The all-time record for largest parade of Mazda Miatas was set last June, when 683 of the beloved roadsters congregated in Lelystad, the Netherlands. Meanwhile, in Anchorage, Alaska, the Alaska Miata Club's (AKMC) record for the most vehicles at a single event is 14. Or 12, depending on how you count.
"If you look at the picture on our website," Mike Fernandez, the club's founder, told me, "there were 12 cars that were all together and then two that were parked way apart from the rest." Those vehicles belong to folks Fernandez has nicknamed "the Alaskan Individuals." "They have Miatas and they lurk on the club's site, and when we go for a run—lo and behold, they're there," Fernandez said. "But they don't involve themselves in the club."
On the day of the AKMC's record-setting gathering, in July 2006, Fernandez approached the Individuals and asked whether they were officially in the club. Despite their presence, the answer was no. "This is partly why people come to Alaska," Fernandez explained in resignation. "Either you're running away from something or you want to be left alone. And that's who these people are. They're rugged individuals. They do whatever they want. And they have different reasons for owning a Miata."
Last spring marked the club's 10th anniversary. Because we're fascinated with quixotic automotive communities—especially ones consisting of tiny convertibles persevering in an arctic landscape—we flew up to Anchorage to join the festivities. And, to take part in their celebratory spring drive, we had Mazda loan us a very special Miata.
Waiting for me curbside at Ted Stevens airport was the Mazda Super20. Painted a smoldering shade of ocher called Hyper Orange Mica, it nicely mimicked the color of the Alaska license plate. It also resembled the spring Anchorage sun, still high in the sky and going strong near 8:00 pm. Daylight wouldn't run out until well after 11:00 that night, which can be distracting if your body clock is set to Eastern Standard.
But, hey, no complaints. It had snowed the previous week, so this 50-degree weather was not only comparative bliss but functional necessity. The Super20—a supercharged, intercooled, 230-plus-horsepower one-off Mazda built in 2010 for the SEMA show in Las Vegas—came with a rather dire series of weather-related warnings from Mazda USA. (The car had been shipped—literally, on a ship—directly from the company's North American headquarters in California.)
"Those tires can be diabolical in the cold," the email cautioned. If the temperature dipped into the 40s, driving would be "dangerous." If it rained, "dangerous as well." And should the mercury dive below 17, we were told in no uncertain terms that the rubber would "actually crack."
The glossy black fiberglass top came with no such warning, though it rattled heartily against the roll bar. I piled into the Alcantara driver's seat and headed downtown. For a brief moment, with the top down and a guttural boom sounding from the engine, I felt like a badass. And then, as I zoom-zoomed north, a jacked-up GMC Yukon pulled alongside, popped its transmission into neutral, and revved the hell out of its V8. In this world, the truck seemed to say, the Mazda and I were something akin to lunch.
Despite months of advance notice, ideal weather, the Super20's guest appearance, and an on-task venue, turnout at the kickoff event for the AKMC's anniversary weekend—a screening of Fast & Furious 6 at the local movie theater—was, well, slight. Though Fernandez had been commandeering asphalt in the multiplex parking lot since 5:30 that evening, when we arrived an hour before the 7:20 show, ours were the only two Miatas present. This threatened to undermine Fernandez's core rule, the rule of three. "As long as three people show up with three different Miatas," he explained, "we'll have an event."
Doing his part, Fernandez, an animated 42-year-old former Air Force mechanic and now post office janitor, had parked his car nose out, in the Japanese style. Except, as it turned out, it wasn't his. The first-generation Mariner Blue roadster, nicknamed "Smurf," belonged to a friend. Although Fernandez had laid hands on seemingly every Miata in the state, his own car wasn't running; he'd chopped the windshield to create a speedster, which required removing the glass, which led to other projects, which soon rendered the car undrivable.
Three of the five club members who eventually showed suffered from similar issues or worse. Fernandez's 36-year-old brother John—gentle giant, local DJ—emerged, somewhat comically, from a Vivid Yellow NB (second-generation) Miata he'd borrowed from a former girlfriend, having sold his own Miata when his kid was born.
"It's not exactly a family car," he said, referring to his 1995 Merlot Mica M-edition model, "and my wife wasn't exactly a top-down kind of girl." Another red Miata came after his subsequent divorce, but that one was sold as well, to his brother, who then sold it on down the line.
Sardonic and bearded, 30-year-old Chris Bailey arrived with his partner Nate Mills in a borrowed, rattle-can-black, third-generation Mazda RX-7. His beloved Highlight Silver '99 Miata, "Connie," awaited an engine transplant, a supercharged unit similar to the one Mazda had installed in the Super20. "It's at a shop nearby," Mills said dryly. "We could drive by and wave."
