Escorts A La Parrilla (Grilled Escorts)

An arsonist is targeting green Ford Escorts, approximately fifteen years old, in Medford, Oregon.

That Arsonist is a long way from being "right," starting with nascent pyromania and ending with his choice of target.

The Ford Escort of the nineties was a good kind of cheap, like a bologna sandwich made from name brand fixings. It was a great bologna sandwich on wheels, but that's all it ever would be. The engines had useful horsepower, and they were decent handlers on good tires, but it was purpose-built for transparency, universally adequate and uninspiring. The GT models charmed with 40 extra horsepower elicited the passion reserved for nude photos of Meryl Streep. (I'll look, but I doubt that I will become aroused.)

It was not bad, but it left the driver with the sense of being transported passively, much as if one had used public transit. It was cheap, dull, and until the recent unpleasantness, disposable.

Family members would give Escorts away until the point where nine-year-olds would curse about the potential cost of disposing of yet another Ford Escort. The well-meaning relative would be attempting to impress a kid and inspire a lifelong automotive enthusiasm. The nine-year-old would be lamenting the lack of a cash offering to be leveraged into the purchase of a bootleg copy of Grand Theft Auto:Peach City, featuring an even more phallic doppelganger for Atlanta's Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel.

This led to the employ of the first strategic abandonment technique: Enlist a tallish 12-to-15-year-old sibling, that young'un with the fever for getting behind the wheel of anything, and some of the ability to do something about it. Drive the Escort to a rough neighborhood, and leave it with the keys in the switch, the title on the driver's seat, with the windows open.

That would be how the police would find the Escort, often with the keys to hot-list luxury imports under the windshield wiper. These Escorts would find their way back to their rightful owners who had to lose another five bucks worth of GTA:PC savings on gas to try and dump the thing again.

In the nearly twenty year history of Escort-dumping this technique only worked once, at the home of one Austin Morris, in the Happy Holiday Acres Manufactured Home Plaza (nee Mobile Home Park), Emerson, Georgia. Mr. Austin Morris is a good friend and somewhat computer literate, promising to raise your Wandering Gentile's readership percentage by double digits...someday. He did quite well scavenging useful bits from abandoned Escorts and keeping his pricipal Escort in as-new condition.

On 12 May, 2005, while visiting his mother in Decatur, a freak windstorm removed Mr. Morris' Zayre Garden Storage Shed, featuring enough mechanical components to assemble up to six complete Escorts, given an adequate supply of bodies. Rumors of Escort parts raining in Hinesville, nearly 300 miles away, have been so viciously denied by authorities in Liberty County and on Fort Stewart that we are forced to believe that the rumors are true.

Mr. Morris, lacking the desire to continue using his wrench set, or collect his parts in Southeast Georgia, became a Toyota man, and hasn't had to fix squat since. And this has nothing to do with an individual torching Escorts 3000 miles away in Oregon. Yet.

The other Escort disposal technique was a much more successful codicil in the NAFTA treaty. Escorts are required to be towed out of the country as a condition of registering a Ford or Nissan pickup from the United States in Mexico. Of the 17 million Escorts manufactured between 1981 and 2001, fully 14 million have been expatriated/repatriated to Mexico. That makes them ubiquitous, just not as ubiquitous as before, except on I-35 in Texas.

Owing to the recent economic unpleasantness, some debate exists as to whether the nation's fleet should be repurposed abroad, with a goal of restarting manufacture. It is entirely possible that a person or persons unknown are acting in Medford out of the suspicion that these Escorts have been employed in the thwarting of immigration enactments, knowing how many Escorts have been repurposed to Mexico.

Does anyone know the whereabouts of Lou Dobbs on the nights of the fires?