MUDDIER!
The morning looked gray but having gone easily enough the day before with
chains on, we no longer worried about a little rain. Nevertheless, we
left our beautiful rooms at the Black Hawk in Davenport, Iowa, the best
accommodations at the most reasonable rates that we have yet had, with a
regret that has since been doubly intensified.
For seventy-five miles beyond Davenport the road was excellent; not
macadam, but a wide dustless surface of natural clay. The country was
very much like that in southern New York and eastern New Jersey—a rolling
picturesque landscape of green fields, beautiful trees and streams. As
there were black clouds gradually coming up behind us, and we had as
usual forgotten to bring any food except our tinned collection, it seemed
wiser when we got to Iowa City to buy some sandwiches rather than stop at
the Hotel Jefferson, and give the black clouds a chance to catch up. At
an eating-place that had a sign on it: “Every Sort of Sandwiches Ready,”
a gum-chewing youth leaning against the shelves behind the counter pushed
a greasy bill of fare toward me. From a list of chicken, ham, tongue,
and cheese sandwiches, I ordered three chicken—we could not do with less
and I doubted if we’d care for more. They hadn’t any chicken! “Ham,
then?” There wasn’t any ham! “Tongue?” The youth thought if we weren’t in
a hurry he might be able to get some canned tongue at the grocer’s down
the street; the only sandwiches he had ready were of cheese laid between
huge hunks of bread and each garnished with a radish skewered on the top
with a toothpick!
Celia meanwhile by chance discovered an apartment called “Woman’s Rest
Room” where she got some delicious homemade coffee-cake and rolls. Those
with our own potted meats or jams were, of course, all anyone could ask.
That is always the difficulty—a stranger in town has no idea where to go
for anything.
From a point about ten miles beyond Iowa City, the story of that dreadful
day ought to be written in indigo of the darkest shade. It was such
an experience as to dampen your enthusiasm as an adventuring motorist
forever; but that leaves you at least a great appreciation of Pullman
trains, or even old-fashioned stage coaches—any means of conveyance that
can keep going, right end first.
Our delay in foraging had given the black clouds time to gain on us.
But after observing them uneasily for a mile or two, we felt confident
that we were keeping ahead of them, until about ten miles further, at
which point we had a puncture—our very first—and the rain caught us. We
debated whether we had better go back to Iowa City or whether we should
try to run one hundred and thirty miles in the rain to Des Moines.
E. M. was not at all enthusiastic about going on. In fact he had not
wanted to leave Davenport. As he is certainly not apt to care about
weather we ought to have paid exceptional attention to his dubiousness.
But he only said something about a strain on his engine, to which I paid
no great attention—as I feel perfectly confident that no matter what
happens, he is not going to let that engine get hurt very much if it is
in his power to prevent it. The engine is to him what Chicago is to the
Chicagoans, the very child of his heart; its every little piece of steel
or aluminum as personally precious to him as a baby’s tooth or curl is
to its doting parent. We can all be tired and hungry, wet or cold, or
broiling and thirsty, it means nothing to him so long as that engine is
comfortably purring under its bonnet. But the slightest complaint on its
part, its faintest squeak or grumble, the smallest thing that he feels
may disagree with it, and he is unspeakably miserable.
However, the rain seemed to be only a drizzle and the roads looked so
hard and splendid, we concluded it would surely take many hours of
downpour to get them in a bad condition—if in fact they were likely to be
much affected at all. So although as a precaution E. M. put on chains,
we went on in tranquil ignorance of the Nemesis that lurked in waiting.
As an illustration of what rain in Iowa can do, twenty-five minutes of
drizzle turned the smooth, hard surface of the road into the consistency
of gruel. Not only that, but as though it were made in layers, and the
top layer slid off the under layers and the under layers slipped out
between, or the reverse. Our wheels, even with chains on, had no more
hold than revolving cakes of soap might have on slanting wet marble.
