Will science ever produce a car that won’t have to be pulled out of snowdrifts?
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 3, 1942.
“I hope we don’t hit any drifts,” said Jimmie Frise. “This car needs a carbon job.”1
“Or its clutch is slipping,” I suggested. “It certainly doesn’t seem to have the pep.”
“I guess the lucky people,” said Jim, “were those who bought early 1940 models. They got them before the war prices and taxes went on. And they’ll be good until the war is over, I hope.”
“Well, a lot of people,” I submitted, “are finding out how long a car will last. Before the war, as soon as a car needed a simonize job we turned it in on a new model.”2
“I hope I live long enough,” said Jim, “to see the period after the war. The wonders of the age we’ve lived through will be nothing to the wonders of the coming age. We’ve lived through one of the most glorious periods of history. We’ve actually seen the birth of the telephone, the radio, the airplane, the motor car, the highway and modern industry with all its marvels. We’ve been very fortunate.”
“We don’t realize,” I confessed, “the miracles we have seen.”
“But after the war,” pursued Jimmie, “as the result of the great discoveries of these war years, we are going to see an age that will make the past 50 years seem like the buggy age.”
“Science,” I admitted, “is boundless.”
“Think,” cried Jim, “what they must have found out about engines in the past year. Engines for planes, engines for tanks, engines for speedboats and warcraft. When the war ends, all those discoveries will have to be converted to the uses of peace. A 1945 model car3 is going to be something to see.”
“And to own,” I reminded him dismally.
“Aw, we’ll get back to normal,” assured Jimmie. “The only basis on which society can operate is that enough people should earn enough to buy what everybody se makes. Things look pretty grim and dreary now, but peace comes. And every peace we’ve had in the past 2,000 years, has been a better peace than the one that went before.”
“Hold on,” I protested. “Don’t try to tell me that the past 20 years, between our war and this one, was better than that golden age, the Edwardian age, from 1900 to 1914.”
Era of Emancipation
“Certainly I do,” said Jim. “Since 1918, hundreds of millions of human beings have been set free, for one thing. The Russians, the Chinese, or are you merely thinking of our own little neighborhood.”
“Excuse me, Jim,” I said humbly.
“Look at those cows,” said Jim, pointing to a herd of cattle that had been let out of the barn for a breath of winter sunshine and a drink at the water trough. “Even the cows look upon the past 20 years as the great era of emancipation. For in those years of peace, the science of vitamins was discovered.”
“What the Sam Hill have vitamins to do,” I demanded, “with cows?”
“My dear sir,” exclaimed Jimmie. “Do you mean to say you don’t know that cows get vitamins? Didn’t you know that hogs are dieted? Have you been eating eggs for the past 10 years without knowing that the average hen today has the services of a dietitian?”
“Dietitian?” I said, a little at a loss.
“My dear boy,” said Jim. relaxing at the steering wheel, “the day is gone forever when you just went out and tossed a forkful of hay to a cow. A cow is now fed according to its weight. All its food is measured. It gets no more a toss of hay, but so much hay and so much ensilage, so much oil cake and so much vitamin cake. So much cod-liver oil.”
“Jimmie,” I protested.
“It’s a fact,” cried Jim. “You might just as well go out of business as try to run a farm the old-fashioned way.”
“Maybe these millionaire farmers…” I started.
“No, sir,” declared Jim. “Every farmer has to be scientific or give up business. He can’t sell his beef or his milk in competition with scientifically-bred cattle if he doesn’t make a personal problem of each cow. Each cow today is a personality. In accordance with its weight and condition, it gets so much food and so much vitamin. It eats out of its own private manger. The same with hogs.”
“Do you mean to say the old-fashioned hog trough is gone?” I demanded.
“Gone,” insisted Jimmie. “Each hog has its own pen and its own trough.”
“Why?” I bewailed. “One of the most delightful institutions of country life has vanished if the hog trough is gone. When feeding time drew nigh, the sound of those hogs squealing and yelling and getting ready was a sound as characteristic of the country as a rooster’s crow. And the riot of pigs when the farmer approached with the pails of swill was one of the greatest lessons humanity has ever learned. Not to be like a pig is one of the first lessons a child learns.”
“Ah, well,” interrupted Jim, “science has carried us well past morals.”
“And the fight.” I insisted, “when the swill was dumped into the trough. The way those pigs jostled and heaved at one another and jockeyed and gulped. The way each pig tried at one and the same time, to guzzle all the swill he could and at the same time to prevent his neighbors on either side of him from guzzling. I love to watch pigs eat. I think there is more education in watching pigs than in going to school.”
