Chapter 5 high-speed Lenovo

That afternoon, when I was driving back to Ma Liu Shui from Kowloon, it was just after get off work. On Tai Po Road, there were all kinds of vehicles, high and low, long and short.A hawk looking at it would think it was two teams of one-horned snails crawling opposite each other, one horn, since each car has only one radio antenna.Unexpectedly, when we were approaching Sha Tin, the car jammed up for no reason, and all of a sudden the one-horned snails turned into sick cats with one beard. The exhaust gas was warm, and the motor murmured, like a group complaining about the narrow road.It is impossible to turn off the engine, because every once in a while, the whole convoy has to squirm again.What the hell is going on ahead, no one at the helmsman at the steering wheel knows.Among Zaidao's complaints and curses, I was the only one who was complacent and laughed happily.Looking down at the dashboard, the seventh blue button from the left, lightly pressed, my emerald green car suddenly rises from the ground, rises, like a carefree green cloud, attracting a lot of stunned and envious eyes , Flying melodiously to the northeast.

Of course it is true: on the crowded Tai Po Road, I often have such fantasies.I love driving.I love to control a machine with strong horsepower, quick response, brutality and gentleness. I love the feeling of the steering wheel vibrating slightly in the palm of my hand and the four wheels spinning smoothly under the body. I love to use the pressure on the back muscles to experience the twists and turns Mountains, in a word, I adore speed.Lawrence of Arabia once said: "Speed ​​is the second ancient animal desire in human nature." In terms of the speed of movement, human beings who claim to be the spirit of all things are very pitiful.The top speed of the swift is 290.5 miles per hour.A hunting eagle can reach speeds of one hundred and eighty miles an hour in its swoop.The racing pigeon has a speed of 96.29 miles per hour.The fastest players among the beasts are leopards and antelopes: the long-legged black-spotted Asiatic leopard, nicknamed "Cheetah", can reach speeds of seventy miles per hour in short-distance sprints, but after five hundred yards, it drops to more than forty miles Yes; the pronghorn gallops and can sustain sixty miles an hour.Compared with these, the "moving rabbit" can only be regarded as "the talent of the middle four": the speed of the English hare is not more than forty-five miles an hour. "White Horse Gap" was even slower, with the racehorse on the jockey's lap traveling at only 43.26 miles per hour.Human speed is the most pitiful, only twenty-six point twenty-two miles per hour at a distance of one hundred yards.

Poor mortals, galloping is not as good as tigers and leopards, jumping is not as good as fleas, swimming is not as good as swordfish, and carrying weight is not as good as ants, but people can create and control high-speed machines, waiting for work with ease, not only breaking through the limits of their physical fitness, even surpassing birds and beasts. In addition to Xing Trent flying, I can chase miracles and follow the fairy trail with a few doubts.High speed, why is it exciting?Physiologists must have his explanation, such as accelerated circulation, sudden change in heartbeat, and so on.But psychologically, at least subconsciously, the pursuit of high speed is actually a great desire for man to compete with God: gravity is the law of nature, which is also the destiny of man, and high-speed movement is to resist this law. It overthrows, at least to minimize its limitations.The moment when a runner breaks the world record in a race or a racing car, it is a flash of religious inspiration, because the frontier of human physical fitness has taken another step forward, and a human step forward is a god step back. From then on, people are more free.

Players who ski, run, swim, race car, fly, etc. are all heroes.Their freedom and glory were taken from the hands of God, not from others.They became heroes not because they sacrificed others, but because they overcame nature, including themselves. When it comes to intense and exciting dynamics, there seems to be such a principle in high-speed sports, that is: the more machinery is relied on, the less contact with nature, and the less dynamic.Running should be the most direct sport.Horse racing is more indirect, but it is not a machine, but a horse with sweaty muscles, tendons, mane and hooves.The most indirect way is racing. There is an iron box and four tires between man and nature.However, the more indirect the movement, the higher the speed.For human beings who are born with low speed, this is really a difficult thing to have both.Other animals should feel at ease in the face of their natural speed, right?I often think, how would a snail with a speed of 0.03 miles per hour feel in the windshield of a sports car to see the world in motion?

