Common Footing

I

IF the world chooses to abandon walking, that is its privilege. If it chooses to unlearn those things which are only learned on foot, that is its penalty. What with rubber tire, gasoline engine, flexible wing-tip, and trolley wire, your modern imagines that the countryside yields its secrets for the price of a carfare. The countryside allows him to think so — and keeps its secrets. But he who walks, instead of seeing more than he can take in, takes in more than he can see. Your rider discovers only that all the values of landscape and life change on the instant when he climbs down from his vehicle (motor-car or other high horse) to trudge the road on such legs as God gave him. On this common and ancient footing of highway dust two momentous revelations are vouchsafed him: his fellows discover that he is, after all, a human being, and he discovers the same of them. After which, things can begin.

To walk is an excursion in democracy. And while I am well aware that cultivated people nowadays do not unanimously believe in democracy; while I know they are convinced that familiarity with cosines and Wagnerian scores has created ineradicable differences between them and their fellowmen (differences which they may be willing to overlook, but cannot quite be expected to forget), I merely proclaim a quick and efficacious remedy for this disbelief. I do not argue. I invite to a rediscovery of human equality such as have the inclination and the legs. We are losing both.

But waiving the moral reward of going afoot, and even the material reward of that pleasant tautness of tendons and a mind dwelling on supper, there is a mental phenomenon which only walkers know. They alone feel the miracle of modern rapid transit, because they alone know the physical contest with distance. From this winding of road over a green alluvial river vale to that rippling blue line of hills against the sky, is fifteen miles: by road or across country, a trudge of some hours. Between lie three towns, lifting white needle spires out of tufted foliage. They can be seen at the price of a brisk stride kept up throughout a forenoon. A train, bound citywards, stops at the toy-sized station of the last of them.

Boarding it, in half an hour you are swept back across the landscape from smoke-blue ridge to river vale, — that distance which cost such a swinging of legs, — watching the groves, streams, meadows, and villages that you leisurely scanned in the forenoon caught up and rushed past you all in a huddle. Steam is a miracle. One never felt it until now.

If people who ride can grow callous to the wonder of distances, what is to prevent them from growing dull to the wonder of the commonplace in human life generally? I suggest a few days in upper Maine in the company of seafaring men, if one would learn that there are only a few topics of permanent importance in this world (the rest are ‘specialties’), and that on these subjects— birth, death, work, marriage, and funny stories (the last including all the others) — one man’s opinions are about as valid as another’s. Also, that the advantage is not always to the educated. Mindful of that notion that Wagnerian scores somehow abrogate human equality, I asked Lem Osborne, purely in the spirit of dispassionate research, whether he had ever heard of Tristan. ‘Seems to me I have,’ says he. ‘Ain’t it a brand of beer? ’ This was sobering. For I was bound to reflect that there were qualities in Lem compared to which the might of orchestras and the majesty of operatic stages are as rubbish for the junk heap. Then it appeared that the notion that there should be any real difference between Percy and Pete — any difference in their ways of being born, falling in love and dying — is profoundly pitiable, impoverishing the holder of it. Let him go afoot. No surer riddance of superfluous baggage.

II

Meredith and Whitman celebrate the sheer joys of walking. Let me expound its methods and its rewards. With them, walking, like health, was its own reward; and so it is. But they had no burdens of the social upheaval to lug on their backs. Merry pagans! They took to the road and forgot the world. Let us take to the road and rediscover the world.

In a time when, I suppose, all seriousminded people must think, and think pretty continuously, about their share in the general task of social reconstruction, walking is offered, not as an escape from such thinking, — not as a dilettante occupation for the forgettery, — but as an aid to it, and, above all, as a valuable corrective. Test your ideas on the road. Whet them on the hard, practical sense of the folks turned up to you by a day’s tramping; then see whether the edge has been turned or tempered. You will find, I undertake, that there are matters which your companions do not know. You will also find that what they do know far outweighs in substance and in value what they do not; that, wherever they may be, their blind spots are least likely to be opposite sympathy and compassion, more likely to be opposite the petty prejudices which the inescapable narrowness of city life has cheated city people into supposing the whole of life.