“Well, those days are done,” declared Jim. “Each pig has his own pen. Each pig has his own trough. He gets exactly his right share. The old principle of letting a hog get all he could resulted in one or two fat hogs and a lot of lean hogs. What we want from a hog is size. We are not interested in his manners or morals. How fat is he? So we’ve worked out a plan whereby all hogs will be fat.”
“It’s terrible,” I enunciated. “It’s stealing their very character and nature from them. I bet in a few years, hogs will sicken and die. We’ll develop a race of high-strung, nervous hogs, lean and stringy, because we have interfered with their basic character.”
“Pooh,” said Jim. “The world has been sentimental about things like that for too long. Now we’re going scientific. You ought to see a modern chicken ranch. Each chicken has his own little stall.”
“Stall?” I cried. “A chicken in a stall?”
“Sure,” said Jim. “When I was a boy, we kept chickens, and before supper we used to go out with a pail of chicken-feed and holler chook-chook-chook, and tromp all directions the hens would come running like mad, the rooster leading. And as they came near, we would take the pail of feed and give it a fling and scatter the grain far and wide in the barnyard. That day is ended, too.”
“I’m dreadfully sorry to hear it,” I said earnestly. “I think that chicken-feeding time I was the most amusing hour of the day on the farm.”
“Sure it was,” said Jim, “but see what happened? The wise chickens used to get to know when feeding time was drawing near and they would start to gather in the barnyard. They learned to know when the lady of the farm appeared, from the back shed, with the pail of chicken-feed and they would start to run to get to a point of vantage. But the foolish chickens, the dreamers, the impractical chickens, were away off in the cabbage field, over the fence from the barnyard, absent-mindedly hunting grasshoppers and worms. Dreamy, hare-brained chickens, drowsily squawking away off in the field. And when that chook chook-chook rang out they had to wake up and run like the devil, down the cabbage rows, under the fence and come flying over the barnyard to get anything at all, if it was left after the wise chickens had had their fill.”
“It’s the way of the world, Jim,” I assured him. “The wise guys stay handy at feeding time. The dreamers are away out in the cabbage patch.”
Wanted: Eggs
“Yes,” conceded Jim. “But is it dreamers we want, amongst chickens? Or wise guys? It is neither. All we want from chickens is eggs. And food makes eggs. And we want all chickens to get the same amount of food, whether they are dreamers who wander off in the cabbage patch, or whether they are wise guys who linger handy when the feed pails are flung. A dreamy hen’s egg sells for just as much as a wise hen’s. And probably tastes no different. It is eggs we want. So we pen up our chickens, ration their feed, so that the dreamy hen gets just as much as the wisest hen.”
“Hard on me, Jim,” I cut in, “but don’t you realize that, this is interfering with the ancient laws of survival? It has taken millions of years to make hens as little wise as they are. What will happen to the poultry kingdom if you start rewarding chicken-headed chickens the same as the wise chickens?”
“It’s eggs we want,” declared Jim.
“Well,” I summed up, bitterly, “I seem to recognize in what you have told me about cows and hogs, and chickens, a certain resemblance to what is happening to human society. What they have tried out so profitably on cows and pigs and hens, they are starting to try out on us humans. We, too, are being rationed. We, too, are being penned. It is getting harder and harder for those of us who linger near the farmyard at feeding time to get more than the dreamy guys who wander afar in the cabbage patch. Like cows, to each according to his need; from each according to his means. We are being rationed according to how much we need and are being milked for all we are worth.”
“It makes better cows and hogs and chickens,” stated Jimmie. “Why shouldn’t the same principle make better men?”
“Jim,” I warned him, “there are certain principles of life laid down by nature. If you monkey with them, there is no telling what disasters may follow.”
“You’re a Tory,” said Jim.
“No, sir,” I replied. “I just happen to know that nature is vengeful.”
“Well,” said Jimmie, slackening the speed of the car, “here’s our first drift.”
And it was a dandy. One of those knife-edged drifts, about three feet deep, lying diagonally across the highway. It was undamaged. No car or sleigh had gone through it.
“Charge it,” I suggested.
“Did we bring a shovel?” inquired Jim.
“This is your car, you ought to know,” I reminded him.
“H’m, no shovel,” said Jim, slowly accelerating and then changing his mind at the last minute, and coming up to the drift so slowly that when we struck it, we stopped dead and the engine stalled.
