The log of the Easy Way

Preface

Where we can lay our hands upon it in a moment when the whim comes upon us, is the original Log of the Easy Way, an envelope full of loose sheets of paper, at least a page for every day of the seven months of drifting, the events of the day, the place we moored, the miles we travelled — the data which are necessary for ordering the main events- Best of all in these loose pages there are other notes, set down from day to day, that ndicate the more vital things, the thoughts that came to us, the indications, that only we ourselves can discover and delight in, of the creation of new points of view, new habits, new knowledge as we went through sunlight and storm, through happy days and sad days together. And with it the spirit of vagabondage, the loosening of the bonds which grip the mind the hard routine and the enforced conventions of city life gradually yielding and permitting the mentally footloose condition of the true philosophical vagabond. We did not reach this condition then, for it is one of evolution and growth ; but those early stages when we were learning to know men and women as they were

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PREFACE

to meet them in their own paths, and were no longer foot-bound in our own — they are recorded in this beloved Log.

The torn and tattered pages of our chart share the same envelope with them — bound sheets of detail maps which guided us down the river. On every leaf they are annotated for every day, sometimes notes similar to those in the Log, but more commonly little incidents, strange meetings, accidents, specific items of other shanty-boat folks, delights we thought of along the way, set down at the mile post at which they belong.

These two things, the tattered chart and the Log, constitute our only tangible records of the Easy Way\ they strengthen and refresh our memories. Yet there are many memories which can never fade, so avid were our new lives for the impressions we were receiving, so nascent to the experiences the Great Water developed for us.

As we grew together then, and worked together upon the Easy Way, so we have grown together and worked together in this story from its Log. Though it bears my name upon the titlepage, that is because I. was elected narrator. It is a work of equal partnership, built out of the memories of aches and troubles, of struggle and toil, no less than out of leisurely drifting,

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PREFACE

of days of fine pleasure, of awakening experiences which make us cherish as a thing deep in ourselves this record of our first journey together.

John L. Mathews.

May 24, 191 1.

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Contents

Chapter

I The Easy Way ....

II The Old Canal ....

Chapter I

It was on the first day of September, 1900, that, hunting in every crack and cranny in which a boat-builder might be supposed to lurk, or whence by purchase or stealth I might hope to secure a floating home, I discovered Mac, an ancient mariner, moored with his long-sufifering family in a house boat of his own construction, to the river bank in the desolate region beyond the Santa Fe elevator. In a dilapidated chicken-coop amid the sweet clovers which still lingered in hopeless opposition to the murky stream beside them, a distracted hen clucked for a lot of tiny ducklings, essaying their first adventure upon this " bubbling brook." From the open end of a half barrel a mongrel pup barked viciously at me. An unstable gang plank, over which the pup stood guard, led across a couple of feet of mud and water to the overhanging deck of the Annie Mac.

In my roseate vision, at the moment, Mac, whom a halloo summoned forth, was a dweller in a House Boat — with large capitals. Later we came to have a suspicion that he was, after all, only a common, shiftless " shanty-boater." But no such suspicion could have been engendered then, though he was game-legged and blear-eyed, and though he proved upon acquaintance none too strenuous in upholding Truth. In regard to liquor his attitude was strictly nolo contendere. But in his actual presence his slight faults were reduced to a minimum — an infinitesimal and not-to-be-considered quantity — by a certain deprecatory condescension with which he reluctantly consented to allow his personality to be connected with the idea of actual physical effort. He was, in fact, a poet, with a soul full of romance; only the thought of assisting in a honeymoon made him at all our willing servant. But he knew the Mississippi from Grafton — he said to the sea, at any rate to St. Louis — and when he had consented to engineer the construction of a floating home he set to work with the best of humor and good sense upon plans which should provide for every contingency.

