Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  Selifan perked up and, slapping the dapple-gray on the back a few times, which made him break into a trot, and brandishing his whip over them all, added in a thin, singsong voice: “Never fear!” The horses got moving and pulled the light britzka along like a bit of fluff…. Chichikov just smiled, jouncing slightly on his leather cushion, for he loved fast driving. And what Russian does not love fast driving? How can his soul, which yearns to get into a whirl, to carouse, to say sometimes: “Devil take it all!”—how can his soul not love it? Not love it when something ecstatically wondrous is felt in it? It seems an unknown force has taken you on its wing, and you are flying, and everything is flying: milestones go flying by, merchants come flying at you on the boxes of their kibitkas [small horse-drawn wagons], the forest on both sides is flying by with its dark ranks of firs and pines, with axes chopping and crows cawing, the whole road is flying off no one knows where into the vanishing distance, and there is something terrible in this quick flashing, in which the vanishing object has no time to fix itself—only the sky overhead, and the light clouds, and the moon trying to break through, they alone seem motionless.

  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 competitive 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 and 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 summer vacation.

  But then, in addition to a station wagon, we got a second car: my father, like so many other dads, wanted something more. 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 an 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 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 speed 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 growling 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.

  *Two millennia later, Jim Stark, the seventeen-year-old played by James Dean in the movie Rebel Without a Cause (1955), raced another teenager down a highway toward a cliff to see who would be the first to chicken out. The other kid meant to stop but couldn’t, and a boy in his vehicle again dropped to his death.

  FIVE

  CAPITALIST ROADERS

  ZHU JIHONG CANNOT WAIT to get started on his holiday road trip. At six a.m. on Saturday, the first day of the October National Day week (one of three annual Golden Weeks in China, intended to promote internal tourism and ensure that workers take some time off), Zhu has parked his brand-new Hyundai Tucson SUV, with its limited-edition package of extras like walnut trim and chrome step-bar, in front of my hotel in downtown Beijing. He is half an hour early, but he is in a hurry. He cannot believe I’m not ready.

  Li Lu, my interpreter, has found me in the hotel restaurant. She was rousted even earlier than I, at her apartment a couple of miles away, and calculates that Zhu, to make it into Beijing from his home on the city’s outskirts, must have gotten up at four. She adds that she’s a bit concerned: she helped me book a spot on this car trip and had assumed that the driver whose car we shared would be a person of, well, culture. But Zhu, she says, is “not educated.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask as we leave the hotel’s revolving glass doors and come upon Zhu.

  Zhu is nicely dressed, in the dark slacks, leather loafers, and knit shirt of many Chinese businessmen. Cigarette in one hand, hair recently cut and wavy on top, Zhu, in his forties, has a somewhat dashing, youthful air. Before Li Lu and I are out the revolving door, he is at the back of the Hyundai, making room for my knapsack and pointing me in the direction of the leather passenger seat. He stops to shake my hand only after I pause and offer mine. Li Lu is our intermediary and tries to effect the introduction I’m after, but Zhu is not one for formalities; he gives a tiny nod, then circles the car, hawks noisily and spits by his door, climbs in, and turns the key. Li Lu, from the back seat, gives me a look that says, See? What did I tell you?

  But as the car fills with smoke from his cigarette and the CB radio battles for supremacy with operatic Red Army tunes on the CD player, I don’t much mind Zhu’s manners (which, Li Lu explains, reflect the factory owner’s peasant background) because we’re off on an adventure and Zhu’s excitement is infectious. Our trip is a seven-day excursion from Beijing to Hubei province in central China, including stops at the Three Gorges Dam and a mountainous forest preserve called Shennongjia, home to a fabled race of giant hairy ape-men. And though the trendy enterprise we are part of is known as a “self-driving tour,” we are not going alone: a dozen carfuls of other people have signed on with the tour, organized by the Beijing Target Auto Club, one of the for-profit driving clubs that are sprouting all over China.

  Zhu is ready for a long day at the wheel—our destination, Nanyang, is more than 500 miles away—but it’s going to be even longer than he thinks. Our rendezvous with the other cars at the Zhuozhou rest stop, normally an hour away, will be delayed four hours, as thick fog closes the expressway. Heavy rain will fall, and our early start will count for little by midday as the highways swell with holiday traffic. There will be wrecks, like the fatal one-car rollover we’ll pass on a bridge around midnight, an upside-down Beijing-plated Mitsubishi. The hotel’s dinner will be waiting for us at one a.m., and we’ll all be happy to see our rooms. But right now Zhu is pouring himself tea from a thermos and telling Li Lu how rich he is and how lucky we are to be in his car.

  “He says he is an excellent driver and we will go very fast,” she reports wearily.

  I had never been to China before 2005. I was born in Okinawa, Japan, where my father was stationed as a navy pilot, but I’d never been back. Instead, as I mentioned, I grew up in Denver, which has a relatively brief history as a settled place—125 years or so—compared to China’s many centuries of civilization. The foreignness of East Asia, to me, had as much to do with its antiquity as with any strangeness of language or custom.

