Barn doors and byways

Front matter

Copyright^?.

l3

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

Contents

Page

I Barn Doors i

II Roads 20

II

NE of the pathetic features of a large city is the fact that so many of the streets are numbered. A numbered street loses caste and dignity as a numbered person would. Consider the relative effect on the imagination of " West Forty-ninth " and " Great Jones " Street! Fifth Avenue has achieved an international fame, and rises above its number. But compare the imaginative quality of " Fourth Avenue " and " King's Highway " — most mouth-filling and splendid of appellations! I dare say you would be disappointed if you should see King's Highway, as you may do on the trip to Coney Island. But its name gives it a dignity and a suggestion of an historic past which no Long Island realty company can quite take away from it, build they never so many rows of uniform frame " homes."

No street, however, comes truly into its own until it shakes off the dust of town and lapses into a state of nature, becoming a road. Once a road, a name does n't so much matter. Becoming one with the large, simple things of the country, it can assert its own dignity and charm without a tag. In the country you do not ask the name of the farmer jogging along; his face is shrewd and kindly, and you speak to him anyway, perhaps get a lift for a mile or two and gossip familiarly. Nor do you care what the name of the road is, if by chance it had one back somewhere in town where it started. It is pleasant and companionable, and ultimately will get you somewhere. Or if it does n't, so much the better.

I say, so much the better ; but I am not always sure. Roads have an endless variety of allurement, and sometimes it is their suggestion of destination which charms, sometimes their mystery. Which is better depends on your individual mood.

When I was a boy we lived on Andover Road, and that was an infinite satisfaction. Andover, with its great elms, its brooding, quiet stretches of shadow and old brick buildings, ivy-covered, the dimly comprehended thunder of its theological guns, best of all its school, mighty in football, and some day to receive me as a pupil, was a spot never to be too much dreamed about. In those days there were no trolleys nor motors, nor even bicycles, and Andover was a long way off up the broad, dusty turnpike. The tramp to the swimming-hole brought it two miles nearer, and even now, as I write the name, there comes back to me the old thrill which I always experienced when, by the bend at the Deacon Sanborn farm, I greeted the groggy signboard which lifted itself with difficulty out of the briers to announce :

Andover 8 Miles.

From that point the turnpike ran north down across the Hundred Acre Meadows, straight as an arrow. Paolo, in Stephen Phillips's play, is torn with a desire to " run down the white road to Rimini." And I, too, before I turned aside to the swimming-hole, used to know that desire, though my Francesca was a position on the football team. It is doubtful, however, if Paolo paid much attention to the road, save as a means to an end. I, having more time, knew every stone and wayside bush northward from my home. They were important because they were on Andover Road.

But in other moods, the charm of the unknown road, the invitation to explore, is the more alluring. To know where a road goes too often accompanies a masterful and exclusive desire to get there. Not to know where a road goes and still to take it, means that you are in that blissful state of nonchalance and wonder, so characteristic of the child and so provocative of shy surprises, quiet enjoyments, intimate touch with nature and her beauties. A country boyhood filled my memory with a background of winding roads, of gray barns and wayside wells, of dark stretches under the pines where the feet crunched softly on brown needles and last week's rain lay in puddles, of crossway signboards and dusty raspberries. So, to me, as I explore summer after summer the soft New England countryside — on foot — there is a stir of old memory with every new surprise, every present beauty; and the unknown road calls me irresistibly, therefore. I now have been to Andover (and did not make even the second eleven ! ) . But down the next uncharted byway may lurk the perfect view of Moosilauke, or there may be that not impossible abandoned farm which fills the contradictory requirements of the entire family, or only a winding ribbon of dust over a hill which will look like Huckleberry Hill. And just why that will give me so much pleasure I cannot tell you ; but it will bring me peace and thoughts of my grandfather, and the remembered fragrance of fresh milk with the dark berries bobbing about in it. Shall we have no pleasure of the road after we have been to Carcasonne? As life advances, the little mysteries loom larger. Perhaps Shakespeare, after he retired to Stratford, took his greatest interest in his roses, and his morning walk down the garden path was his Great Adventure.