" How much money you got ? " he asked by way of reaching a basis of computation. The question touched me a bit too close. There was about one hundred and twenty-five dollars in the savings bank, and another week's salary from a newspaper to be counted on, and something to be spent before the wedding was over — and there was a girl who was used to the comfort and formality of a suburban home to be provided for properly after the boat was built and launched. For this was to be a honeymoon boat.

We are gypsies by nature, Janet and I. In the days of our courtship we had roamed the woods and fields together in happy freedom, or with some friendly book had found a deserted spot on the shore of Lake Michigan and had made camp for an hour or a day above the edge of the breakers. Van Dyke was our dearest treasure then, and with " Little Rivers " or " Fisherman's Luck," we sat for hours beside a " friendship fire " on the sandy shore and journeyed together, gypsywise, in fancy.

So we had planned that when our wedding time should come we would throw aside our formal, conventional selves, and step for a brief season into the full fellowship of wanderers. We had visions of a traveling van, and of roaming in it by easy stages from lake to lake along the lovely roads of northeastern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. We had measured possible stages on the map and had planned and dreamed of our camping places and our outdoor life.

But fate was playing with us. This was to be no stepping aside for a day into this wander world, but a plunging full into the tide of a sea of which we had no knowledge or experience. During a whole year fate paved the way while we planned for other things. Every day of my work drove me steadily toward the Mississippi and every task which was assigned me by the editor had some relation to this water channel that reaches from the back door of Chicago down by the Great

Water to the Gulf of Mexico. "The Deep Waterway " was a slogan we helped to shout, and Janet waxed as enthusiastic over it as I did myself. Fate again intervening, the sight of an artist starting down this route in a house boat on a painting expedition caught our eyes two weeks before we were to be married.

The lure was too strong. A new plan crystallized in an instant. We too would be gypsies, — but water gypsies in a floating van. We would try a floating journey to the Southland which we hoped to find as easy and more romantic than the wagon journey to the north. Hastily we consulted maps, learned that a little craft could go through the Old Canal to the Illinois and down that river to the Mississippi, and down that mighty stream to its chief port. To plan was to act. I flew about the city, presenting the new plan to the city and Sunday editors and getting orders for special stories and for regular correspondence. A public commission added an order for a commercial report to figure in a memorial to Congress; and so at last, we were assured that if we could once get the boat and ourselves under way we would, with no abnormal setbacks, be able to earn a living and pay our way back home again. This problem solved, it was only the preliminary financing that presently bothered me, when Mac presented his inquiry.

" The boat must cost less than one hundred dollars ready for traveling," I said. To my amazement and delight it was possible, and as Mac entered into the spirit of our plans the house boat soon took shape in fancy. That night, twenty miles from the Old Canal, Janet and I counted our funds and laid our plans, discovered economies and defined the hazards, and the next day the Easy Way began to take shape in fact.

It was Mac who insisted on laying the cabin floor upon the keelsons, in order that the height of wall and therefore the wind-resisting surface might be reduced, that we might drift more easily against contrary breezes. It was Mac who set the cabin aft and tilted up the forward deck. It was Mac who insisted on good clean pine in the hull, two- inch stuff all through; and who put in the eight-bytwenty box five heavy, length-wise keelsons. Rock-reefs and snags and sandbars were old acquaintances of his, and he had seen lighter built boats go up against them with disastrous results. " When you 're going six miles an hour and you stop sudden on a rock, it '11 surprise you some," he said. '' Especial, if your sides is thin." He had directed the efforts of Annie, his spouse, in many a gale while she labored heavily at the ash-sweeps to keep the boat off a lee bank, and had even (so it was whispered behind his back, last disgrace of a river man) deigned to take a hand in the work himself in an emergency! Whence he had come to estimate truly the value of a " squatty " effect. Heavily framed and heavily planked, with two-by-six timbers extending out two feet each side of the cabin to support the guard and bear transverse shocks, with gunwales two feet high and without a break from end to end, and lastly with heavy straps of iron on the outside, two and a half inches wide and half an inch thick, — so he built the hull of the Easy Way, while

Annie spun oakum for it and Mac's only son trailed an old tomato can across the seams and pitched them stoutly. The heavy braces and timbers seemed odd to us then, but later when the Easy Way lay for three hours pounding against a steep bank while seas broke against the side and their tops went over the roof, while trees crashed down in the woods close by and less stout craft went to the bottom or were torn asunder, we who clung to a stanchion in the dry cabin and saw not a drop of water enter nor a plank start were grateful for each bolt and spike and timber in her.

