Dawns

Loud good fortune rained on me in the year 2000 when I was able to interview Sam Posey relating to some biographical notes I was preparing about Sam and Miles Collier. Sam (BFA RISD, Tour de France commentator, and a soul of surpassing nobility) has an easy way of recounting events of the past without actually mentioning that he was there to observe them. Ten times he raced at LeMans, but the sensation he most favored in his memory was the arrival of dawn after the long June night of racing. The treeline came into focus, the streaking lights shaped themselves into competitors' cars, and even the corner workers, otherwise jaded and proud, waved a morning greeting: as if to say, you made it too.
The Colliers, entrepreneurs and Florida landowners, were recreational automobile racers. In the 1930s they would drive from their winter home in Boca Grande straight through the night to their estate in New York. If many of us have made long drives across the country and have seen dawn brighten over I80 or I90 or I95, it is possible to imagine that daybreak over rural roads in Virginia in those years would feel redolent with wonder and adventure, as the true nature of the rough continent's topography was discovered and vanquished.