“Detours! Detours! Detours!” I suddenly exclaimed at one place in western Ohio. “I wish to heaven we could find some part of this state which wasn’t full of detours.” And Speed would remark: “Another damn detour! Well, what do you think of that? I’d like to have a picture of this one—I would!”
This, however, being the first we encountered, did not seem so bad. We jounced and bounced around it and eventually regained the main road, spinning on to Owego, some fifteen or twenty miles away.
Day was beginning to draw to a close. The wane of our afternoons was invariably indicated these August days by a little stir of cool air coming from somewhere—perhaps hollows and groves—and seeming to have a touch of dew and damp in it. Spirals of gnats appeared spinning in the air, following us a little way and then being left behind or overtaken and held flat against our coats and caps. I was always brushing off gnats at this hour. We were still in that same Susquehanna Valley I have been describing, rolling on between hills anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand feet high and seeing the long shadows of them stretch out and cover the valley. Wherever the sun struck the river it was now golden—a bright, lustreful gold—and the hills seemed dotted with cattle, some with bells that tinkled. Always at this time evening smokes began to curl up from chimneys and the labor of the day seemed to be ending in a pastoral of delight.
“Oh, Franklin,” I once exclaimed, “this is the ideal hour. Can you draw me this?”
At one point he was prompted to make a sketch. At another I wanted to stop and contemplate a beautiful bend in the river. Soon Owego appeared, a town say of about five thousand, nestling down by the waterside amid a great growth of elms, and showing every element of wealth and placid comfort. A group of homes along the Susquehanna, their backs perched out over it, reminded us of the houses at Florence on the Arno and Franklin had to make a sketch of these. Then we entered the town over a long, shaky iron bridge and rejoiced to see one of the prettiest cities we had yet found.
Curiously, I was most definitely moved by Owego. There is something about the old fashioned, comfortable American town at its best—the town where moderate wealth and religion and a certain social tradition hold—which is at once pleasing and yet comfortable—a gratifying and yet almost disturbingly exclusive state of affairs. At least as far as I am concerned, such places and people are antipodal to anything that I could ever again think, believe or feel. From contemplating most of the small towns with which I have come in contact and the little streets of the cities as contrasted with the great, I have come to dread the conventional point of view. The small mind of the townsmen is antipolar to that of the larger, more sophisticated wisdom of the city. It may be that the still pools and backwaters of communal life as represented by these places is necessary to the preservation of the state and society. I do not know. Certainly the larger visioned must have something to direct and the small towns and little cities seem to provide them. They are in the main fecundating centres—regions where men and women are grown for more labor of the same kind. The churches and moral theorists and the principle of self preservation, which in the lowly and dull works out into the rule of “live and let live,” provide the rules of their existence. They do not gain a real insight into the fact that they never practise what they believe or that merely living, as man is compelled to live, he cannot interpret his life in the terms of the religionist or the moral enthusiast. Men are animals with dreams of something superior to animality, but the small town soul—or the little soul anywhere—never gets this straight. These are the places in which the churches flourish. Here is where your theologically schooled numskull thrives, like the weed that he is. Here is where the ordinary family with a little tradition puts an inordinate value on that tradition. All the million and one notions that have been generated to explain the universe here float about in a nebulous mist and create a dream world of error, a miasmatic swamp mist above which these people never rise. I never was in such a place for any period of time without feeling cabined, cribbed, confined, intellectually if not emotionally.
Speed went around the corner to look for a garage and Franklin departed in another direction for a bag of popcorn. Left alone, I contemplated a saloon which stood next door and on the window of which was pasted in gold glass letters “B. B. Delano.” Thirsting for a glass of beer, I entered, and inside I found the customary small town saloon atmosphere, only this room was very large and clean and rather vacant. There was a smell of whiskey in the cask, a good smell, and a number of citizens drinking beer. A solemn looking bartender, who was exceptionally bald, was waiting on them. Some bits of cheese showed dolefully under a screen. I ordered a beer and gazed ruefully about. I was really not here, but back in Warsaw, Indiana, in 1886.
And in here was Mr. B. B. Delano himself, a small, dapper, rusty, red faced man, who, though only moderately intelligent, was pompous to the verge of bursting, as befits a small man who has made a moderate success in life. Yet Mr. B. B. Delano, as I was soon to discover, had his private fox gnawing at his vitals. There was a worm in the bud. Only recently there had been a great anti-liquor agitation and a fair proportion of the saloons all over the state had been closed. Three months before in this very town, at the spring election, “no license” had been voted. All the saloons here, to the number of four, would have to be closed, including Mr. Delano’s, in the heart of the town. That meant that Mr. Delano would have to get another business of some kind or quit. I saw him looking at me curiously, almost mournfully.
“Touring the state?” he asked.
“We’re riding out to Indiana,” I explained. “I come from there.”