Leaving Las Vegas

WAITAITSBURG

- If you’ve been to Disneyland or the Cirque de Soleil, or have seen any of the super hero movies like Spider-Man, Iron Man or The Avengers, you’ve seen Scott Fisher’s work.

He’s the guy that makes men fly.

Or at least he was. For now at least, Fisher has left the business of building large-scale machinery and control sys­tems for entertainment venues in his rear view mirror. The open road is his life, or roads rather—specifically back roads as he travels the country in his red 1967 Datsun Roadster 1600.

Starting out from his home in Las Vegas, Nevada, on June 12 and traveling “clockwise,” was about the only plan he had, Fisher smilingly admitted while sitting in Coppei Cof­fee Sunday.

“I figured it would be best to head north while it’s hot and then arrive in the south as its getting cooler,” he said.

Fisher fit Waitsburg into his plan after find­ing Main Street’s Seven Porches Guest House on

AirBNB, the off-the-beaten path lodging website where he also found an artist’s home deep in the woods of Eureka, Calif., and a horse barn in Klam­ath Falls, Ore., where he slept in a bed next to the tack room for $15 a night.

He chose to avoid hotels and freeways as much as possible to be “where the people are.” His travel style and route is akin to that of many other adventurers who have come through the Touchet River Valley through the years, from a retired dairy farmer walking his way across country to a cyclist marking every milepost for those who fell in recent wars.

Being an engineer and spending long hours working with machinery hasn’t made him much of a people person, said Fisher, who is 46 and unmar­ried.

“This whole trip has softened me, made me much better at being a human being rather than just an engineer,” he said.

His choice of route has also served him well when problems arise. While returning to Waitsburg from Walla Walla Saturday afternoon, he felt a thump as the convertible’s front left side dropped sharply causing the car to veer left into the oncoming lane.

Fortunately, there were no other cars on Highway 12 at the time. And he was traveling slow enough to avoid serious injury. “If it had happened at speed, it could have been pretty dangerous,” Fisher said.

A couple of local men stopped and helped Fisher move the car to the shoulder and advised him to call Kyle’s Tow­ing in Dayton, which he did. Before the tow truck arrived,

Dayton resident Gary Lowe, himself a vintage car buff, stopped to offer assistance.

“He has a 1966 version of my car and offered to donate parts if I needed them,” Fisher said. “Otherwise I’d have had to wait for them to be sent from California.”

Could the stars have been better aligned for Scott Fisher that day?

What are the chances?

He had to shake his head in wonder.

“Grandpa is definitely along for the ride,” he said, referring to his grandfather, Harry Gould, whose black and white picture Fisher has taped to the Datsun’s dashboard.

When Fisher was in eighth grade, he bought the exact make and model of the car he has now, but in much worse shape. Over three summers, he and Gould restored the sports car so it was ready to go by the time Fisher got his driver’s license. The shared project also fueled his growing knowledge of and interest in mechanics.

As it turned out, Fisher didn’t need the auto parts from Lowe. Kyle Anderson of Kyle’s Towing donated some he had lying around his garage and they made them work—at no charge. But Lowe came by to check the process and invited Fisher to meet his wife and dog and go out to pizza.

“I let him drive my car,” Fisher said. “He’s thinking about restoring his car.”

Its people like Lowe, Anderson and the AirBNB owners who have kept him from becoming lonely, Fisher said.

And the car itself attracts people. One of the first sports cars made by Datsun, the light (roughly 2,000 pounds), four-cylinder, two-seat roadster is perhaps lesser known and less flashy than other cars of its kind and therefore, Fisher said, more “approachable.”

In a word, it’s cute.

Were it a Porsche or something similar, he doubts people would be so inclined to touch it and ask him questions.

Fisher had been casually watching the classifieds for a 1600 when he found his current car in Costa Mesa, Calif.

“That was a big deal because I knew it hadn’t met the rust demons yet.”

And while the car is indeed in decent shape, it hasn’t been fully restored. Fisher “freshened it up” and will do the big overhaul when he returns, about four months from now.

When he bought it, Fisher intended for the Datsun to be a “week­end” car. It wasn’t until the stressful months of dealing with all the lawyers and paperwork involved in the sale of his company were over that he began to view the car’s possibilities differently.

With an impressive and diverse list of clients such as Disney, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Metallica and the Metropolitan Opera, Fisher Tech­nical Services Inc. (FTSI) had grown to the point that Fisher found himself in a mostly administrative role.

He missed being more hands-on. And when, during the economic downturn, FTSI partnered with another firm that was eventually acquired by an even larger company, Fisher felt the corporate nature of his own work would only get worse.

“I could stay or go,” he said. “I took the bail out.”

Wanting to clear his head post-sale, Fisher recalled how much he’d enjoyed a road trip to visit his sister in California the past Christmas. That gave him the idea of a much longer road trip. “But if I was going to make it a real road trip, I wanted to drive something interesting.”

And so he is. He and Harry are heading north once again, the chrome-rimmed dials on his dashboard glint- ing in the summer sun. The tiny trunk carries no spare, just a few clothes, a repair kit and a Triple A card.

“Cars are objects,” Fisher observed, one hand on the wheel. “But they’re not in- animate.”

What comes after the trip, Fisher isn’t sure. “I know I need to build something."