Where Every Car Takes Me

Blame it on Faulkner, fuel, and my father.

That’s what I tell folks who ask how I came to be an auto writer. When I was a kid growing up on a flat, sandy, pine-tree-covered slab above Concord, New Hampshire, known then as “Burglars’ Island” but now the strip-malled Concord Heights, we had stock cars, Harleys, and the occasional Indian motorcycle in the backyard. And we had books everywhere. It was the same after we moved to a desolate, end-of-the-road, 1770s farmhouse in Contoocook, New Hampshire, where wet grass in the back fields taught me, around 12, how to handle a car that got sideways on me – and appreciate the grace of that dance.

My father, Newt, was a tosser of hides in a tannery, a Boston and Maine railroad worker, a cutter of curbs in a granite quarry, a superb carpenter, and a racing man. He was and remains a voracious reader, a man who scanned even matchbook covers for the information they might contain. He preached reading as the best education. And I listened, learning first from a newspaper while sitting on his lap. Later, my early travels went well beyond the local roads, to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and Henry James’s London.

I love cars because they are every bit as much an art form as film, music, painting, or the literature that helped teach me to write. I also love them for their science – there is nothing sweeter and more tactile than the grab of the wheels in a tight corner. But perhaps more than anything, I love them because they inevitably lead me back to my family and the dirt roads of my youth.

A Ford family Sunday drive meant going deep into the woods to see how far a ’52 Chevy with rear-wheel drive could go before it got stuck. In the winter, a weekend of entertainment was taking that car to a frozen lake and doing a dozen slick pirouettes that topped any fancy figure eight at a skating rink. I remember watching my dad race – and roll his stock car over and over and over on bad days. I can still see myself, knees on the floor pan, head on the back seat, trying to sleep late on a weekend night, with brothers and sisters spread throughout the car, as we towed my father’s No. 179 car from some country track (one of which is now the New Hampshire International Speedway).

But all those experiences are more than memories. They were my classroom. What I learned growing up – and later in training from professional racers – transfers perfectly to the job I do today: test-driving cars. Those frozen Sunday spins on the lake have served me well piloting Porsches on ice in the Yukon. Navigating those dirt roads prepared me for flogging Volvos down the Baja race course in Mexico. Off-road clambering in the Mink Hills near Contoocook prepared me for SUVs in the treacherous backlands of Moab, Utah. Driving in demolition derbies at the state fair let me know what to expect as I approached a crash at Laguna Seca Raceway in California. And illicit late-night runs as a teenager set me up for the treacherous Nurburgring, the famous race track in Germany, or driving more than 175 miles an hour in a Porsche over the sands of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

No matter what I drove, I savored the ride and grew to appreciate all cars, whether a ’52 Chevy or the latest hybrid. And so today, when people say, just as many do about art, “I don’t know much about cars, but I know what I like,” I understand.

So would my dad.

Royal Ford has covered automobiles for the Globe for the past eight years. E-mail him at ford@globe.com.