Dylan's song describes a Minnesota highway as a religious place, basically isolated from the rest of the world, while Munro pictures highway driving as a refuge from a family's tragedies. Saroyan also sees long distance car travel as a way to gain transitory freedom, and to escape briefly from time. Erdrich tells of two young Native American brothers' drive to Alaska in the first convertible on the North Dakota reservation, and she follows that car's history in their lives after one brother returns from Vietnam. The "fear of flying" in Jong's novel precedes an extended account of driving a fast sports car across Europe, with implicit contrasts to American freeways.
Roethke's "All Morning" sets traffic disruptions against the pleasures of bird watching; his "Far Field" describes how a dream of driving alone then stalling in a snow storm leads to images of mutilated animals and death. Hollander gives poetic images of a New York City's bridge and the subway tunnel. Jones/Baraka has a harsher view of the train's arriving from the South, the subways, and Father Divine's Cadillac. Bambara portrays a groups of African-American kids on a humorous cab ride down Manhattan. Cisneros talks of the excitement which a Cadillac causes in the San Antonio Latino community, and she uses car-based metaphors are part of peoples' ordinary language. The junk yard in Dickey's poem is a place which stirs up a boy's images of the cars' former owners, and as a place for sexual exploration. Crews elaborates on the junkyard setting, and then develops a grotesque scenario where a young man sets out to eat a new Ford Maverick on Wide World of Sports.
Wolfe's Kandy-Kolored… gives extended descriptions of hot rod shows, stock car racing, and demolition derbies as exciting and marginal elements of the '60s car culture. Cars in Segal's novel have a more ordinary role in allowing young lovers to be together, visit in-laws, and generally drive fast on East coast highways. Unlike Jarrell's images of an older person in a shopping center, Oates shows a suburban drive-in world from a teenage girl's perspective, and her threatening encounter with an older man who is identified with his gold-painted jalopy. Updike gives many details of the suburban world - commuter bus, auto agencies (recently introducing Japanese cars), car repair shops, the end of trolley lines, potholes. Cheever describes the difficulty of a man in a bathing suit trying to cross a highway.
White peoples' reactions to the desegregation of city busses in the South is dramatized in O'Connor's short story. Serling describes other social changes in the airline industry: the professionalization of stewardesses, the advancement of women into executive positions, and a sense of the effects of introducing jets to replace the older propeller aircraft.
Wilson suggests that whites have stopped exploiting African-Americans, since both the railroad and the highway system are completed. Plath associates the train with a woman's sexual body. Brautigan characterizes a family's twentieth-century history as a series of events such as a train accident and a honeymoon trip, and car travel later on. Warner's story for children keys on sentimental pictures of an antique railroad and a vanishing technology. Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test describes another cross-country odyssey, this time in a psychedelically-painted bus which is also a rolling moving-picture productions facility.
Author: Bob Dylan (b. 1941)
Title: "Highway 61 Revisited"
Date: 1965
Systems: Automobiles, the road
Context: Contemporary, Midwest
This song appears on Dylan's album of the same name, an album that includes such songs as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Ballad of a Thin Man," and which is considered by critics to be one of his best records. Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, and the Highway 61 in the song obviously refers to the important road that runs the north-south length of the state, along the eastern border and through the two major urban areas, Duluth and the Twin Cities. But the song, as the title might suggest, is not obviously a return home, an account of Dylan's beginnings. Instead Highway 61 seems to function as the archetypal American road, the road that provides access to dreams and desires - but in this song that myth is depicted ironically. Anything can happen on this highway, but that's not necessarily cause for celebration. In the first stanza God tells Abraham to "'Kill me a son,'" and that he wants it done "'Out on Highway 61'"; in the second stanza a homeless man is looking for a "place," and a man "pointed with his gun" toward that same highway; in the third stanza a criminal is looking to fence some stolen goods and is told Highway 61 is the place to go. The highway is a religious location, a place for exercising blind faith, and it's where the down and out are hidden, and it's a place where the legal system can be subverted. And in the last stanza it's where "the next world war" can be staged: "We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun / And have it out on Highway 61." The highway in America is where possibility awaits, but in this song the highway is anti-communal, and, separated from the community, it offers the chance to do what can't be done in the open, in public. The highway is clandestine, exciting in some ways, but also extremely dangerous.
Edition used: Highway 61. Columbia, 1965.
Author: Alice Munro (b. 1931)
Title: "Miles City, Montana" In The Progress of Love
Date: 1986
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1961, Washington state, Vancouver, Montana
This short story opens with an anecdote from the narrator's childhood, about the drowning of a young boy, before cutting to the beginning of a cross-country road trip (in 1961, in a new Morris Oxford) from Vancouver to Ontario, undertaken by the narrator, her husband, and their two small children. The narrator describes her usual life as a mother and wife as "living in a state of siege," but on the drive she can appreciate each moment and experience as it comes, can be "a watcher, not a keeper." She wonders why she loves the driving so much, suggesting that maybe it's because what goes by her window "'isn't scenery,'" but something more real and direct. They are going to Ontario to see family, a visit the narrator is not looking forward to - her pleasure is in the trip there.
The drive takes them down through Washington and into Montana, where they stop in Miles City, so the children can go for a brief swim. But the youngest, a three-year-old, almost drowns in the municipal pool, an incident which ties into the opening anecdote, and gets at the central concern of the story, which revolves around parenting - specifically the relationship between accident and responsibility. The narrator, both as a child, and as a parent, is appalled at the lack of control over death that parents have, the fact that simply bringing children into the world renders them automatically vulnerable and finally immune to protection. The drive has been a time of pleasure for the narrator, a respite from her usual life; but the incident at the pool brings home the realization that arriving anywhere intact, even moving from day to day, is always and inevitably fraught with dangers that can't be foreseen.
Edition used: Hans Ostrom, ed. Lives and Moments: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1991.
Author: William Saroyan (1908-1981)
Title: Short Drive, Sweet Chariot
Date: 1966
Systems: Car - Lincoln
Context: 1963, Middle West
In the summer of 1963 Saroyan and his cousin drove from London, Ontario to Fresno, California in a 1941 Lincoln limousine (which has only 5,000 miles on it). This short book covers the trip from London, through Detroit, across Michigan, on to a ferry crossing Lake Michigan, across Wisconsin and Minnesota (through the Twin Cities), ending in Pierre, South Dakota (three days short of Fresno). The book is mostly one long conversation between Saroyan and his cousin, covering an amazing array of topics: psychiatry, God, death, Hemingway, movies, Saroyan's writing, Henry Ford, etc. And Saroyan delivers all this in the guise of a sort of mobile and very literate stand-up comic; the book is witty, humorous, and fast-paced. The book is also very much about driving, particularly long-distance driving. Included in the non-stop dialogue are discussions of traffic, accidents, the relationship between memory and long drives, the condition of the limousine, the specific roads they are traveling, roadside stands, motels, the car ferry, night driving, as well as the "freedom" experienced in cross-country driving. While there is a vast difference between this book and Kerouac's On the Road - for one thing Saroyan is in his mid-fifties and relatively well-off - the two texts share a fascination with time, and express similar ideas about the relationship between time, experience, and car travel. For Saroyan life is most fully exhilarating in the present moment - it's here and then it's gone, moment after moment. In a car, enjoying movement itself, apart from thoughts of a destination or the road behind, he finds a freedom that is miraculous and revelatory, providing, if only fleetingly, an access to "truth" that is not available moving at a more mundane pace. The big black limousine opens up a privileged space for contemplation and conversation and for a more immediate experience of time, an experience that Dean and Sal in Kerouac's novel also celebrate.
