Somewhere east of Los Angeles, the pavement started talking back. Just a whisper at first, grooved concrete tugging the tires left, then right. Normal stuff. Probably... Out in the deserts the roads are channeled by semis, time, and the blistering sun. Things were just okay. But then something went weird. The rear of my new to me Mercedes 300E didn’t follow the front. It lagged behind. Just a tick. A maybe. Like something was loose, or thinking about it. Enough to register. Enough to file away. Off the interstate there was no question. Narrow switchbacks shifted curiosity to to anxiety. This wasn’t one of those I think I can most probably make it situations. It was a pull over immediately kind of thing. But I didn’t. The car kept going. So did I. A can't miss it or else sunset film shot in Amboy California was waiting for me.
A couple weeks earlier a DM had come through on social. I'd let it slip on the Overcrest Podcast that I would love to own a W124. It was the "best car Mercedes had ever made." That isn't just talk either. I’d been looking. One had caught my eye at the tiny post office a near my house. It was a white diesel, clean lines, just sitting there. I talked to the owner, an ancient man name Marlin. The first thing he said was "do you want to buy it." Nice guy, very clean car. We talked for a bit but couldn’t quite agree on a price. Still, it stuck with me. Old Benz metal was in my blood.
Compared to Marlin’s white diesel, this new one lacked the Minnesota callouses and black oil. It was anthracite gray over ...more gray. Every suspension component on it looked, and was, new. Ball joints, bushings, tie rods, everything. New transmission. Even the climate control and gasp the vacuum system worked. Unbelievable. An acquaintance had owned it, a friend in the scene, one of those guys who lives with a little extra style baked into everything. The deal came together fast, the kind where money gets wired before the second cup of coffee is gone. Within a week I was on a plane from Minnesota to Orange County.
Driving away from John Wayne airport always comes with a strange contrast. It's all sterile tile, boring stucco, and those strange, terrible signs small businesses always seem to have. If you need a manicure, weed, liquor, a taco, or a bank loan, Its all there on display in stretched and squished mismatched block font. They're all lined on roads tented with non-native (like most Californians) palm trees, scented by sea air, and clogged with a trove of six figure SUV's and Teslas. It reminds you California is beautiful, as long as there aren't any humans there to ruin it.
The ride share driver pulled up in a newer Volvo. He was a big dude that needed the seat pushed all the way back. His stories told a life of the past, a lot of where he'd been, and little of where he was going. He said he used to train NFL players, but liked driving strangers around more. He told me about hot/cold therapy, saunas, (want to buy one?) Polestar torque figures, and how he just liked talking to people. His dad had been a sports agent. Said there used to be an SEC in the driveway growing up and said nothing ever drove quite like those old Mercs. When we pulled up, he looked over his sunglasses and let out a low whistle. Said, "Damn man. You were right. That’s cleaaaaan."
It was. The anthracite shimmered in the California sun. Parked in the driveway, it looked like a photograph. The owner was already outside, waving. The car looked even better in person. Not perfect. But close, especially by Minnesota standards.
The car felt fine through Costa Mesa. Flat roads, low speeds, sunny skies, plenty of traffic. That afternoon I met up with the Leichtbauwerks guys, Byron and Khalil, the owners of the shop. Because I can’t leave anything alone, and stock suspension sucks, we swapped in a set of H&R sport springs and Bilstein HDs. We worked late into the afternoon. The car felt right when we wrapped. Not perfect, but solid. Confident. Everything I wanted in that moment. The car settled into the California road like it belonged there. Solid. Heavy in the way old German cars always are. Everything was working. After an alignment I pointed the hood east, past San Bernardino, out toward the desert. I noted the cruise control was broken.
I was chasing the sun.
There was a route through the hills I needed to hit. Some curves, a ridge, a pull-off that looked promising on satellite view. A road that twisted back and forth on itself. I had to film the car there, and the road to create content for a future Overcrest event. On the interstate an hour earlier I could tell the car was driving oddly. I couldn't place it. Until here it had been subtle. Like trying to pick up on a sound you aren’t even sure exists. You strain to hear it, but nothing comes.
