by Ed Bolian
Introduction
Brock Yates Jr.
One of my favorite memories with my father was riding along on the first Cannonball in our Moon Trash van in 1971 when I was just 14 years old. The thing I will probably never forgive him for is intentionally not telling me about the 1979 running until it was impossible for me to get to the starting line in time. Regardless of your engagement with the actual running, the folklore of the Cannonball Baker Sea to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash holds a special place in the heart of any gearhead. Perhaps no modern passion for Cannonball burns brighter than that of Ed Bolian.
Ed called me for the first time a few days after his 2013 run. He told me about the discussion he had with my father nearly a decade prior and told me for the first of many times what my father meant to him. These modern interpretations of an idea going on fifty years old leave me with mixed feelings but I am happy to congratulate Ed on adding himself to the annals of Cannonball lore and thank him for another safe outcome in a coast to coast drive. Condone is not the right word now that most of us from 1970s runs have aged but I believe that "respect" is right way to put it. Fortunately that respect was clearly mutual. Ed exhibits a respect for my father, the history, and the craft that makes me happy to enjoy the rest of this fascinating story of personal growth and to call him a fellow Cannonballer.
Foreword
Alex Roy
Previous Record Holder
This is a terrible book, written by a terrible person about terrible people inspired by terrible people, all of whom have done terrible things for no damn good reason at all. Or, as an FBI agent once told me, “never have so few accomplished so much on behalf of so few.” He was wrong, of course, as proven by the fact that you’re reading this now, and hopefully paid for it. Those terrible people aren’t to be feared or reviled, but thanked, for in a world where you can pay a guide to carry your luggage up Mount Everest, there are still things that money can’t buy.
That’s just one of the reasons the Cannonball Run still matters.
All the money in the world won’t get you across the United States in a car under 30 hours. It takes intelligence, character and skill. I should know, because I led the team whose record was broken by Ed Bolian, David Black, and Dan Huang in 2013.
Ed Bolian didn’t participate in the actual Cannonball Run, nor did I, or anyone since 1979. But we came close. While the punks, “street racers,” cowards, charlatans and liars upload YouTube videos of donuts, drag times and rallies “inspired” by the real thing, Ed joins a short list of people with the nerve to actually get out and drive, rather than hashtag some pretty stills.
And not just drive. Go after the big one. The Cannonball Record. New York to California, non-stop except for gas. One can quibble over routes and details, but you either went, or you didn’t. Bolian went, joining a list of no more than a few hundred people who’ve even tried, let alone done it in under 34 hours.
Upon first hearing Ed’s story, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He didn’t appear to have gone through the same lengths David Maher and I did when we broke the record in 2006. He had no video. Media? Witnesses? I wasn’t convinced. But Bolian did have something extraordinary. His story rang true. He had called me under false pretenses seeking to know how I had planned our run. He had prepared a car correctly. He knew all of the details of the drive off the top of his head. His story was consistent. His GPS records matched.
Of all the people who’ve ever called to say they’d beaten our time, Bolian’s was the only one that made any sense. As soon as I met him, I knew he was telling the truth. I’ll never stop insulting him to his face for not shooting video, however, for I think he lowered the evidentiary bar, enabling frauds with times tattooed to their arms to claim they are part of the history.
But history isn’t for me to decide.
No one person can ever own the Cannonball history again, except for Brock Yates, who is now gone. All that is left is respect for the history. Go across in a car and you’re part of it. Under 38 is good. Under 35 is better. For every hour under 34, your voice will be louder among those who know. Loyalty? Brotherhood? These things can’t be bought. The entry fee? The cheapest car that will get you across safely will suffice. Cannonballing in the purist sense isn’t for rich people. It’s for smart ones…if you call risking your life for nothing smart.
I have absolutely nothing in common with Ed Bolian. We disagree on religion, politics, you name it. He’s wrong, and I despise his traitorous and absurd opinions. Hypocrisy? Thy name is Bolian. What else can you say about a Sunday School teaching, Lamborghini-driving criminal with a lovely wife and baby at home? You can say that he has a friend in me, for I too have struggled to rationalize the art and science of getting in a car and attacking a problem that doesn’t need solving. Actually, we have everything in common. What am I thinking? Who am I to judge anyone? I practiced going cross country by dressing like a German cop. And a Spanish one. And a Canadian one. And a storm chaser, going cross country in one of the worst storm seasons in recent memory.
No one who does this sort of thing can claim a moral high ground, and yet—
For all the differences between us, we share something that goes to the heart of car culture, and what it means to be American. As a wise man named Mr. Regular once said, “California is the finish line of the world.” Why do people keep doing this? Why do people dream of doing this? Why are people afraid to try? Why do people keep lying about doing this? Why are people ripping off the name, and trading on the goodwill of the Cannonball mythology?
There are only three books on the topic. Brock Yates’ Cannonball, my book The Driver, and now, thankfully, Ed Bolian’s. All amazing — mine being the best one, of course — and yet even these don’t tell the full story.