Edition used: New York: Pocket Books, 1967.
Author: Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)
Title: Love Medicine
Date: 1984
Systems: Car
Context: 1960s, North Dakota, Native American perspective
The chapter, "The Red Convertible," is a narrative told by Lyman Lamartine about himself, his brother Henry, and the convertible they buy together. They are Chippewas, living in North Dakota, and the first on their reservation to drive a convertible. The early part of the chapter tells of their drives through the Dakotas, Montana and up into Alaska; but when Henry is drafted to fight in Vietnam, the car is put in mothballs. When Henry returns after three years, he is a changed man, mean and seemingly on the edge of insanity. Lyman secretly trashes the convertible and schemes to get Henry interested in fixing the car up. The plan works and Henry throws himself into restoring the car, an activity which seems to have a therapeutic effect. Once he finishes, the two brothers go for a test drive to a nearby river. There Henry reveals that he knows Lyman secretly wrecked the car and tells him he doesn't want it. They argue, fight, seem to reconcile, but then Henry jumps into the river and drowns. After trying to save him, Lyman returns to the convertible and pushes it into the river. The car functions before the war as an important marker of the brother's close relationship, but after Henry returns from fighting, not even the red convertible can reestablish the ties that so closely linked the two men.
Edition used: New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Author: Erica Jong (b. 1942)
Title: Fear of Flying
Date: 1974
Systems: Airplane, car, train
Context: Contemporary, travel in Europe
The issue announced in the title is dramatized in the opening chapter. Isadora, the narrator, is on a Pan Am flight to Vienna with 117 psychoanalysts, including six who had treated her fear and a seventh who is her husband. She rehearses her physiological symptoms during the takeoff, and expresses her hope that "the laws of aerodynamics are not … flimsy superstitions," and her skepticism about the "diabolical explanations of air-foil" in the multilingual card. She is humorously convinced that only her concentration and that of her mother keep the plane aloft, and thus the flight requires constant vigilance. Fear of flying expresses a concern about the future which runs against the attitude of her lover, an amateur existentialist, who forbids her to talk about the future. In the same vein, riding on a train or driving a car are more insistently present modes, and Isadora finds them more comfortable.
Also in the first chapter is Isadora's sexual fantasy that she will meet a man in a second-class European train compartment and they will have physically pleasant and psychologically anonymous sex, a contrast to her sexual relations with her husbands and lovers, especially Adrian, who is her companion for the second half of the novel. Near the end of the book she is in exactly the situation she thought would be delightful and escapes from what then is clearly an unwelcome rape attempt; now she looks for a crowded compartment, "One with nuns, or a family of twelve, or both" (Ch. 18). Her travel by train in Germany and Austria is colored by the fact that she is Jewish, so she has fears or fantasies that the ordinary trains are actually cattle cars, that the station commander "with his high-peaked Nazi hat" is going to route her to a concentration camp (Ch. 4).
Isadora and Adrian, after she leaves her husband at the psychoanalysts' congress, travel extensively in France, Italy, and Germany in his Triumph. "We came to know the German Autobahn automats with their plates of sauerkraut and knockwurst.… We were usually drunk from noon on, careening down the Autobahn in a right-hand-drive car, taking wrong turns everywhere, being tailgated by Volkswagens going 80 miles an hour, by Mercedes-Benzes blinking their headlights aggressively and doing 110, by BMWs trying to outrun the Mercedes-Benzes.… I am secretly in love with death. I will suffer morbidly through a shuttle flight from New York to Washington, but behind the wheel of a sports car I'll start doing 110 without hesitation and love every terrifying minute" (Ch. 8).
In her youth, she and her lover, Charlie, went on the Queen Elizabeth tourist class. They could not share a cabin because they needed proof of marriage, so they wound up in single-sex rooms with four berths each and had little luck finding a place for sex. They get in this predicament because Charlie is so frightened of flying he won't even go near a plane (Ch. 13).
Edition used: Frogmore (UK): Panther, 1976.
Author: Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
Title: "All Morning"
Date: 1964
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, New England
A couple of nice moments in a poem where tracking birds in the countryside is disrupted by automobiles. The wood pigeon, high in the trees, "his call floating over the on-coming traffic"; those back of the house "Flapping away heavily when a car blasts too close." Nature has a small victory, though: "And the ducks near Lake Washington waddle down the highway after a rain, / Stopping traffic, indignant as addled old ladies."
Edition used: William J. Martz, ed. The Distinctive Voice: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966.
Author: Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
Title: "The Far Field"
Date: 1964
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary
The narrator's dreams take him to the "far field" of the title at first through a detailed account of driving alone in a snowstorm. The road is "lined with snow-laden second growth," snow is "tickling the windshield." The isolated trip, with no traffic in either direction, goes further into the countryside, "changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone, / Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut, / Where the car stalls, / Churning in a snowdrift." This stalled car leads to a series of images of dead animals, "young rabbits caught in the mower," polluted streams, swamps. Despite the unpleasantries at the end of the road, we are ultimately assured that "All finite things reveal infinitude."
Edition used: Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie L. Lewis. Introduction to Literature: Poems, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1975.
Author: John Hollander (b. 1929)
Title: "Helicon"
Date: 1962
Systems: Urban streets
Context: Contemporary, New York city
Poetic images of the city viewed from the bridge above and the subway below street level: "Gray / Stony light has flashed over Morningside Drive since noon," past the "Blanched steel trusses of Hell-Gate … revealing the clarity of / Harlem's grid, like a glimpse of a future city below." "The heights of Morningside / Sloped downward, to the north, under the iron line / The subway holds to above it, refusing to descend / Under the crashing street."