On this twisty and very photogenic road, as the car's weight transferred from one side to the other, it was no longer a mystery as to if something was wrong or not. This stretch of road was clean. Fresh blacktop, wide radius turns. No traffic. Nothing to blame but the car. No grooves or rutted out asphalt. No wind at all, I even pulled over and checked. The rear wasn’t following right. It swayed through the apex, hesitated, then came back around with too much intent. It was far worse at higher speed. It felt like the trunk was 100 feet behind me, and filled with reckless bowling balls. The car was well and truly broken, and I knew it.
I pulled off just outside the Salton Sea. The heat was settling in. I crawled around in the gravel under the bumper, tugged on control arms, yanked at the wheels, pulling on anything we had touched. Everything looked tight. The clock said it was either time to go or time to quit. The old Roy’s Motel neon in Amboy California would be glowing soon, and I wanted to be (had to be) there when it did. So the car went back in gear. The sun kept sinking. And the problem followed me like the inevitability of dusk. I knew continuing was borderline suicidal, but If I kept the speeds down it wasn't that bad. "Kris Clewell. Born 1981. Died. 2025. Final words: It wasn't that bad."
Out by a turnoff to nowhere, somwhere close to Trevor from Grand Theft Auto's house, near a junction that might not even be on the map, there was a NAPA. The kind that still has faded banners and oil-stained concrete out front. I stopped, stepped inside, and asked the woman behind the counter if there was a shop nearby that did alignments. She pointed north, said something about a guy in a Quonset hut who worked on tractors. He'd just opened up his shop to the public. I nodded. Said thanks. and then I drove right past it.
This is how it goes sometimes. Logic and instinct don’t always shake hands. The logic said: go back. Get it fixed. Don’t push your luck. Instinct said: make it to Amboy, do your job, the Overcrest team needs you. One more hour. Just get there. It's not getting any worse so just go on then. Somewhere near that point, the road narrowed. The sun dropped a little farther. And unconvincingly car sporadically started steering itself again.
It would turn in fine, then snap back mid-corner. Like the rear subframe was flexing. Like something in the geometry was breathing. A rhythm developed, steer, correct, overcorrect, sweat, grip tighter, breathe shallower. Every time the car shifted was an adrenaline hit, a heart jump, and a gasp. It was exhausting. The highway was deserted and the sky was fading. There was nothing out here but silence and a cell signal that came and went, and there was nothing to run into if the car decided it had enough of my gambling.
Pulling into Amboy felt like arriving at the edge of the world. They'd name an ocean after me. A train was rolling west through town as the sun was folding into the desert. The neon I needed to shoot hadn't popped on yet. The car was still twitching, unsettled, but I had finally stopped. I stepped out, stretched, and felt the heat still rising off the panels. My hands were shaking. Not from fear exactly, just the long drag of tension.
Amboy was was founded back when a gun on a hip felt a bit like "key’s on the left breh." Decades later, in the 1930s, it boomed when Route 66 turned it into a vital pit stop for weary travelers heading west. When the interstate came, people didn’t, and everything dried up. It turned into nothing but a slow and lonely deep breath of a whistle. By the ‘90s, Amboy was a ghost town. But instead of vanishing into the sand, it got a second life with new owners. The neon flickered back on. The past held its ground.
A few cars sucked into the lonely tourist trap were parked near Roy's. The girl behind the counter inside was young, probably in her twenties. Quiet, but sharp. After a bit of conversation she walked me over to the breaker box for the sign and said, “You can flip it if you want.” I asked her why she didn’t do it herself. She paused, then said, “I don’t like it.” I laughed nervously. “Haunted or something?” I asked. She didn’t answer. I asked again and she just nodded toward the old rusted panel like it was my job now. No smile, no smirk, just a flat expression that says: your move. The breakers flipped, and nothing said "Boo".
I filmed what I needed, got in the car, and headed toward Vegas. One hour to go. The road between Amboy and its uncle the neon city felt heavier now. The car still twitched on the broken geometry, but I kept going. The visual quiet of the desert faded as lights started dotting the horizon. I was in that strange space between alone and surrounded. Somewhere past Baker, I stopped for gas and watched the glow of slot machines blink behind the convenience store counter. I felt like I was dragging a wounded animal through battle. I was tired, thirsty, unsure. Vegas wasn’t a destination, it was just the next place where I might be able to find help.
That night I stayed in a casino motel that smelled like ashtrays and carpet. The kind of place where you expect the door chain to break if it ever actually had to work. I went to bed hoping I'd wake up with a better idea of what to do.
