01/07/13

There’s a tidbit of common knowledge that claims one of the growing pains of America’s automobile empire was an epidemic of car tires punctured on byways littered with horseshoe nails. Like most common knowledge the story stinks of sewer alligators and microwaved poodles, too good to actually be true.

The truth of the jazz age automobile was in the sum of its parts, a folded, hammered, cast, sawn and sewn amalgam of steel, wood, leather, rubber and glass with not one micron of long-chain-molecule plastic. The gasoline in the tank, the oil in the engine and the paint on the fenders were the only byproducts of all that murky crude pumped up from under Oklahoma's hardpan.

But the greatest truth of that first generation of automobiles was as intangible and imaginary as a tale of car tires porcupined with horseshoe nails. The truth lay in the maps. Before the flivver the American horizon was a circle of rough ground ten miles wide. Maps that had been a patchwork of sheds and a crosshatch of cornfields became veined with roadways, routes and ways of escape. And the future, which had been one of Staying, became one of Going, ever Going.

Over the next hundred years cars became ubiquitous and stayed as seductive as ever, though finally riddled with plastic and stamped out like tin toys. My own future was charted at age eleven, a speculative atlas that might as well have been labeled ‘here be dragons’ like its more exalted but no less unreal ancestors. I saw it all, at eleven, my way of escape laid out as clear as Fodor’s, and like most boys for the last hundred years the map of my future was based on The Car. Mine was a sporty two-seater. Ask me what make or model it was, then or now, and I couldn’t have and can not say. But in my mind I knew and still know every one of its sensual, low, hand-hammered curves, part Shelby Cobra, part Batmobile, with a warplane’s engine under the hood and white leather buckets tucked in about an inch above the blacktop. It was painted a deep Summery blue, as blue as the sea, as blue as the sky. It was completely imaginary and utterly beautiful, and it still is.

Kel