Smartsville to Marysville. Some Reflections on Automobiles and "Hoboes"
Early the next morning I started for Marysville, the last leg in my
journey, and a long twenty miles distant. I had been dreading the
pull through the Sacramento Valley, having a lively recollection of my
experience in the San Joaquin, on leaving Stockton. The day was sultry,
making the heat still more oppressive. After leaving the foot-hills for
good, I walked ten miles before reaching a tree, or anything that cast a
shadow, if you except the telephone poles. For the first time I realized
there was danger in walking in such heat, and even contemplated the
shade of the telephone poles as a possibility! Fortunately a light
breeze sprang up--the fag end of the trade wind--and, though hot, it
served to dispel that stagnation of the atmosphere which in sultry
weather is so trying to the nervous system. Marysville is nearly
one hundred miles due north of Stockton--of course, much farther by
rail--and the same arid, treeless, inhospitable belt of country between
the cultivated area and the foot-hills apparently extends the whole
distance. It is a country to avoid.
About two miles short of Marysville, while enjoying the shade cast
by the trees that border the levee of the Feather River, which skirts
Marysville to the south, a man in an auto stopped and very kindly
offered to give me a lift. I thanked him politely but declined. He
seemed amazed. "Why don't you ride when you can?" he asked. "Because I
prefer to walk," I answered. This fairly staggered him. The idea of
a man preferring to walk, and in such heat, was probably a novel
experience, and served to deprive him of further speech. He simply sat
and stared and I had passed him some twenty yards before he started his
machine.
A sturdy tramp walking in the middle of the road, who had witnessed the
scene, shouted as he passed: "Why didn't yer ride wid de guy?" I replied
as before, "Because I prefer to walk;" adding for his benefit, "I've
no use for autos." Whereupon he threw back his head and burst into peal
after peal of such hearty laughter that, from pure contagion, I perforce
joined in the chorus. In the days of Fielding and Sam Johnson, this
fellow would have been dubbed "a lusty vagabond;" in the slangy parlance
of today, he was a "husky hobo," equipped as such, even to the tin can
of the comic journals. To him, the humor of a brother tramp refusing a
ride--in an autocar, at that--appealed with irresistible force.
To walk in the middle of the road is characteristic of the genuine
tramp. There must be some occult reason for this peculiarity, since in a
general way, it is far easier going on the margin. Perhaps it is because
he commands a better view of either side, with a regard to the possible
onslaught of dogs. There is something about a man with a pack on his
back that infuriates the average dog, as I have on several occasions
found to my annoyance. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his whimsical and
altogether delightful "Travels with a Donkey," thus vents his opinion
anent the dog question:
"I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear
more than any wolf. A dog is vastly braver and is, besides, supported
by a sense of duty. If you kill a wolf you meet with encouragement and
praise, but if you kill a dog, the sacred rights of property and the
domestic affections come clamoring around you for redress. At the end of
a fagging day, the sharp, cruel note of a dog's bark is in itself a keen
annoyance; and to a tramp like myself, he represents the sedentary and
respectable world in its most hostile form. There is something of the
clergyman or the lawyer about this engaging animal; and if he were not
amenable to stones, the boldest man would shrink from traveling a-foot.
I respect dogs much in the domestic circle; but on the highway or
sleeping afield, I both detest and fear them."
I confess to a feeling of sympathy with the men we so indiscriminately
brand with the contemptuous epithet, "hobo." In the first place, the
road itself, with its accompanying humors and adventures, forms a mutual
and efficacious bond. How little we know of the "Knights of the Road,"
or the compelling circumstances that turned them adrift upon the world!
"All sorts and conditions of men" are represented, from the college
professor to the ex-pugilist. I have "hit the ties" in company with
a so-called "hobo" who quoted Milton and Shakespeare by the yard,
interspersed with exclamations appreciative of his enjoyment of the
country through which we were passing. And once when on a tramp along
the coast from San Francisco to Monterey, I fell in at Point San Pedro
with a professional, who bitterly regretted the coming of the Ocean
Shore Railway, then in process of construction. "For years," said he, "I
have been in the habit of making this trip at regular intervals, on my
way south. I had the road to myself and thoroughly enjoyed the peaceful
beauty of the scene; but now this railroad has come with its mushroom
towns, and all the charm has gone. Never again for me! This is my last
trip!"
I have not the slightest doubt that sheer love of the road--and only a
tramp knows what those words mean--is the controlling influence which
keeps fifty per cent of the fraternity its willing slaves. What was
Senhouse--that most fascinating of Maurice Hewlett's creations--but a
tramp? A gentleman tramp, if you please, but still a tramp. What is
the reason that Senhouse appeals so strongly to the imagination? Simply
because he loved Nature. And in this matter-of-fact period when poetry
is dead and even a by-word, the man who loves Nature, if not a poet, at
least has poetry in his soul. In a decadent age symbolized by the tango
and the problem play, it is at least an encouraging sign for the future
that such a character as Senhouse came to the jaded reader of the erotic
fiction of the day, as a whiff of sea breeze on a parched plain, and was
hailed with corresponding delight.
