I am admittedly a little nutty about this airplane. I fell in love hard many years ago when we took the boys to a P-51 Mustang Fly-In at the Santa Maria Airport. The planes, even though they weren’t piloted by small, wiry 23-year-olds but by middle-aged men with enormous amounts of disposable income, have a mystique that is their own.

This piston head, which I treasure (along with my Civil War bullet, my fragment of the Berlin Wall and my piece of oak from HMS Victory), was a Christmas gift.

And here are the obligatory stats:

Wingspan: 37 feet
Length: 32 feet
Maximum Speed: 437 miles per hour
Cruising Speed: 275 miles per hour
Maximum Range: 1,000 miles
Engine: Packard Rolls Royce Merlin V-1650-7 (1,695 hp)

The engine was miraculous and the sound it produced—nicknamed “whistling death”—was unforgettable, I guess especially if you were a German soldier. Near the sad end of Saving Private Ryan, P-51’s make a brief star turn as the Panther tank closes in on the doomed Capt. Miller:

The sum total of my mechanical abilities consists of reaching into my wallet for my AAA Card, but there are certain engine sounds that are unforgettable. Yesterday I watched, mouth flopped open, as a late-model Mustang, I think a Shelby GT350, pulled up next to me and then made a stately left turn; the driver punched it once he’d passed the intersection and the result was a kind of deep bubbling sound that you could almost feel in your breastbone. It was beautiful.

We can’t afford to fix it up yet, but we have my late mother-in-law’s 1968 Camaro Rallysport in the garage. (Hers has wire wheels. Very cool.) It has a 327 V-8 and when it was running, entering freeways driving this car was one of the great joys of my life. From inside the passenger compartment, it was more of a guttural rumble with the bubbles hovering in two-part harmony just above it. For those of you of a Certain Age, it was the Righteous Brothers of automobile engines. Since you hit 65 mph so quickly, it was a little sad—like that last bite of an In-And-Out burger—when you let off the accelerator. Sigh.

One more: Like the Mustang, the Harley-Davidson has an inimitable sound. My dear friend David Cherry once owned a Harley 45 Flathead with a suicide shift (a gearshift on the left side near the footrest) and when he bought it, I followed him as he drove it back to our apartment in San Luis. That might’ve been the one day the bike actually ran; it became a collection of discordant parts in many boxes and I’m not sure David ever had the chance to rebuild it. But following him home was a happy day. He was happy. The Harley was (momentarily) happy. Hearing that sound, even inside my car’s compartment, made me happy.

Here’s a photo of a restored 1948 45, I think the same year as David’s bike:

This British guy (no helmet law?) demonstrates the sound of his Harley; this late-model bike sounds mellower than Dave’s old-school Harley, but you get a sense of the sound anyway.