Sunday morning, I pulled up to the first tire shop. Closed. No note, no lights. Just a sun-faded OPEN sign that had given up years ago. There were supposed to be open. Obviously not. I waited a few minutes and then rolled off to another place, tucked into a strip mall behind a vape shop and a cash-for-gold place. The guy behind the counter told me to pull around. It felt like they might know what they were doing.
The car went on the rack, got wiggled, poked, measured, and sent back down. They told me it was probably alignment. I said it wasn’t. They said, "Well, it might be." I paid, because that’s what you do.
Whatever they’d done, it made the car worse. Not only was something broken, but now the alignment was off too. It felt like something deep in the structure was trying to escape. The rear end still had that unholy float. They did not know what they were doing.
Harbor Freight, the savior of every broken s***box in a foreign land. I bought the cheapest socket set they had, some wrenches, and a floor jack. It was a hundred degrees in the shade, and I wasn’t in the shade. I laid down on blistering asphalt and went through the same ritual. Pulled at control arms. Twisted bushings. Turned nuts. Tightened what I could reach without putting my head at the mercy of a hydraulic jack manufactured to maximize margin. All the parts were new, and I couldnt figure out what could be wrong. Subframe? Differential bushings? Defeated, I finally called up Leichtbauwerks and asked if I could bring it back. I was sure it wasn't any work we did, but I didnt really have another options. Keep going? Find another shop the next day?
I parked outside a 7-11 to ponder the decision when my phone rang. It was about my Grandfather. Lately I always felt a bit of dread every time my extended family called. In my head, every call was "the" call. His foot had come off the gas awhile ago, but it seemed like things were rolling to a stop. It was indeed "the" call. I had some time, but not much.
When I was little, so little I don’t even remember how little, I’d lie in the back of Grandpa’s old Ford Econoline van. It was a blue one. I remember the fabric on the seats. It had vertical blue stripes with thin yellow bands. That van took us all over the place. And somehow, the ride home always took longer than the ride there.
As a kid, it was unbearable. But now, the older I get, the more it makes sense. He didn’t just take the long way home. He believed in it. Straight, empty roads filled with hours. For him there must have been clarity in motion. He always took the long way home. Maybe he just wanted to be with his family more, or maybe it was just his way to slow things down.
I called AAA. It was "no problem" and "be there in an hour". Then it was three. Then five. Then eight. The guy on the other line sounded genuinely sorry. Told me if he were closer, he’d drop me off at a place to have a steak to pass the time while I waited. I declined. He didn't mention until later that the steak came with a side of boobs at a local strip club. Opportunity missed. It was hard to get mad at anybody. The car was broken and everyone else was just trying.
I sat on the curb outside the 7-Eleven for eleven hours waiting for a tow, staring at the car just waiting. It was way too much time to grind out with a down trodden spirit. I watched the entire ecosystem of a 7-11 wax and wane. From guys getting snacks at lunch, to the gotta get home for dinner but I dont have any gas guys, to the evening, when the shiny rides started to come out and beer went in the trunk. I wondered if I should fly home. Just leave it. Let the W124 fade into the background of a strip mall parking lot and go say goodbye. But I didn’t. Grandpa wouldnt want me to spend $1500 I didn't have on a last minute one way plane ticket. I thought about bailing on AAA and trying to drive it back to Costa Mesa, but I didn't have the energy for the risk in me anymore.
It was an inhuman hour when my driver the pulled up in shiny new Freightliner, big enough to tow a dually if he had to. Long beard, dark glasses, husky. He had the gait that told you he'd seen enough weird shit on the side of the road that nothing really surprised him anymore. He was in no hurry. As the car was getting winched up, he leaned against the side of the truck and nodded toward the Benz. I said hello over the sound of the winch. He grunted. It was going to be a long ride. It was four or five hours to Orange County.
We started talking somewhere outside Primm. It had taken quite some time for him to speak. It was clear he was the kind of tired that lives deep in the bones. There was, strangely, no small talk, just his story in chunks between the dark. I just listened. He'd been through a divorce. Said he'd lost his kids, or at least lost time with them. Used to drive long haul until he got tired of living in parking lots. Vegas was too loud for him now, but he liked the quiet outside the city. He said he wasn’t supposed to be the one doing this tow, but his mechanic hadn’t shown up. So here he was, no sleep for 36 hours, dragging a Mercedes through the desert at 2am with a stranger in the passenger seat.