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: LeRoy Jones (Amiri Baraka) (b. 1934)
Title: Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961-1967
Date: 1961-3, 1963-5, 1965-6
Systems: Railroad, subway, car - Cadillac
Context: 1960s, New York area; African-American perspective
Jones writes with some cynicism of the railroad's role in providing African-Americans with a way out of the South: "Trains / leaning north, catching hellfire in windows, passing through Chicago, / And then all ways, we go where flesh is cheap…. Make your way, and swing the general, that it come flash open / and spill the innards of that sweet thing we heard, and gave theory to" ("Three Modes of History and Culture"). The atmosphere is more poetic in the brief "On Out": "Train roars thru / dead dark. Lights ringing / on fences, air, night, slide / on the outside, and I ride / pinned together in the fast light."
"The Visit" describes the departure of a "Yellow girl. Gone / in the subways, my heart / pounding above the train." The subway is also presented as a symbol of broader cultural change, "We are in the era of imminent brake failure, breakdown / Country boys make believe they are emerging from pyramid crypts." The speaker talked with a subway conductor, who "just drove his train, dreaming of Columbia" ("Lowdown").
"Five Father Divine Women Circling a cadillac on the Last Day of the Year 1966" uses the notoriously expensive automobile to point up some of the excesses which Jones finds in Divine's followers.
Where are you in the snow, ghost, looking at jewels and lips, ghost, are you near us now, in hover in a dance air, the red hair of ghost wind wraps you near the cadillac and the ladies preparing their trip to daddy's shrine… the ladies pulld off in their cadillac they'll be dead like you very soon contact broken with the living, the other ladies cadillac riders in their fading youth
Edition used: Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
Author: Toni Cade Bambara (b. 1939)
Title: "The Lesson"
Date: 1972
Systems: Taxicab, subway
Context: 1950, New York; African-American perspective
This story provides a brief but interesting look at City transportation from a ten(?)-year-old's point of view. The narrator is a young hellion, and she gives a humorous account of a summer excursion in which she and her friends take a cab downtown. They are closely supervised by prim Miss Moore - "this lady [who] moved on our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup." The kids are distinctly uncomfortable in the presence of Miss Moore, "who always looked like she was going to church." Their parents, however, occasionally allow her to round up the kids and administer "lessons," because - as the narrator tells it - "she'd been to college and said it was only right that she should take responsibility for the young ones' education, and she not even related by marriage or blood."
This particular lesson is about the value of money, and the first exercise in economics concerns the cost of transportation. The narrator, tired of the lesson before it's begun, suggests "we oughta get to the subway cause it's cooler and besides we might meet some cute boys. Sugar done swiped her mama's lipstick, so we ready." Miss Moore has other plans; she astounds the group when she "steps out in the street and hails two cabs just like that."
Miss Moore puts the narrator and three others in a cab on their own and sends them on their way. The narrator's description shows the ride to be an exhilarating and boisterous adventure, and points out the tension between the driver and his inexperienced passengers:
Then [Miss Moore] hustles half the crew in with her and hands me a five-dollar bill and tells me to calculate 10 percent tip for the driver. And we're off. Me and Sugar and Junebug and Flyboy hangin out the window and hollering to everybody, putting lipstick on each other cause Flyboy a faggot anyway, and making farts with our sweaty armpits. But I'm mostly trying to figure how to spend this money. But they all fascinated with the meter ticking and Junebug starts laying bets as to how much it'll read when Flyboy can't hold his breath no more. Then Sugar lays bets as to how much it'll be when we get there. So I'm stuck. Don't nobody want to go for my plan, which is to jump out at the next light and run off to the first bar-b-que we can find. Then the driver tells us to get the hell out cause we there already. And the meter reads eighty-five cents. And I'm stalling to figure out the tip and Sugar say give him a dime. And I decide he don't need it bad as I do, so later for him. But then he tries to take off with Junebug's foot still in the door so we talk about his mama something ferocious. Then we check out that we on Fifth Avenue and everybody dressed up in stockings. One lady in a fur coat hot as it is. White folks is crazy.
The cab is a high-energy experience - hot and more self-contained (no chance to meet cute boys) - in comparison with the return trip by subway, where they were "watchin the tracks whizzin by large then small then getting gobbled up in the dark." But the cab provides anxious fascinations and lessons of its own, for instance, the ever-ticking meter that rivets the attention, the politics of tipping inappropriately.
Edition used: Charles Bohner, ed. Short Fiction, Classic and Contemporary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989.
Author: Sandra Cisneros
Title: The House on Mango Street
Date: 1984
Systems: Bicycle, car, subway.
Context: Late 1960s, early 1970s, Chicago and San Antonio; Chicana perspective
This novel is composed of brief vignettes and recounts a young Chicana's "coming of age."
In "Our Good Day" the narrator Esperanza makes two new friends by going in on the purchase of a neighbor boy's bike: $15, five bucks each. The focus is on their newly acquired friendship, power and daring as they all three pile on ("which makes the bike all wobbly as if the wheels are spaghetti"). They ride "fast and faster" around the neighborhood and down "the avenue which is dangerous."
The vignette "A Smart Cookie" underscores the difference in educational opportunity for a Chicana school-girl and her Mexican mother. As a girl in Mexico, the mother quit school because she was ashamed of her clothing. Now she must rely on her school age American daughter to help her negotiate life in the U. S. Esperanza tells us that her mother, who can speak two languages, repair TVs, and sing operas, "doesn't know which subway train to take downtown. I hold her hand very tight while we wait for the right train to arrive."
In "Louie, His Cousin and His Other Cousin," Esperanza recalls the only time the neighborhood saw the "other cousin," the day he drove up honking "in this great big yellow Cadillac with whitewalls and a yellow scarf tied around the mirror" and invited an undesignated number of kids to pile in for a ride. Lots of attention is given to the white leather interior, automatic windows, FM radio and "a little white cat in the back window whose eyes lit up when the car stopped or turned." Police sirens cut the ride short, and all wave as the cousin pulls away in the back of the "cop car."
Other stories relate cars to female sexuality: In "The Family of Little Feet," girls experiment with high heels; the Bum Man on the tavern stoop tells Rachel (in the lemon pumps), "you are prettier than a yellow taxi cab." In "Hips": "One day you wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition. Ready to take you where?" Finally, "The Monkey Garden" shows abandoned cars which pop up "like mushrooms" in this overgrown and Edenic vacant lot/playground; the vehicles are alternately innocent and ominous. "The old blue pick-up" is first a clubhouse for the kids and later the spot where a group of boys take Sally for "kisses."
Edition used: Houston, TX: Arte Publico, 1988.
Author: James Dickey (b. 1923)
Title: "Cherrylog Road" In Helmets
Date: 1963
Systems: Auto junk yard
Context: Contemporary, South
This dream-like poem of seventeen six-line stanzas describes a car junkyard in the south, on a blazing summer day, from the perspective of a young boy who clambers through the various abandoned cars, imagining their past owners and the places they went. While he wanders among the cars he is also anticipating the arrival of a girl, who comes regularly to the junkyard, wrench in hand, to practice a sort of junior archeology on the wrecks - and to meet him in the back seats of cars. They come together in the midst of the "dreaming traffic," and later leave separately, the boy flinging himself down the road on his bicycle, "wild to be wreckage forever."