‘You tell us of this buried treasure: how is it to be digged?’

It was nine o’clock of a blustering November night, seven miles from anywhere in particular. The three of us had little idea where we were going, and less where we were going to stop. ‘I wish,’ remarked Stirling, one of the pedestrians, ‘that some of my fastidious acquaintances were along on this expedition; they would be so utterly miserable.’ The remark betrayed a person new to the game of bartering for supper and bed; for though the zest of the occasion was the uncertainty of both, the transaction itself is democratic and of the utmost simplicity. Modesty of arrival is a strategic point. You should be neither prince nor pauper. You should evidently need the accommodation, yet be able to pay for it. Above all, you should no more be anxious to pay more than it is worth than to pay less than it is worth. Condescension is as bad form as stinginess. On lonely roads of the headlands along the northern coast, the union rate is, I find, about sixty cents for supper, bed, and breakfast. If Clem rose at 3 A.M. to fracture the closed season on lobsters in order that the guests might have a treat, an extra twenty-five cents is courtesy.

So far, the negotiation for lodging will have been conducted entirely on credit. ‘He looks harmless’ — that is your asset. ‘What is your name, and how do you earn your living?’ (this question in a delicate periphrasis) — that is your liability. Once accepted, you should cash in promptly and with a good grace. You are expected to tell, briefly but circumstantially, the story of your life. If college-educated, you may, without dishonesty, leave that out, and you had better do so. I do not know why, but that item, while not a shout from the quarter-deck of ‘All hands stand by to repel boarders,’ seems to admonish whole families to be on their guard against being patronized within an inch of their lives. I merely record the fact. A college is hard enough to live down merely as a guilty secret. Known, it may become as a skeleton at the feast of democracy. For the rest, you tell who your folks were, what sort of house they lived in, and how the deuce you happened to be coming this way. This brand of simplicity, practiced on a householder in a city suburb, would, I cheerfully admit, produce a clandestine hurry call to the police station. In the country, it is your credential. Whereupon, your host counters with his own life-story, and those of his eldest children who are out west on the wheat lands, or trained nurses in the city — ‘Maybe you know them?’ This done, you are old acquaintances, and may chat of life, death, immortality, what ails the church, and the high cost of living.

Let me hasten to interpolate that, tried near big towns, this procedure is a ghastly fizzle. In railway and streetcar belts people simply cannot believe that any one is such a dunce as to walk by preference. That story is received with the same polite skepticism which greets the remark, ‘No, I really care nothing for money.’ And, being unable to fathom your game, they prefer to take no chances. The nearer the city, the more the mere act of walking requires elaborate explanations which frequently fail to convince. Within fifteen to thirty miles of a metropolis it is simpler to give up, and go to country inns. But on lonely roads a plain tale should earn a plain deal. ‘Do you give your real name?’ I am asked. Now in the name of all the gods at once, why not? —unless one has set out with definite designs on the spoons. It is only the alibi that requires the alias. Besides, it is a mistake to suppose that the story of James Steerforth is unknown to people who have never read David Copperfield. The wayfarer is taught this by the preliminary inspection of him. Perhaps he is bluntly told, ‘Well, I guess you look all right.’

Walkers quickly discover that it is not so easy nowadays to break out of one’s class. People, wondering why, if your possess an advantage, social or financial, you should be such a fool as to repudiate it, attempt, with only the kindest intentions, to thrust you back where they think you belong; just as a stranger makes bold to inform you that you have come down town wearing a black shoe on your right foot and a tan on your left. You are told, pityingly, that there is a real summer resort at Cheapslow, or a good hotel at Dippsbury, six miles farther along. Both are known to you: Cheapslow, a noisy, confident, codfish aristocracy of marriageable daughters and yacht-racing sons; Dippsbury, a hostelry which unites the horrors of neo-colonial architecture with a squad of stodgy dowagers who overdress twice a day and overeat thrice. One tactfully explains that the express object of the present expedition is to avoid both the Cheapslows and the Dippsburys of life, for the following reasons, to wit; and will they kindly assist. Since you put it that way, they are generally quite cordial about it, although it is only late that evening that they begin to perceive that this preference for their own society and fireside is genuine.