At some point, he mentioned he'd been in a coma once. For two weeks, he was gone to the world. Waking up to not even being sure what had happened. It was like he blinked. At first it was today. blink. Now its 3 weeks later. An instant. He didn’t say how it started, only what it changed. The whole thing made him quieter, maybe even calmer. Said time didn’t mean the same thing after that. It just got... different. The kind of confessions that only happen when you’re both facing forward, and the circumstance guarantees you’ll never pass over this road the same way twice. I now know this man who's name I've forgotten, better than I knew some of my closest friends. I know his ultimate failures, and the dreams he has that cover them up. I know what pains him, and what keeps him going despite them.
While he talked I stared out the window into the blackness. Somewhere along the way a thought popped in that couldnt be shaken. Why is every landmark out here named after the devil? Devil’s Canyon. Devil’s Backbone. Devil’s Elbow. Why was everything devils this, devils that? Maybe it was because a long time ago, all people could think about out here was dying. Everything hot. Everything sharp. Everything trying to kill you. There was no comfort in the terrain. Just miles of punishment and reminders that you didn’t belong.
By the time we got to Leichtbauwerks at around 3 or 4 am, he leaned out the window and said "Hope it’s something stupid." The truck pulled out, and headed on the long road back to Vegas. No rest for the wicked.
The next morning, Byron sat in the drivers seat, and we went for a test drive around Costa Mesa. The car stepped out hard to the left under throttle, then snapped back under braking, shifting from one lane, to half in another. There had been a lot of unfounded worry that the problem wouldn't replicate myself and the most foolish trip of all trips in a very expensive tow truck had occurred. Byron is a man of reservation, and he didn't say a whole lot. When we pulled back in, he looked over and said, "Well, I’m glad you didn’t die." Me too. I'm grateful he and Khalil were there to help.
After the test drive, we rolled the car into the shop and threw it up on the lift. Byron shook the rear end from side to side, going from bolt to bolt until he found it. The the rear toe adjustment arm. The balljoint on it was loose. Dangerous. Stupid. The kind of dangerous that turns every corner into a roll of the dice. The rear right toe would shift drastically under load, sending the car into a new trajectory mid-turn like it was dodging something invisible. Whoever had installed the tie rod before my ownership had forgotten to tighten things up. It was an easy fix on a hoist. On a boiling asphalt Las Vegas at noon parking lot with a jack made of chinesium? Not so much.
It took 34 hours to get home. The road passed like a dream. Not fast, not slow, just a kind of blur that only comes when you're emptied out. One jaunt off the interstate stuck out. High winds forced the trip into a detour onto a state highway. Low clouds dragged their tendrils over brittle tundra, slow and heavy. They reached down, licking at boulders and teasing the wind-stung earth. It had shook loose a reflection of a similar trip with Grandpa after college. He’d flown out to San Francisco to help me move home. We loaded up a W126 with college junk and drove east. We broke down at the front gates of Yosemite. He had packed everything we needed, tools, a full camping setup, and there was an open campsite. It was so absurdly perfect I still wonder if he sabotaged the car on purpose so we could camp out for a week. He was by far the most prepared man I have ever met.
We hiked every day. Me in my twenties, him in his seventies. I couldn’t keep up. He just kept going. Quiet. Steady. Patient. That trip took two weeks instead of two days. At the time it felt like a disaster. A time suck. Now I know it was a gift.
This trip felt the same. Long. Disjointed. Full of failure and rerouting. But also time. Time to think. Enough time for the adrenaline to wear off. Enough time to wonder if I’d made the wrong call by not flying. I thought I’d have more time. And I did. But not much. I sat with Grandpa for a short time, and then in a blink he was gone. He didn’t say much, of course. He couldn’t. But I like to think he waited for me. Just long enough for me to make it back. That’s what I tell myself anyway. Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve just flown home. Paid the ticket. Left the car. But maybe I needed those miles. Maybe the road had something to show me before I said goodbye.
Back on that college road trip, I had hated how long everything took. I'd always thought I was missing out on what waited for me when I got there. But Grandpa understood something I didn’t. The road isn’t about getting somewhere. It’s about what settles in while you're in motion. What reveals itself when there's nowhere to be, and realizing that where you are going is just another place that you are. That rhythm, the patience, the detours, the unplanned stops, that’s what I learned from him. When he could, he always took the long way home. And now, so do I.
