Auto columnist is taking next exit

Royal Ford got this 2001 Porsche 911 Twin Turbo up to more than 175 miles per hour in the Black Rock Desert east of Reno in June 2000. He's leaving The Boston Globe after a 29-year career, most recently as the newspaper's auto columnist. "And I'm still behind the wheel," he says. (Cathleen Allison for The Boston Globe/File 2000)

I'll never get out of this world alive," a young Hank Williams sang in 1952.

And on the first day of 1953 he proved it, in the back seat of a Cadillac.

Unlike Hank, I'm leaving the Globe from the front seat.

I had dreamed of writing for this newspaper ever since I was a 10-year-old in New Hampshire, born of a stock car racing family whose patriarch worked the railroad, tossed hides in a tannery, cut curbing in a granite quarry, became a master carpenter, and instilled in me the importance of books.

I am most thankful for the stories I have been able to share in my 29 years here. My aim was to give readers a feel for what it is like to drive across shifting sands in Nevada's Black Rock Desert at more than 175 miles per hour, or to barrel and bounce down the Baja off-road route in Mexico in a family-style Volvo, or to traverse California's legendary Rubicon Trail in a Jeep.

But before I hit the roads for the Globe, there were other great adventures not related to driving. For example, I remember:

Being atop New Hampshire's Mount Washington with the temperature at 41 degrees below zero and sustained winds of more than 100 miles per hour. During the four days we were trapped in a summit building, a hiker - his hands frozen china-white - stumbled to safety with us. But his friend, lost two miles away, died.

Being somewhere over the Atlantic in a P3 Orion Navy plane, looking for ships carrying drugs. I was told which parachute would be mine if things went bad. Later, I found out that a parachute would have been useless - we were flying about 100 feet above the ocean's surface.

Visiting too many places in the United States where children lived below the poverty line. Some had made their homes on Native American reservations, in unincorporated towns on the Texas-Mexico border, and in "squats" in Seattle that were favored by runaways. That is where photographer Stan Grossfeld and I talked with a prostitute and her female pimp. Both of them were teenagers.

Spending a week on the frozen Allagash River in Maine with photographer Mark Wilson, while the high temperature was 17 degrees below zero.

Riding in a helicopter in winds just a mile per hour below the safety limit, over the woods near West Lebanon, N.H., where a Lear jet had disappeared. The brother of the Lear's pilot sat beside me. He would return to the area months later - to claim his brother's remains.

Visiting a seasonal town that grows each winter on Lake Champlain. It is made of ice-fishing shanties and miles of plowed ice roads. It was a sunny day in spring, and I wrote: "That sun will kill this town."

I thank the Globe for letting me roam the planet on what the late, great Peter Anderson used to call "my publisher's expensive account."

I got to circle Daytona Speedway in a Porsche with pedal to the floor, drive the deadly Nurburgring in Germany, and pilot cars - small and cheap to big and flashy - that mean so much to us, especially in the unpredictable driving conditions of New England.

And as this column ends, there is space for a final reflection on today's cars: Nobody is building a really bad one, thanks to the motivation created by increasingly global competition.

A favorite part of my drives was cranking up a Bruce Springsteen CD. He was the guy who promised to "Drive All Night" for his love. Since I sometimes operated wickedly fast cars, I always heeded the Boss's warning that things that could easily go wrong.

"There's machines and there's fire waiting on the edge of town," he sang.

So I have just tapped the brakes to get the weight up front, blipped the gas, and downshifted to hit the apex in this corner of life. I'm fully on the throttle and heading for a new career.

And I'm still behind the wheel.