Ted Conover on Speed and the Open Road

Ted Conover, author of several books including Newjack and Rolling Nowhere, spans the world in The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, his study of six crucial roads in Peru, East Africa, the West Bank, India, China, and Nigeria. In the excerpt below, Conover, a past Zócalo guest, considers the history of speed — from the first teenage driver Phaeton to the first woman to drive the Indy 500 to his own four-hour teenage trek through Colorado in his dad’s Porsche to meet a girl.

The Routes of Man, by Ted ConoverA blocked road is a thwarted intention.

A good road – smooth, straight, free of roadblocks – allows us to go fast. Speed, in fact, is not only the advantage of a good road but one of its great pleasures.

In the pre-Hispanic Americas, speed was a fast runner. Spaniards introduced the horse, which, according to early chroniclers, the Aztec saw as an intelligent being, even a god. Larger and faster than any other creature they knew, a horse with a soldier on its back formed a huge, intimidating fighting machine.

With time, Native Americans came to understand, breed, and ride horses with a skill commensurate with that of the cowboys and soldiers they battled. Around the world, in Mongolia and Scandinavia, in Australia and Argentina, pastoral people used horses for transportation and, yes, for the pleasures of racing.

Earlier, though, other civilizations had taken it to the next level. Four-wheeled chariots appeared in Mesopotamia between 3000 and 3500 B.C., pulled by oxen or tamed asses. As their use spread to India, China, and Europe, they became more nimble with the use of spoked wheels, and by 2000 B.C., they were pulled by horses, two, three, or four of them – a potent innovation for battle. They could go faster than a single horse ridden by a soldier in full armor, and they allowed soldiers better access to weaponry. As we know from sources including the movies, Greeks and Romans put them to use in races and other pageantry.

The Greeks, in addition, found a place for chariots in their mythology. Phaeton, challenged by his friends to prove that Helios, the sun god, was his real father, asked to drive his chariot (the sun) for a day. Helios tried to talk him out of it, but to no avail. Phaeton, reins in hand, quickly lost control: the chariot came too close to earth, setting rivers and oceans to boil; “whole cities burn,/ And peopled kingdoms into ashes turn.” Libya became a desert and the Moors’ skin blackened.

Finally, Zeus, god of the sky, intervened, striking the runaway chariot with a bolt of lightning. Phaeton, perhaps history’s first teenage driver, plunged to earth with his hair on fire and perished.

Horses pulled carts and wagons of various kinds for centuries, but not until the eighteenth century did a combination of better roads and better cart technology result in vehicles that brought wheeled speed to large numbers of people. The French were leaders in this development, with the horse-drawn cabriolet, a lightweight, two-wheeled, open-air cart for two, sturdier coupés, and the turgotine, a narrow stagecoach. The convenience, excitement, and utility of these innovations resulted in a boom: the number of vehicles in Paris went from 320 in 1658 to 20,000 by 1765. “Everyone has become a driver,” wrote the Chevalier d’H. in 1819. “It’s the fashion of the day.”

England, too, was transformed. Over seventy-five years the number of carriages shot up from 18,000 in 1775 to 106,000 in 1840. Roughly corresponding to the French conveyances were the English curricle (two wheels, one axle), phaeton (four large wheels, minimal body), and mail coach. Like the French vehicles, and like the fallen god, and indeed like the modern sports car, all were known as fast and dangerous, thrilling to drive but a peril to pedestrians. With vehicles “came efforts to widen and straighten out streets, regulate traffic, differentiate sidewalks from roadways…efforts that had the effect also of encouraging a further acceleration of motion.”

A significant enabler of speed, of course, was [John Loudon] McAdam’s better pavement. In combination, smooth pavement and horses pulling lightweight carriages brought the pleasures of speed to a larger number of people than ever before. As angry as pedestrians were with the newfound perils of the street, drivers and passengers became ecstatic with motion…..

Meanwhile, travel in England was being transformed by a system of fast government mail coaches. Pulled by four horses, they could carry four passengers inside, but mail delivery took priority. Danger courted the coaches: a post office guard stood outside in the back, on the lookout for highwaymen. And they were prone to accidents, the driver’s seat being the riskiest. An additional passenger was allowed to sit with the driver. An Oxford student who was fond of doing so, Thomas De Quincey, famously recalled his experiences in his essay, “The English Mail Coach”:

The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.

These sensations of speed, De Quincey wrote, had a large role “in developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams,” by which he appears to refer to the experiences behind his book The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. The idea of velocity as a sensation-heightening narcotic is not new.

The mail coach system had stopped by 1846, largely replaced by railroads. Looking back, De Quincey doubted whether this was progress: not only do you not feel the velocity of a train, he complained, but the visceral connection between passenger and horse was gone, replaced by “the pot-wallopings of the boiler.” Jeffrey T Schnapp, a Stanford professor who spent years as a serious motorcycle racer, adds that the mail coach was invigorating because it was irregular, an experience of speed that defied tedium because it always contains “the promise/threat of accident.”

