BEYOND ELMIRA
Early morning
And now beyond Elmira for a distance of one hundred and twenty miles or more, all the way into Warsaw, we had one of the most delightful days of any—a perfectly heavenly day, the weather so fine, the sky so blue, and not a tinge of anything save harvesting weather anywhere. As we rolled along the sound of the reaper was heard in the land—great mechanical combinations of engines and threshers and grain separators and straw stack builders—a great flume or trough reaching high in the air and carrying out the grainless straw and chaff, blowing it on a single mound. It was really wonderful to see America’s daily bread being garnered mile after mile, and mile after mile.
And the marvelous herds of cattle, mostly Holstein, which yield the milk supply for the trains that pour nightly and daily towards that vast plexus of cities called New York, with its eight million people.
In this Pennsylvania-New York valley alone, which seemed to stretch unbroken from Wilkes-Barré to western New York, from the Chesapeake really to the falls of the Geneseo, there were indeed cattle on a thousand hills.
There was too much traffic along the first portion of the road out of Elmira and by now I was beginning to get an idea of the magnitude of the revolution which the automobile had effected. Thirty years ago these roads would have been traveled as elsewhere, if at all, by wagons and buggies, but now on this Saturday morning the ways were crowded with farmers coming to town in automobiles, or as Speed always put it, “in autos and Fords.” Why this useful little machine should be sniffed at is a puzzle to me, for it seemed to look nearly as well and to travel quite as fast as any of the others. The farmers were using it as a family carryall—taking in sacks of wheat or other products to town and bringing home groceries and other needfuls.
In Corning, a town of about ten or twelve thousand population, some twenty miles west of Elmira, we found a city as prosperous as most of the others apparently, and as naïve. It being Saturday, the natives from the surrounding country were beginning to come in, but I did not notice any of that rural flavor which had seemed to characterize them in my youth. On leaving every town where we had loitered too long we made a solemn pact that we would not waste so much time in unimportant towns that were nearly all alike; but whenever one rose into view and we dashed into a principal street lined with stores and crowded with people, it was beyond human nature not to get out and look around a little. There was always the excuse of picture cards for a record of our trip, or meals or a drink of some kind or even popcorn (Franklin’s favorite), or peanuts or candy. Think of it—three grown men getting out to buy candy!
Here in Corning it was that I first noticed that Franklin had a peculiarly sharp nose and eye for ferreting out ideal rural types. Those who have read Hamlin Garland’s “Main Traveled Roads” will understand instantly what I mean—not the crude, obvious, one might almost say burlesque types, but those more difficult and pathetic characters who do their best not to seem to be of the country and yet who are always so obviously of it. I tried my best, as Franklin nudged my arm at different times, to formulate to myself what it is about these interesting individuals—the boy or woman or young man from the country—dressed in those peculiarly new and store-y store clothes that makes them so appealing and so pathetic to me. In “Main Traveled Roads” one gets a sense of it all. Times have changed a little since then and yet here were the same types—the red-cheeked, wide-eyed boy in the new brown suit and twentyfive cent hat looking at people as if all the world and its every gesture were a surprise, and the women walking about streets impossible, one must say, from a social and intellectual point of view, trying to look as if they had something to do and some place to go. I always suspect them of eating their meals in some wagon back of some store—a cold snack brought along for the occasion or asking the privilege of adding a few things out of a basket to the repast provided, say, by a glass of ice-cream soda.
Oh, the lovely roads by which they came, the sylvan nooks where their homes are, the small schoolhouses, the wide spacious fields with crows and blackbirds and bluejays for company, the grey snowy fields in winter, these black filigree trees for a border—and the great cities which haunt the dreams of these boys and girls and finally lure so many of them away.
Beyond Corning came more delightful small towns, “Painted Post,” with a church so singularly plain, a small spire so thin and tall that it was truly beautiful; Campbell, with one of these typical rural streets of homes which make you wish that you might stay for days, visiting country relatives; Savona, a hot country store street where Speed stopped for oil and gas. Anent Savona, which hadn’t a tree to bless itself with, where Franklin and I sat and baked while Speed replenished his stores, Franklin told me the story of why the principal street of Carmel, his home town, was treeless. Once there had been trees there, beautiful ones, but with the arrival of the metropolitan spirit and a desire to catch passing automobile trade it was decided to widen the street somewhat and make it more commercial and therefore more attractive. The idea which first popped into the minds of all who desired metropolitan improvement was that the trees should come down.