  And yet, since Deng Xiaopeng’s economic openings of the 1990s, something had been growing in China that did seem familiar to me, and that was a culture of cars. Zhou Enlai’s “Four Modernizations” picked up speed under Deng, and by the early years of the twenty-first century, Deng’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was taking hold and turning the country into a huge economic powerhouse. “Socialism does not mean shared poverty,” Deng said, and millions of Chinese mobilized to see what it might mean instead.

  On its way to becoming the world’s factory, China began to manufacture its own cars, trucks, and buses—over a hundred distinct brands of them by 2007, as well as foreign makes developed in joint partnerships with Volkswagen, General Motors, and Hyundai, among others. It was only a matter of time until lots of people had the money to buy a car; the desire to drive one, I would learn, had already been around a good long while.

  I’d heard about the driving clubs springing up in big cities in China. They organized group trips for members of the new driving class, and I wanted to sign on. A friend’s mother was just back from a more conventional tour of China, and put me in touch with the guide she’d had in Xi’an, in western China. We started to instant message. It was too bad I hadn’t asked her a couple months earlier, the guide said; she and her boyfriend were just back from a driving trip, and I would have been welcome to join them. Short of that, she was able to recommend a well-known club in Beijing. They had a trip leaving in a few weeks, they said, and while most members came with friends or family, a few were solo and would welcome a passenger.

  All I lacked was a translator. Often serendipity enters into these matters, and it did this time: a Little League dad with whom I chatted during my son’s games turned out to have worked in Beijing and knew just the person. Her name was Li Lu, he said; he’d met her when she came to teach English to some of his bank’s Chinese employees. Right now she was teaching in one of the city’s most famous language schools. He would call her for me.

  And so it was that Li Lu (Lucy Li, to me) greeted me the moment I stepped off the jetway at Beijing’s airport (the boyfriend of a former student of hers was a security supervisor at the airport, and got her into the secured zone). She was about thirty, petite and effervescent. Her hennaed hair had bangs and, I later realized, long extensions. She wore an orange skirt and high white leather boots that had sneaker laces and soles. Her contact zipped us through Customs and I followed Lucy outside and into a black car whose driver was waiting for us.

  We sat in the back and Lucy asked if I was surprised by the large size of the car. It was a Red Flag, she explained, a Chinese-made car that until recently had been used exclusively by high officials. The car was about the size of a Honda Accord, but boxier; I confessed that my car at home was about the same size.

  It was drizzling rain and the midafternoon traffic was very slow. As we creeped onto a roundabout, Lucy said that we were entering the 6th Ring Road, which took me by surprise; my recent-edition guidebook referred to only five of these major arteries that encircle the city, three of which had been built in the past ten years. Probably by the time this book comes out, there will be a seventh.

  We ate an early dinner at a neighborhood restaurant near her school and my hotel, the fancy Jade Hotel, where Lucy knew the manager. At the restaurant, two moms were eating at different tables, each with one child, while the children did homework. “Their fathers often get home very late,” Lucy explained. She was divorced, she told me, with no kids. “Shame?” she asked. Divorce in China is not common, and there is still stigma in it. “No shame with me,” I said, explaining that my own parents had divorced, that it was common in the States.

  She loved to eat and we ordered a lot more than we could finish; she took the rest home to the room she shared with a teacher on the campus of
Beijing Normal University. She was taking some days off to help me out—not to make money, though I would pay her for her trouble, but because the car trip sounded interesting. Her friends, she said, were surprised by the news that she’d be hitting the road with me and the driving club. “I’m just a Beijing girl, a taxi girl!”—not a sporting, auto-club type. But she was game. “Everything is changing now in China!” she explained to me, needlessly, more than once. You had to be ready for the next new thing.

  The figures behind China’s car boom are stunning. The country’s highway miles at the end of 2007 totaled at least 33,000, more than triple what existed in 2001, and second now only to the United States. There were about 6 million passenger cars on the road in 2000 and over 24 million in 2008. Car sales were up 54 percent in the first three months of 2006, compared with the same period a year before; every day, 1,000 new cars and 500 used ones are sold in Beijing. The astronomical growth of China’s car-manufacturing industry will hit home for Americans and Europeans as inexpensive Chinese automobiles start showing up for sale here over the next few years.

  But of course the story is not only about construction and production; car culture is taking root in China, and in many ways it looks like ours. City drivers, stuck in ever-growing jams, listen to traffic radio. They buy auto magazines with titles like The King of Cars, AutoStyle, China Auto Pictorial, Friends of Cars, Whaam (“The Car—The Street—The Travel—The Racing”). Two dozen titles now compete for space in kiosks. The McDonald’s Corporation expects half of its new outlets in China to be drive-throughs. Whole areas of major cities, like the Asian Games Village Automobile Exchange zone in Beijing, have been given over to car lots and showrooms.