On the first day, the drivers had to attack the walls of ancient mountain paths with pickaxes so their machines could pass through. Godard and the journalist accompanying him almost died of exposure after they ran out of fuel in the Gobi Desert.
But as dangerous as the racers’ path was, as devoid of comfort and shelter, I found myself yearning to see that world as they saw it, long before it looked like everywhere else. Every time the competitors reached a Siberian settlement that today is a mass of concrete apartment blocks, or came to a river still wild and uncrossable, or encountered a now-vanished culture on the taiga, I wanted to stand athwart the race, yelling, “Stop!” Or at least, slow down. Even as the racers look for carpenters in the Urals to repair their smashed wooden wheels, the book returns again and again to the promise — or threat — of the massive transformations to come.
St. Clair interlaces chapters on the race with snapshots from the era: Russia and China in the last days of their decadent empires before revolutionaries demanded to join the modern world; Western industrialists trying to make fortunes in the new kingdom of “motordom.” Here, in short, are the choices made then, few of them wise, that we’re stuck with today.
Before the oil industry and armaments makers imposed gasoline as the fuel of choice, many car designers preferred electric motors, especially because then (as now) most people drove less than 100 miles a day. But then (as now) electric cars were seen as less manly, less rugged — and we couldn’t have that. The Detroit Electric car company withered until it finally went out of business in 1939, even though one of their most loyal customers was Clara Ford, wife of Henry.
None of it was inevitable. None of it was, as we are often told, a natural result of the human urge for freedom and open spaces. The triumph of the petroleum-fueled automobile, and the complete transformation it wrought on our physical world, was caused by many things — including the inspiring dash and daring of the transcontinental racers. But in the end, the true catalyst was a succession of powerful men deciding that whatever the rest of us actually wanted, our real destiny was to make them very, very rich.