The pleasures of the unknown road are many and varied. First among them, of course, is the pleasure of the curve. I have taken a curve in an automobile. Doubtless it was a very beautiful curve, but what I was aware of was a hoarse honking, a lurch, the crunch of gravel, the mutter of the owner about tire repairs and " these abominable country roads " ; and then the renewed monotony of watching a white ribbon rushing to meet me. That is not the way to know the pleasure of the curve. As you approach it on foot, you pause. You notice first, perhaps, the beauty of its line, a living line swept on the green canvas of the earth with one sure turn of a giant wrist. Then you notice anew the wayside foliage, thrown into prominence ahead because, on the curve, you face it. There is every shade of green, from blackest fir to brightest emerald. The hemlocks bank their layers of rich, heavy shadow; behind them rises a birch in virgin white and frail, translucent green; and behind that a giant chestnut thrusts up boldly against the blue sky. Perhaps between is a glimpse of the mountains, or a pasture ridge. Then you let your eye follow the curve of the road once more. It flows with its beautiful line, checkered with shadow, into the woods, through the Gate of the Cedars. And here the mystery allures once more. What lies beyond that curve? What vista awaits down the cool aisle of the evergreens? How far and how well will you fare? So then you resume your tramping, and, if your stride is good and you possess imagination, as you swing around the curve you can get the thrill of it, that peculiar thrill of counteracting centrifugal force, without resort to a motor-car, and without the sacrifice of those delicate beauties and quiet allurements of the bended road.

It is surprising, as you walk, what a tiny symphony of sounds detach themselves from the large hum of nature and peep or shrill or rustle at you along the way. There is the incessant snaffle of grasshoppers around your feet when you brush close to the margin; the shrill of crickets, at night a sleepy, peaceful, antiphonal chorus; the soft scurry of little things in the hedges ; the rustle of a snake into the dead leaves by the edge of the swamp; the rattle of a stick kicked down by a chipmunk as he scampers along the stone wall, scolding ; the extraordinarily high

ROADS 2,j

Phee, phee, phee of the Pickering frogs in the wayside pools in April ; the tap of a woodpecker ; the call of a chickadee, most friendly of birds, waiting in the hickories to greet the passer. And always from June to August along unfrequented ways in the north, especially in Franconia, there lurks the possibility of a hermit thrush.

Once Stella and I climbed Mt. Agamenticus, and as we tumbled down the trail through the woods Stella pealed out the Valkyries' call, Hojo-to-ho-o ! — the augmented fifth ringing clear and wild in the stillness of the uplands. Just as we reached the road and she paused for breath, there came an answer from the thicket, sweet and true and without a hint of the Valkyries' wildness, yet just now curiously defiant. We laughed, and Stella pealed again. Once more the thrush answered, with his fresh and exquisitely controlled voice. Where have I heard his song likened to an accordion going by in the air ? This song was not like that. This thrush went up the octave scattering triplets with the measured precision of formal melody written for wood-wind, yet with supreme joy of the grace and spontaneity of the performance — Mozart defying Wagner.

" I give up! " cried Stella, and we left the bird triumphant in his thicket.

The unknown road, as it winds along, is a perpetual garden, wild roses, lambkill, Joe-Pye-weed, wild raspberry, asters, goldenrod, filling the summer through, not to mention the berries which you eat as well as look at; and now and again in some melancholy cellar hole at the base of a charred brick chimney, the flaming fireweed which blooms in the path of desolation. Indeed, a catalogue of roadside flowers, even in New England alone, would fill pages. Do you know toad-flax and golden ragweed (not the kind that gives hay-fever!)? And gold-thread, quaintest of little growing things, and lion's-f oot, and wild lettuce? And of climbing things along the way there is always clematis and hempweed, and often bedstraw, that, overcome with the humbleness of its name perhaps, leans heavily upon other stalks, bearing its white, sticky, faintly fragrant masses of bloom. But best of all are the re3 bunch-berries where the pines are near, and the fringed gentians on the uplands, bits of sky come down to earth. Who needs a garden when he can tramp the roads?

And the line of the road, too, is a perpetual revelation of beauty. From a high hilltop it dips with the grace of the curve at the crest of a waterfall, into the woods, and is lost to view. It seems to flow away from under your feet. You look out over the trees to a valley, checkered with green pastures and brown squares of ploughed land, with here and there a white house, and suddenly a mile away you spy your road again, emerging from the woods and beckoning you up over the next slope. Down in the valley it takes on another aspect. It is the line that carries the eye out of the picture. Shut in by the hills, there would be something a little oppressive about this quiet green bowl but for the friendly road. That climbs steadily over the slope, laying down its white ribbon between the pastures, and, letting out the eye, lets out the imagination, tells of things beyond. So long as its graceful line breaks over the crest, you are content to abide here for a spell, to eat your lunch

SO BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS

and chat with the small boy who comes out of the big red barn.

