The Blog from the Black Lagoon.

A tough, noisy night at home, plenty of upset baby time, with snow falling all the while (which didn't bother any of us). Got out of bed at 6:45 am and in rapido succession, gave Ann 2 oz. of formula, showered, dressed for the cold, shoveled the eight or so inches of fresh snow from (part of) my sidewalks and (part of) the driveway, walked a half a mile, and caught my train just past 8 am. Whew.

Last weekend I did all the grocery shopping, since Ann is still a little small to go out regularly, and her mother is usually worn out from nursing. At one point, my route took me down Ogden Avenue, where I spotted a Hummer H2 on a used car lot. Not on a used car lot attached to a mainline dealership, either, but at one of the many nondescript independent used-car mongers along Ogden, a big commercial street in central DuPage County. I suppose it might be called a mom-n-pop operation, but more likely it’s a pop-and-Uncle Bill who’s-so-drunk-can’t-get-a-job-anywhere-else operation.

Be that as it may, I had to wonder how that Hummer ended up there. Probably someone bit off more than he could chew, financially. Indeed, a Hummer would be a chewy slab of buffalo meat, financially speaking. You can get a house in some parts of the country — a crummy house, but a house — for the price of a new Hummer.

But this isn’t going to be a SUV rant (see my Feb. 28 blog). No, I have a soft spot in my heart for the Hummer, though I wouldn’t recommend that anyone actually buy one. It might be just another very large vehicle on the road to me, but for one very important thing: I got to test drive one.

Back in the spring of 1996, soon after I’d joined the editorial staff of “Fire Chief” magazine, the editor, Scott, came into my office and asked, “Would you like to drive a Hummer?” Not a question you hear every morning.

AM General, manufacturer of the Hummer, had invited Scott and some other editors to come tour the factory and take a test drive at the company’s test track in South Bend, Indiana. Scott couldn’t go, and our publisher was courting AM as a once and future advertiser for the magazine. So someone needed to go.

No strings were attached. I didn’t have to write a line about the experience — professionally, that is, since I’m clearing doing so now. Of course, if I did write about it, that would be swell as far as AM was concerned. Though the original civilian Hummer, and the H2 for that matter, are known to the public as rich men’s playthings, AM was eager for the world — a certain, vehicle-buying slice of the world — to learn that the machines were useful for fighting fires, mining, and other intense work.

Did I want to drive a Hummer? Yes. Absolutely. It was something all former boys could aspire to. But I have to report that a fair number of former girls came to the test track to drive the things, too.

It was a nice spring day, and first we toured the factory, and then sat through a slide show and heard entirely too much technical detail about the machines. All that was all just automotive foreplay, however, leading up to a session on the test track, which consisted of an oval course with various obstacles built in, plus 300-some acres of woodland crisscrossed by trails and studded with more obstacles. Two editors got in each Hummer, wedged into the uncomfortable seats, along with one member of the AM staff in the passenger seat to make sure we didn’t do anything really stupid. The editors then took turns driving over bumpy trails, logs, rock piles, and steep grades, and through muck, ditches, and a scummy pond deep enough to come half-way up the side of the door.

It might be ridiculous to go buy one, but it made for a fine day away from the office.