The car not only zigzagged sideways, backwards, every way but forward,
unless some unexpected obstacle or pitfall loomed or yawned in our
path, in which case it was seized with an impetuous desire to plunge
to destruction. We saw two unfortunate automobiles already landed in
the ditch. One, luckily, was being hauled out by a team, but the second
was on a lonely stretch of road, and embedded far above the hubs. Its
occupants peered out at us sympathetically, as they saw we were utterly
powerless to help. We were just balancing this way and that, and for a
while it looked as though we were going to park ourselves beside them. We
could only call out as we finally slithered by, that we would send back a
team from a town ahead—if we ever got to one.
At the end of an hour of this swerving, crawling misery, we had a second
puncture. There was a barn near by, and the farmer, a German, let us
drive in and change the tire under cover. We asked if there was any
town nearer and less out of our course than Cedar Rapids. Or would he
himself, or perhaps one of his neighbors, take us in? No, he did not
want any boarders in his house; he said it with a quite surly manner;
his neighbors had no liking for strangers, either. Cedar Rapids was our
nearest place.
In contrast to the kindness with which he had motioned us to come
into his barn in the first place, it struck us that he was on closer
acquaintance, surprisingly curt. But it was not until afterwards, in
the light of later experience, that we realized his manner had become
intentionally unfriendly.
The tire changing went very quickly, and in a few minutes we were on the
road again. Celia and I ate our luncheon, but E. M., struggling with the
zigzagging car, had no thought for food and ate only a mouthful or two
that I fed him as he drove. It was by now pouring hard and we seemed to
be making less and less progress. One thing, we now quite understood what
our friend the fire chief meant when he said the road around Rochelle was
only a little muddy. Without hesitating a moment we would be willing to
swear that the mud championship of the world belongs to Iowa. Illinois
mud is slippery and slyly eager to push unstable tourists into the ditch,
but in Iowa it lurks in unfathomable treachery, loath to let anything
ever get out again that once ventures into it. Our progress through it
became hideously like that of a fly crawling through yellow flypaper—as
though it were a question of time how soon we would be brought to an
exhausted end, and sink into it forever!
At the end of two hours more, we had gone ten miles. Cedar Rapids was
still nearly twenty miles away. _Twenty miles!_ Could anyone in a
lifetime go so far as that? Could any machine hold out so endlessly? In
another hour we had gone only four miles further, and by no means sure
of our road, and then came a third puncture! It was one of those last
straws that seem to finish everything. You think you just can’t live
through it and struggle more. Much better give up and _lie_ down in the
fly-paper and stay there. We were at the top of a fairly steep hill, so
that we might perhaps be able to go on again, but to see E. M., already
exhausted, and not a soul to help him, get out again into that drenching
rain—he had no raincoat and the mud was over his shoetops—and we had
started on the trip in the first place because he had been ill—I could
easily have burst into tears. Which exhibition of courage would have
helped the situation such a lot!
[Illustration: HOURS AND HOURS, ACROSS LAND AS FLAT AND ENDLESS AS THE
OCEAN]
Meanwhile he was having a hopeless time trying to jack the car up. There
was no foundation for the jack to stand on, so that it merely burrowed
down into the clay. Some men lounged out of the one house near by. They
were Germans. All the inhabitants seemed to be German. They approached
with seeming friendliness, but on closer inspection of us, their
demeanor noticeably changed. There was something in our appearance they
did not like. I thought possibly they resented our car’s waltzing, or
thought that E. M.’s jack was harmfully puncturing the surface of their
beautiful road. Two of them shrugged their shoulders and all of them
looked at us in impassive silence that was neither friendly nor polite.
Then a younger man appeared who came forward as though to offer to help,
but stopping to look inquisitively at the radiator top, he too, grew
sullen. And then we understood! The emblem of the Royal Automobile Club
of London was put on when we were in England last year; and as it is very
pretty, we happen never to have taken it off, and the men were Germans!
That’s why they wouldn’t help us. We had asked for a piece of plank that
one of them was holding; the man carried it away. Finally, when that
dreadful tire was at last on, they would not even tell us the way until I
asked in German. Then one of them laconically pointed it out.
Hot, tired, and soaked as a drowned rat, E. M. for three and a half hours
longer guided the steaming, floundering and irresponsible machine until
at last by supreme effort he got us to Cedar Rapids.