Edition used: William J. Martz, ed. The Distinctive Voice: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966.
Author: Harry Crews (b. 1935)
Title: Car
Date: 1972
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, Jacksonville, Florida
Crews' novel is about the Mack family, who live over Salvage House, amidst the forty-three acres of Auto-Town, their wrecking yard on the outskirts of Jacksonville, Florida. The father, Easy Mack, who had once been considered the "best shade-tree mechanic in Lebeau County, Georgia," loved cars: "he had always loved them. Always in all ways." He runs Auto-Town with his three grown children: Mister, who operates the car crusher and scrap metal end of the business and who is obsessed with money; Junell, who drives the tow truck, "Big Mama," scooping up wrecks off of the nearby highway, and meeting her boyfriend, Joe, a highway patrolman, at accident scenes (the only place they meet), where they neck and pet in the backseat of his cruiser; and Herman, Mister's twin and a "dreamer of mad dreams," the only one of Easy's three children who hadn't "taken hold and found [his] place."
The book is largely about Herman's attempt to take hold, to find something beyond the junkyard that will give his life meaning. But though the running of Auto-Town isn't enough to satisfy him, Herman, like the others, does look to cars for that meaning. One of his first "dreams" is "CAR DISPLAY: YOUR HISTORY ON PARADE," an attraction he creates which consists of "individual [wrecked] cars for each of the last fifty years" (1920 to 1970) spread across ten acres of the junkyard. "'Everything that's happened in this goddam country in the last fifty years,' said Herman, 'has happened in, on, around, with, or near a car.… And everybody wants to return to the scene of the crime.'" The display is a huge success, visited by thousands of people; but when a man stabs his brother-in-law over the hood of a '47 Ford coupe, and a women loses her sanity at the sight of the interior of a '40 Studebaker, Easy makes Herman shut down the show, telling him there is "'no joy. No love'" in such autoarchaeology.
Herman's next project is the main focus of the book: he decides to eat a car. He makes a deal with a local hotel owner to eat a new '71 Ford Maverick, piece by cut-up piece, a half ounce at a time, a half pound a day - a rate that will require ten years to completely consume the car. The eating and "passing" are done in separate performances, in the hotel's ballroom, next to the slowly disappearing car, each day before enthusiastic sellout audiences (and Wide World of Sports is recording the whole thing for an eventual highlights film). After the first eating performance Herman returns to his room and has a waking dream in which he imagines he is "filled" with cars, cars racing in his eyes, in his veins, in his limbs, and in his heart. Terrified, he feels himself filling up with cars "tighter and tighter until finally he was bumper to bumper head to toe." At the last moment, as he feels himself beginning to explode, Herman comes up with a "solution": "He was a car. A superbly equipped car. He would escape because he was the thing that threatened himself, and he would not commit suicide."
But finally, after eating and passing the front bumper, the grille, both front fenders, and part of the hood, Herman can't go on. He hurts too much, the physical pain is becoming overwhelming. To continue, he realizes, would be suicide. He realizes that his consuming love and worship of the Maverick, his desire to transform himself into the car, to swallow it, has been a misdirected dream. He still loves the car, but he can't stand "that kind of pain from something" he loves. His attempt totally to identify with the car - to the point of assimilation - has proven impossible and hurtful. By practicing a sort of theophagy, literally consuming the body of his god, and by subsequently imagining himself a car, Herman has attempted to ingest the transformative power of the car, its divine qualities. But what he has consumed turns out to be the death force of the car, a "quality" of automobiles that is well documented in the novel, in the violent highway accidents, the wrecked cars at the junkyard, and the polluted air and water that engulfs and surrounds Auto-Town. The car Herman worships proves a destructive god, and so he must give up his quest, look for a human connection.
In place of the car, Herman develops (over the course of the performances) a relationship with Margo, the "hotel whore," and he takes her with him back to Auto-Town after he gives up on eating the Maverick. In the final scene of the novel they sit together in the middle of the junkyard, in the backseat of a wrecked Rolls Royce, the car where as a child Herman had played "Mommy and Daddy" with a neighbor girl, who was one day crushed by cars as she made her way towards the Rolls. Love for Herman is rediscovered in the Rolls Royce, but a less destructive love, one that expects less from the automobile.
Edition used: New York: William Morrow, 1972.
Author: Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
Title: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
Date: 1965 Written: © 1963-1965
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, South, both coasts
Several of Wolfe's portraits focus on the new roles of automobiles in the American culture of the 1960s. The relevant essays are on demolition derbys, customized cars, and stock car racing. Wolfe shows how these anti-Establishment subcultures set trends in the Detroit industry as well as young peoples' attitudes. The "Introduction" recalls Wolfe's visit to the New York Hot Rod and Custom Car show, with "weird . . . nutty-looking, crazy baroque custom cars, sitting in little nests of pink angora angel's hair for the purpose of 'glamorous' display." One exhibitor, Dale Alexander, is an artist who creates cars "which more than 99 per cent of the American people would consider ridiculous, vulgar and lower-class-awful beyond comment almost." Stock car racing in the South had replaced baseball as the top sport, a move from a fixed, land sport modeled on cricket to one with "standard-looking, cars that go 180 miles an hour or so."
"The Last American Hero" starts with Wolfe's trip to a stock car race. "Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-Cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields." Wolfe thinks he is "in the midst of the biggest traffic jam in the history of the world," with 17,000 fans converging on the North Wilkesboro Speedway to watch Junior Johnson, the hero. Stock cars are important to the mentality of the automobile world because they use vehicles which are technically like those which ordinary people could drive. The 600 horsepower, 427 cubic inch motor could be bought by special order. After the first rounds of "hot" cars, the 1947 Hudson, 1946 Chrysler, 1955 Pontiac, and a lot of Fords, Chrysler and Ford began active sponsorship of racing cars. Johnson's use of privately-owned Chevrolets broke the tradition. When he shifted to a Ford, it was noted by the Southern fans of the sport, and it affected which cars they would buy. That led to Detroit's interest in promoting the sport, despite the general tendency of the Establishment to ignore the South, rural culture, and young people ("good old boys").
"Clean Fun at Riverhead" traces the history of demolition derbys when Lawrence Mendelsohn recognized that most people who went to stock car races liked the wrecks, "So why put up with the monotony between crashes?" The demolition derby, where one hundred cars in four heats converge until one is still running, is "culturally the most important sport ever originated in the United States." As part of the "national symbolism," it ties into the claims that three quarters of all car thefts are by joy riders, and that the police suspect that many accidents on the road are caused by belligerent drivers.