Like jazz, if you have to ask...you’ll never know until you’ve gotten in a car and tried. Don’t bother until you’ve read all three cover to cover. Twice. And even then, if you’re serious.
People often ask me if — now that the record Dave Maher and I set in 2006 has been broken — we’re interested in going again. As if something has been taken from us. As if we have something to prove. As if the team of Bolian and co-driver David Black are our enemies.
Nonsense.
Everyone who has ever tried shares as much respect for each other as contempt for those who would claim unearned valor. Everyone who has ever gone for the record — alone or against other cars — did so on the backs of those who came before. Anyone who has gotten across safely knows that one’s time ultimately doesn’t matter.
It’s that you tried.
I’m proud to have done it, proud to have had the help of countless Cannonball and U.S. Express veterans, and proud that our experiences (however unwittingly) helped Ed and Dave raise the bar even further. Their achievement is monumental. Their margin of improvement? Insane.
Bolian, Black, and Huang are now part of Cannonball history. Something tells me they won’t be the last to join it, as it should be. Anything is possible, even if not everything is necessary. Someone is going to do the research, likely one of you reading this now, and surprise Ed as much as he surprised me. Given the tradition of the old guy calling the new guy a liar, I can’t wait for Ed to know that feeling.
FYI, if I was going to go again, I certainly wouldn’t tell Ed (or anyone) in advance.
Now enjoy this terrible book about terrible people doing terrible things.
Dedication
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br /> For my son, Graham
The most important thing in your life is your relationship with God. The recognition of the grace that saves me from sin, rather than the works or good deeds that I may do, is what delivers me from eternal separation from God through the sacrifice that Jesus made to bear our sins. If I teach you only one thing in your life, I want you to understand God loves you even more than I can. He sacrificed His own son so that you, me, and anyone else who asks can spend forever in paradise with Him. I would, however, like to teach you one more important thing about our lives here on earth.
This awesome God that we get to serve set a stage for humanity to exist upon. It involves a constant struggle between pride and benevolence, comfort and fear, and winning and losing. One of the coolest things that God ever did was build the world so that we could have great experiences, make a mark, and truly achieve something great. I want to tell you about a goal that came to define a significant portion of my life and where the journey to explore and eventually conquer that idea took me.
I am writing these first words sitting just a few feet away from you. You are three days old.
Chapter 1
All Roads Lead to Cannonball
The tires squealed for mercy as the Lamborghini Murcielago’s differentials traded grip for lateral inertia. My seventeen-year-old hands feigned confidence beyond their skillset and the bloodless face of the inexperienced salesman next to me failed to exude his desired cool as we slid between a bicyclist and a road-going tractor. I was grinning ear-to-ear as the V12 howl reverberated off the Carolina trees. There is nothing like controlled power, except of course the sensation of power just beyond complete control - that is when you trade precision for general direction. Dangerous. That is how it felt; dangerous and seductive. In the most basic sense - I was alive.
Today’s man is not invited to do ballsy things. Producers seem to travel to England or Australia to find a “real man” actor to play opposite a casted hero who is either a sexy nerd or “just gay enough” to be palatable and called “metrosexual.” It seems like being up on the latest internet memes and reality show drama constitutes culture. We downplay the significance of education and actual explorative achievement behind internet anonymity and social media status. Where are the real heroes?
Men are supposed to be powerful, dangerous, nearly unapproachable. They need to be in search of opportunities to either find or demonstrate courage, toughness, and strength - both mental and physical. Perhaps to win the admiration of womankind or just to exhibit their dominance over other men. There is a communism of masculinity happening where we want to have all betas rather than the occasional regal alpha.
Regardless of how much these animalistic urges are repressed, they still loom quiet and persistent beneath the surface just waiting for an opportunity to act.
But where are we to do that these days?
Cars. Beautiful, powerful, beastly, outrageous, exotic cars. Challenges in cars. Beating records so impossible that they were relegated to myth. Being smart and tough and calculating and devious. Hitting the road on a mission with a couple of other guys with enough testosterone and reckless abandon to kiss the wife, job, and maybe freedom from incarceration goodbye.
You just have to wake up one morning and say, “Today I’m going to start planning. It is something I simply have to do.” Then for the next ten years it nags at you, it pulls you toward it with a simultaneously terrorizing and exciting magnetism. It drips in the background like a toilet that won’t stop running until that one day when it is all that matters.
It must have been around 8:00 PM. The car felt under control and all systems were functional. I did not know precisely where I was, how fast I was going, or how long I had been driving. My eyesight was blurring with intense halos around every light ahead and in my mirrors. My depth perception was gone. I could not comprehend what Dave and Dan were saying. I remember telling them to find the next gas station. I had driven for what felt like hours directly into the Western Arizona setting sun near Kingman, wedging my head against the roof of the car to use it as a makeshift sun visor since the actual visor completely obstructed my view of the road. My senses were disoriented and struggling to focus. When I got into the mountains headed towards the eastern California border, the winding roads felt completely alien to me.