“Back out,” I said, “and buck it.”
But the car would not back out. All drifts are the same. No matter how many times you come to one, you always make the same mistakes. I got out, shoved feebly, snow getting up my pants legs. Jim got out and waded around in the drift, as if that would do any good. We both got back in and Jim started the engine and backed and went forward, as far as gears were concerned, but the car never budged an inch.
“What a silly thing to do,” said Jim. “Why did you say to charge it?”
“You didn’t charge it,” I recalled to him. “You changed your mind at the last minute.”
“Well, I guess there is nothing for it,” said Jim, “but to go up to that farm house there and borrow the farmer’s shovel.”
“It would take half an hour to dig through this drift,” I protested.
“Would you rather just sit here until spring?” inquired Jim pleasantly.
So we waded across the drift and walked up the road a little way until we came to the farm lane. As we opened the gate, I saw three horses far up at the other end of the lane standing and looking at us. “Horses, Jim,” I informed him. “Horses won’t hurt you,” said Jim, who was born on a farm and therefore I trust him. “Come on.”
We started up the lane towards the farm house, which stood with that curiously solitary air that farm houses adopt in winter. The three horses wheeled sharply and stood staring down the lane at us with pricked ears and manes blowing in the wind.
“I like horses harnessed,” I happened to say.
“Pawff,” said Jim. “Horses never bother you.”
Suddenly the three motionless horses started to walk slowly towards us, their nostrils blowing snorts of steam and their hoofs making heavy sounds on the snow.
“Scare them, Jim,” I suggested.
Then the leading horse started to trot towards us and the others followed. All of a sudden they all started to gallop. And they charged straight down the lane at us.
“Whoa,” yelled Jim, masterfully.
But all three charged full tilt past us, as we leaped to the fence to let them pass. And as they passed, all three kicked up their huge feet and made swishes in the air, throwing clods of hacked snow in all directions.
I was already half over the fence.
“Jim,” I said. “Lookout.”
For the three horses, their ears wobbling forward and back and their eyes blazing, had all halted in a kind of shy jumble and were wheeling. Starting at a walk, then a trot, they suddenly burst into the gallop again and charged up the lane, lashing in the air with their hoofs as they passed us, snorting and stamping.
Jim took the fence much easier than I. With one hand on a post, he heaved his weight into the air and his long legs went soaring into space. But in his haste, Jimmie misjudged the height. Or maybe Jimmie just isn’t as young as he used to be. At any rate, one foot cleared the barrier nicely, but the other caught in the top wire. This dislodged his hold on the fence post, and Jimmie sailed through the air as pretty as you please. Down he went on the other side, sprawling face first in the snow. His nose carved a deep furrow through the new snow.
I managed to make the safe side of the fence as Jimmie finally lifted himself from the ground and began banging the matted snow off his clothes.
“They know you’re nervous,” explained Jim. “If they know anybody is nervous…”
“Would they know how brave you are?” I inquired sweetly.
“I Like Horses”
So we walked up to the farm and the dog heard us and barked the farmer out, and he came and met us. And when we asked to borrow his shovel, he said he would tow us out with the horses, because there was another and a worse drift a couple of hundred yards farther on.
“I’ll just tow you across my fields,” he explained. “I do it for everybody.”
And he went and got bridles and opened the lane gate and called the wild horses, and they came and very skittishly and jerkily submitted to the bridles and were led into the barn to be harnessed.
“You see,” said Jim, “if you know how to handle them, they’re like children.”
“Yes,” I said. “And they’re not fed any vitamins. They’re not kept in pens and doled out food.”
“All we want from horses,” countered Jim, “is work, not milk, not meat, not eggs, just work.”
“So,” I said, “we treat them, not like new-fangled beasts, but like old-fashioned human beings. And they work. And they kick up their heels. And they have fun.”
And like model children, in their harness two of them came out and walked eagerly down the lane and hooked on to our car and yanked it through the drifts, and the farmer charged only 50 cents, and the three of them went whooping back over the fields to the barn.
“I like horses,” I declaimed.
Editor’s Notes:
- Likely engine carbon cleaning. ↩︎
- This is hard to gauge, but I get the impression that more well-to-do people, including some middle-class people got a new car every year or two. Back in the early days of cars, there could be huge improvements in just a few years. Of course there would still be people who held onto a car until it fell apart, but the war forced everyone to keep what they had since civilian car production stopped for the duration. ↩︎
- A good guess by Jimmie. ↩︎
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