The title story begins with Wolfe's visit to the Teen Fair at Burbank, California, where customized cars are treated as art objects. George Burris, the biggest name in customizing, works out of "Kustom City" in North Hollywood, a place which is not a body shop but an art gallery - most customized cars never touch the road, but are carried from show to show in trucks. They are curvilinear abstract sculptures in the Brancusi tradition. They challenge Detroit, which works in a Mondrian mould. The streamlining, such as that which evolved from paper mockups added to the Studebaker Avanti, affected special cars made for Elvis, Liberace, Barry Goldwater, and others, and ultimately Detroit itself. A person from the Cadillac "styling center" shows up at one of the customizing shops. Wolfe claims that some twenty modifications from the customizing world wound up in Detroit, including, for example, the "bullet-shaped, or breast-shaped if you'd rather" front bumpers on the Cadillac. Wolfe concludes, "the young Detroit stylists came to the automobile strictly from art school and the abstract world of design - rather than via the teen-age mystique of the automobile and the teen-age ethos of rebellion."
Incidentally, "The Peppermint Lounge Revisited" tells of New Jersey teen-age girls who catch the Somerset Line bus in Plainfield at 7:30 on Friday and take the Turnpike and Lincoln Tunnel to the Port Authority Terminal for their mid-town fling at the place where the Twist was invented. Wolfe notes that they get off at the platform "with some incredible number of 155. One hundred and fifty-five platforms: this was New York."
Edition used: New York: Pocket Books, 1966.
Author: Erich Segal (b. 1937)
Title: Love Story
Date: 1970
Systems: Car
Context: Contemporary, New England, New York city
Segal uses driving style as a symbol of the relations between Oliver, the narrator, and his father and his father-in-law. For example, Oliver reminds us and his wife, Jenny, that the drive from Cambridge to his parents' home in Ipswich, Mass., is 40 minutes although he had done it in 29: "A certain distinguished Boston banker claims an even faster time." Jenny comments that he's driving "like a maniac," and that the speed will "kill us" even before her first meeting with his father whom he dislikes "Because everyone likes him." At Ipswich he misses the turnoff to his family's estate, and then he asks editorially, "Is there something symbolic in the fact that I backed up three hundred yards to the entrance of our place?" [Yes, there is, but both Segal and his early-twenties narrator are less than subtle about emotions and about symbolism.] (Ch. 7).
We had earlier learned that Jenny's mother was killed in a car crash, and, on the first page, that she had died at the age of 24, so many of the comments in the book, such as the one about high speed being fatal hold potential dramatic irony. Jenny does not drive at all.
In contrast, when Oliver drives the MG to visit her folks he is "obeying all posted speed limits," and Jenny complains when he does 40 in a 45 mile zone: "I told her the car needed tuning, which she believed not at all." In Cranston, Rhode Island, "there were entire families sitting on their porches with apparently nothing better to do this Sunday afternoon than to watch me park my MG" (Ch. 9). Presumably Oliver drives reluctantly because he does not know what to expect from this visit.
After Jenny is diagnosed with fatal cancer and is rushed to the New York city hospital for emergency treatment, Oliver has to drive to his father's for $5,000 to cover the medical expenses. "It is impossible to drive from East Sixty-third Street, Manhattan, to Boston, Massachusetts, in less than three hours and twenty minutes. Believe me, I have tested the outer limits on this track, and I am certain that no automobile, foreign or domestic, even with some Graham Hill type at the wheel, can make it faster. I had the MG at a hundred and five on the Mass Turnpike." He again breaks his personal best in getting to his father, but this time with a kind of immediacy lacking in the earlier trip. Oliver does not tell his father why he needs the money, but puts the request in nasty terms which leads his father to pay out of love even though Oliver shrinks from touching his father's hand (Ch. 20). To show that the father rises above his son's crassness and rejection, he finds out about Jenny's illness and takes the trouble to drive himself to New York - alas, too late, since Jenny had died, but not too late to close the symbolic circle.
Edition used: New York: Avon, 1977.
Author: Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)
Title: "Next Day"
Date: 1960
Systems: Station wagon
Context: Contemporary, suburban
A picture of modern shopping, "Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All," ironically picking up on soap names. "And the boy takes it to my station wagon, / What I've become / Troubles me even if I shut my eyes." The speaker, an old woman, notices that her face "looks at me / From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate, / The smile I hate," and she recognizes her aging and approaching death framed and constrained by the vehicle.
Edition used: Charles Kaplan, ed. Literature in America: The Modern Age. New York: The Free Press, 1971.
Author: Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
Title: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" In The Wheel of Love
Date: 1970
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, small town
Oates's short story is about a fifteen-year-old girl, Connie, and her experience of coming of age, the sexual awakening of adolescence. Early in the story Connie's experiences are limited to brief make-out sessions in the cars of boys she meets at the local drive-in, nights she thinks of as sweet and gentle, "the way it was in movies and promised in songs." But one Sunday her parents and sister leave for the day and Arnold Friend, whom she recognizes from the drive-in but doesn't know, shows up in his gold "jalopy," bent on having Connie. Friend, who is not a "boy" but it appears a thirty-year-old man, begins his "seduction" by asking Connie to go for a ride with him in his car, a car that is described as "painted so bright it almost hurt her eyes to look at it." Friend's name is painted on the side of the car, as are various sayings. At first he's gentle and cajoling, but as Connie continues to resist his entreaties to come for a "ride," his impatience begins to show. He comes out and tells her that he's going to be her "lover," and begins describing what he's going to do; when Connie panics and threatens to call the police, he answers with his own threat of coming in the house to get her if she picks up the phone. Finally he tells her if she doesn't come out he'll wait for her family, hinting that he'll kill them when they return. In the end Connie does come out to get in his car.
The connection between adult sexuality and the car is clear in the story. The house is the place of childhood, but the car is the way out into the world, away from "Daddy," whom Connie continually invokes in her attempt to resist Friend (her forays in other cars with boys were always short, followed by a return home). But the "healthiness" of this transition, this going for a ride, is questionable in the story. Arnold Friend and his desire are depicted in a frightening and threatening manner. Further, Friend is several times described as sinisterly unreal, as if he is operating from behind a mask, suggesting that he arises from some evil or devilish origin. In the end Connie begins to see herself from the outside, and to think that her body "wasn't hers," and when she joins Friend outside she moves like an automaton or a zombie. Going to the car is not simply "growing up" in the story, but a movement that for a young girl is dangerous, that puts her under the control of a male sexuality that objectifies her. As an adolescent it is clear that Connie lives under the authority of her father, but that authority (represented by the house she doesn't want to leave), though also patriarchal, is clearly more benevolent. At the end of the story it's not clear just what Arnold Friend has in mind, beyond "having" Connie; as her threats to her family reveal, Friend is capable of murder and their ride together could prove fatal for Connie.
