The Little Outboard that (Hasn’t So Far, but …) Could

Reflections from the Publisher: The Little Outboard that (Hasn’t So Far, but …) Could

Sitting in my barn is an outboard motor that’s older than I am. One of Johnson’s classic “Turtle Motors” built from 1964–1973, this two-stroke, 9 ½ horsepower masterpiece apparently represented a high water mark in American marine engineering when my wife’s uncle bought it, new, in 1968. By all accounts the little Johnson never let Uncle Pap down through thirty years of hauling his Jon boat from Natchez down to Fourchon to chase redfish, specks, and flounder around the marsh. But to the best of anyone’s knowledge the last time the Johnson went anywhere under its own power was more than twenty years ago. Between then and now it has sat forgotten in the back of a barn, waiting for a scavenger with an inflated sense of his mechanical abilities to take an interest in it. Lord, save me from myself; I think I feel another project coming on.

Right alongside the outboard is parked a twenty-two-year-old Kawasaki 4-wheeler that our son, Charles, pushed into the yard one day last summer. The reason Charles was pushing this 4-wheeler was that it didn’t work—hadn’t worked for years, in fact—which explains why it had been given to him, by yet another uncle savvy enough to recognize an opportunity for off-loading defunct machinery when he saw one. The fact that it wasn’t running actually solved a problem for Charles, who for years had been told that his parents would never buy him a 4-wheeler, and that the day he’d get one would be the day he paid for it himself. Of course, Charles’s parents never considered that he might contrive to be given one. Anyway, on some level I suspect Charles knew that should he turn up with a broken one, his dad’s penchant for fooling with machinery would win out, and that the beknighted thing would be allowed to stay.

And let’s not forget the twenty-year-old Ford pickup truck, that I salvaged from the field into which it had been sinking since breaking down there sometime in 2015. Of course this truck wasn’t running either, although judging by the size and quantity of rats’ nests in the cab, engine bay, and behind the dashboard, if you could just have trained all the rodents to run in the same direction we could have had the fastest farm vehicle in the Felicianas. Once I’d spotted this truck, and with visions of resurrecting it to serve as Charles’s first vehicle, I approached the owner to see about buying it … and was surprised by how firmly he insisted on giving it to me. Should have been a sign. It took six months to get the Ford running, and another three to convince the rest of the rats to move on. Charles, it has to be said, has been less enthusiastic about the truck than he was about the 4-wheeler. I think I drive it more than he does.

Do you see a pattern developing? Taking inventory of the growing collection of vintage and cast-off machinery accumulating around our property, my wife certainly does. Strangely she struggles to appreciate the aesthetic value of automotive yard art, preferring the dull utility of vehicles that move under their own power to the kind you need to mow around. But with more than twenty-five years of living in rural Louisiana to my name now, I think this means that, finally, I’m starting to fit in. I recently had cause to visit a landowner in East Feliciana whose magnificent home, manicured acreage and enormous lakes present one of the most beautiful and well-maintained rural estates I’ve ever seen. But even there, artfully concealed behind a thicket of crepe myrtles, was a barn filled with an eye-popping variety of defunct maintenance machinery. Here were cars, trucks, tractors, motorcycles, ATVs, generators, mowers, chainsaws, boats, a combine harvester, and what might have been bits of a light aircraft— in various stages of decomposition. Gazing in awe upon this automotive Père Lachaise, I concluded that, far from being a character flaw, my evolution into a backyard scavenger mechanic should rightly be seen as a natural stage in the journey towards full membership in the club of Southern rural property owners. So, with my role model now established and my dubious contribution to this annual Design issue complete, it’s back to the barn I go.

Until the Johnson sings again, I remain …

—James Fox-Smith, publisher james@countryroadsmag.com