We never come at the best in the other fellow — the full flavor of what he has felt and thought — until we have shed all our own pretensions, — or, better, convinced him that we have none to start with, which takes some time. But then how he unbosoms! If possible, hoist feet to fender, tilt back chair, produce an ancient, battered pipe, and remark that if things keep on at this rate, ordinary folks will have to go without meat except on Sundays. . . . You might have been neighbors for forty years. ‘The missus’ adds a log to the stove, and resumes her mending. Presently she asks, bending soberly over a stitch, what are the chances for a boy in the city these days; and whether he is better off on the farm. . . . I merely inquire what better opening one could have for landing a black eye on urban industrialism and cheating it of one more victim for mill-fodder.

Two hours of give and take. Forbear to put on any ‘ side,’ and you may have eager and earnest listeners. Be a good listener yourself, and you may have all the wit and wisdom of the countryside, all the lore of the coast: the wrecks, the rescues, the exploits, the lean years and the fat, the big wind, the record log-drive, the miraculous draught of mackerel, the plague year, the Indian massacre, the Good Friday gale, the high water, the gold diggings, the smuggling days, the privateers, and the phantom ship. You get the story of Clare McLean sailing ten miles across the bay to fetch the doctor for her father at midnight in a November gale, when the breakers were dashing halfway up the surf-scoured granite of Owl’s Head, and the fishermen next morning would not believe the doctor had come by boat. And Clare cooking breakfast as usual, — ‘Only,’ says she, ‘my hair’s a bit wet-like.’ Asked how it was out there in the storm, she says, in the lingo of the headland, ‘Well, not too bad.’

Or a captain discusses ships and shoes. ‘When a new man come aboard my vessel I could tell whether he was going to be a good hand or not. How? I will tell you, sir. The crew would say: “Well, what do you think of him, skipper?” “He’s an able man, but he’ll catch no fish.” “Why not?” “I don’t like the looks of his boots.” It would n’t fail. I had an instinct. Maybe my eye was accustomed to a sailor’s boot from a life-time of going to sea. When I saw a pattern of creases on his boot that looked strange to me, I knew he might be a good carpenter or a clever woodsman, but no sailor. In sizing up a man, I always sized him down.’

In an interval when the captain had excused himself to give the cow a bucket of water, his wife told her part: how she ached with dread when he was off on a coasting voyage or fishing on the Grand Banks. ‘It near killed me. I would n’t have lived out here alone on the headland between the sea and the moor all those years if I had n’t known he would leave off going Banking as soon as he could manage. And when the storms came — ’ She shook her head and turned her face away. ‘Yet I can say that we have been pretty lucky, take it all in all.’

This line of humble adventure is not recommended to the squeamish. It presupposes a readiness to put up with things as they come. If the mattress is corn-husk, you are in luck: it might have been a cord bedstead. To one fresh from a scientific dairy, the sanitary programme of milking-time is an affair to curdle blood, if not the milk itself.

At Polly Soi, the dish of ‘blueberry slump’ which constitutes the evening meal had made its noun a verb; whereby it appeared that a twenty-five-mile tramp to reach that dish was its own reward, and something more: on no less heroic terms would the slump have yielded to the suave persuasion of the gastric juices.

At Cornelius Libby’s, the baby howls straight through the meal-time without exciting the concern of anybody.

There is a limit to the appetite not educated on salt herring.