Somehow, I made it to the last gas station we would need to finish the trip. I looked down at the trip data displayed on the Mercedes computer. I had driven for just over two and half hours at an average speed of 95 miles per hour. It was our slowest leg of the trip thus far. Our overall average was right around 100 mph and we were just over 500 miles from the Portofino, our destination. On one hand the Portofino felt unbelievably close, in fact we did not need to completely fill the gas tanks to get there. On the other hand, 500 miles was nearly the distance that I used to devote a day to in a drive from Atlanta to Palm Beach, Florida visiting family on holidays and summer vacations. Considering the distance in that light remained as demoralizing and draining as that leg of driving had felt.
It was no surprise that no scenes from the Cannonball Run film were filmed in this setting. Even Captain Chaos would have stumbled. It was at that point when it hurt the worst and exactly that point when it all made sense. Any combination of goals, desires, and motivations which could get me twenty-four hours into a drive, barely coherent, and on track to do something this momentous had to be truly special.
I love cars. I haven’t always loved cars. I don’t love working on cars, drawing cars, cleaning cars, or building cars. I love driving cars. It is the way that I make my living, the lens through which I view the world, and my favorite recreational activity.
It kicked in at the point when I was able to drive. Being a grossly overconfident teenager, I saw nothing wrong or disrespectful in walking into every exotic car showroom in the metro Atlanta area and asking the hard working sales people to test drive one of their fine automobiles.
Most people who are successful by any accepted metric could be deemed obsessive. My personality has been characterized by a series of obsessions lumped together in sequence - dinosaurs, basketball, athletic shoes, reptiles, Ivy League schools, cars. It could have been rattling off every Mesozoic era dinosaur at age eight, playing in AAU basketball tournaments with Dwight Howard and Lebron James at thirteen, collecting Jordans at fifteen, attending the National Reptile Breeders’ Expo at sixteen, trying to get into an Ivy League school at seventeen, at age twenty trying to drive 200 mph in my first Lamborghini without enough cash in my bank account to make the next payment, falling in love with a girl that was way out of my league around that same time, selling supercars at twenty-four, and barreling through Arizona inebriated only by exhaustion at twenty-eight. Life was generally one obsession after another with everything else either falling into place or falling by the wayside.
I started my first business when I was in middle school. The idea first came to me through my pet green iguana named George. Impressing them with my keen interest in genetics, I convinced my strangely indulgent parents to invest in an Albino Iguana breeding project. Before long we had a basement filled with thirty-three six foot long gentle giant lizards. Given their appetite, we were on our way to becoming the largest consumer of collard greens in the state of Georgia.
Mine was not a lemonade stand, pet sitting service, roadside carwash or any of the cliche first entrepreneurial projects you might expect of a kid. I wanted my work, even as a young teen to signify a uniqueness to my character and be something worth talking about. Anyone could have a pet dog or cat. Not many people had a basement that looked, smelled, and sounded like Jurassic Park.
Great White Reptiles was a lot of fun. My father and I built elaborate cages together, learned the intricacies of incubation, and took the lizards to trade shows to sell. Peculiar is a good word to describe the demographic of people who buy breeding quality reptiles as a blended hobby and investment. Imagine simultaneous enthusiasm for leather clothing, body art, and liv
ing home decor in a fascinating emulsion. Add twenty foot reticulated pythons, eight foot Sumatran water monitors, and adolescent me to the mix and you have it.
I sold a breeding pair of iguanas that were heterozygous for albinism to a couple of interesting guys from Tampa. Their pony tails, self-customized denim wear, and general lack of hygiene were quite frightening to Megan, whom I had recently begun dating. We found out later how, soon after leaving the rest area where we had made the exchange, they had released both thirty-plus pound lizards to roam about in the cab of their truck. Intrigued by their genetic mutation Noah’s Ark, they ran their truck out of gas en route home and were forced to play paper-rock-scissors to see who got to walk five miles to fill a gas can.
Success was limited. The iguanas seemed so healthy and comfortable that perhaps I convinced them they would live forever. Regardless of whether it was communal solace or some other herpetological libido diminisher, fertile eggs were rare. My short attention span soon had me searching for my next fixation.
I was sixteen when I became smitten with cars. The confidence games to solicit test drives, magazine racing, internet videos, and a burgeoning indoctrination into the local car culture led to the desire to become professionally engrossed in the car industry just as I had with iguanas. I thought I wanted to be an automotive journalist, but found out it was not a high paying industry. I would have had a lot of chances to drive uninteresting cars for a few days but only rare opportunities to drive an exotic car for five minutes, so it seemed worthwhile to explore other automotive careers. It occurred to me if a job was widely considered to be cool you’d probably not be paid much to do it. I needed to change that.