A Hoosier holiday

by Theodore Dreiser

I felt no least desire to dine with him, largely because he had cut down all the fine trees and built such trashy houses.

He chattered on in an impossible fashion. I could see he was greatly impressed by our possession of this car. And to have come all the way from New York! I wanted to annihilate him for having destroyed the trees—the wretch!

But I felt that we ought to be getting on. Here it was after five and I still had various things to see—the old Central High School, where so long ago I finished my eighth grade common and my first year German and algebra; the lakes, Centre and Pike, where with many others I had been accustomed to row, swim, skate, fish, and camp; the old swimming hole out in the Tippecanoe (three miles out, I thought, at least); our old Catholic Church, where I regularly went to confession and communion; the woods where I had once found a dead peddler, lying face down, self-finished, at the foot of a great oak; and so on and so forth—endless places, indeed. Besides, there were various people I wanted to see, people who, like the wiry Mrs. McConnell, could tell me much—perhaps.

Alas for intentions and opportunities! I suppose I might have spent days browsing and communing, but now that I was here and actually seeing things, I did not feel inclined to do it. What was there really to see, I asked myself, aside from the mere exterior or surface of things? In one more hour I could examine exteriorly or in perspective all of these things—the lakes, the school, the swimming hole, the church—they were all near at hand—unless I wanted to linger here for weeks. Did I really want to stay longer than this dusk?

Franklin was eager to get on. When first he invited me he had planned no such extended tour as this, and these were not his sacred scenes. It was all very well—but——

Nevertheless, we did cruise (as Speed was wont to express it), first to Centre Lake, where many a moonlight when the ice was as thick as a beam and as smooth as glass Ed, Tillie and I, along with a half hundred town boys and girls, had skated to our hearts' content or fished through the ice. My, how wonderful it was! To see them cutting ice on the lake with horses and fishing through holes only large enough to permit the extraction of a small sized fish when one bit. To my astonishment the waters of the lake had receded or diminished fully a fifth of its original circumference, and all the houses and boathouses which formerly stood close to its edge were now fully two hundred feet inland. In addition, all the smartness and superiority which once invested this section were now gone—the region of the summer conferences at Winona having superseded this. Houses I was sure I would be able to recall, should they chance to be here—those of Maud Rutter, Augusta Nueweiler (she of the fir tree kiss), Ada Sanguiat, were not discernible at all. I knew they were here unchanged, but I could not find them.

We went out past an old bridge to the northeast of the town (scarcely a half mile out) and found to my astonishment that the stream it once spanned—the Tippecanoe, if you please—and that once drained Centre and Pike Lakes, was now no more. There was only a new stone culvert here, not the old iron and plank wagon bridge of my day—and no water underneath it at all, only a seepy muck, overgrown with marsh grass!! The whole river, a clear sandy-bottomed stream, was now gone—due to the recession of the lake, I suppose. The swimming hole that I fancied must be all of two or three miles out was not more than one, and it had disappeared, of course, with the rest. There was not even a sign of the footpath that led across the fields to it. All was changed. The wild rice fields that once stood about here for what seemed miles to me, and overrun in the summertime (July, August, and September, in particular) with thousands upon thousands of blackbirds and crows, were now well plowed cornland! I could not see more than the vaguest outlines of the region I had known, and I could not recapture, save in the vaguest way, any of the boyish moods that held me at the time. In my heart was a clear stream and a sandy bottom and a troop of half-forgotten boys, and birds, and blue skies, and men fishing by this bridge where was now this culvert—Ed and I among them occasionally—and here was nothing at all—a changed world.

“Oh, it’s all gone!” I cried to Franklin. “Why, an iron wagon bridge used to hang here. This was a beautiful fishing pool. A path went across here. Let’s go back.”

We went up to the old Central High School, looking exactly as it did in my day, only now a ward instead of a high school—a new high having been built since I left—and here I tried to recapture some of the emotions I have always had in my dreams of it and have still. I saw troops of boys and girls coming out of it at noon and at four in the afternoon—I and my sister Tillie among them. I saw Dora Yaisley and Myrtle Taylor (of the pale flower face and violet eyes), and Jess Beasley and Sadie and Dolly Varnum—what a company! And there were George and John Sharp—always more or less companionable with me, and “Jud” Morris and Frank Yaisley and Al Besseler and a score of others—interesting souls all and now scattered to the four corners of the earth.

But sitting in the car—suddenly I saw myself in my seat upstairs looking out the north window which was nearest me, and dreaming of the future. From where I sat in those days I could see up a long, clean alley, with people crossing at its different street intersections for blocks away. I could see far off to where the station was and the flour mill and where the trains came in. I could hear their whistles—distant and beckoning—feeling the tug and pull of my future life to come out and away. I could see clouds and trees and little houses and birds over the court house tower, and then I wanted to get out and fly too—to walk up and down the great earth and be happy.