'I Hear You Calling Me'

by Hugh Pendexter

“I Hear You
Calling Me”

^by Hugh Pendexter
AUTHOR or “TIBERIUS SMITH,” “CAMP AND TRAIL SERIES,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HARRY GRANT DART

ACCORDING to the latest census returns, there are more than two hundred thousand Lovers Leaps in this country. I have visited some eighteen hundred of them, and was early convinced that the principal occupation of the aboriginal American females was to hurl themselves from a stern and rock-bound coast or overhanging cliff rather than to embrace the hazards of matrimony. So far as I can figure out, the primeval landscape was continuously cluttered up with dusky maidens scurrying to the highlands in search of good jumping-off places. In some cases, I have no doubt, the men-folks did the jumping.

Be that as it may, I now know why the Indians are so scarce. If the precipitous territory had held out, there wouldn't be enough redskins alive to-day to furnish a Wild-West show.

I also kept a running total of the various Devil's Washbowls, Devil's Bath-tubs, Devil's Basins, till my adding-machine broke down; and I can confidently assert that they are to-day trotting the Lovers Leaps a dead heat, while incidentally revealing that his Unwholesome Majesty spent much of his time in the old days in natatorial pursuits or in performing his ablutions.

There are skeptics who will jeer at this, and aver that many a Lovers Leap was known as “McCartys Quarry” or “Beans Ledge” till the invasion of summer company demanded a bit of euphonic catering to the romantically inclined, and that the legend of La-la-ha-ha loping from leap to leap till she found the best leaping-place in the county is but a recent invention of the transportation company's publicity bureau. And similar lese-majesty is daily being committed anent divers Devils diving-places.

But let that be as it may or otherwise: I hear the railroad and steamboat booklets calling me—although the tracery of last summers sunburn has not yet worn away—and I will persist in believing what I read in the advertisements. I pride myself on putting up a good fight against this migratory dementia. I did all a prudent man could do once he had learned the nature of his disease. I have been vaccinated and insured against it; I have taken quarts of anti-vacation toxin. Useless! I bestirred myself too late. The doctor persons found the walls of the Erie canal were hopelessly infected, and that the Ore. Short Line ganglion show-ed an abnormal reflex action, while the Atch. Top. peduncle was all out of proportion.

With a sweep and surge the fever returns each midwinter, and by spring I am fairly engulfed, sinking for the third time with a bunch of transportation literature clutched in either hand. Then I embrace the village station-agent and fare forth to snare the Ethiopian in his native Pullman. The haughty person in blue condescends to mutilate my brand-new ticket, jams a laundry check in my eye, and I'm off for the newly railroad-discovered Eden.

I have known men to withstand the disease for years by sternly chucking aside unread the insidious and highly lithographed circulars, only to succumb once they forgot and opened a fervid description of

“Nature's Rest Cure,”

“The Playground of the Nation,”

“Everybody Lives to be a Hundred in the Mussussussupicook Region.”

Yes, sir! Just one tiny glance and the travel germ has secured a toe-hold. Only a blind man is immune.

The finishing stroke is usually a chromatic debauch, rioting in high lakes, depicting the “Inside Route to Fairyland,” with a brunette man in peek-a-boo anklets good-naturedly allowing his spouse to tote a load of yams on her head, one hand gracefully draped on high like a bunch of grapes. Then is the conquest completed, and the railroads and steamboats own that man heart and soul.

Poor fool! He may not believe it. He may not even suspect the truth. He may think he is dwelling upon the question of a vacation in an indifferent, tentative sort of way. During April and May he may even publicly pooh-pooh the idea of taking a “rest.” But subconsciously and submarinely he has memorized:

“Don't you heat Mother Nature calling you) Don't you hear the melodic tinkle of the mountain brook) Can't you feel the cool spray of the health-giving ocean wave) Don't you taste the balsamic aroma of the cathedral-pines)

And hes a goner. Not even the world-series could hold him. He recks not that the circuses have been plundered of their best word building artists. He only knows his travel temperature has zipped some thirty degrees above normal by June fifteenth, and that as soon as he can secure his laundry he's off for Broad View Farm, Cundys Harbor, or the Wild River Region.