Edition used: Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985.
Author: John Updike (b. 1932)
Title: Rabbit Redux
Date: 1971
Systems: Automobile, commuter bus
Context: late 1960s, eastern Pennsylvania
Set in the "stagnant city of Brewer" (Pennsylvania) with specific references to the first lunar landing, the 1968 Democratic convention, Vietnam war, and Senator Ted Kennedy's car accident, Updike presents the world of rather small cities which have no clear link to metropolises. The characters are definitely part of an automobile-focused culture, but not quite totally committed. Rabbit (Harry Angstrom, a middle-aged Linotype operator) and his father regularly commute by bus to work, yet each family has a car, a Falcon and an old Chevy, respectively. After Rabbit and his wife, Janice, separate, she takes the Falcon but he doesn't seem much inconvenienced. Janice's father owns a Toyota agency, Springer Motors, which becomes one excuse for Rabbit's frequent racist and conservative remarks about selling "Jap cars" and "tinny cars" (Ch. 1). Rabbit's bigotry is established early in the novel. On the first bus ride we see, he notices that the "bus has too many Negroes," and that, as it moves out of town, it "begins to drop people instead of taking them on" (Ch. 1).
Predictably, individuals and families are pegged by their cars. Rabbit's wealthy teen-age lover Jill from Stonington, Connecticut, has a white Porsche. His sister, a wealthy person with multiple sexual partners and a fair amount of money borrows an indigo Toronado from some guy she meets. The Fonsnachts, neighbors of slightly more wealth, have a blue Mustang. Jill's car breaks down when the motor seizes from lack of oil ("'Don't they do it when they put the gas in?'"), and "Rabbit gets out to look under the hood, but the works of this machine are not open and tall and transparent as with a Linotype, but are tangled and greasy and closed." The drive to the garage is humiliating and, under the circumstances dangerous since they have an escaped prisoner with them. Their ride back to town with a stranger: "Car tires crackle; an ancient Fifties Buick, with those tailfins patterned on B-19s, pulls into their orbit" (Ch. 2). Street sounds are constant - on Saturday night in the town, we hear "cars driven by teenagers laying rubber and shifting down" (Ch. 2). Outside the place where Janice and her lover live, she is kept awake by worry, but she "was surprised how this city always rumbles with traffic" and her insomnia makes "the darkness shudder between pulses of the headlights that tirelessly pass below on Eisenhower Avenue" (Ch. 4).
Changes, for the worse, in Brewer, are partially charted by symbols such as the "flowerpotted traffic circle where the trolley tracks used to make a clanging star of intersection" and the main street was "potholed macadam," (Ch. 1) or, later, that middle of the town is "all parking lot" (Ch. 4).
Incidentally, Jill's parents fly from Connecticut and Rabbit's sister flies from the West Coast to be with their ailing mother. For the upper middle class, this mode of travel is possible, but it is not presented as being routine.
Edition used: New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Author: John Cheever (1912-1982)
Title: "The Swimmer"
Date: 1964
Systems: Highway, suburban roads
Context: Contemporary, Eastern suburb
The central character swims (and drinks) his way home through his neighbors' nearly-linked swimming pools on what starts out to be a summer day, but which symbolically becomes autumn by the time her arrives. Along the way he walks on driveways that cut his feet, across lawns, and into a couple of parties. At one point he overhears a de Haviland trainer airplane overhead; a train whistle makes him wonder what time it is, and then reminds him of "the provincial station at that hour, where a waiter, his tuxedo concealed by a raincoat, a dwarf with some flowers wrapped in newspaper, and a woman [his wife?] who had been crying would be waiting for the local." After swimming most of the way, he has to cross a highway to continue the adventure: "Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen him, close to naked, standing on the shoulder of route 424, waiting for a chance to cross. You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had his car broken down, or was merely a fool. Standing barefoot in the deposits of the highway - beer cans, rags, and blowout patcher - exposed to all kinds of ridicule, he seemed pitiful." "An old man, tooling down the highway at fifteen miles an hour, let him get to the middle of the road, where there was a grass divider. Here he was exposed to the ridicule of the northbound traffic, but after ten or fifteen minutes he was able to cross." After traversing the Village's public pool, he crosses another road, and is a couple of pools away from home. Upon his arrival there, "He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and rust came off the handles onto his hands." The house is locked, his family has left, "the place was empty." The empty garage, then, is a symbol of his financial and psychological ruin.
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
Title: "Everything that Rises Must Converge"
Date: 1965
Systems: Urban bus
Context: Contemporary, Southern city
Set in the context of the civil rights movement, and especially recently integrated buses, the story emphasizes the consciousness of both whites and blacks about who will sit near whom, who will talk with whom.
The middle-aged Julian takes his widowed mother downtown for her weekly weight reducing class at the Y; "She would not ride the buses by herself at night since they had been desegregated." She puts on her new hat ("hideous" in her son's view) as part of her formal dress for the occasion. The neighborhood has been fashionable forty years ago, but Julian now would like to move where the nearest neighbor would be three miles away. Her mother glories in the memory that "'Your great-grandfather had an plantation and two hundred slaves.'" She speaks on that topic "every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station." This romantic metaphor about the train contrasts to the squalid details about the bus ride.
When Julian is alone on the bus, he makes a point of sitting beside a Negro, "in reparation as it were for his mother's sins." "The frustration of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep up his neck like a hot hand." He tells his mother, "'Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are.'" He helps her up the steps of the bus, puts in the tokens, and they sit on one of the seats which face the aisle in the front. "Everybody was white. 'I see we have the bus to ourselves,' she said. Julian cringed." The woman across the aisle understands the code and agrees: "'I came on one the other day and they were thick as fleas - up front and all through.'" She also complains about '… 'those boys from good families stealing automobile tires.'" Julian picks up an abandoned newspaper from the floor and opens it so he won't have to talk, "a kind of mental bubble."
The bus stops "with a sudden jerk" and "a large Negro got on … well dressed and [who] carried a brief case." The mother's immediate whispered reaction is, "'Now you see why I won't ride on these buses by myself.'" The white woman moves to a rear seat; Julian takes her place - he would like to talk about "art or politics or any subject that would be above the comprehension of those around them." The black man hides behind his newspaper. Julian tries to make contact by asking for matches; after the man gives them, he sees the NO SMOKING sign and hands them back: "The Negro refused to come out from behind his paper." He recalls times when he talked with a black undertaker and another Negro man who slipped him two lottery tickets, but "he had never been successful at making any Negro friends." The bus stops again and a "sullen-looking colored woman got on with a little boy." The four-year old sits next to Julian's mother, and the "giant of a woman" squeezes next to Julian - her hat is, ironically, as "hideous" as his mother's. The mother calls her son who slides down until she snatches him.
