MUD!!
We have struck it!
It looks pretty much as though our motor trip to San Francisco were going
to end in Rochelle, Illinois.
Thirty-six miles out of Chicago we met the Lincoln Highway and from the
first found it a disappointment. As the most important, advertised and
lauded road in our country, its first appearance was not engaging. If it
were called the cross continent _trail_ you would expect little, and be
philosophical about less, but the very word “highway” suggests macadam at
the least. And with such titles as “Transcontinental” and “Lincoln” put
before it, you dream of a wide straight road like the Route Nationale of
France, or state roads in the East, and you wake rather unhappily to the
actuality of a meandering dirt road that becomes mud half a foot deep
after a day or two of rain!
Still we went over it easily enough until we passed De Kalb.[3] After
that the only “highway” attributes left were the painted red, white
and blue signs decorating the telegraph poles along the way. The
highway itself disappeared into a wallow of mud! The center of the road
was slightly turtle-backed; the sides were of thick, black ooze and
ungaugeably deep, and the car was _possessed_, as though it were alive,
to pivot around and slide backward into it. We had no chains with us, and
had passed no places where we could get any. Apart from the difficulty
of keeping going on chainless tires our only danger, except that of
being bogged, was in getting over the bridges that had no railings to
their approaches. The car chasséd up every one, swung over toward the
embankment, slewed back on the bridge, went across that steadily, and
dove into the mud again! It certainly was dampening to one’s ardor for
motoring. If the Lincoln Highway was like this what would the ordinary
road be after it branched away at Sterling?
A little car on ahead was slithering and sliding around too, although it
had four chains on it, but it did not sink in very far and it was getting
along much better than we were—so much better in fact, that at the end of
a few miles it slowly wobbled beyond our sight.
Finally we turned a bend and there was a little car on ahead. Not the
same one however. This one evidently had no chains and was coming toward
us drunkenly staggering from side to side. Gradually the lower half of
it was hidden by the incline of an intervening bridge, then suddenly it
disappeared altogether. When we arrived at the bridge ourselves we saw
the car in a deep ditch almost over on its side. The occupants of it, a
man and a small boy, were both out and nothing, apparently, was hurt. The
small boy was having a heavenly time paddling around in mud way above his
knees, and the man called up to us cheerfully:
“’Twas m’own fault; I hadn’t ought to ’a’ come without chains on! No use
for you to stop, thank you! You couldn’t help any and we’d only block
th’road between us. A team’ll be along before long!”
Regretfully we left them and slipped and slid and staggered on for some
miles more.
“Oh,” said Celia in the back, “how are we ever going up _that_?” “That”
was an awful embankment ahead which to look at made me feel as if I had
eaten nothing for a week. It was steep, narrow, turtle-backed, with black
slime, and had a terrifying drop at either side of its treacherous and
unguarded edges. The car went snorting up the incline until, nearly at
the top point where the drop was steepest, it balked and slid toward the
edge——!
“This is the end,” I thought, wondering in the same second if any of
us would fall clear. For one of those eternity-laden moments we seemed
to hang poised on the brink. Then E. M. seemed almost to lift the huge
weight of the machine around bodily and compel it in spite of its
helplessness to crawl up, up, up on the bridge.
Glancing back at Celia, after we were safely over, she looked about as
chalky and weak-kneed as I felt. A short distance further, however, we
ran on the brick pavement of a town. The ragged red-brick buildings
of the street we turned into were not very encouraging and we feared
that again the Blue Book’s hotel description might be one of those
“complimentary” ones, consisting of its paid advertisement. E. M. urged
our trying to get chains and going on to Davenport, but Celia and I had
all the motoring in the mud that we cared about. No matter how squalid
the town, or how poor the accommodations, we meant to cross no more
bridges like that last one until the roads dried! Then we made two turns
like a letter Z and found ourselves in the sweetest, cleanest, newest
little town imaginable. Its streets were all wide and smoothly paved with
brick, and its houses, mostly white, were set each in a garden of trim
and clipped green. There was a new post-office of marble magnificence and
a shopping center of big-windowed, fresh-painted, enterprising stores,
but no hotel except a dingy ramshackle tavern that we took for granted
was the one mentioned in the guide book. We wondered if one of the neat,
sweet little houses might perhaps take us to board instead.
In front of a garage was a man with a blue coat and brass buttons, and
“Fire Chief” on them. We asked him if he knew anyone at whose house we
could stay until the road dried. He looked at us and then at the car in
a quizzical sort of way.
“Oh, y-es,” he drawled. “You could put up at Mrs. Blake’s, I guess.”
We asked the way to Mrs. Blake’s and then happened to remark that it was
curious a town as up-to-date as this one had no good hotel. He lost his
drawl immediately: “No good hotel? Well, I just guess there is a good
hotel! The Collier Inn is just across that street and around the corner.
It’s a fine hotel.”
We cheered up instantly. But why hadn’t he told us that sooner? He
thought that “considerin’ we had asked for a boarding-house, mebbe th’
hotel it was too high-priced for us, but it was a fine hotel if we didn’t
mind the cost.”
I don’t know how we had missed it. It was a fair-sized yellow brick
building on a corner, a rather typical small-town commercial hotel. I
went in expecting dingy darkness. The lobby looked like the office in
a Maine summer resort. I asked—not that I for a moment expected to get
it—for rooms with baths. The proprietor said, “Certainly,” and showed me
three new little rooms, each with a little new bathroom attached.
I returned to my companions grinning like a Cheshire cat. It seemed to us
as though we had found a veritable Ritz!