SINKING FOR THE THIRD TIME.

Thats the great beauty of a railway or steamboat booklet. Every region the engine snorts through or the boat coughs by is “Gods country.” However, if you are comfortably located hence, you must hasten thither before you can feel the “lure.” There something all-powerful will hold you till September comes to the rescue and you've wired home for money. Its great! Of course beauty-spots are laid away in lavender on the approach of fall, for the transportation people know the kiddies must be back in school and the men at work. Broad View Farm pays off the Echo, the tame bear in the Wild River country joins the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the hardy salts at Cimdys Harbor drop the price of clams some fifty per cent, per peck, and the country returns to normal.

Dear, dear! How I used to puzzle and fret over it all! How I sought to pry into the psychology of the dementia and ascertain by rule of three why the man on the Allagash should find pleasures climax in buying pop-corn at Nantasket, while the average Jerseyite could sigh only for the wild, black-fly reaches of the Ontonagon.

Families snugly ostermoored on the Maine coast proclaimed at Moosehead Lake that they “couldn't stand the coast.” At the same time an old man at Kineo confided to me that his life-long ambition was to quit the virgin forests of his ideal environment and haste to Lake Maranacook (an eighth of an inch long on the map), “jest to git a sniff of the salt water.” As he thus confessed, he slyly produced a worn folder and with tremulous finger pointed out the meager Mecca of his desire and softly read aloud the railways eulogy on the same. Geographically he was wrong, logically and artistically he was wrong; but enthusiastically, migratorially, and time-tabley he was right.

Up among the Oxford hills in the Pine Tree State (mostly spruce trees now) are enchanting chains of lakes and amiable mountains. Travelers from all quarters of the globe have halted their world-wide pilgrimages there to linger by the pellucid waters and sing their praises, while they envied those who possessed the daily companionship of such a variety of natural perfections. But when the loco months of July and August (clerks go in July, bosses in August) snoop down upon those fortunate people, do they joyously hike to the aforesaid pellucid waters for their outings?

Not to pay an election bet!

And why? Because their quaint and pleasing villages have been flexed with pxtsters and circulars and booklets setting forth the charms, the health-manufacturing germs, of some other place down the line—and away go the natives to a stretch of burnt sand, smelly of clams and fish, where the neighbors are as gregarious as a boiled dinner.

And so it unwinds. A family in Lubec, after reading a “Big Game” pamphlet, flee from the grand old coast and succulent fogs, to visit a cousin on Dead River. Then they hurry home to entertain their impatient host in turn; for he has been brooding and sighing over the coastwise summer schedule. It's much like taking in each others washings.

Before I had diagnosed my disease, when I innocently took travelogues to my bosom, one and ail, I would say in May, “Ah, spring has came!” By the first of June I would find myself frequenting the railway station, feverish to obtain more travel literature.

Then followed fitful slumbers, with diagrams of the country's railways ever dancing through my dreams. July first found me madly fighting for a seat on an outgoing train and greatly pjeeved to discover the track blocked for a few hours by an influx of incomers.

At last came that maturer moment when I took a mental birds-eye view of the entire nation, and beheld the whole people (or all who hdd the price of a ticket) surging to the crest of mountains, ebbing and creeping into the hollows of the hills, or flowing steadily down to the coast. The truth seeped in slowly. No flash, no inspiration, no quick intake of the breath; rather a steady, sluggish conviction, and I was awake—but hopelessly committed.

Then, at last, I knew why the man from the Bay State hastens to the deep blue of Ontario, while a native of the Adirondacks snatches passage on a south-bound fruit steamer, hununing betimes, “Robbed in the Cradle of the Deep.”