All four get off at the same stop; Julian's mother tries to give the boy a new penny, an awkward gesture which her son anticipates, but the black woman slugs her with her purse: "'He don't take nobody's pennies!'" The mother is immobile on the sidewalk, gets up and wants to go home, then collapses again in an apparent stroke.
Edition used: Hans P. Guth and Gabriele L. Rico, eds. Discovering Fiction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Blair, 1993.
Author: Robert Serling
Title: Stewardess
Date: 1982
Systems: Airplane
Context: 1955 to 1970, Miami and New York
Serling charts the professional rise of Danni Hendricks from stewardess to vice president of In-Flight Services of the fictional Trans-National Airlines (TNA). Along the way he dramatizes the shift in equipment from propellor planes to 747s, the entry of blacks into the industry, the professionalization of stewardesses, union bargaining, and executive-suite politics. The novel is an example of how late twentieth-century, popular fiction can serve as a vehicle for social history and liberal commentary.
When Hendricks is first hired in 1955, TNA is on the verge of deciding on the DC-7, which holds more than 72 passengers (Ch. 1). During the training period, the stewardesses (and others) must also learn about the Convair 240 (40 passengers) and Lockeed Constellation (68) (Ch. 3, 4). By 1957, the airline has ordered fifteen Boeing 707s, which hold 111 passengers, and travel at double the speed - the effect on the crew is to serve twice as many people in half the time (Ch. 8). The decision not to select the Douglas DC-8 was based on better delivery dates; the 707s arrive in 1959, and by the next year the airline is booking 70,000 first-time flyers, chiefly women and children, a situation that changed the airline industry's almost exclusive emphasis on business flights (Ch. 11). By the mid-sixties, TNA, having ordered Boeing 747s for delivery in three years, needs totally to restructure its routes (Ch. 14); however, because the company is overextended, with many quarters of deficit, the order is shifted to four fewer 747s and six more 727s. In March, 1970, with the first 747, the age of the jumbo jet arrives, and the company's president reminisces: "'This beautiful, magnificent creation - my God, only forty years ago I was flying Ford trimotors and thinking there'd probably never be a bigger airplane built.'" (Ch. 18).
Hendricks's first flight on a jet is rendered lyrically: "Takeoffs. Accelerations so slow at first that 240,000 pounds of aluminum, plastic, cloth, rubber, and fuel seemed glued to the runway. Then the exhilarating sensation of increased speed as the turbines screamed defiance of gravity… and the racing wind caught the airfoil of the wings like a giant hand pushing the plane up.… The incredible knowledge that this 120-ton monster was covering almost ten miles every minute, and doing it so quietly and smoothly that it seemed to be suspended in the sky.… Letdown and landing. A return to earth with a controlled steadiness that made one think the jetliner was riding an enormous railroad track toward the ground.… adventure without real danger, sense-quickening without concern, excitement without fear" (Ch. 11). As with other changes in American technology, the older system provides metaphors for a new one.
Hendricks is presented as being at the center of social changes for stewardesses, especially after she is promoted to a central-office, middle management position after she drafts a key report on the staffing needs of the 707s. She eventually wins the battles to abolish rules terminating married stewardesses and those over 35, and she is instrumental in hiring the first two black women for the job. The opposition (and support) for these positions comes from the all-male executives of the airline; some changes had been adopted by other airlines, others are accepted on moral or economic grounds (Ch. 10, 13).
Other episodes and events are part of Serling's general portrait of the industry. In a 1956 flight through a thunderstorm (incredibly with Eleanore Roosevelt on board), Hendricks is calm and helpful when the plane loses altitude (Ch. 6). We see her reaction to a plane crash where crew members she knows are killed (Ch. 9). In the early 1960s she helps to disarm a hippie-type who tries to get LSD-laced cookies passed to the pilot, and who may be a hijacker (Ch. 11). She works on an appropriate reaction to 1965-66 pictures of a naked TNA stewardess in Stud magazine (Ch. 14). In the face of a threatened strike by stewardesses, she comes up with the successful negotiating package, one part of which includes setting up In-Flight Service as an independent department with its own vice president (Ch. 15-16). After giving details about how the vice presidents conduct their infighting, and how the successor to the president might be selected, we finally see Hendricks promoted to become the first woman vice president of the company (Ch 17-18).
Edition used: New York: St Martin's/Marek, 1982.
Author: August Wilson (b. 1945)
Title: Two Trains Running
Date: 1990
Systems: Train, cars
Context: 1969, Pittsburgh; African-American perspective
Memphis owns a small rib-joint in Pittsburgh. For twenty years he's known that two trains run from Pittsburgh to Jackson, Mississippi every day; there was a time when he had the schedules memorized. Ever since he was driven off his farm and run out of Jackson, Memphis has been plagued by the memory. The white men that burned his crops also disemboweled his mule and castrated the beast while Memphis watched. "They ran me out and I called it a draw," he says:
One of these days I'm going back and get my land... When I left out of Jackson I said I was gonna buy me a V-8 Ford and drive by Mr. Henry Ford's house and honk the horn ... then I was going out and buy me a 30.06 and come on back to Jackson and drive up to Mr. Stovall's house and honk the horn. Only this time I wasn't waving.
At first Memphis imagines revenge in economic terms; he will succeed in spite of the men who determined to prevent that success. But, as he tells it, it took thirteen years to get that Ford. Six years later he traded it in on a Cadillac: "There wasn't no way in the world I was going back to Jackson then. Do you know what they do to a nigger they see driving a cadillac in Jackson? But I'm going back one of these day. All I got to do is find my way down to the train depot."
Where the fine cars would represent one kind of victory over his tormentors, a victory that could in fact backfire, the train offers an entirely different form of redress. In his introduction to the play, August Wilson writes, "There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us ride them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of anyone." In this drama trains represent the opportunity to return and return with dignity - to one's past, to the scene of one's disgrace. There one can "pick up the ball," in Wilson's words, that is, confront your loss or face your adversary responsibly and, in turn, force him to take responsibility for the dirt he's done you.
Railroads and highways also represent the wealth white men have extracted from black labor. "Ain't no more money in niggers working," says Memphis's buddy Holloway as he philosophizes on unemployment: "If the white man could figure out a way to make some money by putting niggers to work, we'd all be working. He ain't building no more railroads. He got them. He ain't building no more highways. Somebody done already stuck the telephone poles in the ground..."
Edition used: Printed in Theater 22.1 (1991):42-72.
