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From Off the Road Database
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<p>And so the machine is conquering the old frontier, carrying the thudding of modern mechanics into the land of romance. There are many pleasures in such a journey; you bring a new thing to an old people and they re-teach you old things that should never be forgotten. You see, perhaps, the wildest and most natural places on the continent; and there's a touch of adventure, for such a trip cannot be taken without some danger. We crowded what used to take months to do in nine days-nine hundred miles up mountain and down valley. The trails of Kit Carson and Boone and Crockett, and the rest of the early frontiersmen, stretch out before the adventurous automobilist. And when he is tired of the old, there are new paths to be made. He has no beaten track to follow, no schedule to meet, no other train to consider; but he can go with the speed of an express straight into the heart of an unknown land. And he isn't in much greater danger than the man who pilots his machine between the trucks and carriages of a crowded city street. It is only the beginning of automobile exploring and frontiering in the old West.
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<p>When we went through San José I began to understand over again and in a new way Mark Twain's "Adventures of a Connecticut Yankee." The whole of King Arthur's court on bicycles could not have started the stir we created in that single automobile. We went through the place like the wind, the machine snorting, whistle tooting, while the poor inhabitants huddled into frightened groups out of reach. We were a kind of first thunderstorm to them.
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<p>South from Walsenburg, the next day we swung past the Spanish Peaks, snow-white above the evergreens. Mountains were everywhere. They leaned in to- ward us threateningly through the clear air from all sides. Then down through Trinidad, toward Raton, New Mexico, the way wound around foothills, black with outcroppings of coal. From Raton we left the railroad lines, which had paralleled us, and pushed across the level plains, where cattle turned and ran in herds at the sight of a motor on the old Mexican land grant and the machine slowed down, necessarily, and followed the burro pace-maker. After a night in an old adobe house in Cimarron we went down through the cañon, its rocky walls echoing in hollow calls the throbbing of the machine. As we hurried along, a fuzzy-coated burro walked out placidly before the car and nonchalantly jogged along, and the machine slowed down, necessarily, and followed the burro pace-maker. And so we were led into Elizabethtown, whose placer diggings were the scene of a wild scramble in '68.
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<p>Santa Fé is rich with history, and the road on to Las Vegas is rich with color and beautiful landscape. The wild green on every side is cut with clean white streams full of trout for the angler. The little Mexican adobe village of San José, which has scarcely changed in a century, nestles in the heart of this country.
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<p>Drop those priggish ways for ever, stop behaving like a stone: <br />
Throw the bath-chairs right away, and learn to leave ourselves alone.
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<p>Intimate as war-time prisoners in an isolation camp, <br />
Living month by month together, nervy, famished, lousy, damp.
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<p>Engine-drivers with their oil-cans, factory girls in overalls <br />
Blowing sky-high monster stores, destroying intellectuals?
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<p>Yours you say were parents to avoid, avoid then if you please <br />
Do the reverse on all occasion till you catch the same disease.
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<p>Taught us at the annual camps arranged by the big business men <br />
‘Sunbathe, pretty till you’re twenty. You shall be our servants then.’
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<p>Newman, Ciddy, Plato, Fronny, Pascal, Bowdler, Baudelaire, <br />
Doctor Frommer, Mrs Allom, Freud, the Baron, and Flaubert.
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<p>These were boon companions who devised the legends for our tombs, <br />
These who have betrayed us nicely while we took them to our rooms.
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<p>When we asked the way to Heaven, these directed us ahead <br />
To the padded room, the clinic and the hangman’s little shed.
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<p>Run the whole night through in gumboots, stumble on and gasp for breath, <br />
Terrors drawing close and closer, winter landscape, fox’s death;
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<p>Hope and fear are neck and neck: which is it near the course’s end <br />
Crashes, having lost his nerve; is overtaken on the bend?
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<p>Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago; <br />
Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below.
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<p>Where the Sunday lads come talking motor bicycle and girl, <br />
Smoking cigarettes in chains until their heads are in a whirl.
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<p>Far from there we spent the money, thinking we could well afford, <br />
While they quietly undersold us with their cheaper trade abroad;
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<p>Lawrence, Blake and Homer Lane, once healers in our English land; <br />
These are dead as iron for ever; these can never hold our hand.
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