Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America

Whenever you go out on deck, in the morning or in the evening, in a storm or a calm, on Monday or on Thursday, you will always find water, of which there is no end. Whenever you look out the window of an automobile there will always be an excellent smooth road, with petrol stations, tourist houses, and billboards on the sides. You saw all this yesterday and the day before, and you know that you will see the very same thing tomorrow and the day after. And the dinner in the state of Ohio will be the same as yesterday’s when you passed through the state of New York – quite as on a steamer, where the change of latitude and longitude introduces no changes in the menu of your dinner, or in the disposition of the passengers’ day.

It is in this consistent sameness that the colossal dimensions and the incalculable wealth of the United States are expressed. Before saying about Eastern America that this is a mountainous or a desert or a forest land, one wants to say the main thing, the most important thing, about it – it is the land of automobiles and electricity.

The journey was scarcely begun when we managed to violate the principal point of our daily itinerary as worked out by Mr. Adams.

“Gentlemen!” he had said before our departure. “Travel on American roads is a serious and dangerous thing.”

“But American roads are the best in the world,” we countered.

“That is precisely why they are the most dangerous. No, no, don’t contradict me! You simply do not want to understand! The better the roads, the greater the speed with which the automobiles travel over them.

No, no, no, gentlemen! This is very, very dangerous! We must agree definitely that with the approach of evening we retire for the night, and that’s tire end of it! Finished!”

That is exactly how we agreed to behave.

But now an evening found us on the road, and we not only did not stop as Mr. Adams demanded, but put on the lights and continued to fly across the long state of New York.

We were approaching the world centre of the electrical industry, the town of Schenectady.

It is frightful to race at night over an American highway. Darkness to the right and to the left. But the face is struck by the lightning flashes of automobile headlights coming at you. They fly past, one after the other, like small hurricanes of light, with a curt and irate feline spit. The speed is the same as in the daytime, but it seems to have doubled.