The DrakeCast #75: Clyde Rides Again w/ John Agricola

A grainy still from Clyde’s introduction to the world, the 2010 short movie “When Guiding Goes Gangster”

In 2010, Drake Magazine owner and editor Tom Bie and filmmaker R.A. Beattie bought a rundown old car so they could make a short movie called When Guiding Goes Gangster. It starts with an innocent couple walking into a fly shop where they meet their guide, Sharp Cheddar and his posse. From there, the crew loads into the aged Mercury Marquis and heads to the river. The guide neglects his clients to roll dice and uses a handgun to land a fish that is obviously a frozen tilapia. It’s silly. But once the movie was done, the car came to be known as Clyde. For the past fifteen years, the car has traveled the country, being passed from writer to writer and making quarterly appearances in the magazine. If you subscribe to The Drake, you’ll notice its been a while since we heard from Clyde. So today on the podcast, we speak with the car’s current caretaker, John Agricola, to hear about Clyde’s latest misadventures.

Below are some photos of Clyde on his journeys accompanied by a few choice quotes from the episode.

“If you follow the word cursed back through its oldest meanings, you find not a definition, but a lineage. Something spoken in the dark, carried in the bones, passed from hand to hand like a deed nobody signed for, but everyone must honor. Clyde fits that lineage. The car drags behind him a wake of broken parts and broken men. The gas tank split on Kentucky Stone, the fire under the hood, the floodwater rising in Tennessee like it meant to swallow us whole. But in the South, a curse is rarely satisfied with metal. It threads itself through fathers and sons, through the stories they haul and the burdens they pretend to choose. And sometimes I wonder, standing before Clyde’s open hood, like a mourner at a graveside, if the trouble isn’t in the car at all, if the real cursed thing is the man still trying to resurrect it.’ – John Agricola

John’s late father, Jack Agricola, contemplates life while taking a much needed break from working on Clyde

“I guess I agreed to [take on Clyde] because of the excuse to have an adventure. And that’s exactly what Clyde is. If I had Clyde and I’m a hack writer, it becomes a clothesline to hang a fishing story on. Especially if you’re going to bring your father, who is in early stages of dementia…” – John Agricola

“I think Clyde was the exact same width of the trailer we brought, so there are these bolts that are coming through the sidewalls of the trailer. And so the moment that Clyde rolls up onto the trailer and meets those bolts, you hear the deflation of both my hopes and dreams for adventure and also the front tires of Clyde being punctured. Jen’s still driving. Jen has to get out of Clyde through the window because you can’t open the door at this point. If it had been me driving, there’s no way I could have gotten my fat ass through that window and out the car, so it was really lucky that she had been driving it.” – John Agricola

“Jonathan at the Flybox said it best. ‘To most people, it’s just some shitty old car. But when you realize the people that are involved with it, the relationships that develop because of it, the adventures. And that’s the awesomeness of this freaking car. It brings everybody together.'” – Larry Littrell in the 2024 International Fly Fishing Film Festival movie, “A Ride with Clyde.”

“It’s a pretty tough car to work on considering it’s as big as an alien spaceship. Eight feet wide almost, and every bit of eighteen, almost nineteen feet long. It’s five thousand pounds of 140 horsepower. It’s awful. This car would eat other cars on the way to anything.” – Mechanic Broc

Mechanic Broc considers crawling under the behemoth

Many thanks to John Agricola and everyone who has ever driven or enjoyed Clyde over the years. John and the Southern Culture on the Fly crew have some fun plans for him this winter. If you’d like to keep up to date on Clyde and see some photos from his adventures, make sure to check out the latest issue of Southern Culture on the Fly. If you like what you see, you can sign up for the SCOF newsletter or check out their podcast. And finally, John Agricola has a Substack called Carpicola’s Common Current, which I highly recommend.