Modern Magic Carpet

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 26 November 1927, Page 13

Modern Magic Carpet

THE MOTOR CAR OPENS A WORLD BY POS81BILT1ES (By “SPARKS.”) T OFTEN WONDER if surroundings have the same effect on other people that they do on me. 1 don't mean that 1 feel I am unique in any way, what 1 means is, do the same sights, or sounds, or smells give others precisely the same feelings of elation or depression, of warmth or cold, that 1 experience. THE ENCHANTED FOREST. For instance, when 1 go into a forest where the mighty trees tower up and up to a-dome oi leaiy green, 1 get the feeling that 1 am in a sort of holy place, that the forest is a sanctuary .where no harm can come to me. With this feeling of peace, there is, too, a desire lor quiet. 1 don't want to run and jump or make unnecessary noise. Perhaps there is some dim hereditary instinct in the sense of security and desire for quiet in the forest, for may not our forebears, away back in the ages when primitive man often had to fly from his enemies, have found sanctuary and security in the dim forests, Then again, there’s the different sensation I get when I come out of the bush after having been away from the unfettered sunlight for a week or two. On these occasions I want to whoop and sing, or perhaps sprint for a hundred yards or so just to let off the bottled-up steam. I don’t always do these things thought, in case my friends might “put me under medical observation” and give me a ticket to a home for incurables down the line.

EXHILARATION OF SPEED. I think we must all get the same feeling of exhilaration out of speed, though. I can see the same expression that I fancy is in my eyes in their’s when they let a willing horse have his head with a clear stretch tempting to a gallop, or when, at the wheel of a high-powered six-cylinder car, they “stand on the gas” and eat up the open road. I expect this universal love of speed also has some prehistoric origin. Perhaps when our hairy forefathers first tamed and rode the then representative of the horse, they got the same thrill that we, to-day, get out of a sixty mile on hour gait.

WHEN NATURE CALLS'. The modern motor car always seems to me rather like that magic carpet the tale of which thrilled us all in our youth. You have a day when the sun is shining, and there is just enough breeze to ripple the water, and soifiehow your business seems a little, unnapotant thing. You smuggle your rod and a lunch basket out to the car, and away you art wafted to that spot you have dreamed of by the quiet stream, where the water rustles over the stones and the watchful trout waits lor the gaudy fly. Or perhaps on that holiday you long for the virgin bush with its seiomn dim-lit silence, or the open plain where the sunwarmed breeze carries the scents and perfumes one dreams about. Maybe the high mountain top calls irresistably with its wide view of the far horizon. On its summit one feels a superman. Far below are the puny habitations of mere men where your fellow dig and delve for little insignificant rewards that for the moment appear to you so futile and worthless. To be high up, with nothing above but the blue sky, always helps me to get things sorted up and back into their right proportions again, and I come back, down to the very necessary digging and delving, with a mind swept clear of the dogging unessentials, BEAUTIES SURROUND US. Here in Hawke’s Bay, with the summer and its long, bright, clear days with us, all the world of sensations awaits the man who is the happy owner of a motor car. It is the magic carpet, the open sesame, to all the beauties that surround us on every side in this fertile and beautiful province. Man’s mechanical genius has given us the means of rapid and effortless transport of which the ancients could but dream. Let us then make full use of our opportunities, and by going, at our leisure, near and far. •wherever inclination calls, learn to know and love every corner of this part of New Zealand which we are privileged to call “our Hawke’s Bay.”