of such a highway in early days must have been overpowering, but
with time and weather this strip of stone has worn into an
infinite number of little ruts and hollows, with stones the size
of cocoanuts sticking up everywhere. A trolley-line along one side
of this central stretch has not improved matters.
Perry's Pike is so bad people will not use it; a road alongside
the fence has been made by travel, and in dry weather this road is
good, barring the pipes which cross it from oil-wells, and the
many stone culverts, at each of which it is necessary to swing up
on to the pike. The turns from the side road on to the pike at
these culverts are pretty sharp, and in swinging up one, while
going at about twenty-five miles an hour, we narrowly escaped
going over the low stone wall into the ditch below. On that and
one other occasion the Professor took a firmer hold of the side of
the machine, but, be it said to the credit of learning, at no time
did he utter an exclamation, or show the slightest sign of losing
his head and jumping--as he afterwards remarked, "What's the use?"
To any one by the roadside the danger of a smash-up seems to come
and pass in an instant,--not so to the person driving the machine;
to him the danger is perceptible a very appreciable length of time
before the critical point is reached.
The secret of good driving lies in this early and complete
appreciation of difficulties and dangers encountered. "Blind
recklessness" is a most expressive phrase; it means all the words
indicate, and is contra-distinguished from open-eyed or wise
recklessness.
The timid man is never reckless, the wise man frequently is, the
fool always; the recklessness of the last is blind; if he gets
through all right he is lucky.
It is reckless to race sixty miles an hour over a highway; but the
man who does it with his eyes wide open, with a perfect
appreciation of all the dangers, is, in reality, less reckless
than the man who blindly runs his machine, hit or miss, along the
road at thirty miles an hour,--the latter leaves havoc in his
train.
One must have a cool, quick, and accurate appreciation of the
margin of safety under all circumstances; it is the utilization of
this entire margin--to the very verge--that yields the largest
results in the way of rapid progress.
Every situation presents its own problem,--a problem largely
mechanical,--a matter of power, speed, and obstructions; the
Here's a piece of wisdom on driving or cute car quote to study:
Consider the man on horseback, and I have been a man on horseback for most of my life. Well, mostly he is a good man, but there is a change in him as soon as he mounts. Every man on horseback is an arrogant man, however gentle he may be on foot. The man in the automobile is one thousand times as dangerous. I tell you, it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if the driving of automobiles becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale never seen before. It will mark the end of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living happily in one home. It will destroy the sense of neighborhood and the true sense of Nation. It will create giantized cankers of cities, false opulence of suburbs, ruinized countryside, and unhealthy conglomerations of specialized farming and manufacturing. It will make every man a tyrant. ~R.A. Lafferty, written in the late 1800s, as quoted in Adbusters, Spring 1996
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