Of course there are "hoboes" and "hoboes," as in any other profession,
but so far as my experience goes, the "hobo" is an idealist. Of the many
reasons he has taken to the road, not the least is the freedom from the
shackles of convention and the "Gradgrind" methods of an utilitarian and
materialistic age. Nor is he a pessimist. Whatever his trouble, the road
has eased him of his burden and made him a philosopher.
Thoreau, writing in the middle of the last century, deplores the fact
that in his day, as now, but few of his countrymen took any pleasure
in walking, and that very rarely one encountered a person with any real
appreciation of the beauty of Nature, which if he could but see it, lay
at his very door. Speaking for himself and companion in his rambles,
he says: "We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts (Concord,
Massachusetts) practiced this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at
least if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen
would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy
the requisite leisure, freedom and independence which are the capital in
this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct
dispensation from Heaven to become a Walker. Ambulator nascitur non fit.
Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me,
walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to
lose themselves for half an hour in the woods."
Who is there who walks habitually, who does not know the man who tells
you of the walks he "used to take?" You have known him, say a dozen
years. During all that time, to your knowledge, his walks have
practically been limited by the distance to his office and back from the
ferry boat. When you urge him for perhaps the twentieth time, to essay
a tramp with you, he will say he would like to very much, but
unfortunately so-and-so renders it impossible. And then looking you in
the eye, he will tell you how much he enjoyed tramps he took, of twenty
or thirty miles--but that was before you knew him! As if a Walker with
a big "W," as Thoreau writes the word, would remain satisfied with the
memory of walks of twenty years ago!
I had heard of the "Marysville Buttes," as one has heard of Madagascar,
but their actual appearance on the landscape came as the greatest
surprise of the trip. As I first caught sight of them when within a
few miles of Marysville, they gave me a distinct thrill. I could hardly
believe my eyes and thought of mirages; for those pointed, isolated
peaks rise precipitously from the floor of the Sacramento valley; in
fact, their bases are only a mile or two from the river. They have every
indication, even to the unscientific eye, of having been upheaved by
volcanic action. Perhaps that accounts for the uncanny impression they
impart.
A walk of twenty-one or two miles without food, in any kind of
weather, is apt to produce an aching void. My first efforts on reaching
Marysville were therefore directed to finding the sort of place where I
could eat in comfort. The emphasis which Robert Louis Stevenson employs
when upon this most important quest would be amusing were it not also
a vital problem in your own case. There is nothing humorous per se in
hunger or thirst; at any rate, not until both are appeased. With the
black coffee and cigar, you can tip your chair at a comfortable angle
against the wall, and watching the delicate wreaths of smoke in their
spiral upward course, previous to final disintegration, smile at the
persistent energy with which an hour ago you systematically worked the
town from end to end, anxiously peering in the windows of uninviting
restaurants until you finally found that little "hole in the wall" for
which you were looking, with the bottle of Tipo Chianti, the succulent
chops and the big red tomatoes, in the window. It is always to be found
if you have the necessary perseverance. The genial Italian proprietor,
with the innate politeness of his countrymen, will not bore you with
questions as to where you have come from, whither you are going, or
what you are walking for, anyway, etc., etc. He accepts you just as you
are--haversack, camera, big stick and all, hanging them without comment
on the hook behind your head; while you simply tell him you want a good
dinner, the best he can give you, but to include the chops, tomatoes and
Tipo Chianti. With a smile and that artistic flip of the napkin under
his arm, which only he can achieve, he sets about giving his orders.
Later on, after a hot bath, a shave and the luxury of a clean shirt,
feeling at peace with the world and refreshed in body and soul, you set
out to examine the town in comfort and at your leisure.
In the mining days, Marysville ranked next to San Francisco, Sacramento
and possibly Stockton, not only in interest but in actual volume of
business transacted. It was the natural outlet for all the foot-hill
country tributary to Grass Valley, Nevada City, and Smartsville. There
the miners outfitted and there, when they had "made their pile,"
they began the process--subsequently completed in Sacramento and San
Francisco--of reducing it to a negligible quantity. That, of course, is
merely a reminiscence, but as the center of one of the most prosperous
grain and fruit-raising sections of the Sacramento Valley, Marysville is
still a place of considerable importance. The old town is very much in
evidence; so much so that, in spite of the numerous modern buildings,
the general effect produced is of age, as age is understood in
California. I doubt if San Francisco before the fire, or Sacramento
today, could show as many substantial, solid buildings dating back to
the fifties.