Annie, Mac's wife, was a voluble, slatternly creature, but with a good heart in spite of her loose habits of dress and character. She was all interest in the bride to be, and when Janet stole a day from her " sailmaking," as she nautically called her sewing, and made the long trip to see how her home was progressing, Annie seized upon her and did the honors. Through her own by-no-means immaculate house she marched her, showing with feminine pride the innumerable crannies in which a shanty-boat woman has to store her extra supplies. Janet, enjoying hugely the humor of a first experience, exclaimed with amazement and delight at the crannies and the house, and the frumpy old dame of the shanties became our champion forthwith.

As we look back upon this encounter with Annie, in the perspective of later experience, it seems to have been the first real test of our fitness for what we were later to go through. Whatever roughing had come my way in the hustle for my living, Janet had remained a perfectly nice young person of the suburban type, instinctively drawing the lines of caste which appertain to suburbs, and thoroughly acclimated to a rich, hide-bound, prejudice-bound community, in which even to have described Annie as she was would have shocked and scandalized an entire assembly. Now she came among the very poor and plainly ugly, of whom Annie was the symbol; Annie, who got drunk often, swore coarsely, probably dipped snuff, beat Mac when he angered her, but for all that proved to Janet extraordinarily interesting. Just as I had hobnobbed with Mac on our first encounter, so Janet rose at once to the full estate of partnership by taking Annie for what she was worth — and yet treating her as a lady.

While the Easy Way was building far out on the west side, and Janet was still sailmaking far on the north side, I covered the third grand division of the city in search of equipment, and finally discovered one Barnacle fastened, in fulfilment of his name, to the side of a street where his second-hand wares flowed out over the sidewalk and bade defiance to the rain. Dickens would have delighted in this old chap, whose mine of salables included everything to be found in the most eccentric households. I had a wagonload from him, and on the last day of my bachelorhood, a Sunday, mounted upon the top of the load, with Barnacle's man Charley to drive, traveled away to the Old Canal with my new-old possessions.

Charley examined the load with critical eye. His glance fell upon a wash-tub in which was neatly coiled some twenty fathoms of choice manila line, an inch in diameter.

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" Buy that rope ? " he asked with a nod of his head.

" Yes."

" How much 'd he," — with a backward nod — "git fer it."

" Two dollars."

*' Humph ! That 's my rope. Feller give it to me. Buy that lantern? "

" Yes, — paid a quarter."

"Humph! That 's my lantern. Brakeman I moved give it to me. Used that rope to h'ist planners and the lantern to see with. Buy that tub?"

" Yes."

" Humph ! That 's my tub, too. Seems like I can't keep nothin'. Old Barnacle jes' fastens tight on and clings to 'em till he gits a chance to sell. He 'd sell his immortal soul if he knowed where he could git another, and mine, too, if I left it lyin' around the shop whilst I was off with the wagon."

So it was somehow with the feeling of being the receiver of stolen property that I dumped bacon and ham, chairs, tables, stove, canned goods, trunk and books and other im-

II pedimenta into the cabin about which before nightfall walls were to be built.

With what little help Chum and I could give after office hours, Mac had planned and built and turned upright the hull. Later, under a broiling sun, a whole colony descended upon the South Branch to help the work along.

Above the hull rose a single room of a cabin, with a roof held on stout carlines so that we might use it for an upper deck. There was a window in each side and in the bow, and a door in either end. All around extended a two-foot guard, and forward hung an extended deck twelve feet across and eight feet fore and aft.

