“I don’t know even yet what it all meant,” she went on, “but, as I was crossing the Arizona desert, I saw a long petition being circulated by the native Arizonians, praying the National Congress to preserve for them and for posterity a portion of their original desert.”
My poor niece! Moses saw the giants pass away; Thoreau saw the frontier pass away; Masefield sees the clipper ship pass away; but it remains for my niece and her day to see the Great American Desert wiped out by the irrigation ditch, and the gila monster with the desert, and the need of a shovel on the trip across the sands! Have we eaten the cassaba melon and gone mad? Is it all of life to make the desert blossom as the rose? To bring forth cassaba melons, and alligator pears, and spineless cacti for cow feed?
Ploughing the desert; turning the giant cactus into ensilage, as if to live were a silo—for fear of this the native Arizonians are asking Congress that a portion of their original desert and of Life’s adventure and romance be saved to them and to their children.
It is sad. But this is not the worst of it: for they have laid an oiled road across that desert, as if it were the whole of life to get through to San Diego on time.
There is no hope for a man who gets through to San Diego on time. He will strike Los Angeles on time, come to San Francisco on time. Portland on time, Winnipeg, Chicago, Boston, and Hingham on time; where he will die on time, be buried on time, rise on time, and keep going on time, with never a chance to get off. But where is the adventure in that? It is not the whole of life to get through to San Diego on time. I had rather leave my bones to bleach beneath a bush than travel on and on by schedule, always making life’s connections, and so missing always life’s magical chances. Don’t you remember your Mother Goose, wise old dear?
“A dillar a dollar,
A ten-o’clock scholar,
Why have you come so soon?
You used to come at ten o’clock,
But now you come at noon.”