“Psst. Hey, buddy, wanna drive a duck?”
After having driven the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, a Chevrolet yellow cab and a Honda moped or two, the offer to drive a duck seemed tame enough by comparison.
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The Duck is a DUKW, for those who recall the U.S. Army vehicles built between 1942 and 1945 by General Motors Corp. The acronym was a special code used to identify the vehicle: D for 1942, U for amphibious, K for front-wheel drive, and W for rear-wheel drive.
Yes, that’s front- or rear-wheel drive, the choice is yours depending upon whether you are motoring over pavement or through a sand bar. One letter left out was P, which stands for propeller, the device that takes over when you leave the land and enter the water. This Duck is at home in either environment.
More than 2,000 of these land/water carriers were used in the invasion of Normandy. The vehicles were retired from the service in 1958. Ducks now serve the annual summer invasion of the Dells by vacationeers, which is how we came about driving one of the machines.
The last time we were in one of these vehicles was about five years ago on a Dells vacation. The bones have just about recovered from the jarring received from a vehicle that we suspect was responsible for Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf getting the nickname “Stormin’.”
The Ducks are 32 feet long, 8 feet wide, 9 feet high and tip the scales at 14,000 pounds, meaning they are somewhat larger than a ’60s Cadillac sedan, a tad smaller than the QE2.
As a passenger admiring the Wisconsin scenery, your mind-as well as the majority of your appendages-is distracted from the discomfort of the WWII troop transporter. As a driver, there`s no such luck. You find yourself behind the wheel of a floating truck sans power brakes, power steering, air conditioning, AM-FM stereo, digital clock-or air-filled shocks.
The only standard “goodie” a Duck comes with is an orange life vest, one for each of the 21 passengers and their chauffeur. Despite the good intentions of the life vests, they don`t instill the same feeling of security when motoring as would a driver-side air bag.
As if the life vests alone don`t make you sit up and take notice of your vehicle, the names blazoned on the machines certainly will. In arriving at the site of the “Original Wisconsin Ducks,” there sat a row of drab green and white Ducks with such monikers as “Palermo,” “Normandy Beach,” “Mt. Suribachi” and “Dolly.”
“Dolly?”
“The college students who drive the Ducks used to paint the names of their girlfriends on them, but we`ve changed most of them to references to WW II,” said Daniel Gavinski, general manager and chief caretaker of the Duck fleet.
A Duck is not pretty. Each hull is painted forest green and white, only slightly more attractive than your run of the mill army camouflage cover. There`s no roof, only a large green canvas to keep the sun and water off the occupants who sit behind the driver. The windshield folds down over the roughly 12-foot-long hood whose only decoration is a pair of rounded headlamps that looked as though they were borrowed from a ’49 Chevy.
The driver and co-pilot’s chairs are up front, the two rows of passenger seats are directly behind.
We slipped behind the wheel of “Palermo,” a 14,000-pound metal steer with 10 forward gears, five in low and five in high.
Navigation equipment includes a gas and brake pedal, clutch, starter pedal (you stand on it rather than turn a key) and the gear shift. Another handle engages the propeller when you reach the water.
Power is supplied by a 270-cubic-inch, in-line 6-cylinder, 100-horsepower, gasoline engine capable of speeds up to 60 miles an hour on land and about 7 m.p.h. in the water.
Speed wasn’t our primarly goal. Shifting the lever was the concern because the Duck features double clutch operation. The drive pattern meant pressing the gas pedal, releasing it, depressing the clutch and shifting to neutral, releasing the clutch, depressing the clutch and shifting to second, then releasing the clutch, then pressing the gas pedal again.
It’s not that complicated — if you aren’t at the controls of a 14,000-pound boat on wheels standing 9 feet off the ground and boasting of a 12-foot-long nose. And the college kids who wield these monsters over the summer have to work all the controls while informing the visitors in back that the rock formation off the stern looks like a wandering Sioux.
We confined our driving to the massive parking lot for a variety of reasons: It takes 3 1/2 weeks for the summer collegians to master the Duck on the trails and in the water and 30 minutes hardly justified mastery; the regular route requires traveling down a hill into the river, which, in a 14,000-pound machine, roughly equals riding a Jet Ski down Mt. Fuji into a rice field; at 4 m.p.g. learning to double clutch while cruising the parking lot had consumed a week`s worth of fuel; and being Sunday, vacationers were in line at 8 a.m. waiting for their 1-hour, 7 1/2-mile excursion over land and water, and the nut double-popping the double clutch on ”Palermo” was eating into valuable souvenir-buying time.
It didn`t take long to master double clutching, though having Gavinski in the co-pilot`s seat grimacing each time we ground metal against metal served as an incentive to learn quickly.
Once shifting was down pat, controlling 14,000 pounds of Duck sitting 9 feet off the ground became the next chore. It was akin to being in control of a CTA bus without having to take tokens or run red lights.
The lack of power assist on the steering didn`t present as much of a problem as we had expected, though any left or right turn meant using both hands and both arms and spinning the wheel more than once in a circle. You don`t maneuver a Duck with one finger on the wheel. A summer at the wheel of one of these machines would make the upper torso look like an ad for steroids. Though our venture took place on the smooth pavement in the parking lot, the suspension system on a Duck proved it isn`t quite the same as that on a Cadillac or Lincoln. In a Duck, shocks refer to the aftermath of any movement forward, which also results in movement up and down as your seat meets the thin coating of vinyl underneath.
About 200,000 hale and hearty (before the trip) Dells tourists board the Ducks each summer.
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If you can`t make it to the Dells but would like a Duck, the salvaged machines are relatively cheap. Gavinski said he buys the surplus vehicles for $3,000 to $4,000 each. Getting them in tourist-toting condition, however, requires roughly another $15,000. Gavinksi has 36 Ducks in his fleet-and five full-time mechanics on hand to service them.
For those mechanics, a simple repair isn`t as simple as running down to your parts store and rummaging the shelves. Remember, WW II was a couple of wars ago.
“I get my parts from salvage companies in North Carolina and Georgia and once a year also place an order from a salvage company overseas,” Gavinski said. ”The boxes themselves the parts come in are unusual and are marked ‘Packed-1949’ or ‘Packed-1954.’ And when you open the box, the part is still covered with the cosmoline (a Vaseline-like substance to protect them from water) they were packed in during WWII.”
Though buying and reconditioning a Duck is costly, and ride and handling are akin to navigating a Brahman bull down Michigan Avenue, we envision a variety of pluses in owning a Duck.
You never, for example, would have to worry about finding a parking spot for your 14,000-pound treasure. Tired of tailgaiters on the Kennedy Expressway? Not when your vehicle stands 9 feet high. And who needs an alarm system? Even if the potential thief got the Duck started, by the time he mastered double clutching, he`d be only a block away and out of gas.