Chum, temporarily abandoning the law, painted the roof with more strength than dexterity. His brother and mine drilled holes and bolted on the straps. Mac and a hired helper laboriously fastened to the timbers carved oak cavils he had dug up from some cranny, to hold our lines; and the crew of a tug, with jolly good will, left their vessel at the elevator to assist me in putting on the cabin walls. Too much help affronted Mac, as a jarring element in a romance, and he left in high dudgeon; but an enthusiastic sister of mine, sawing straighter than woman ever sawed before, built the after deck in shipshape fashion. Tugmen brought lines and tackle to equip a possible square-sail, and another tug threw a line ashore and dragged the complete house boat into the water; and so, amid great whistling and cheering, the Easy Way was floated.

When the minister had made us one, and we came out to Bridgeport to take possession, we found Mac's energy had entirely waned with the launching. The bunk he had promised to build was as yet unshaped, the floor unlaid, the lumber to make them lay unsawed on the roof. The sweeps were unmounted — twelve- foot ash oars — and there was no hole cut for the stovepipe. Within the cabin, piled on and between the keelsons, was a nondescript mass of freight where it had been dumped from the wagon before the walls were set up. It had been somewhat disarranged by the launching, but the stove — triumph of second-hand bargaining — was still on top, and the china and groceries were still on the bottom. In between were two steamer chairs, a hammock, a tub of ropes, a deal table, two common kitchen chairs, a crate of books, a lot of tinware, and all the odds and ends of camping-out housekeeping, with my old leather trunk for a bracer. It was to such a house that I brought my astonished bride. But by nightfall the Easy Way was homey. The books were in their places on shelves, a set of Lowell hobnobbing with " Huckleberry Finn," the "Little Minister" and "Life on the Mississippi." The dishes had found security behind ledges on other shelves, made from odds and ends of flooring. The floor was laid, the steamer chairs unfolded, the bunk built and the bed made, the lamp filled and lighted, the table spread, the oars hung on hooks from the rafters, and, through a newlycut hole in the after wall, projected the outlet of a piping-hot stove.

The gale which demolished Galveston swept up the Mississippi valley to the Chicago Divide and there crossed over to the basin of the Great Lakes. It struck the western suburbs of Chicago with terrific force, demoHshing smokestacks, unroofing buildings, and driving the surface of the streets in clouds in the faces of those who had to travel upon them. It piled the water of the river and of the ancient Illinois and Michigan canal into waves, ripped off the crests from these and sent them in spray high in air over the tops of wharves and lumber piles. At Bridgeport, where the canal and river meet, it howled and whistled about the roof of the Easy Way. The little vessel was moored to the piling close to the lock of the gate — the mooring of an inexperienced boatman who, a week later, would have hung his vessel easily in a hammock of lines well away from the shore. Now and again MacEwen of the lock or his assistant came along the bank with an armful of split kindlings, a pike pole or some other friendly gift; and a head bobbed out of the doorway to exchange greetings with them. A few grains of rice on the roof of the boat, sheltered in the seams of the canvas, defied the gale to dislodge them. A pot of paint on the bank told of frustrated attempts to decorate the walls with white bands and cupids.

An unpainted, rakish, but sturdy little vessel, newly joined together by a competent shipwright, was the Easy Way; and we, who were laying the floor and tying up curtains, who were as newly joined together and by as competent a joiner, we twain were captain and mate, cook, crew and passengers. My new wife was cooking our first supper in our first home — a wonderful supper, which I smell in savory memory now when I am hungered, a supper fit only for Gods and working men, a supper such as never in his life has Tsar Nicholas tasted the like of, and failing which he has missed a great thing, a supper — but why hesitate for similes when to every hungry American the names themselves conjure up all I could say — a supper of fried ham and eggs and boiled potatoes and bread and butter and tea.

