“We haven’t had any trouble since, have we?”
“Not a bit.”
“Last night, after you had gone to bed, Speed and I went to a restaurant. As we were eating, I said: ‘We’ve had some great tire luck, haven’t we?’ Perhaps I shouldn’t have thought of it as luck. Anyhow he said, ‘Yes, but we’re not home yet,’ and he knocked on wood. I said: ‘You shouldn’t knock on wood. That’s a confession of lack of understanding. It’s a puncture in the perfect idea of the car. We’re likely to have a blowout in the morning.’ And here it is.”
He looked at me and smiled.
“What is this,” I said, “a real trip or an illusion?”
He smiled again.
“It’s a real trip, but it wants to be as perfect as the idea of it.”
I felt my conception of a solid earth begin to spin a little, but I said nothing more. Anyhow, the wheel was fixed, as well as the psychic idea of it. And we didn’t have any more tire trouble this side of Carmel, where Speed left us.
Going south from North Manchester, we came to Wabash, a place about as handsome as Warsaw, if not more so, with various charming new buildings. It was on the Wabash River—the river about which my brother Paul once composed the song entitled, “On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away” (I wrote the first verse and chorus!), and here we found a picture postcard on sale which celebrated this fact. “On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away,” it said under a highly colored scene of some sycamore trees hanging over the stream. As my brother Paul was very proud of his authorship of this song, I was glad.
From here, since it was raining and we were in a hurry to reach Carmel before dark, we hustled west to Peru, about twenty miles, the cover up and the storm curtains on, for we were in a driving rain. I could not help noting how flat Indiana was in this region, how numerous were the beech and ash groves, how good the roads, and how Hollandesque the whole distant scene. Unlike Ohio, there was no sense here of a struggle between manufacture and trade and a more or less simple country life. The farmers had it all, or nearly so. The rural homes were most of them substantial, if not markedly interesting to look upon, and the small towns charming. There were no great factory chimneys cutting the sky in every direction, as farther east, but instead, windmills, and silos and red or grey barns, and cows, or horses, or sheep in the fields. At Peru I asked a little girl who worked in the five-and-ten-cent store if she liked living in Peru.