When the windshield was closed it became so filmed with rain that Claire
fancied she was piloting a drowned car in dim spaces under the sea. When
it was open, drops jabbed into her eyes and chilled her cheeks. She was
excited and thoroughly miserable. She realized that these Minnesota
country roads had no respect for her polite experience on Long Island
parkways. She felt like a woman, not like a driver.
But the Gomez-Dep roadster had seventy horsepower, and sang songs. Since
she had left Minneapolis nothing had passed her. Back yonder a truck had
tried to crowd her, and she had dropped into a ditch, climbed a bank,
returned to the road, and after that the truck was not. Now she was
regarding a view more splendid than mountains above a garden by the
sea--a stretch of good road. To her passenger, her father, Claire
chanted: "Heavenly! There's some gravel. We can make time. We'll hustle on to the
next town and get dry."
"Yes. But don't mind me. You're doing very well," her father sighed.
Instantly, the dismay of it rushing at her, she saw the end of the patch
of gravel. The road ahead was a wet black smear, criss-crossed with
ruts. The car shot into a morass of prairie gumbo--which is mud mixed
with tar, fly-paper, fish glue, and well-chewed, chocolate-covered
caramels. When cattle get into gumbo, the farmers send for the
stump-dynamite and try blasting.
It was her first really bad stretch of road. She was frightened. Then
she was too appallingly busy to be frightened, or to be Miss Claire
Boltwood, or to comfort her uneasy father. She had to drive. Her frail
graceful arms put into it a vicious vigor that was genius.
When the wheels struck the slime, they slid, they wallowed. The car
skidded. It was terrifyingly out of control. It began majestically to
turn toward the ditch. She fought the steering wheel as though she were
shadow-boxing, but the car kept contemptuously staggering till it was
sideways, straight across the road. Somehow, it was back again, eating
into a rut, going ahead. She didn't know how she had done it, but she
had got it back. She longed to take time to retrace her own cleverness
in steering. She didn't. She kept going.
The car backfired, slowed. She yanked the gear from third into first.
She sped up. The motor ran like a terrified pounding heart, while the
car crept on by inches through filthy mud that stretched ahead of her
without relief.
She was battling to hold the car in the principal rut. She snatched the
windshield open, and concentrated on that left rut. She felt that she
was keeping the wheel from climbing those high sides of the rut, those
six-inch walls of mud, sparkling with tiny grits. Her mind snarled at
her arms, "Let the ruts do the steering. You're just fighting against
them." It worked. Once she let the wheels alone they comfortably
followed the furrows, and for three seconds she had that delightful
belief of every motorist after every mishap, "Now that this particular
disagreeableness is over, I'll never, never have any trouble again!"