It’s 10:30 on a Friday night. The football game is over, the crowds disperse. Some boast, some lament. Another contest is beginning, this time on a dark and deserted road that pierces through miles of cotton fields. The fields reflect a soft glow in the moonlit night.
Soon headlights appear. Four cars arrive, 12 boys get out, mill around. They are there to witness Robert’s attempt to beat the local record of 0 to 60 in 6 held by a boy from Blakely, who with two friends stands apart. They jeer, hurl taunts. Fists tighten, but nobody moves. Boasting rights are essential in South Georgia.
Robert fires up the engine, moves onto the road and straddles the yellow ribbon that bifurcates the black asphalt. The truck idles, shakes itself with an occasional vroom, vroom from the twin exhaust pipes. Tension fills the air. The stakes are high. Two specks of light appear in the distance. They puncture the humid air and provide perspective. A slight fog is forming.
Robert finishes his beer, flicks the cigarette out the window. “Ready?” he asks. “Let’s do it,” his friend with the stopwatch says. He shifts the manual transmission into first gear, revs the engine to 2,000 rpm’s and pops the clutch. The clock starts. The truck lurches forward, its rear tires spin, grasp the damp asphalt. The smell of burning rubber permeates the air. Cheers erupt. The race is on!
The truck roars through the night. Robert speed-shifts into second at 30. The tires lay six feet of new rubber. Faster, faster they go, 40, 50. He downshifts into third as the speedometer passes 60. The watch stops. So does the truck. They return, get out grinning.
We’re a culture of junkies, intoxicated with speed. It burns our brains. Ethane fuel surges through every fiber of our body, screaming “faster, faster.” We’re helpless against its heady rush of highs. We live for it. We’re addicted to it.
Speed is not a new phenomenon. Ever since Fred Flintstone invented wheels for his golf cart, we’ve tried to beat the speed of light with piston-driven vehicles. We’ve come close. In 2008, Tom Burkland broke the record, achieving 415.896 mph, far exceeding Jeantaud Duc’s record of 39.24 mph in 1898. Everything begins somewhere!
But we move on in our endless pursuit of speed. We try jet propulsion technology and strap wheels of spinning turbines to the sides of cars. In 1997, Andy Green recorded the first supersonic speed record of 760.343 mph with a Thrust SSC Turbofan vehicle. We’re still not satisfied. Projects now aim for 1,050 mph. Imagine. Our lust for speed lacks limits.
Speed creeps up on us in small increments. Babies have strollers with wheels, move onto tricycles, then bicycles, roller skates and the progression is endless. The speed record for bicycles is 138, downhill on snow. Eric Barone’s nerves and quads achieved 83 mph on a flat surface. Who needs treadmills?
Airplanes had their beginning with Wilbur Wright, flying 6.82 mph. Today, a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird holds the record for a manned aircraft at 2,193.2 mph.
Our obsession with speed consumes us. We have taken the competition off of roads and put it on silicon chips. They defy gravity. Our fingers fiddle with speed every day. We curse the sluggish chips. The military supercomputer that monitors everything and everybody is made from video games. It calculates at a mind-boggling 1.026 quadrillion bytes per second. That’s 1000 to the power of 5 (1015) How many vacuum tubes is that?
What’s the limit of our search for speed and living in the fast lane? Who knows? But we know the results of Robert’s run in the GMC that moonlit night. The stopwatch registered 5 seconds exactly. It was contested. It always is!
0 to 60 in 5…a milestone? For one boy in South Georgia it was. I know. I held the stop watch and bought the beer.
Bud Hearn
February 2, 2012
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