Many people love to drive an open-top sports car because they want to bear and enjoy more nature at high speeds: when the speed exceeds 75 miles, 80 miles, and 90 miles per hour, the whole world rushes towards you, handed over to the wind. , the lungs are handed over to the turbulent airflow. At this time, it should feel a little flying.Lawrence of Arabia has the patience to ride a camel, but he is impatient to drive a car: he thinks that a car is a thing without spirituality, which is only suitable for riding in the wind and rain.After returning to civilization from the desert, he got off the camel's back, stepped on the motorcycle, and went to visit Hardy and Bernard Shaw.On a motorcycle, he traveled at least 2,400 miles a month, and when he was fast, the speed was as high as 100 miles per hour. He died in a car accident.

I have ridden a bicycle for five years and driven a car for four years, but I have never driven a motorcycle, but I can imagine Lawrence's sudden pride.The aggressiveness of a motorcycle is far above that of a bicycle, and the sense of devotion to rushing into the wind and turning with the car is far better than that of a steering wheel helmsman leaning on the back of a bucket seat and stepping on a thick carpet.In the movie "Easy Rider", the scene of the three knights galloping in a straight line in the desert of the southwestern United States, under the rhythm of rock music, is a major climax of modern movies.I think, subconsciously, modern teenagers ride unruly motorcycles as horses: modern knights still wear helmets and boots, but the riding posture with two feet on stirrups and elbows spreading out the two horns of the dragon's head is rich. In terms of romantic exaggeration, only Da Da's screaming goes against people's nerves, which is not as good as the classical neighing of horses.The engines of modern vehicles use horsepower to indicate power, which is vaguely nostalgic.Accurately, a convertible can be compared to an ancient chariot, and a four-door "sedan" is even more retro.In the middle of the 1960s, the "Mustang" driven by the Ford depot was a sports car with a long neck and short tail, and was unusually strong. "Charger" (Charger) to compete.

I learned to drive in the autumn of 1964.At that time, I went from Peoria to Iowa to visit Ye Shan and Huang Yong. On the way, the train was delayed and Greyhound’s long-distance bus changed the fare. Then I realized that I had to go through Li County to have an overview of Whitman and Huang Yong. The imposing America of Sandberg's poem must have a steering wheel in its hand.My father was shocked when he heard the news in China, and an air letter came from Songshan, trying to prevent me from learning to drive.But the endless highway with no red lights opened its arms to welcome me in the vast and free wilderness. My logic is: rather than entrusting your life to others, it is better to hold it in your own hands.After studying for seven hours, I got my driver's license.The American policeman who sent me that hard card said: "The road is yours now, don't forget, your life is also yours."

The wonderful steering wheel, the world revolves around you when you turn it, and the road is as straight as a distribution line when it is still.The scenery in front is cut open for you, and the background behind is shrunk into tiny, even tinier phantoms in the mirror.At a speed of seventy miles per hour, the white dotted lines in the reflector shot away like bullets flashing from a gun in an air battle. Thousands of rivers and mountains, in my memory, the long and long-distance expeditions were all captured by the magic reflector. I won't let it out. "Welcome to Nebraska," "Welcome to California," "Welcome to Nevada," crossed state and county, lost count of borders and customs.High speed is exciting, because it is a purely moving world, the windshield is an endless window, with endless scenery and infinite field of vision, when the accelerator is wide open, the straight super avenue becomes a huge long zipper, zip The long-range mirage in front of the car, the skyscrapers, the cliffs, and the ground suddenly cut away and became the background of the rear of the car, which was zipped and pulled together.At high speed, the white peaks of the entire snow-capped mountains will turn your head back, and thousands of hectares of flat domains will turn into rolling convergence of wheels.From spring to autumn, the changeable weather shows the face of God on the windshield: wind, sand, rain, dew, ice and snow, scorching sun and cold moon, flying canopies in the desert, dense insect corpses in the grassland in summer night, kicking in the gaps between the wheels of big trucks The kicked pebbles and all of these are jointly borne by the large curved glass.

From coast to coast, from the woods hole in the extreme east soaked in the cold green of the Atlantic to the long embankment bathed in the warm tide of the Pacific Ocean, my wheel marks are constantly crossing the New World.The broad avenue with four alleys running side by side extends from the horizon but does not go to the horizon.In the United States, the landscape on the horizontal axis is endless, only for the distant view behind the steering wheel.The modern Xu Xiake toured the exotic smoky scenery, and what he dubbed for me was not the classical horseshoe's sails fluttering, but the brisk crooning of the eight-cylinder engine.

