All this service is given free of charge with the petrol you purchase. The same service is rendered even when you buy only two gallons of it. Difference in treatment is unknown here. A dilapidated Chevrolet or a shining Deusenberg that costs thousands of dollars, the wonder of the automobile show of 1936, will find here the same impartial, rapid, and unruffled service.
In farewell, the attendant of the petrol station told us that he personally would drive the new machine not at the rate of forty miles an hour but at thirty, and not only the first five hundred miles but the first thousand. That would make the motor work ideally in the future. Mrs. Adams was completely overwhelmed by this, and, smiling wryly, held her speed at 28–29 miles.
We men, however, were occupied with calculations. How pleasant it is to be busy when one really has no business to attend to! Our sedate, mouse-coloured Ford showed that it used one gallon of petrol (three and a half litres) every sixteen miles. In the state of New York petrol costs sixteen cents a gallon. That meant that a full tank of fourteen gallons, costing two dollars and twenty-four cents, presented us with the possibility of driving two hundred and twenty-four miles. After converting the miles into kilometres, we discovered that an automobile journey is much less expensive in the United States than in Europe.
This comforting arithmetic helped us endure the insults of the automobiles that passed us. There is something insulting in being passed. In America the passion to pass each other is strongly developed and leads to a greater number of collisions and all the other kinds of road mishaps which in America bear the name of “accident”. Americans travel fast. Every year they travel faster and faster. Every year the roads become better and better, and the automobile motors more and more powerful. They drive fast, daringly, and, on the whole, not too carefully. At any rate, dogs in America have a better understanding of what an automobile highway is than do the automobilists themselves. Wise American dogs never run out on the highway and never race after an automobile with an optimistic bark. They know what that leads to. They will be crushed – and that’s all there is to it.
We stopped for lunch at a roadway restaurant with the sign “Dine and Dance”. We were the only ones in a large, dim room which had a square in the middle for dancing.
Out of small bowls we ate a brownish soup, accompanied by crackers, small salty rusks which justified their name by their incredible crackling when bitten. When we were attacking the large T-bone steaks – beefsteaks of frozen meat with a T-shaped bone in the middle – the owner of the restaurant and entertainment aggregate “Dine and Dance” drove up in an old Ford. He began to drag out of his machine and into the hall bundles of dried cornstalks to decorate the room with them. That evening the youth of the district was to assemble and dance. It was all very pleasant and peaceful – even patriarchal – yet we had driven only a hundred miles away from New York. Only a hundred miles behind us was the noisiest population in the world, while here was quiet, peace, heart-throbbing bucolic flirtation during dances, cornstalks, even flowers.
At the very doors of the quiet restaurant lay the dun concrete of a first-class highway. Again the wound in Mrs. Adams’s heart opened the moment she took the wheel. Thirty miles an hour – and not another mile!
A foreigner, even one who has no command of English, can drive out on an American road without any apprehension. He will never get lost, no matter how strange the country is to him. Even a child, even a deaf-and-dumb person can freely make his way along these roads. They are carefully numbered, and the numbers are met so frequently that it is impossible to make a mistake of direction.
Occasionally, two roads become one for a time. Then the roadway post contains two numbers – the number of the federal road above that of the state road. At times, five, seven, even ten roads come together. Then the quantity of numbers grows, and with it the post on which they are inscribed, so that the indicator begins to look like an ancient Indian totem pole.
There is a great variety of different signposts on the road, but-remarkable distinction! – not one among them is superfluous, not one might distract the attention of the driver. The signs are placed sufficiently low above-ground so that the driver may see them on his right without taking his eyes off the road. They are never conditional and never require any decoding. In America you will never find a mysterious blue triangle in a red square, a sign over which you may wrack your brain for hours.
Most of the road indicators are on round mirrored glasses which at night reflect the glare of automobile lights. Thus, the sign shines of itself. Black inscriptions against a yellow background (these are the most noticeable colours) warn: “Slow,” “School Zone,” “Stop Danger,” “Narrow Bridge,” “Speed Limit 30 Miles,” “Railroad Crossing,” or “Dip-30 Feet Away”—and precisely thirty feet away there will be a rut. However, such an inscription is met with as rarely as the dip itself. At each road crossing stand poles with thick wooden arrows. On the arrows are the names of cities and the mileage to them.
Noisily, and making a baying sound, heavy silver autotanks with milk fled past us. They carry milk for New York’s seven million population. They frighten you to death – these huge milk machines which suddenly appear, approaching with the rapidity of a squall. The tanks are especially grandiose at night when, surrounded by a chain of green and red lanterns, they fly without a stop toward New York. Seven million people want to drink milk, so it must be delivered on time.
Even more imposing are the trucks with special attachments which transport at once three or four new automobiles. At a distance of approximately a thousand miles, delivery by truck costs less than by railroad – so, again a storm descends upon us, this time gleaming with lacquer and nickel. We close our eyes for a second against its unendurable glare, and drive on.
Roads are one of the most remarkable phenomena of American life – of its life and not only of its technique. The United States has hundreds of thousands of miles of so-called highways, roads of high quality, along which regular automobile communication passes. Autobuses race on schedule at the rate of sixty miles per hour, and transportation on them is twice as cheap as by rail.
At any time of day, at any time of year, in the worst possible weather, passenger autobuses race across America. When at night you see a heavy and threatening machine flying across the waste spaces and the deserts, you involuntarily remember the post diligences of Bret Harte run by desperate drivers.
An autobus travels down a gravel highway. It turns large stones over and sucks the small ones after itself. It cannot be late. Where are we? In the state of New Mexico? Faster, faster! The young chauffeur steps on the throttle, Carlsbad, Lordsburg, Las Cruces! The machine fills with noisy wind, and in it the passengers, slumbering in their easy-chairs, suddenly hear the great melody of the American continent.
America is located on a large automobile highway.
When we shut our eyes and try to resurrect in memory the country in which we spent four months, we see before us not Washington with its gardens, columns, and a full collection of monuments, not New York with its skyscrapers, its poverty and its wealth, not San Francisco, with its steep streets and suspension bridges, not hills, not factories, not canyons, but the crossing of two roads and a petrol station against the background of telegraph wires and advertising bill-boards.
11. The Small Town
WE STOPPED in a small town and dined in a drug-store.
It is necessary to explain here the nature of a small American town, and what sort of drug-store it is in which one may dine. That story might be entitled “Pharmacist Without Mysticism, or The Secret of the American Drug-store”.
When America’s big business men, in search of profit, directed their attention to the drug business, they were first of all curious to find out what pharmacists were really doing behind their partitions.
What were they grinding there with their pestles in those thick china mortars, while frowning importantly? Was it medicines? Well,