"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.
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