He is not a Will-o'-the-mill. Armies have not marched past on that road, tanned about the eyes, nor great coaches gone rumbling down to a far city on the plain. It is nothing but the Athol road, and he has been to Athol — knows where you can get fishm' tackle there. — What ? Bless the boy, he 's been to Boston, too ! An' seen the State House, an' the Bunker Hill Monument, an' the Common, an' the Harvards play baseball! Nowadays, alas, all roads lead to Carcasonne, and there are no illusions any more !

No illusions? Not caring for Athol, we hopefully take this other road to the left, through the woods, and presently it bends by a row of elms and maples, giant trees which show, between, a smooth-cut meadow and opposite a man laying brown ribbons with a plough under a cloud-dome. Then it leads us past a square, substantial farmhouse, past another and yet another, and suddenly grows narrow, while the tell-tale grass appears between the wheel-ruts. But still we hopefully keep on, up the hill, till without warning the road runs casually into the front door of a farmhouse and disappears. We go round the house and look for it again, but it is not there; nothing there but chickens, raspberries, and dishwater.

" What have you done with the road ? " we demand of the boy who comes peering from the wood-shed.

For a moment he hesitates. Then a grin breaks over his face. " Paw used it fer beddin' las' winter," he drawls, " it 's so soft."

We are wise and cease the contest. " Is there no way on ? " we ask, humbly.

" 'Pends on whar you want ter git."

" Anywhere — the next town."

" Hain't no next town. You kin hit a loggin' trail down ter the Great Swamp, an' then you kin strike over ter the railroad, ef you don' mind gittin' wet."

So we go back, but without anger at the Runaway Road. One is never angry at a road. If one takes the wrong road when he really wants to reach a definite place, it is his fault for not asking the way or carrying a map. Going back, the roadside vistas are different, seen from the reverse; even the coloring in the foliage, the shadows on the fields, take on a different aspect. But the way seems shorter. Landmarks are familiar, and the eye jumps ahead from one to the other with certainty of the distance. Then, too, the sense of curiosity, the tense mood of expectation, is at rest. So, if the legs are not weary, the ten miles home are always less than the ten miles out. Besides, you have made friends with the road, and the walk with a friend is always shorter. I admit that I greet a new road with almost as much pleasure as a new person, and usually part from it with rather more regret.

The friendly road! Two pictures come back to me, one out of childhood, one out of yesterday. It was night, the deep, starlit, hushed night of the mountain intervales. And I, a little boy, stole away from the buzz of talk on the veranda and scurried up the road, so familiar by day, so sandy, but now curiously smooth and hard under my feet. (Later in life I used to notice that a road the bicycler cursed by day, picking his path, seemed smooth enough as he bowled along in the dark; which thing is a parable.) The black wall of mountains to the left grew terribly like a great wave as I ran along — a great wave that seemed to be rushing upon me. But I climbed up the hill, comforting myself with a bravado whistle. At the top of the hill the road swept past sentinel cedars like black spires pointing to the stars, and ran into the woods, so that it soon showed but a ghostly white patch ahead of me. I slowed down to a timid walk, my nerves a-quiver. Suddenly there was a terrific noise in the darkness side of me. I turned and ran. It was only the stamping of horses in a stable — that I realized the next day; indeed, I almost knew it then — with my head. But my head was not in control. I ran in foolish, unreasoned terror. I remember how that white, ghostly patch of road gleamed ever ahead of me, with friendly help and comfort. At the sentinel cedars I again saw the ridge of the mountains. The moon was just coming up behind them, and the firs on their summits were shot with silver, like the foam on a wave-crest. The illusion of a great breaker curling over upon our valley was overpowering. For an instant I stood paralyzed with terror, conquered by my own imagination. Then I saw my friendly white road stretching down to the distant lights of the house. And, with a little cry, I raced madly down it, back to the buzz of talk. The next day the road looked as commonplace as before, but ever after it has held a warm spot in my affections, like a human thing.

The picture of yesterday is framed by the branches of an apple-tree. There came first a complaint about skirts, wherein our apple-tree differed from the first and most famous! But once up in the spreading boughs, we gave ourselves over to lazy, happy contemplation of the view, while the afternoons drifted by.

The apple-tree stood in a pasture. East was a stone wall, half hidden in goldenrod and wildrose bushes. Then the white road swept curving across the picture, from behind a little grove to the right, back behind a little hill to the left. Beyond the road the coast ledges rolled away, covered with bay and huckleberry bushes and scrub pines, till they broke against the sky. Only, in the centre, there was a depression filled in by the blue sea, its horizon line laid down with a ruler. Always a speck of white sail moved across that patch of blue, and always at sunset time the sail took fire. Meanwhile traffic flowed around the white ribbon by the wall — automobiles with guttural honks, buckboards freighted with boarders, pedestrians, Indians with packs of sweet-grass baskets, and finally, as the sail was taking fire, always an old man driving two black cows. All this we saw from our apple-tree, while the salt air blew sweetly about us. And when the old man had driven his cows around the hill, we stepped into the white road and it led us cheerfully home to supper. How simple it sounds to tell! Yet that road touched our picture as with a gentle hand, a hand which held the green and blue beauties of the landscape closely to our human kin — and led us home to supper. We loved it like a friend.

