It was not much better for some distance beyond here until we began to draw near Napoleon, Ohio. The country for at least twenty miles was dreadfully flat and uninteresting—houses with low fences and prominent chicken coops, orchards laden with apples of a still greenish yellow color, fields of yellowing wheat or green corn—oh, so very flat. Not a spire of an interesting church anywhere, not a respectable piece of architecture, nothing. Outside of one town, where we stopped for a glass of water, we did encounter a brick and plaster mausoleum—the adjunct, I believe, of a crematory—set down at the junction of two macadam crossroads, and enclosed by a most offensive wooden fence. Although there were some wide fields and some patches of woods, which might have been utilized to give an institution of this kind a little grace—it had none, not the faintest trace. The ground was grassless, or only patched in spots with it. The stained glass windows which ornamented its four sides were botches—done by some wholesale stained-glass window company, very likely of Peoria, Illinois.
“Kind heaven,” I exclaimed, on sight of it, “what is the matter with a country where such things can be? What’s the trouble with their minds anyhow? What a deadly yearning for the commonplace and crude and offensive possesses them!”
“Yes, and they slave to do it,” replied Franklin. “You haven’t any idea how people will toil for years under a hot sun or in cold or snow to be able to build a thing like that”—and he pointed to a new yellow house of the most repulsive design.
“You’re right! You’re right!” I replied.
“This country isn’t so bad, perhaps, but the intellectual or temperamental condition of the people spoils it—their point of view. I feel a kind of chicken raising mind to be dominant here. If another kind of creature lived on this soil it would be lovely, I’m sure of it.”
We sank into a deep silence. The car raced on. Once Franklin, seeing some fine apples on a tree, stopped the car, climbed a fence, and helped himself to a dozen. They were better to look at than to eat.
It was only when we reached the region of the Maumee that things began to brighten up again. We were entering a much fairer land—a region extending from the Maumee here at Grand Rapids, Ohio, to Fort Wayne, Warsaw and North Manchester, Indiana, and indeed, nearly all the rest of our journey. We were leaving the manufacturing section of Ohio and the East, and entering the grain growing, rural life loving middle West. The Maumee, when we reached it again, revivified all my earliest and best impressions of it. It was a beautiful stream, dimpling smoothly between raised banks of dark earth and fringed for the most of the way by lines of poplar, willow, and sycamore. Great patches of the parasite gold thread flourished here—more gold thread than I ever saw in my life before—looking like flames of light on a grey day, and covering whole small islands and steep banks for distances of thirty or forty feet or more at a stretch. We might have ridden into and through Grand Rapids, but I thought it scarcely worth while. What would I see anyhow? Another town like Bowling Green, only smaller, and the farm of H——'s parents, perhaps, if I could find it. All this would take time, and would it be worth while? I decided not. The Maumee, once we began to skirt its banks, was so poetic that I knew it could not be better nor more reminiscent of those older days, even though I followed it into Toledo.
But truly, this section, now that we were out of the cruder, coarser manufacturing and farming region which lay to the east of it, appealed to me mightily. I was beginning to feel as if I were in good company again—better company than we had been in for some time. Perhaps the people were not so pushing, so manufacturing,—for which heaven be praised. We encountered three towns, Napoleon, Defiance and Hicksville, before nightfall, which revived all the happiest days and ideals of my youth. Indeed, Napoleon was Warsaw over again, with its stone and red brick courthouse,—surmounted by a statute of Napoleon Bonaparte (gosh!)—and its O. N. G. Armory, and its pretty red brick Methodist and brown stone Presbyterian Churches and its iron bridges over the Maumee. The river here was as wide and shallow a thing as had been the Tippecanoe at home, at its best, with a few small boat houses at one place, and lawns or gardens which came down to the water’s edge at others. The principal street was crowded with ramshackle buggies and very good automobiles (exceedingly fancy ones, in many instances) and farmers and idlers in patched brown coats and baggy, shapeless trousers—delightful pictures, every one of them. We eventually agreed to stop, and got out and hung about, while Speed went back to a garage which we had seen and treated himself to oil and gas.
Truly, if I were a poet, I would now attempt a “Rubaiyat of a Middle West Town,” or I would compose “The Ballad of Napoleon, Ohio,” or “Verses on Hicksville,” or “Rondels of Warsaw.” You have no idea what a charm these places have—what a song they sing—to one who has ever been of them and then gone out into the world and changed and cannot see life any more through the medium—the stained glass medium, if you will—of the time and the mood which we call our youth.
Here, as at Warsaw, the railroad station of an older day was hidden away in a side street, where possibly six trains a day may have stopped. At Warsaw we had the village bus, which took passengers to the one hotel. Here they had a Ford, by heck!