Twenty rounds rolled with a bang. The slender and burly aluminum truck was several times as long as a small car. When passing it, the nerves of the whole body tightened like a net, and the stomach convulsed faintly. Galloping is like racing a rhino on a narrow cliff. It's crazy.All of a sudden, the small car rushed to the left, and the heavy-ton container truck galloped and roared to the right. The right ear was too shallow, how could it accommodate such a vortex of noise?At the beginning of 1965, on a bitter cold morning, the gray and misty sky was like a piece of frosted glass. I set off from Chicago in a Dodge car, crushing the residual snow and ice all over the ground, and drove 700 miles a day to get back to Getty. Fort.On the interstate highway out of the city, I encountered a convoy of heavy-duty trucks, end to end, half a mile long, like a grand canyon with cliffs blocking out the sky and the sound of water.Without any explanation, he caught me in the crack and took me away.In this way, the confrontation continued until the Indiana border, and the car traffic gradually thinned out before I was released from the canyon.

After driving for a long time, I don’t know how many times I have experienced this kind of overtaking. I didn’t realize how powerful the 20-wheel truck is. Until a few days ago, I saw the thriller directed by Spielberg on TV in Hong Kong. Duel).Eager to get home, a returnee overtakes a monstrous gas truck on a backcountry road, enraging the invisible driver perched high in the driver's seat, and transforming the gas truck into a metallic dino-monster with its sinister violence Sprinting blindly, chasing after him along the way.In the reflector, he saw that the front of the oil truck was already a wild beast, and when he entered the tunnel, the headlights came on, and his horrifying eyes were like a monster bull.After reading Spielberg's later work "Jaws", you know that in it, he treated the big oil truck as a beast, but it is more fierce, mysterious and secretive than the great white shark. Adrenaline. Hong Kong is a claw-like peninsula, surrounded by many small islands. The terrain is divided and the roads are narrow and dangerous. The maximum speed is only fifty miles per hour, and the general speed is less than forty miles per hour. Take it easy.On the low-speed Tai Po Road, walking behind a string of slow cars, I often miss the great plains in the Midwest of the United States and the deserts in the Southwest.Although the United States lowered the speed limit on superhighways to fifty-five miles per hour in the year of energy shortage, I was driving in Southern California at seventy miles per hour last August, and I didn't hear the sirens wailing to give chase. Even more, on a rainy island, how many modern Yugongs are moving mountains and clearing roads under the sun of the subtropical Xiao Yangchun, the track of the road-opening machine is rolling, the giant claws of the shovel are being lifted violently, and the crane is busy. Rolling the potter's wheel, in order to lay a giant felt from Keelung to Kaohsiung, to welcome the arrival of a new era.Zheng Chenggong and Wu Feng have never dreamed of such a magnificent scene, with unobstructed roads and thousands of vehicles running side by side, and never sang the folk songs of the Ami and Tayeru peoples.I want to pick a sunny day in autumn, when the left window is brightly lit with golden morning light, and set off from Taipei, pass through the greenest and most emerald jurisdiction of Mushen, and jump on the most beautiful island in the world; and ride back to Taipei from Kaohsiung that night, I will ride Speed ​​limit or even a little speeding, in the pulse of excitement, write a modern poem about the Faun with a little gasoline smell, like Tao Qian and Wang Wei never dreamed. The greater desire is to gallop in an older and more echoing land.The most romantic ancient post road in China should be in the northwest.The best is the dawn of drizzle, starting from Weicheng, with Yiyi's willow branches tied to the radio antenna.There is still light dust on the windshield, but the city of Wei is getting farther away, and the sound of the waves is getting weaker.Ganzhou tunes, Liangzhou lyrics, the rhythm of the Yangguan trifold, the car heading northwest, the zither sound and poetic rhyme of the Hexi channel, the right is the faint battlements of the ancient Great Wall, and the left is the clusters of snow peaks in Qinghai, shining white in the sky. Driving into the world of Zhang Qian's dream Gao Shicenshen at a high speed, the footprints of the ancient heroes' long march overlapped under the wheel.