As the movie's curtain approached, Mike Fernandez spun toward each raspy exhaust note, anticipating additional attendees. But the only other person to join our lineup, albeit briefly, was a buff African-American military guy who screeched into the lot in his cherry Ford Lightning. Popping his Oakleys, he declared "Miatas in Alaska!" and shook his head. Fernandez explained that the club was hosting a drive the following day. "Feel free to join," he added. "We don't discriminate." Military guy seemed even more bewildered than when he pulled in. "I'm good," he replied. "Just curious."
Fast & Furious 6 featured exactly zero Miatas. It did have myriad ludicrous chases involving impossibly sexy iron and a custom "flip car" with a prow resembling the spatula-beaked northern shovelers we'd seen by the shore. The plot, meanwhile, hammered home the importance of maintaining community in the face of adversity; notably, none of the AKMC members seemed struck by this poignant parallel.
Later that evening—represented in this case by a sunny window of time around 90 minutes before midnight—we did get around to discussing the challenges of owning a diminutive Japanese roadster amid Alaska's environmental, and personal, hostilities. Having once hit a sheep five hours after hitting a deer, Fernandez brought up wildlife hazards. Bailey talked about the difficulties and benefits of using his Miata as a year-round daily driver.
"All the features that make it ideal on the track," he said, "even weight distribution, low center of gravity, also make it an ideal winter vehicle. Of course, you need a set of studded tires." Bailey and Mills both alluded to the derisive conflation of Miatas and homosexuality. (Later, Bailey laughingly showed us a T-shirt featuring a rainbow-shrouded MX-5 and the tag line, "I'm Not Gay, I Just Love Miatas.")
But Fernandez, in his guileless way, gave insight into another type of hazard altogether: the fellow Alaskan who just plain doesn't like Miatas. "Trucks will pull up alongside you and rev their engines, or they'll purposely put one wheel off the road and shoot gravel up from the shoulder," he said. "I don't think they're trying to humiliate me. I think they think it's expensive. Which it's not."
As if on cue, on my drive back to the hotel, the Ford Lightning we met at the theater sidled up to us at a light, supercharged V8 revving, side exhaust fuming at roughly the height of my neck. But when the light turned green, I peeled up A Street and smoked him.
On the morning of the 10th-anniversary drive, sunrise arrived around 4:45, less than six hours after sunset. I was thankful for the hotel's quality blackout curtains and the admonition of a former Anchorage resident: "Buy a sleep mask. They sell them in the gift shop." This same friend also explained that it's not the stygian winter that drives Alaskans crazy, but summer's eternal daylight. "People finish dinner and watch a movie, and at 10:00 pm, they're like, 'Maybe I'll fix the roof.'" Denied its circadian snooze button, compulsion runs wild.
The clear, warm morning showed the fruits of Fernandez's Miata compulsion. By the time our caravan giddyapped, it contained 11 roadsters, including a handful of new recruits. Fernandez hustled from member to member, passing out swag, providing meticulous route directions, and delivering officious instructions like "drive at or above the speed limit, but not too fast." I recalled my first conversation with him: "I've always liked to start things and follow through," he said. "So when I was a kid and I played Dungeons & Dragons, I was the dungeon master." Later, he went a bit further. "The bottom line for this club is, without me, it wouldn't exist."
The drive began with a three-mile jaunt through Anchorage and a 25-mile stretch along the picturesque Glenn Highway, hitting its stride with an eight-mile bomb up Eklutna Lake Road. A narrow two-lane that wends into the Chugach Mountains east of town, Eklutna features blind turns, altitude changes, crisp drop-offs, and no guardrail. It ends at the eponymous lake, Anchorage's freshwater reservoir. Fernandez calls it "the best road in the whole state." (We're happy to share his enthusiasm but note the survey might be undermined by Alaska's notorious lack of pavement.)
By the time of our first pit stop, at Rochelle's Ice Cream Stop (cum-Laundromat-cum-Firewood-Depot-cum-Dall-Sheep-Viewing-Platform), our candy-colored parade had collected all manner of responses. Little kids had pointed, perplexed. A Hungarian motorcyclist had threatened to run away with us. A guy in a pickup had yelled, "You're all queer!"
Female AKMC members draw less ire. Karen Anderson, who bought "Mauda," her Classic Red 1990, as a retirement gift in 2010, claimed she's more frequently cut off by trucks when driving her Subaru Baja. The regal 61-year-old artist Rosemary Redmond—who traded a Toyota pickup for her white '99 seven years ago, and who drives it year-round—confessed that men still flirt with her when she drives the car she calls "Gypsy."