At last I knew why folks up in northern Vermont, where they don't consider it good sleighing till they've used the snow for three years, should shed their lethargy with their woolen socks, and with glittering eye scan the company's half-tones of the rugged haunts of a Nova Scotia tide. The hypnotic spell exuded from the Painted Pamphlets! I knew!

It was far different in the old days, when father would hitch up a span and take the whole family for a carriage-drive for a couple of weeks, covering on an average ten miles a day and finding his way home on a magnificent hundred-mile circle, with no traveling done on Sunday. A few of the neighbors would keep up a clip of twenty miles a day, but they were joy riders and were held in disrepute. No; a hundred miles was going some, with frequent stops along the way.

One always planned such a trip where kinsmen grew thickly, and we called it “cousining.”

That modicum of nomading would let us out for a year. And believe me, the time Herm Whitten ventured as far as Boston and took the next train home without leaving the station, it excited no laughter when he swimg limply off at our little station and, pointing in mild wonder at the agents canine, queried, “Same old dog?”

Gone are those times and those manners, together with the buffalo and the wild-whiskered Populist; gone hand in hand with the rare old days when the butcher slung in a piece of liver for the dog. Vanished are they, taking their exit arm in arm with the days when the Dakotas were “Out West,” and Lem Tibbetts used gravely to inform the village oracles that his son (somewhere in Montana) was “way out beyond the West.” Never again will the annual Sunday-school picnic at Hobbs Pond suffice. Never again will the county cattle-show assuage the Wanderlust of the Haley Neighborhood. Vale! and enter the time-table.

“DON'T YOU HEAR MOTHER NATURE CALLING YOU? DON'T YOU HEAR THE MELODIC TINKLE OF THE MOUNTAIN BROOK? CAN'T YOU FEEL THE COOL SPRAY OF THE HEALTH-GIVING OCEAN WAVE?

I do not say those were the halcyon days. They were simply days. The map of the United States did not then resemble a Martian canalscape, nor were the picture post-card and the Sunday newspaper then in our midst. And dear, dear! To think all the changes have been pulled off in less than a hundred years. It simply makes me dizzy when I pause to contemplate what terrific feeding the three hundred thousand miles of railroads and the innumerable coastwise steamboats in this country demand.

When statistics tell me that back in 1904 nearly eight hundred million passengers were carried hither and yon by the rail roads alone, I submit and prepare to keep on contributing my share. They need the money. And so we box the compass in our hegiras, and many a hoss-hair trunk from the Kennebec gives up the ghost among the fronded flora of the South. A man who doesn't change cars as often as he shifts his summer underwear is now classified as a vegetable. For life is on the wing—away, away.

As children we read about “Where rolls the Oregon,” and always pictured a fearsome grandeur and isolation. Now we slap the Oregon on the wrist and tell it to be good till we come again. How beautifully prophetic become the words of that grand old excursion agent, Virgil:

Armed with a trunk-key, canoe—Hullygee! why style us abnormous?

 

“Dye know where I wish I was to-day?” gloomily inquired a native as I stood on the wharf of one of the fairest, coolest, cleanest isles in the Sheepscot River. “I wish I was in Boston.”

“Merciful heavens, man!” I shuddered. “Take back your reckless words before some one wishes the trip on you. Don't you know all the cities are tied for first place in the number of heat prostrations? Don't you know that even the policemen have been driven to drinking beer to keep cool? Don't you know that right now you're enjoying more ozone to the square breath [see coastwise steamer-folder] than you could inhale elsewhere on earth? Don't you know——”

“Ding bust yer ozone,” crossly broke in the native. “I want to go to Boston and see them historic places before they've all been proved to be dern lies. Ive been reading of em in this here writing.” And he solemnly produced “Sightseeing in Boston,” as published by an enterprising road.

