The Friendly Road | Page 6

catbirds and orioles
are here. The oaks are not yet in full leaf, but the maples have nearly
reached their full mantle of verdure--they are very beautiful and
charming to see.
It is curious how at this moment of the year all the world seems astir. I
suppose there is no moment in any of the seasons when the whole army
of agriculture, regulars and reserves, is so fully drafted for service in
the fields. And all the doors and windows, both in the little villages and
on the farms, stand wide open to the sunshine, and all the women and
girls are busy in the yards and gardens. Such a fine, active, gossipy,
adventurous world as it is at this moment of the year!
It is the time, too, when all sorts of travelling people are afoot. People
who have been mewed up in the cities for the winter now take to the
open road--all the peddlers and agents and umbrella-menders, all the
nursery salesmen and fertilizer agents, all the tramps and scientists and
poets--all abroad in the wide sunny roads. They, too, know well this
hospitable moment of the spring; they, too, know that doors and hearts
are open and that even into dull lives creeps a bit of the spirit of
adventure. Why, a farmer will buy a corn planter, feed a tramp, or listen
to a poet twice as easily at this time of year as at any other!
For several days I found myself so fully occupied with the bustling life
of the Road that I scarcely spoke to a living soul, but strode straight
ahead. The spring has been late and cold: most of the corn and some of
the potatoes are not yet in, and the tobacco lands are still bare and
brown. Occasionally I stopped to watch some ploughman in the fields:
I saw with a curious, deep satisfaction how the moist furrows, freshly
turned, glistened in the warm sunshine. There seemed to be something
right and fit about it, as well as human and beautiful. Or at evening I
would stop to watch a ploughman driving homeward across his new
brown fields, raising a cloud of fine dust from the fast drying furrow
crests. The low sun shining through the dust and glorifying it, the

weary-stepping horses, the man all sombre-coloured like the earth itself
and knit into the scene as though a part of it, made a picture exquisitely
fine to see.
And what a joy I had also of the lilacs blooming in many a dooryard,
the odour often trailing after me for a long distance in the road, and of
the pungent scent at evening in the cool hollows of burning brush heaps
and the smell of barnyards as I went by--not unpleasant, not
offensive--and above all, the deep, earthy, moist odour of
new-ploughed fields.
And then, at evening, to hear the sound of voices from the dooryards as
I pass quite unseen; no words, but just pleasant, quiet intonations of
human voices, borne through the still air, or the low sounds of cattle in
the barnyards, quieting down for the night, and often, if near a village,
the distant, slumbrous sound of a church bell, or even the rumble of a
train--how good all these sounds are! They have all come to me again
this week with renewed freshness and impressiveness. I am living deep
again!
It was not, indeed, until last Wednesday that I began to get my fill,
temporarily, of the outward satisfaction of the Road--the primeval
takings of the senses--the mere joys of seeing, hearing, smelling,
touching. But on that day I began to wake up; I began to have a desire
to know something of all the strange and interesting people who are
working in their fields, or standing invitingly in their doorways, or so
busily afoot in the country roads. Let me add, also, for this is one of the
most important parts of my present experience, that this new desire was
far from being wholly esoteric. I had also begun to have cravings which
would not in the least be satisfied by landscapes or dulled by the sights
and sounds of the road. A whiff here and there from a doorway at
mealtime had made me long for my own home, for the sight of Harriet
calling from the steps:
"Dinner, David."
But I had covenanted with myself long before starting that I would
literally "live light in spring." It was the one and primary condition I
made with myself--and made with serious purpose--and when I came
away I had only enough money in my pocket and sandwiches in my
pack to see me through the first three or four days. Any man may
brutally pay his way anywhere, but it is