In 1920 my father bought a used Tin Lizzie. I think he paid $350 for it. Noisy and bone-rattling though it was, that Ford Model T changed our lives. Now we could go all the way to Speculator for shopping without spending two days on the road with the old wagon and Charlie. Once there, we even had time to rest a few minutes in the nickelodeon, watching the latest Little Mary Sun Play. I think that’s what they called movies in those days. When I see our rugged outdoorsmen today with their $6,000, four-wheel-drive Jeeps and Land Rovers, tons of metal and complicated wiring, I have to smile as I remember our Model T. It stood seven feet tall, knock-kneed and bony. Only its mother could have loved it. But it would go anywhere and run on anything. If it was sluggish, you simply tossed some camphor balls in the gas tank. Or if you couldn’t get gasoline, it would run on kerosene and chopped-up candle wax. Neither hole nor hill stopped it. Almost all driving then was “off road,” and our flivver opened up new lakes and streams to my father’s fishing rod and trap lines. The Model T would follow old cattle trails and footpaths. It could wend its way through a pine forest almost as easily as a whitetailed deer, yet it was so light that if it dug its way into a bog, four men could pick it up and carry it to firmer ground. The tires weren’t much bigger than bike tires. By the time my father bought the car, there were some four million Model Ts in the country, and more and more of them were finding their way into our mountain wilderness. Everybody had a joke about them. One man was supposed to have asked that his flivver be buried with him because, “I ain’t never been in a hole yet where my Model T couldn’t get me out.” Spud Wilkens, who ran the garage in Indian Lake, said one traveler came in and ordered a pint of gas. “Don’t you think it ought to have more than that?” Spud asked. The traveler replied: “No, I’m weaning it.” More than once, I saw Fords go by with college boys in them, up our way camping, with stickers pasted on the side reading, “Danger! 50,000 Jolts!”

By 1921 my father had become very concerned about the growing number of tourists in the woods. “They’re going to ruin the fishing,” he predicted. “And they’ll drive the animals so far upland that we’ll never shoot another deer.”

Of course, he never considered giving up his own Model T. It had opened up too many new trails for us. He just didn’t want anybody else poaching on the wild land he considered to be his own. Now, Miss Pauline, she never went out into the woods with us. She didn’t really approve of Tim turning into an outdoor boy. But she never said anything to my father; she knew better. Besides, what was Tim supposed to do if he grew up without knowing how to act in the woods? Work in an office in the city? A man had to work outside; that’s the way things were.