These items are enumerated not ungratefully, but as mortifications of the flesh whereby the soul may profit. City germophobes may die a thousand deaths of apprehension; but the fact is, hygiene or no hygiene, they thrive, in spite of science, on the deadly bacteria, and pass their plates for second helpings.

III

It may have been guessed that personally I prefer the coast roads, which, speaking humanly, is a preference for the shore fishermen of the North Atlantic. These evenings beside kitchen stoves in tiny cottages on bleak headlands, storm whistling outside and wind wailing under eaves, are noctes ambrosianæ. People wonder at the hardy breed these men are. Let them try the life and cease to wonder. A meagre living wrung from the sea at continual peril. Face to face with elemental danger, these men acquire a faculty of moral judgment which is profound in simplicity. ‘The dread is always on you,’ confesses Leander Holland, skipper of the Land Ho! ‘You get off shore with nothing but a half-inch of board atwixt you and eternity; and maybe a westerly gale springs up. You’ve got to claw in against it somehow. The dread is always on you.’

Is it any wonder that they are grave; that they look on frivolity with solemn amazement; that the ordinary ills which beset mankind look trifling to them; that their stern sense of right and wrong, won from dwelling in the shadow of eternity, is a corrective and enlightener to men of towns who go among them? In the mortal risk of tussle with winds and waves, they have learned that on salt water, at least, human preferences are not consulted. Dutiful as they may be at church (Leander plays the organ — with some retardation), they are fatalists, pagans at heart — but truer Christians, even so, than numerous inland brethren flattered by easeful security into imagining that certain laws of retribution can be cheated. These men have wrestled with God on the high seas too often to entertain a light opinion of that contest.

It was Morgan, my walking companion, who, on one of these excursions, first bade me observe that while city life traces lines around men’s eyes, seafaring life imprints its lines on men’s mouths. The first are lines of nervous anxiety; the second are lines of stoical determination. Farmers, while the absence of vital danger in their work may sometimes allow a whine to creep into their legitimate grumble, have learned the same lesson: that man lives, fundamentally, in a hand-to-hand struggle with nature, and only secondarily by his wits. Economists, of course, have settled this officially; but no verification of truth is necessary for those who live it.

So, I say, wisdom is gathered on foot, along country roads. Collect your ideas where you can: from alley, boulevard, office, lecture-hall, theatre, dinner-table, library, wharf, picture-gallery, street-car, opera-house, curbstone, or courtroom; but test them on the road. Confronted with the realities of soil and salt water and the character shaped by these, they will look vastly less momentous or vastly more so. We are a nation at ‘the smart age,’ which is the dangerous age. If we were predominantly an agricultural people, not predominantly an industrial people, this moral ballast would be ours without taking thought for it. But we left the land and went into the cities, where, having learned to earn more by our wits in one month than our parents could from soil or salt water in a year, we briskly assumed that the whole range of our powers had risen in the same ratio. A look at the cities and what they breed scarcely corroborates this.

These headlanders do not understand the minutiæ of a minimum-wage regulation; but they know that you can get no more out of a farm-hand or an acre than you put into them. ’Gene Gordon, to be sure, has never listened to a symphony orchestra, or walked through a picture gallery. Why should he? Around him and above are unrolled, day by day, the pageantries of the weather—the screeching gales of winter; the lyric moods of May on these moors; the matronly, rich abundance of summer; the smouldering sunsets behind brown November woods on evenings ruddy with frost. In his ears sings the drone of insects, or the clank of a bell-buoy — the mournful wash of surf on a distant shore, the tinkle of cowbells over the lea. The sweet chime of church-bells peals over the bay; gulls set up their shrill piping. It is absurd to suppose that he is unconscious of all this music and landscape, of which the music and landscapes of art are but the counterfeit. It is absurd to suppose that it passes him unnoticed, without appreciation. It is, on the contrary, built into the bone and fibre of him. He takes it for granted, as he takes health, and the love of women, and the pretty prattle of little children, and loyalty to friends, and death by drowning at the last. I know, for we have spoken of it together. The greater absurdity is to suppose that casual association with orchestras and picture galleries can compensate the folk penned in great towns for the loss of the great originals. I doubt, for instance, if ’Gene Gordon would be much impressed by a statue. He himself is a statue. And all the fellows he knows are statues. Evenings, when the gang goes swimming off the rocks at Yankee Cove, he sees a dozen statues, gloriously bronzed, diving, oaring with sinewy arms — figures to set a sculptor’s fingers itching for the wet clay.