It is curious, indeed, how closely roads are linked with humanity, how warmly companionable they are, and yet how little they ever mar the beauty, even the wildness, of a picture. That, I suppose, is because they are made of the earth and follow its contours, catch the rhythm and flow of nature. A snow-covered road in winter lies through the bare trees, lovely with the blue shadows of their trunks, and throws into exquisite relief the straight, slender horizontals of the second-growth saplings, the columnar aisles of the hemlocks. Catch the road in the early morning after a new fall of snow, when the sun is bright above a dazzling world and the chickadees sing, and you will find, perhaps, the tracks of a single " pung," blue as the shadows of the tree-trunks. These blue tracks say to you that some fellow has been along ahead, up before you were into the white, frosty world, with the jingle of sleigh-bells. He has left all this beauty of slender horizontals, of columnar hemlocks, of blue shadows on the white carpet, but he has left, too, thanks to the road, a blue trail which jogs you pleasantly to remember your human kin, which keeps nature linked with Man. After all, he is rather a morose and stingy lover of nature who would have it otherwise, who would banish roads from his landscape.

It was a theory in the old days that a good road, like a straight line, was the shortest distance between two points. So the Old Portsmouth Road goes up Sewall's Hill from York Harbor, and the former road from Rowe to Charlemont in the northern Berkshires is now but a logging-trail over Mount Adams, where the fringed gentians bloom in the wheel-ruts. Newer roads follow " the lay of the land," and if you want to tramp in comfort, get a government survey map, find the roads that go straightest over the highest elevations, and take them. That Old Portsmouth Road knows not the dust of touringcars, but it leads you past the house of a certain wise man who has built himself one of the most beautiful dwellings and one of the most adorable gardens along the coast of Maine, and built them for their own sakes, since none pass to see. The garden gate is a gap in the stone wall under an apple-tree, and the path lets in to a pool under a boulder, a tangle of ferns, and then the blaze of hollyhocks, cosmos, gladioli, and other old-fashioned blooms. The house is deep-brown stucco with an Italian roof. Trumpet-vines climb over it, and two deep orange awnings shade the door and the ample window of the living-room. Set on a hill, you see over the tree-tops to the new road, the river, and the far-off point where the cottages face the sea, back yard touching back yard, huddled without privacy together. Then the Old Portsmouth Road runs down the hill again and you meet the cows coming home at twilight. It is good to find a man who dares place a lovely and expensive dwelling on the back road. It shows him not dependent on the opinions of his fellows. I have had the temerity to fancy that he even leaves his machine in the garage occasionally, and walks somewhere.

It would be foolish to dwell here on the sociological value of good roads, their place in the well-being and progress of mankind. Others more fitted have told of that. But has a paper ever been written on roads in literature? Certainly the word " road " would fill pages in a concordance of popular quotations. From the strait and narrow road of hortatory scripture to that which climbs in Christina Rossetti's " Up Hill," roads run through what the Race has written, almost always with allegorical purpose, a symbol of the eternal restlessness of man, the flow and flight of human aspiration, the steady plod of time. Simple, primitive, unmistakable, roads are among the enduring things, and so wind their way through enduring literature, one of the ultimate metaphors. How full of roads is Bunyan's book ! And how full of roads, in these latter days, are the novels and poems of Thomas Hardy. In the open Wessex country they are apparent from afar, and in the novels you never lose sight of them, till they become charged with significance. To think of Jude is to see his hungry little figure by the sign-post, looking down the long road to Oxford. Egdon Heath carries the bricky outfit of the Reddleman moving along a white trail cut sharp on the furze. And plodding figures in " Tess " pass and repass on endless highways, weary with you know not what tragedy. In the poems the poet's own quaint illustrations show his preoccupation with roads. Ever they are vanishing over hills, reappearing in distant valleys, ribboning the pastures. He would call them, no doubt, the trail of Man over the face of the earth. Perhaps, then, our joy of the trail depends on our fondness for him who made it, and the road is beautiful, lead it to Carcasonne or Athol, Mass., in proportion as we are willing to share it, are glad that others have blazed it on ahead, and will follow after.