"It's the only way I can get attention from a man anymore," she quipped. And 65-year-old energy lobbyist and former B-Mod SCCA autocrosser Marilyn Leland echoed this regarding "Kazoom," her Titanium Gray '03. "If I've got the top down, people talk or wave at stoplights." But even these benign encounters can turn peculiar in Alaska. "Once," Leland said, "when I was driving in Spenard, a woman on the street nodded and smiled at me, and I smiled back, thinking she was just being friendly. Then I realized she was a hooker."
As we snaked back down Eklutna, I grew more adventurous with the gas pedal. We continued north along the Old Glenn Highway, whose gentle sweepers took us through the Matanuska Valley—colonized in the 1930s by a New Deal program that granted intrepid midwesterners up to 80 free acres—all the way to the base of the Talkeetna Mountains. En route, we traversed a narrow bridge over an eluvial plain, a gray wash of glacial sediment dissected by gentle rivulets. It would have been a beautiful sight if it weren't for the hundreds of RVs parked along the shore and the hordes of buzzing ATVs. It was like a scene from the Thunderdome.
Soon, we began to switch back up Fishhook Road, heading toward an abandoned mountain gold mine. We passed pristine snow-mounded runs, stunning avalanched slides, and the occasional brave skier and winter camper. Surveying the rainbow of Miatas winding top-down through this imperturbably perfect landscape, I thought of something Redmond said at Rochelle's.
"Other people here have cabins, boats, and snowmobiles," she said. "But I have my car. It gives me such a sense of freedom. The way it drives and handles, I feel like I'm in a French movie, going down the Riviera." The sentiment held until, as we assembled for a group photo at the road's craggy terminus, a guy in a Pontiac Grand Prix GTP pulled past, revving his engine.
Counting the cars in the commemorative shot, our number now stood, curiously, at 12. We seemed to have picked up a new member. "Martha lives in the Butte," Fernandez explained, pointing out a woman laughing loudly at the row's end. "She met us back where the Old Glenn meets the New Glenn."
Martha told us about "Radika," her Velocity Red '05 Mazdaspeed turbo she acquired following her husband's workers' comp settlement, and about how she drives it in winter when the roads are plowed, and about how she hit a 1000-pound moose the previous August. ("It bounced right off.") She then launched into an eloquent defense against Alaskan Miata haters, sarcastically clocking their complaints. "No remote start, no four-wheel drive, a convertible, not jacked up 10 feet off the ground." She rolled her eyes. "I say, if more people had them up here, more people would be smiling."
The ride back down the mountain was predictably thrilling, and the AKMC members took plenty of interest in the Super20—the way it sounded, the way it worked, everything. Let's put it this way: If you've never chased a tangle of Miatas through a glacial valley in a hotted-up version of the same, you really should.
In keeping with my personal subtheme of temporal displacement, lunch took place at 5:00 pm in Palmer, a dusty valley town that hosts the Alaska State Fair. (Fun fact: The fair is so popular that it draws nearly 41 percent of the state's 730,000 residents every year.) Later that night, I met some AKMC members at a gay bar downtown, where men in cutoffs preened in the giant backyard, taking in the 55-degree sunlight at 10:30 in the evening. Two fistfights broke out. We retreated to a martini bar, where a pretty blond girl propositioned a member of our entourage who did not play for that particular team. In Alaska, every cake is pineapple upside-down.
It is also a place where a stranger, and a sober one at that, will open a conversation by noting that your blazer makes you look like a reject. Where your sole wild-moose sighting places the animal directly in front of a road sign that reads Moose Crossing. It's a conflation of the improbably odd and the blandly forthright, and in loading up the Super20 for the drive back to the airport, I decided this was the most legible of Alaska's many paradoxes.
Here, the Miata's allure seemed to fit into the same template. The car's obvious appeal is the joy it brings—but in Alaska, that joy is simultaneously tempered and enhanced. There are only a few days each year you can put the top down and scan the mountains for Dall sheep, and on those days, a handful of other drivers are practically guaranteed to spew rocks and insults at you. They're the best days of the year.
One might wonder as to the point of a club for Miata owners in Anchorage. But consider instead how wondrous and heartening it is that this club exists here compared to, say, a similar community in California or Texas, where the weather, driving opportunities, and available vehicles make membership easy. Speaking of his unyielding love for Mazda's tiny roadster, Fernandez said, "I know it's not practical. But that's the whole point." You could say the same thing about Alaska itself.
source: http://www.roadandtrack.com/features...n-65-7-roa0314
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Originally Posted by AKMC
