34 A lonely cloud hung in the brisk autumn air. An idling engine hummed perched on top of a hill, ready to pounce, its muscles tense. School had let out long ago, but the roads had just opened up. A grey soulless sedan rolled along right at the speed limit, as so proclaimed by an electric sign. It read “35” in big, loud yellow letters. A thick and heavy bass line filled the cabin. As my thumb rolled down a dial on
the steering wheel, the sound of wind and birds triumphed over the dubstep that was so popular in that time. The smell of rotting leaves filled my nose with one of my favorite smells. I sat here waiting for an opportunity, an open stretch of road. It had been a minute or two since the sad little appliance, which some call a car, had left my view. Time to go. My foot planted the gas pedal in to the floor. The engine screamed, and the spooling turbo whistled as it built boost. Second gear came, and fire escaped from the exhaust.
MPH
By Alex Lee Photos by Hinton Bolinger I was not focused on what was in the cabin, but on the little electric sign in front of me. As I drew near, it popped into life, blinking out its electric words. It screamed “65!” In third gear, there was no fire this
time as the turbo spooled harder. At 75, the sign now complained. Many saw it as a warning. I saw it as score board. In 4th gear, the sign now simply blinked out in error. I screamed a rebel yell as I began to
drop down the hill, foot still hard down. The bridge at the bottom came into view. I screamed over it in the low triple digits. This was not my first encounter with speed, a petroleum-based drug, driven by the internal combustion engine. It was and still is an addiction of mine. It began only a few short months after getting my license and has only grown since. My one thing left from the divorce was the car my father had originally got my mom, a sky blue 2006 Audi A4. He was a successful doctor, and such expenses were of no concern to him. It should have been such; this car was far too much for a teenager. In my testosterone-filled adolescence, it was the music of a songbird at idle and the call of the sirens at wide open throttle. On another, colder day, my hands wrapped around the same familiar key fob. One twist of my hand and the engine sparked to life. On cold days, the air is thicker, so the heart and lungs of my car didn’t have to work as hard to harvest the oxygen from the atmosphere. To me, this meant one thing. Faster.