The savor of it was in my nostrils then as it is in my memory now. It seemed a happy augury for the long journey we had in mind, the route of which we studied that night on

i6 map and chart, and which was to take us fifteen hundred miles down the old Illinois and Michigan canal to the Illinois river, down the Illinois river to the Mississippi, and down the Mississippi to the Crescent Bend where river •fleets and ocean steamers meet and transship their cargoes. The crinkly line across the map yielded no sign of what experiences might await us on the way. We only knew, dimly, indeed, of the bare possibility of it — that having been towed through the canal by a steamboat, we might drift with the current down the rivers, needing no other motive save the oars to overcome head winds or to move in or out from the bank, or the tiny sail which would help us in a fair breeze. A hundred feet or a hundred miles, we know not what might be the length of a day's drifting.

" It will take you six weeks," the Managing Editor had told us.

" Ten weeks is a minimum," insisted another wiseacre.

For ourselves, we made no guess, being content to go the whole journey and finish it when we might. Yet as we lay moored in the entrance to the Old Canal that night, waiting the steamer Imperial which would come next day to tow us on, Columbus himself, with all the experience he must have had in weary days and nights upon his quarter-deck, could not have conjured up more wonder nor more expectation over what the future might bring forth.

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Chapter II

The Old Canal was a stream in Fairy Land. We fell in love with it. From the first thrilling moment when the towline, made fast to the stern of a barge ahead, lifted from the water and drew tense; when the Easy Way, from her position against the bank, swung lightly and easily out into the stream and followed its leader; when the shores began to slip by, the lock to dwindle in the distance, the figure of MacEwen, the gate-tender, and Barron, the fee-collector, to diminish as they stood waving their farewells at us — from that moment we looked upon the little channel as the road to Paradise.

Through the soft hours of a warm September afternoon we lounged in dreamy idleness in our steamer chairs upon the roof of the Easy Way, holding each other's hands in blissful comtemplation. Goldenrod and wild asters in masses nodded at us from the bank, and gigantic sunflowers in magnificent profusion of bloom made for us a long avenue of gold, reaching back into the distance whence we had come, luring us onward, a way of promise toward the future. The steersman of the barge ahead, bashfully hesitant to turn our way lest he surprise us in some honeymoon demonstration, called notes of explanation, footnotes of history and geography, over his shoulder at us, to make clear the text of the passage. Now and again we swung close to the bank, to pass some upbound stone or coal boat, looking as old as the canal itself; no rude implement of rushing commerce, but the quaint survival of a bygone age in which the windowless stone warehouses on the bank, the abandoned quarries, the ruined wharves and bridges each had its part.

We swung through long arching avenues of elm trees, their tops meeting high overhead. We crossed tumbling creeks that dropped from the hillsides and gurgled under us as we crossed them — on narrow aqueducts,

bridges of water arched above the land. We drifted out upon the placid bosom of the Des Plaines and crossed it, and went for miles through the back dooryards of farmhouses, whence dogs barked at us, and hens and ducks ran clattering away, and children raced after us merrily. We drifted along the hillside and watched the Des Plaines below us grow into the Illinois. We saw the Kankakee merge into it, the Au Sable, and the Du Page. Sometimes the canal itself widened to a lake, and tiny islets, elm-crowned, stood out upon its bosom like graceful ornaments upon an artist's ocean. And now and again as we dropped lower and lower into the valley of the Great Water we came into an old lock, and settled through it in all the ease and solemnity with which this ancient manner of carriage is conducted.

