Story and Photographs: Will Sabel Courtney

To read our review of the Cadillac CTS-V wagon, click here.

Mile 1: After dropping off Crenshaw at Xtreme Machines, a motorcycle dealership in New Jersey where he’s picking up a Ural Sidecar for the weekend (immediate verdict: it’s the shit), I make my way back to the New Jersey Turnpike for the drive north to my ancestral home in Vermont for the Fourth of July weekend. I unintentionally do a burnout at a stoplight on N.J. Route 33, causing me to giggle like Homer Simpson.

Mile 5: Outside temperature: 87 degrees. Windows still down. Fuck air conditioning, more throttle.

Mile 38: Realize I’ve missed my intended turn onto the Garden State Parkway. Curse loudly.

Mile 40: As I pass Newark Airport, I’m struck with the irrational desire to race a Boeing, even though the air traffic control radar is currently causing my Valentine One to undergo an apoplectic fit. However, the wind is at my tail, so the planes are taking off and landing the wrong way for a race. Probably for the best.

Mile 51: Pass a sign informing me that the Vince Lombardi Service Area will be coming up shortly, offering such fine dining establishments as Cinnabon, Burger King, and Popeye’s. Yet I can’t even think about food, given the swampy eau du Jersey wafting up from the toxic marshlands on either side of the road. Any nutrition ingested here would probably be back on the pavement five minutes later.

Mile 60: Briefly confused by a lack of road signs, I nearly merge onto surface streets instead of the Garden State. Luckily, I’m able to dart onto the Interstate 80 on-ramp, giving me a chance to give the CTS-V full power through second and third gears.

Mile 74: Pass from New Jersey into New York. Suddenly filled with a sensation of superiority.

Mile 88: Gotta admit, there’s something really cool about the giant, full-color Interstate signs painted onto the roadway that are designed to let you know which lanes lead to which highways at the upcoming fork in I-87. Consider taking picture, but decide against, based on my near-death experience trying to snap a photo while taking a turn on the Tappan Zee Bridge a few miles back.

Mile 107: In Connecticut now, on the Merritt Parkway. The speed limit is 55. Still, no fewer than three Toyota Camrys blast by me at 90+. I’m being passed almost exclusively by Camrys. It’s embarrassing. I sink a little further down in the seat.

Mile 109: Now I can’t stop thinking about the ass-hauling Camry brigade. What’s their motivation to drive so fast? Follow my logic here. Most people who like to drive fast for the thrill of speed would be interested in the vehicles they’re using to do it, right? Which in this case would make them car guys. But we know it’s unlikely they’re car guys, because most car guys would sooner mortgage a kidney than buy a Toyota Camry.

So if they’re not car guys, who are they?

Mile 110: Have established three possible identifications for the high-speed Toyota drivers.

1. They’re reckless drivers simply trying to get from Point A to B, with no concern as to the kind of hardware they have or the methods they use.

2. They’re car guys whose significant others forced them into buying a Toyota Camry, presumably due to its reputation for safety. Now that they’re stuck with a Camry, they drive as fast as possible to try and feel alive again, as well as avoid being seen behind the wheel of a Toyota Camry.

3. They’re car guys who bought Camrys in hopes of avoiding police attention, and are willing to sacrifice a whole lot of dynamic responsiveness so they can fly under the radar.

Mile 131: Dinner. Find myself walking backwards away from the CTS-V in the mall parking lot so I can keep looking at it. Accidentally walk into a small child in the process.

Mile 147: Hit the Heroes’ Tunnel on the outskirts of New Haven. As an automotive journalist, I feel it is my right—nay, my duty— to rev the 6.2 liter V8 to high heaven so all my fellow motorists in the tunnel can luxuriate in that sweet Cadillac exhaust music.

Mile 182: Pass an Audi A7 with Michigan plates. Since Audi’s doing a full-court media press for the A7 and the car has manufacturer plates, my deductive reasoning skills lead me to believe I’m passing another journo going somewhere for the holiday weekend. Also, the A7′s radar cruise control could explain why my Valentine One has been chirping like a game of Angry Birds for the last mile.

Mile 200: Hit the halfway point just outside the town of Hazardville, Connecticut. Briefly debate finding a dry riverbed to jump the Cadillac over, but decide against it.

Mile 206: Bruce Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch” comes on the satellite radio, causing me to drop the car down to fourth gear and give it a brief, glorious blast back up to speed while whooping at the top of my lungs. Synchronicity is a wonderful thing.

Mile 228: Pass the towns of Easthampton and Northampton, Massachusetts. How many friggin’ states have Hamptons in them? Seriously, were there only, like, five different guys settling America back in the colonial days? Or did these guys up in Massachusetts just want to add some class to the area, so they took a couple towns with names like Timbuctaint and Goitersburg and gave them names that might make people think the rich and famous frequent central Mass on their weekends?

Mile 229: I realize my mind goes weird places after a few hours on the road.

Mile 258: Finally cross into the Vermont border. The air sweetens approximately 50 percent almost immediately.

Mile 280: Dropping temperatures and rising speeds force me to finally raise the windows. On the bright side, though, I can now hear the radio well enough to realize “Purple Haze” doesn’t include a line about kissing a guy.

Mile 304: I’ve been holding this Roman candle of a station wagon in as long as I can, but I don’t think I can fight it anymore. This Cadillac wants to maul the road into submission. It wants to try and break the sound barrier. It wants to run. And right now, there’s an empty Vermont interstate in front of me, half a tank of gas waiting to burn, and it’s cool enough that I don’t even need the windows open or the air conditioner on. Maximum power, minimum drag. It’s almost perfect. Almost…

Mile 304.1: I cue up Metallica’s cover of “Turn The Page” on the Bose 5.1 surround sound stereo.

And I let ‘er rip.

Mile 305: I can’t remember the last time I felt this free.

Mile 335: Only a few minutes away from July 2nd, and it’s got me thinking. 235 years ago, the Second Continental Congress came together and held a vote to declare their independence from Great Britain. The language was approved on the Fourth—hence the fireworks and hot dogs and other assorted Rockwellian goodness—and it was signed over the course of the next month, but it was exactly 235 years ago today that Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and around fifty other political leaders gathered together and decided the fate of a nation. On July 2nd, they woke up British citizens. They went to sleep Americans. Everything this country has accomplished owes itself to that one vote in the Pennsylvania State House.

In the days that followed, Jefferson sketched out the language that would go on to define not just the ideals of the United States of America, but the hopes and aspirations of the human race itself. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

More than two centuries later, Cadillac would go on to use “Life, liberty and the pursuit” as an advertising tag line.

I don’t know what Jefferson would have made of the Cadillac CTS-V. The Christian in him probably would have taken one look at this creased crimson monster that runs four times faster than the fastest race horse and run the other way, screaming it was the chariot of Satan. But he was a scientist, too. I like to think he’d be intrigued by it.

He’d almost certainly be fascinated by its supercharged V8, a mechanical marvel he could wrap his arms around that generates more power than every animal on Monticello combined. He’d probably be intrigued by its sat-nav system that talks continuously with metal moons orbiting the Earth.

But even beyond all that, I like to imagine the thing that would impress him the most is that this marvel of engineering exists because, in part, of those words he wrote; of those actions he took; of those beliefs he held. I think he’d be proud to hear that the country he helped create would go on to build a vehicle like this—a vehicle that came out of nowhere to startle the world with its strength.

Mile 358: Figure out just what I’m going to write about for this article.

Mile 400: After nearly seven hours on the road, I’ve finally arrived at my old house. I kill the engine and step out into the Vermont night. A silence as big as everything greets me. It says, Welcome home.

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