Fuel costs fail to drive down Hummer passion

'Street queens'
There are Hummers and then there are HUMMERS. It's that way with their owners, too.

The Hummer pilots flocking to the parking lot of a Hampton Inn tonight are clearly the latter. Hummering is not some two-minute fad. "It's a lifestyle," they say repeatedly.

They're well aware of the many other Hummer owners, who use their vehicles for little more than dropping the kids at baseball and supermarket trips.

"Street queens," the serious crowd calls them. "Pavement princesses."

But you don't have to be a tough guy to be here.

When GM bought Hummer and began selling the H2 (huge, but medium-sized as Hummers go) and the H3 (still pretty big) a few years ago, owners of H1s — the prettied up version of the Army's vehicle — were worried suburbanized Hummers would dilute the experience. But when they voted, the big boys chose to let the newbies join in.

So Brandie Lopes, a silkscreen printer, is here from Winterport, Maine, a 600-mile haul that would've been cheaper to fly than to drive in her polished new H2.

She's joined by Howard and Vickie Schultheiss, up from Maryland in a nearly 11,000 pound H1 that bears the scratches and scars of off-road battles. The steel roof-rack above the windshield is carved with letters spelling out "D-Man," the nickname of a highly trained German Shepherd, now lost to cancer, whose fierce spirit the couple says lives on the rig.

Nearly all come with a story about how they were smitten.

'Forget the Range Rover'
For John Andres, a software writer from New Albany, Ohio, it goes back to 1991, when he was scrimping for a Range Rover. He turned on the TV one January night and was transfixed by a report of two dozen U.S. Marines pinned down behind a wall in the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji. With Saudi tanks providing cover, the soldiers packed into Humvees and barreled through Iraqi lines.

"I saw that. I thought, 'forget the Range Rover,'" says Andres, whose sand-colored Hummer jokingly sports silhouettes of the compact sedans he's knocked off, a la the Red Baron. "Humvee is the way to go. These things are just bad."

Dan LaForgia's story is more elemental.

"My mom says my first word was 'truck,'" LaForgia says. In the mid-'90s, LaForgia persuaded his father to drive him to the Hummer dealership near his home on New York's Long Island so they could take one out for a test drive. He was 12 — and hooked.

"Some people say its the ugliest thing on the road," LaForgia says. "I love it."

Carolyn Kaster / AP Vickie Schultheiss

This weekend is a big deal for LaForgia. In three years of Hummer ownership, he's never taken his off-road. He cringes noticeably as others trade stories of broken axles, smashed windows, and the deep scratches and gashes their vehicles have endured in previous adventures.

At 8:45 a.m., though, he joins the other owners under a tent, ready to embark in groups dispatched by levels of skills and experience.

They head a few exits up to a former strip-mine turned off-road haven. Members of the extreme group — four of the most gung-ho H1 owners — trade jokes over the radio as they part the treeline.

But inside the rig the Schultheiss' have dedicated to their dog, the mood is reverential.

"Cue it up," Vickie says to Howard, her husband.

"All right. Here we go."

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