Commercial airliners likely would have bored De Quincey. Perhaps even space travel would: as the fastest human beings to date, astronauts orbit the earth at 17,500 miles per hour while looking perfectly relaxed. (the more potent symbols of speed in the twentieth century are the faces of test pilots like Chuck Yeager, who were photographed in the late 1940s breaking the sound barrier while g-forces grotesquely wrinkled and pulled back their cheeks, exposing their teeth.)

But the future was not devoid of promise. With the rise of horses and carriages, argues Schnapp, individuality became “identified with administration of one’s own speed” as never before. This trend only continued with the rise of the automobile, and its domination of roads around the globe.

At a writers’ conference in Aspen, I had the pleasure of teaching a workshop that included Janet Guthrie, the first woman to drive in the Indianapolis 500. She was working on a memoir, since published; here is the ninth paragraph, describing a moment from the Indy of 1977:

The Lightning had long since become an extension of myself. I was melted into it, centrifugal force smearing me like putty against the torso support and headrest as the side loads rose in the turns. My nerve endings extended out to the contact patches where the tires gripped the pavement, like the fingertips and toes of a rock climber.

Guthrie’s racetrack experiences remain extreme, the province of a few talented drivers. But from the free falls of sky divers ad bungee jumpers to the theme park roller coasters so beloved of teenagers, people are finding ways to go faster and faster.

There remains, however, something singular about the accelerator, about controlling it yourself. I suppose this is one reason that traffic so thwarts driving pleasure: it effectively caps acceleration, and subtracts most of the skill from driving. Similarly, repetition – of driving the same route again and again, in the same car, even if it’s a Corvette – kills the thrill. The road must be open, and winding, and you can’t be headed to work.

I grew up a passenger in a Rambler station wagon, and then an Oldsmobile. My first experience of incarceration was being buckled into the back seat of that Oldsmobile as my father drove the family across the seemingly endless American West on a “fun” summer vacation.

But then, in addition to a station wagon, we got a second car: my father, like so many other dads, wanted something fast. He bought a blue Porsche 912. The excitement he felt for it was infectious. At thirteen, I loved riding in that car with him, seated so close to the ground, accelerating so quickly when the light turned green, touching the wooden shift knob and smelling the leather interior. There were two vent windows in the rear; I’ll never forget my dad repeating what the seller, Glen Somebody, had told him: that leaving them ajar “creates a nice cross-breeze.” It was like gospel. As was the wisdom that the noisy, air-cooled rear engine liked running at high RPMs  – that’s what the tachometer was for, to make sure the Porsche got the sports car equivalent of exercise.

Dad had a client up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, about an hour and a half from Denver if you ignored the speed limit. Which I must conclude Dad did, and who could blame him? One night he returned home from Wyoming after dark. I was the first one outside in the morning, and the first to notice the pelt of an entire rabbit dangling from Dad’s car, partly embedded in the grille. Damn, I thought.

In high school the car I drove was the current station wagon, a Pontiac Catalina.  But the spring of my senior year, a girl from Florida I’d met while teaching skiing on weekends wrote me to say she’d be up in Aspen for a week with her family. It corresponded with my spring break. I asked my parents if there was any chance I could borrow the car and go up there for a couple of days.

I got a “no, sorry” – my mom needed the wagon for various errands. But then, the day before break, Dad took me aside. Would I like to take the Porsche to Aspen? he asked. Was he kidding?

He handed me the keys with a bit of trepidation, murmured something about downshifting on the hills to save the brakes – but it was all just ceremony. The main thing was he had handed me the keys. It was the closest thing I’d ever have to a teenage rite of passage.

The trip to Aspen took four hours that time of year. I’d never driven so far from home by myself. But I knew how to go. An after-school job kept me from leaving until dinnertime. By the time I reached the mountains, it was dark. The national seeped limit at the time was fifty-five, but even going faster I could seldom put the Porsche into fifth gear, had to stick with fourth, the engine roaring satisfyingly as I climbed hills in the passing lane.

Then I came to Glenwood Canyon. The interstate highway ended there (later it would go through, in a magnificent feat of engineering that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and involved lots of dramatically elevated roadway). At the time, the mid-1970s, the road turned into a curvy two-lane highway that ran alongside the Colorado River. High rock walls rose on either side of the narrow canyon, softened by willows at road’s edge and the occasional waterfall.

I drove as fast as I possibly could, pushing around corners as the engine roared. It was late March; there was no snow and the road surface was clear. I had the windows open and the heater on. My heart beat fast because of the chance I could crash. The Blaupunkt radio played a song I loved. There was a girl from Florida at the end of the road. All was motion, moment, potential, thrill.

Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc.

*Photo courtesy miss_blackbutterfly.


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