Wes Davis, "American Journey"

 

from Christoph Irmscher's WSJ review of Wes Davis' American Journey. “The trouble with driving,” observed nature writer John Burroughs, “is you have to keep your eyes glued to the road all the while.” He had been skeptical of those new machines, their propensity to fill “the land with noise and hurry.” But things changed when in January 1913 he received a free, brand-new Model T from none other than Henry Ford himself. Yanked out of the 19th century right into Ford’s modern mobile utopia, Burroughs was soon zooming around as if he’d been doing nothing else his whole life.

"His eyes, though, were anywhere but on the road. His complimentary car, claims Wes Davis in his jaunty book “American Journey,” gave Burroughs a “magic carpet ride” through nature, fast-tracking him into a paradise of rural delights: “A golden border of dandelions to the roadsides, the apple orchards a mass of pink and white bloom, the fragrance of lilacs streaking the air.” But Burroughs’s dalliance with the Model T wasn’t uncomplicated. On one humiliating occasion, hoping to park his car in the barn, the naturalist lost control and shot out the building’s back, saved from a tumble down the hill only by the flywheel that had ground itself into the floor. But such calamities didn’t keep Burroughs from joining the vehicle’s maker on a series of well-publicized road trips that, to his delight, also included the famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison..."

Autoliterate: We posted Senator Eugene McCarthy's Model T poem a while back. And a one-family Model T in Saskatchewan. We met several Model T's in Canyon, Texas.