As it is with the arts, so it is with philosophy, religion, sociology, or whatever you choose to call the art of life. He does not theorize about it: he lives it. His theory may be weak; his life is strong.

Now the curious thing is that, in all good faith, I am not able to discover that the gentlemen I encounter in great place —the senators, the wizards of preventive medicine, the scholars weighing drachmas of theory, the subtle critics, the jurists sifting evidence; the harassed administrators of affairs, the business executives (those ‘ managing brains’ which, we are ponderously assured, collectivism cannot pay for), the eminent architects and the cunning artists — are, at bottom, any more clever than my farmers and fishermen. They are specialists. You catch them young and train them to do one thing. They can do it. It would be strange if they could not. Meanwhile, the effort they have spent mastering what they do know has blinded them to the vastness of what they do not know — the wonder and majesty of common life. They preen themselves on being ‘in the know.’ They fail to disguise a patronizing tone in their references to ‘the average man.’ Caught outside their little orbits of artificial routine, they are adrift in chaos.

And then, if you speak of specialists, so are my farmers and fishermen. Abraham Judson, hand on tiller, warily manœuvring for just the puff of squall which will pull his schooner between two ugly rocks in Dover Basin, and getting the puff, and pulling her through, is a specialist. Leahman French, running the Horse Race of the Penobscot West Branch on a morning of spring freshets, with only a splash of water in his canoe to show for the exploit, is something of a specialist. But they are not conscious of it. Modesty has sharpened the eyesight of their wisdom.

Some magic is in this life of contact with elemental things which seems to provide a sane and sturdy mind against which to try the perplexing questions of urban civilization. Take your puzzles to them and be helped. Not directly; but, as most discoveries advance, by indirection. Not that they can give the explicit answer; but they offer a character test which seems to reveal the truth or folly of whatsoever it encounters.

And why should they not be the arbiters of these issues? Who but they supply the city with that clean, new blood which keeps it fresh? They have given their best to the cities. Who has a better right to be consulted?

The difficulty of their lives, the honesty of them, their hard work and upright living give them a sweetness and dignity which make the outer-world-liness at which they wonder so seem tawdry and vulgar. They put one instinctively on his best behavior. He wishes his own class to appear as well as it can in comparison with theirs. If you walk such roads as these, pay trust with trust. Whatever your hosts seem to wish to know about you, tell them. It is not curiosity; it is interest and friendliness, genuine and deep. They are giving their hospitality and flavoring it with a welcome far sweeter than luxury.

So I sing the Road. It is a different road from Walt’s. Like him, I tramp out of the city into the country, but not to leave the city behind — to come back to it, rather, through wisdom bred in the open: to test, in contact with sons of soil and salt water, ideas that shall profit the cities. I sing the pleasant converse by the stove in cottage kitchens on winter evenings; the good man in his woolen-stockinged feet on the lounge by the woodbox; the good wife sewing under yellow lamp-beams. I say that it is good to listen and to reply. I say that here is no superiority or inferiority, moral or social. We are equals, swapping experience of the road, bound on the same journey, bearing the same burdens, hoping the same hopes, fearing the same fears, suffering the same bereavements, earning at a dear cost the same rewards. I say that there is no city and no country, no college-educated or illiterate; no Yankee and no Polack, no master and no servant — but just neighbors round a kitchen stove resting after the day’s work. And I say that he who would come to this feast must come as a common man, on foot.