A well built, high-powered vehicle pumping high-octane gasoline can blast from zero to sixty miles per hour in less than five seconds. My '94 Hyundai can reach the same speed in twice or thrice the time. But the effort required from the drivers is the same. Or is it? If this were truly the case, than any human contest would be readily predictable by the caliber of machinery that each possessed, whether that machinery were a composition of glass, metal, and plastic, or one of bone, blood, and muscle. The deciding factor is more often beyond the reach of such corporeal, material things, and into the realm of passion, of the drive for victory, of Will.

But none of this reaches the level of conscious thought as the traffic light suspended over the intersection of Route 14 and Pingree suddenly casts a green glow in place of it's red one, and my race begins. The sound of two gas pedals striking against the floor of vehicles fills my ears, one real, one imagined as we can always hear things, see things, that we know are happening with such certainty. Then, both are drowned out by the congealing sound of two engines roaring to life, and eight tires spinning into motion.

Immediately, my friend and opponent has zoomed several car lengths of slick black pavement ahead of me. This is anything but surprising. Of my opponent's vehicle I can say little, except that it seemed an exceptionally average sort of thing. My own car was quite different. If left out in the heat or cold for more than two hours, chances of it starting on the first try were 50/50 at best. The speakers went in and out. The back left tire needed regular pumping lest it go flat. The driver's side window only opened half way, making visits to the drive-through window difficult. The windshield had one long crack that ran nearly the entire distance from one side to the other near the bottom, and a hole covered by duct tape from when a small rock bulleted in, blasting tiny fragments of glass all over me.

A far below average sort of thing. Infer at will regarding my car's ability to race. Why, then, was I soon once again traveling side by side with my friend and opponent? Why was I grinning in that split second of a glance to the right when our eyes locked and these two rocketing machines under our control had at least that tiny shred of a tether between them that was eyesight? Why was I going to win? Will.

It was one of those nights when a warm rain had come and gone. The road was darker than normal, puddles of water struggling to hold together on the near flatness of it. With the bizarre sort of temperatures in play, steam seemed to rise from all five lanes of it at once like a giant skillet. It was the sort of time when it doesn't matter what time it is; it is simply night. Anywhere between 1:00 AM and 5:00 AM is the same time for our purposes. The night is quiet, the road is all but empty, and there's only the two of us and our race. It didn't need a purpose, and perhaps it never had one, save that my friend and I both reached that light at the same time. That was all it took.

And then its back to reality, and reality is all revving engines and the bliss of velocity. That glance into my friend's eyes was all it took to affirm my beliefs, if I had needed affirmation of them, that he did not have the will to win. For him, fear of petty things like tickets and accidents was greater than Will. And so we approached the light that had shone yellow for as long as it had been in our vision, and I pressed the gas down harder, and he dropped out of my vision and into my side mirror, and I laughed. I laughed as the light came closer, laughed as I passed under the redness of it without a care, laughed as I saw him slow and slow and slow until finally, the male ego must have kicked in for my friend. Testosterone levels rising, the ape within raging after I urinated on his tree; my friend sped through the red light and was fast approaching behind me.

It becomes increasingly obvious that this is far less a battle of machinery than it is a battle of Will. And even more so as we swing around a bend and suddenly, my lane is clogged with cars traveling with the nauseating slowness required by the speed limits, a speed which both I and my friend were exceeding by nearly twenty miles per hour. But my friend didn't know Will yet. Hastening again, easily doubling the speed limit with no regard to whether the cars I would soon pass or the car passing to the left were in fact officers of the law, I slid effortlessly into the right lane in front of my friend, our bumpers mere inches apart. And we sped on, both in the rightmost lane now, moving in a slithering line until the other cars were far behind us and my friend slipped into the left lane and matched me again.

The power of Will has always been trusted by the artists and the writers. In the film The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey regales us with the tale of Keyser Soze and his experiences with the Hungarian mobs. "They realized that to be in power, you didn't need guns, or money, or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't."

