[CHAPTER VIII]
INDIANA AND ILLINOIS
The first bit of fun was not far ahead. In places the road was passable if one ignored the six-inch layer of loose sand and soil that covered it. The country was flat and uninteresting. Diversion was occasionally encountered in the form of side-slips and here and there an unexpected spill. The quicker I went the easier I got through, as the soil did not cling to the wheels so much and hinder steering. At thirty it was almost impossible to maintain balance. At thirty-five it was tolerable, and at forty it was comparatively simple.
Now and then I would pass a kind of harrow the width of over half the road and drawn along by a team of horses. The function of this was to break up the big lumps of solid mud formed by the recent rains. After this would follow a similar team of horses dragging a "grader"—a kind of snow-plough arrangement which scraped the surface flat and shovelled the surplus sand and mud-lumps into the side. In these districts the farmers are held by law individually responsible for the condition of the roads their farms adjoin, and the process of grading is expected to be carried out within three or four days after the rain. When the farmers are busy with their crops this doesn't get done, and when they aren't, it sometimes does, according, I think, to whether the farmer is a sheriff or a justice of the peace and has to set an example to others. Fortunately all farmers are motorists as well; they have to be able to get about, so when they wish to travel, they grade the roads for their own use if for no more altruistic object.
Once I was passing one of these road-ploughs drawn by a team of three horses abreast, which took up most of the road and showed not the slightest intention of drawing in to the side. In endeavouring to pass it, I struck at too small an angle the huge ridge of solid mud-lumps that it had formed. I was going fast, of course. The handlebar was wrenched out of my hands and I was thrown with great force over it and on to the bank at the side. Lizzie herself lay roaring on her side in the dirt. The horses took fright and galloped off. The only damage done showed itself in some nasty cuts and scratches, some small areas of skin missing from different places, and a few bent levers and controls. From past experience I had learnt that in all such cases the clips and brackets and sharp corners of Lizzie's profile always seemed to be in the path of my flight over her handlebars.
A handkerchief bound tightly round the cuts, a few adjustments made, and on we go with smiling faces, only to overtake the wretched thing again!
After twenty or thirty miles of this, we came to mud in earnest—mud measured not by the inch in depth, but by the yard. Never was it soft and squishy and respectable, but always baked rock-hard into ugly contorted shapes that simply defied progress on two wheels alone. The diabolical effect had been heightened by the passing of numerous cars through the roads when the surface was still plastic, and great ruts and cracks and ridges were thrown up at every point between the road-boundaries, each one representing an eternal struggle to "get through." When the fierce sun came out and poured down for days unceasing upon such ugliness as this, the hideous surface was as if petrified by its glare, and the efforts of a "grader" would be futile to alter in the slightest degree its abominable condition.
Riding was out of the question. It was haulage work that had to be done, and many times when I got into a huge solidified "crevasse," I had to leave the machine standing in it on the tubes of its cradle-frame and proceed ahead to chip the edges down until the wheels would reach to the bottom again.
Anyone who has stood on the "Glacier des Bossons," looked upwards towards the summit of Mont Blanc, and seen the contorted, fantastic shapes that the ice assumes as it swells over the ridges in its path, can perhaps imagine the same effect on a smaller scale applied to the dirt roads of Indiana.