Author: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Title: "Getting There" In Ariel
Date: 1965
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary
In this late poem, Plath uses the train as a metaphor of both journey and condition, specifically as a bodily metaphor for her experience as a woman. The train at first seems a now-familiar phallic representation: "The gigantic gorilla interior / Of the wheels appall me - ." And on this nightmare train the narrator says: "I am dragging my body / Quietly through the straw of the boxcars."
Where she is trying to "get" it turns out is a place to escape, a place where she can be something else. But on the journey there she is undergoing a transformation that will ready her for arrival, a bodily shift from passenger to a train herself. After the description of the men on the train as "wounded," a "Dynasty of broken arrows!" "The body of this woman" and the train seem to become synonymous.
The train is dragging itself, it is screaming - An animal Insane for the destination, The bloodspot, The face at the end of the flare. In the final lines the destination is achieved, And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, old boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe Pure as a baby.
The train functions simultaneously as a sort of male prison and as a womb from which she is reborn into a new body, a new life. The train is both what encases her and what saves her, taking her where she wants to go, and delivering her to a new beginning.
Edition used: The Collected Poems. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.
Author: Richard Brautigan (1937-1986)
Title: "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane"
Date: 1971
Systems: Airplane, train, automobile
Context: Contemporary, California
At the beginning of this very brief short story the narrator gets a phone call and learns that his wife's father is dead. In an effort to decipher what "his death means to all of us" the narrator composes a list, of 33 items, which is a synopsis, a sort of mini-biography of the dead man's life, a life that has been very eclectic, full of success and failure, with a preponderance of the latter for the last twenty-five years or so. The title refers to the father's experience as a pilot in World War I, one of the several experiences of his early life that were exciting and satisfying. But in addition to that experience, his life has been shaped and marked by other transportation technologies: by "a horrible automobile accident … in which everybody was killed but him," by a conversation on a train in Texas that led to his moving to Idaho and starting a bank, by a honeymoon trip by train to Philadelphia, by a Chevrolet that was the only thing left him after a business failure and in which he moved his family to California. The function or meaning of these different modes of transportation is impossible to generalize about; but their importance in the father's life, their profound influence and effect is undeniable. The man lived from 1890 to 1960 and he was immersed in a culture that relies daily on cars, trains, and planes, and so it's not surprising that these would inscribe his life. The act of remembering the life of a man in the twentieth century is almost inevitably going to utilize transportation experiences as "historical landmarks," and Brautigan's story clearly illustrates that modern link between life and machine travel.
Edition used: Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970. New York: Pocket Books, 1972.
Author: Gertrude Chandler Warner
Title: Caboose Mystery
Date: 1966
Systems: Train
Context: Contemporary, probably an Eastern state
"The Little North Railroad is a story book railroad, but the cabooses are real cabooses." The Alden children had previously lived in a boxcar in the woods with their grandfather who has "a friend who owns a railroad." He uses his connection to get them all a ride on an old-fashioned big caboose with a mysterious past. The caboose is equipped with a bottled-gas stove, sink, icebox, canned food and bunk beds. Along the way, the kids find out about the emergency brake and the "dead-man's pedal"; Benny pulls the lever to start the train. It turns out that the caboose had been part of a circus train, and a previous user had hidden a diamond necklace in one of the mattresses; the plot involves getting this back to the former owner so he can take care of his horse. The path to the recovery includes taxi rides, removing a fallen tree from the path of a fast train, and various ad hoc changes in the train's rather informal schedule.
Other children's novels in this series include The Boxcar Children, Houseboat Mystery, and Bicycle Mystery.
Edition used: Chicago: Albert Whitman: 1973.
Author: Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
Title: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Date: 1968
Systems: Bus
Context: Contemporary, California
A saga of author Ken Kesey and his entourage in the mid-Sixties with the "great bus trip" as the main event of the early chapters. Kesey is, until the final chapters, wandering away from drugs charges, arrests, and trials and so pursuit and escape are dominant themes. Kesey's group of followers and collaborators, The Pranksters, assembles in a San Francisco garage called the Warehouse to organize a bus trip to the 1964 New York World's Fair. The bus, a 1939 International Harvester, is wired with an elaborate sound system both to record the passing world and to broadcast music, lectures, and poems back. The bus is also the rolling studio for a Movie, ultimately 40 hours long, which shows the Pranksters' travels and consciously includes the outside world's harassments and interactions with the bus. The "Hieronymus Bosch" bus is flamboyantly decorated: "The painting job, meanwhile, with everybody pitching in is a frenzy of primary colors, yellows, oranges, blues, reds, was sloppy as hell, except for the parts Roy Seburn did, which were nice manic mandalas. Well, it was sloppy, but one thing you had to say for it; it was freaking lurid. The manifest, the destination sign in the front, read: 'Furthur,' with two u's" (Ch. 6).
Social life on the bus is dominated by LSD trips; it becomes "like a pressure cooker." It has a refrigerator, bunks, and so is a self-contained world. The ride to New York goes through the South, and the bus attracts frequent attention by the police. In New Orleans, "The city cops were no more able to keep their Cop Movie going than the country cops. Hassler talked sweet to them like the college valedictorian and Kesey talked sweet and down-home and Hagen filmed it all like this was some crazed adventure in cinema verité and the cops skedaddled in a herd of new Ford cruisers with revolving turret lights. Sayonara, you all" (Ch. 7). The usual driver is Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty of Kerouac's On The Road, now forty years old, which provides a link between the hipsters and the Beat generation, a link emphasized by a meeting with Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Terry Southern and others when the bus arrives in New York City. Kesey's message is "about how writing was an old-fashioned and artificial form and pointing out, for all who cared to look… the bus" (Ch. 8). The run back, over the northern route from Ohio through Minnesota, South Dakota (frequently noted as being 191 miles to drive across), into and out of Canada where Mounties become part of the Movie.
During a big protest against the Vietnam war, they paint the bus a dull red, the color of dried blood with (anti-)military symbols. It rains. The paint washes off, so they do an American Eagle, put on a fake gun turret with two cardboard cannons (Ch. 16). Kesey flees to Mexico to avoid his drug charges - the bus is driven down to be in the action. Sandy, one of the Pranksters, says "I'll always be on the bus" (Ch. 25). Between his conviction and sentence, Kesey and his family (the Pranksters are disbursed) take the bus to his home town, Springfield, Oregon. At the end, "Kesey was writing again, working on a novel. The bus was there, parked beside the Space Heater House" ("Epilogue").
In an incidental remark, Wolfe and the Pranksters mock a group of Vietnam protesters as "A bunch of fraternity men in their Mustangs!" (Ch. 26). Also, when the Pranksters are visited by the Hell's Angels gang, the latter's "trip" was motorcycles, parallel to the Prankster's dedication to Acid (Ch. 13).
Edition used: New York: Bantam, 1969.
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