There was no finish line. The race would only end when someone could race no more.

In the novel, Stairway To Heaven, as Jeremy Craft goes through the final step of his transformation into a young dark god (a Forsaken), it is written, "It was useless. They were no longer fighting a man, nor were they fighting a Forsaken. They were fighting an impossible battle against a pure unstoppable will to exist, to live, to Become."

And my friend was racing against a pure will to win.

In The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, Gail Winand fights a band of tough young men in his childhood to keep control of his gang. Neither their superior numbers nor their weapons would give them victory. Winand was triumphant, for his Will was greater.

The intersection of Route 14 and Route 176 lay before us, as we stayed our parallel course. He on the left, I on the right. Right then, I saw my best chance. Flooring the gas pedal once again, I wrestled all the speed that my little metal contraption would surrender to me, and my friend vanished from my sight. Jerking the wheel as harshly as I dared, wincing from the sound of my tires squealing, I turned left from the right lane, zipping in front of my friend who I knew was well far enough behind me not to crash. In the blink of an eye, Route 14 was a memory, and I was ripping apart the cold darkness of Route 176.

My friend followed. His Will was not to be discounted. As I challenged and exceeded the greater speed limits here, he followed. Walls of night time umbra stood tall on either side of us. But a single car passed us, and then, there weren't even any headlights in the distance to cut through the dark.

My friend accelerated behind me and pulled into the left lane of this two-lane highway. He was showing his Will to me now. But ironically, I felt safer and more at home in that moment, because it was the purest sort of conflict. I know little of machines, and my driving skills are sub-par. But this was simple now. The mechanics of this conflict were meaningless, and Will was everything. This wasn't driving. This was fighting, and fighting is something that everyone knows how to do.

Two Wills matched in combat. This is Bliss. In our souls, lightning cracks loose and billowing black clouds roar under us. We are born naked and helpless, thrown into the world with nothing, and nothing is what we hold with us always, whatever else we may have. Nothing, that is, but our Will. The dog with his bone may be happy, but the dog without a bone, but having the Will to take one, is far more fortunate, for he has something that can never be stolen, can never be broken, and will never wane.

Will is the force nature understands best. Killers wander the roads and do their vile business, and do so despite the far superior numbers and forces trying to stop them. The lone actor with hardly a skill to speak of finds work and attains success. The underdog politician becomes mayor, becomes governor, becomes president. Why?

Will is what makes the weaker man pummel the stronger man into unconsciousness. Will is what puts the corrupt politician into office ahead of the decent one. Will is what makes the driver of the slower car win the race.

I had had enough then. My car shaking in a violent protest, I pushed on as my friend dropped back slightly, slightly. The left turn just ahead is the finish line; I've decided it. It approached fast, faster, far faster than my friend was receding into the darkness behind me. Had he fallen back enough? It was time to find out.

The left turn was met with a far greater commotion than I expected. My tires squealed from the drop in speed, and my friend's tires from the sudden engaging of brakes. I slid onto a little field of pebbles and rock dust that kicked up in an angry cloud as I skidded, brakes struck in panic, likely no more than an inch from a collision with my friend. I spun and dizzied over the rocks, barely catching a glimpse of his car as it, nearly stationary on the road, whipped from one side of my windshield to the other. He must have been sliding too, but it was impossible to tell the speed or direction. I was far more concerned with myself.

Then, it was over.

Neither of us moved. However it had happened, the ass-end of my car was off of the road, and I was staring forward at my friend's vehicle, himself inside of it, sideways on the road. He was staring forward, unblinking, a grin slowly growing on his hard, formerly stoic face, like rock eroding under a stream. There was only silence as the dust cloud settled. Somewhere in the spinning and turning, his turn signal had been flipped on, and it stayed such, blinking solitary and diligent and ceaseless like a beeping heart monitor beside a hospital bed.

And as I realize that I am farther onto Briarwood Road than my friend, and the race is clearly over, I have won. And it was never about cars. It was about Will.