“Bah and tush,” I chided. “This place is a million miles ahead of Boston, or I would have remained there. I know—you want to see Paul Reveres Ride and the Old South Church and the Massacre on the Common, and ad infinitum.”

“I don't care about the last,” eagerly cried the native. “But the others—seeing as how ye've been there, spose ye tell me about em.”

Well, my wife has hunted up all those places, so he had no legitimate cause to grin so derisively. Besides, I explained to him that I knew a man in Buffalo who had seen Niagara Falls. As he left me, to dig up additional colonial literature from the hotel time-table rack, I fingered a steamboat-published monograph on the coast aborigines and framed some stinging remarks about his neglecting to explore the clam-shell deposits back of his barn.

Yes; it's due entirely to the advertising of various locales by transportation companies that the necessary billion passengers are being shot from coast to coast.

“Every summer I do the mountains, the lakes, and the coast,” an elderly lady informed me.

“How long does it take you?” I anxiously inquired, studying her enviously.

“Two weeks from the time we leave town,” she proudly replied. “I tried on this trip to squeeze out enough time to do the northern part of the state—I do so dote on the Big Woods. We drove through the edge of them one evening. I couldn't see anything; but the smell of the fir! We've been to all these places this summer.”

A MAN IN BUFFALO WHO HAD SEEN NIAGARA FALLS.

“”

Bless you, I knew she was searching for the inevitable folder, although she is an enemy to railways. “I've marked our stopping places in red,” she complacently added. “See them: Rangeley Lakes, Belgrade Lakes, from Kittery to Bath by coast roads, and—Henry!” The last to her husband, who was nervously seeking to steal motor-car information from the hotel's “How to Do the White Mountains from the the Car Window.”

THE PRINCIPAL OCCUPATION OF THE ABORIGINAL AMERICAN FEMALES WAS TO HURL THEMSELVES FROM A STERN AND ROCK-BOUND CLIFF.

“Henry, did we see the Pepperell Mansion at Kittery Point?” Henry paused and pondered. Then he triumphed: “Yep; thats where we blew out our second tire.” “There! I knew wed seen it,” she exulted. And, whipping out her red pencil, she added another cross to her long line of victims. For good measure she babbled: “We use up on an average fifteen of the Government topography sheets and from now on we must average twenty, Henry says.” Shades of Hobbs Pond picnics and the Haley Neighborhood fairs! Is it any wonder general passenger agents always go into convulsions when a touring-car shoots by?

Our American laurels are not undisputed, Some will remind us that the English are great travelers. So they are; that is, some of them. They have to ship their soldiers all over the world so as to give room for American tourists to land and spend their money. They simply have to get out and travel. Again, our pioneers used to ramble round quite a bit. Our commercial travelers venture up and down the land throughout the winter. But all these are instances of deliberate, cold-blooded travel. Such wanderers can't lay claim to migratory dementia. They're not “called”: they're pushed. Yes, Mister Railroad and Mister Steamboat, we go because we hear you calling us. If the forewarned would escape the microbe, he must scorn the infectious literature as he would scorn a scorpion. And may the good Lord help us when the carriers of human beings take up work of exploiting the Roaring Forties, the lonely Gilberts, and the Andamans. For as a nation well respond, and there wont be enough left at home to do the haying.

Just now I'm in the thralls of desire to go westwarding. At first I fought against it; then read more publicity matter and surrendered. I ought to be satisfied with my present environment, I am satisfied, but I am consumed to heed the call. It's the Painted Desert this time, I detest walking in sand in low shoes. I like fresh, green, friendly, cordial slopes and hills, where you can lead a little child and feel perfectly free to the poor stay-at-home avalanche. I don't like big, sharp, naked, spurs of rock, where Indianesses close both eyes and find good leaping-places. I like it up in Maine ... and yet the pamphlet has clinched me. I don't know whether the Painted Desert is in Mexico or in Painted Post. I only know I hear it calling me.