“This is getting very esoteric, Franklin,” I commented, “very, very esoteric.”
“Just the same,” he continued, “the automobile is a part of this same sense of freedom, the desire for freedom made manifest; not the freedom of the group but the freedom of the individual. That’s about what it amounts to in the ultimate. Here we have been traveling across country, not limited in our ability to respond as we chose to the ‘call of the road’ and of the outdoors in general; and we have been bound by no rule save our own, not by the schedule of any organization. That same freedom was in Haynes' mind in the first instance, and right here, stationary in Indiana,—and it was generated by Indiana,—the conditions here.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Well, to me Indiana is noteworthy in having done and in still doing just that sort of thing. It stands unique in having produced a great many celebrated men and women in all departments of work, not only those who have departed from the state but those who have remained and gained a publicity for their achievements far outside its boundaries. It was, I’m confident, primarily this soil-generated call that came to you. It came to me. It must have come the same to many others, or to all I should say who have accomplished things, those who have grasped at or struggled for, if you wish to speak of it that way, universal standards and scope. You felt it and picked up and went away some years ago; now on your return you do not feel the old generative impulse any more; everything seems miserably changed and the beauty to a large extent faded. But it is not. I also do not find things the same any more. Yet I am convinced the old call is still here; and when I return I have a feeling that out here on the farms, driving the cows in the morning and at evening, in the small towns, and hanging around the old watergaps along the creeks, are boys just like we used to be, to whom the most vital thing in life is this call and the longing—to be free. Not to be free necessarily or at all, of these local experiences, but to achieve a working contact with universal things.”
“That sounds very well, at least,” I commented.
“There’s something in it, I tell you,” he insisted, “and what’s more, though I’m not inclined to make so very much of that, Indiana was originally French territory and La Salle and his companions coming down here may have brought a psychic sprig of the original French spirit, which has resulted in all these things we have been discussing.”
“You surely don’t believe that?” I questioned.
VINCENNES
The Knox County Fair
“Well, I don’t know. Certainly Indiana is different—inquisitive, speculative, constructive—the characteristics which have most distinguished the French. And, by the way,” he added, returning to Haynes and his car for a moment, “a short time before Haynes developed his automobile, though not long enough, I’m sure, or to such an extent that he could have known much of its progress, the same problem was being studied and worked out in France by Levasser.”