotic to be valuable, only focused and specific.
My friend John might have been typical in southern California, although to this taxi-dependent resident of an Eastern city, his freeway life was as foreign as his garage was full: matching Porsche 911s as the couple’s separate commuting cars, a sizable Mercedes sedan to haul the luggage for weekends in the country, a marshmallow-shaped Plymouth coupe that went back to his boyhood, and a baby-blue MGB soft-top nestled in the corner, so cute you wanted to pat its rear as you walked by.
There was also his go-shopping vehicle, in which we set off for wine and other weekend necessities -– a civilian version of the English-built WWII jeep, vintage late 1940s. Right-hand drive, olive-drab, canvas roof and otherwise open to the elements. Its short wheel base made the kidney-thumping ride hellishly uncomfortable.
Parked at a busy market, it attracted stares. I was puzzled. “How do you lock it? Isn’t it an inviting target?”
I was met by scoffs. John did not suffer fools.
“Not another person in all of LA County could get it out of the parking lot. First, there’s no ignition key. A thief wouldn’t know about the off/on toggle under the dash. And the ignition is separate, with a starter switch on the floor above the accelerator.”
I had visions of early lessons on the farm trucks and tractors of my rural youth. To drive the hay fields and the feed lots required a contortionist’s flexibility to manage a foot-activated starter tucked up obscurely between the two main pedals.
“The shifter is floor-mounted under the driver’s left hand. There’s no chance an American could find the R in the pattern. It’s the same lay-out as in this country, just like the pedals, but a Yank would think ‘mirror image,’ hit 2nd gear, and lurch right into the curb.”
“Last, the old crash-box transmission. If a thief did manage to get out of the parking space, he’d be stuck in low gear and stall within twenty yards.”
There are times to believe in the “wisdom of crowds.” But the instincts of the herd only serve for conventionally available knowledge and experience. The advantages of small information gaps open up when nobody else has the facts.
Put another way, a model based on commodity-scale knowledge has weaknesses that create opportunities in either of two ways: first, because everybody wrongly thinks they know it -– like the dubious worth of bitcoin or a no-advantage business plan -- second, having a unique niche, as with an armor-plated portfolio of intellectual property, or a unique license, or as here, a foreign post-war jeep.
Neither need it be complicated. British soldiers were trained and knew exactly how to handle the simplicity of their camo-decorated workhorse. In America, John’s jeep was fully theft-proof, for reasons as hidden in plain sight as its inscrutable old technology.
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