But does that philosophy compel us trampers to breathe with delight the dust of the passing motor-cars ? By what new pragmatism shall we adopt them into the pleasant scheme of things? And it is a short road now which has no motor-car. Like most philosophers, I shall have to end with a riddle !

Ill

RIVERS F you desire an argument for idealism, said Emerson, stoop down and look at a familiar landscape through your legs. (This, it will be recalled, was also Peter Pan's method for intimidating the wolves!) Yet Emerson need hardly have resorted to so gymnastic a feat for casting over a familiar landscape the sense of strangeness. There flows through the Concord meadows, and 'neath " the rude bridge " which spans its flood, the Concord River, incomparable for canoes, and from the seat of a gently moving craft on its dark, quiet waters you may see all that fair New England countryside through the transforming lens of an unaccustomed viewpoint — the viewpoint, as it were, of the floor of the world.

If you walk with the shade of old Izaak Walton by the bank of a river, in quiet contemplation or busy with a rod, you may fall in love with life and flowing streams, but you will not know the true river view. You will know that only from a boat, preferably a noiseless, smooth-slipping canoe, because only from the boat is your level of vision altered from the habitual, lowered till all the common objects of the landscape shift their values and the world is indeed so strange a place that you realize, as Emerson intended, how many of our so-called facts are merely habits of the human eye. We have often suspected that Bishop Berkeley himself was a traveller by inland waterways, and drew his philosophy from the river view.

Did you ever lie stretched on your garden path, shutting the eye farther from the ground and squinting with the other through the strange jungle of your flower-beds? The sensation is curious, almost disconcerting. The pebbles on the path cast long shadows, the bordering grasses are tall, and the stalks of your daffodils tower like a pine wood, while the sun shines through amid the translucent green trunks, bringing down a shimmer of golden blooms. See, a robin hops into the picture! You know him for a robin by his rosy breast and his brittle legs. But how huge he is ! You are scarce aware of the sky, and of your neighbors' houses, even of so much of your own garden as lies beyond this little field of your earth-bound vision, you are not aware at all. You feel curiously like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. As you rise to your feet, you are tempted to rub your eyes, like one awakening from a dream.

This, on a larger scale and enhanced by the charm of moving boat and lapping water, is the sensation of him who journeys by a little waterway through the meadows and the hills. A wellbehaved river is bound to be lower than its banks, so that sometimes your head, as you sit in your canoe, is actually below the floor of the world, sometimes on its level, but seldom or never above it. What a transformation this works on the landscape ! Step into your craft, dip your paddle, glide out on the current, and the flowers and grasses on the bank, scarce noted before, are suddenly the rich foreground of your picture. They are larger, more intricate, more beautiful, than you ever guessed. The cardinal flowers and Joe-Pye-weed lift their blooms against the blue sky, instead of lying at your feet. The delicate designs of their petals emerge like a snow-flake on velvet. As you glide under arching willows or maples, you seem to be in the depth of a forest. The road or the trolley line may be but a few hundred yards away, yet you do not see them. You float silently up a liquid aisle beneath vaulted foliage, in a sufficient and cloistered world of your own.

It may be presently you catch the sparkle of bright sunlight on the water ahead, and emerging from the mottled shadows of the woods your canoe slips into a stretch of river where tall grasses come down to the black, oozy banks. An old punt, half full of yellow water, is moored to a stake. Out in the fields you hear the hot click, click of a mowing machine, drowsier than a locust's song at summer noon. Men are near, no doubt horses, a road, perhaps a town. But you do not see them. You see only the old punt, the tall grasses on the bank, it may be the top of a far blue hill peeping over, and ahead the quiet waterway wandering again into the cool shadows of the maples. Those hayfields might stretch to infinity for all you can say. Your view of the world is not comprehensive ; it is the view of the worm rather than the bird. But how alluring is its strangeness, how restful its seclusion, between grassy banks under the dome of the summer sky ! Even the ways of the worm may be pleasant, then — a fact worth finding out.

Presently there is a rustle in the grasses, and a small boy stands over you, staring down, a onepiece bamboo fishpole towering in his hand. His body cuts against the sun, and, see, he has an aura in his hair !

Always there is this strangeness of the river way to give it perpetual allure. Do you meet with a fisherman sitting on the bank, it is his feet you see first. Always the bordering grasses are important, and how large the sky, how flat and restricted the plain when the banks sink down to give a glimpse of it ! Passing under a bridge, the dust disturbed by a rumbling motor overhead shakes down upon you or tinkles on the water — sweetest of tiny sounds, this tinkle of dust on still water! It is as if you were in another world, below your human kind in space, but not, you are sure, in degree, so gently your craft slips along amid the cloistered beauties of the stream.