We came to our first stone lock in the early evening, when the lights were just beginning to twinkle on the hillsides about us, and the silvery surface of the river down below still reflected at its edge a band of crimson from the sunset sky. Locks are but familiar devices to us now, but there is still present in memory the imperfect, the half understood adventure of this passage; the coming in a bankful stream, in the breathless stillness of the evening, to a stone coping and a gate, beyond which yawned dimly a mysterious depth into which our consort had vanished; the twinkling lights, the voices hailing each other with startling distinctness to give familiar orders (so there were those to whom all this was familiar! to whom the mystery was not, to whom we were but another shanty-boat to be locked through — thought unthinkable) out of the darkness. Palls clanked. Unseen waters gurgled. Vaguely the gate swung open, and the Easy Way, itself hesitant, shrinking from the unknown ahead, entered. Silently the gates closed behind us and our house settled slowly, still mysteriously, into a deep well. About us all vanished; the dusky hillsides, the twinkling windows — themselves pregnant to us with their suggestion of other homes, of stationary lives through whose stations we thus moved silently, ghostlike, neighbors without neighborliness ; of other lovers through whose lives we were passing thus unseen, unheeded,

A glimpse alicad

Dragging my eager wife and my reluctant house behind me neither speaking nor spoken to, regardless of what infinity of companionship, of aid, of comfort, of affection might He, a germ in the seed, waiting but for the gentle stimulus of acquaintance to spring to life — all this that was in our minds and in the vale about us vanished in a moment, shut out by dark stone walls, felt rather than seen, which rose out of the water about us, slowly, ponderously, with a persistent suggestion of the incongruity of the idea that heavy stone walls could rise out of water; rose, bringing a new, a chilling atmosphere that seemed to add to the weird strangeness of it all, till we looked only up at the receding stars. Voices had ceased. Waters about us gurgled softly. Tiny waterfalls, innumerable and unseen, tinkled musically down from the sides of our prisoning well. We stood on the deck of the Easy Way, living it all intensely, silently. It was all that we had come to find, this new, strange world; it was all in this lock, that was no lock to us, but a miracle ; and in the interminable instant that it lasted we passed finally and completely, beyond the possibility of return, from the old life, the commonplace life of the city of which our bachelor days had been a part, into the association of imagined things in which we were to live broadly ever after. It was but an instant ; yet we were beyond recall when out of the darkness spoke distant voices, coarse, commonplace, calling above our heads. The wall before us gave. A sudden myriad of drops chinked and rippled into the water about us. In the darkness appeared a narrow rift, widening, giving a view of a starlit horizon, twinkling lights below us and far ahead, duskily looming hills and buildings nearer by, and, bulkily at hand, something huge, indescribable, from the summit of which the steersman called noisily for our towline. And as we moved softly out of the embrace of that wonderful gateway, we knew, and in a swift handclasp shared the possession of the knowledge, that wherever we might go, down the Great Water, in this Easy JVay with its deal table, its shaded lamp, its comfort and simplicity, or beyond and beyond eternity, while we went thus together we should go not as visitors, but in our own home, taking it with us as we now took it through this valley of the homes of others, through the stone gateway of the Old Canal.

There was in this a new pleasure for us we were soon to discover, in that this bringing of our own familiar, homely life with us on our wanderings gave us a standard, a judging point to which to relate the lives of those about us; so that we saw the familiar, the homely in them, and entered daily into the pleasures which these others about us found in their living. Yet none of them could share with us that which we shared together on such days as when we locked through beautiful Chanahon and in the windless basin below the lock set our table by an open window, and dined to the accompaniment of nature's harmonies. Through the open port came the scent of trees and of wildflowers, the songs of birds, the cool, sweet air that had passed across the water, the murmur of the woods and fields about us, reveling in the harvest. An arm's reach beneath the window sill was the water, and the gurgle of it against our hull blended enchantingly with the other sounds. Our open back door gave us a glimpse astern of the lockkeeper's house, sheltered, as carefully as a babe in a cradle, in its nest of tenderly arching elms; the white coping of the lock, bordered by neatly clipped grass lawns, the hospitably open door through which we could see the crew of our towboat dining at a long table. We were gypsies by chance and by choice, and our lives might have begun and ended in the hours of such wedding feasts.