Читать книгу Across America by Motor-cycle - C. K. Shepherd - Страница 7

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The scenery now began to look charming. Rolling ranges of hills extending into the distance clustered around as we drew nearer to the Chesapeake River, which flows into the well-known bay to which it gives its name.

"All aboard for Chesapeake Bay."

… I hummed the air to myself as the road abruptly ended and a suspension bridge continued the course across the broad, peaceful mouth of the river. The whole country around seemed to be permeated with a comfortable, wholesome vigour. Nothing seemed shabby, discontented, or poverty-stricken. I passed through many small towns and embryo cities. All were prosperous and all extended a hearty welcome to the traveller or visitor. Stretched across the road between two poles, just before I entered one little town, was a huge white banner bearing the words:—

"CONWAY CITY WELCOMES YOU.

WE LIKE TRAVELLERS TO VISIT US.

HAVE A GOOD LOOK AT OUR CITY."

Conway "City" did not prove to be exactly a metropolis. It was probably nothing more than a well-to-do farm town. But the houses were clean and neat, indeed some of them were very beautiful, perfectly up-to-date but never objectionably modern. The roads were a bit bumpy in places but not at all bad as American roads go. As I passed out of the town I saw another notice similar to the first:—

"THANK YOU FOR COMING.

WE HOPE YOU LIKE US.

COME AGAIN."

I got so used to being welcomed to every town I came to that I forgot I was a "stranger" in a "foreign land." There was not a town or village that did not publish its welcome in some form or other. In the main it was by advertisements. But if I stopped at a wayside store to quench my thirst (oh, the sun was hot!) I was met neither with scowls nor incivility. I am reminded of the old joke of Punch many years ago:—

"Oo's that bloke over theer, Bill?"

"Dunno; stranger, I think."

"'Eave 'arf a brick at 'im."

That is typical of what we English think of strangers. The man of better education or more refinement perhaps expresses himself differently, but he feels just the same as a rule.

At this juncture in my reveries the macadam road stopped and gave way to "natural gravel." That was quite sufficient to postpone any soliloquies I may have been indulging in until a later date. The entire sixty seconds in every minute were employed in keeping myself substantially upright. Small pot-holes gave place to larger ones, and they in turn to larger still. The loose sand, which was an inch or two deep at the start, soon assumed more considerable depths. As the detective books of our youth used to say, "The plot grew thicker and thicker." I was floundering about from right to left, prodding energetically on the ground each side with my feet to maintain some kind of balance. At times the back wheel churned up the sand aimlessly in an endeavour to get a grip on something solid. Here and there the sand and gravel were heaped into great ridges as if a mighty plough had been along that way. Getting through this stuff, thought I, was no joke. Furthermore, it was warm work; very warm work. Now and then I would find myself directed absolutely without control from one side of the road to the other, and only with the greatest strain could I keep the machine on its wheels. And with all this the "highway" still maintained its regulation width of 90 feet! The casual observer from an aeroplane above would in all probability be attracted by its straightness, its whiteness, and its apparent uniformity. "What a splendid road!" he would think.

Not so I. I was on the point of physical exhaustion with the seemingly-endless paddling and pushing and heaving (and don't forget the half-hundred-weight bag on my back!) when I was thrown on to a steeply-cambered part of the road at the side. The back wheel just slid limply sideways down the slope and left everything reposing peacefully in the natural gravel of Maryland.

When I had extricated myself from under the machine, I surveyed the position with a critical eye. What a road for a civilized country! These Yanks must be jolly-well mad to tolerate such roads as this!

Just then an old Ford came by. It was shorn entirely of mudguards, running boards, and other impedimenta. As he wallowed past me, swaying to this side and that, sometimes pointing at right angles to the way he was going and with his old engine buzzing away in bottom gear and clouds of steam issuing from his radiator (it had no cap; it must have blown off!) the driver seemed perfectly at ease. He rolled a cigar stump from one corner of his mouth to the other and gazed nonchalantly ahead. I don't think he even noticed me and my recumbent motor-cycle. I could not repress a grin as his old box of tricks disappeared slowly up the road, wagging its tail this way and that and narrowly averting a catastrophe at every few yards. "You ragtime bunch of tin merchants!" I mused (not so much in reference to the driver as to the nation in general!) as his diminishing form finally side-slipped into the ditch at a bend in the road.

And then a distressing thought struck me: "They'll never believe me when I get back home and tell them!" So I took my little camera out of the tool-box on the top tube and snapped the worst bit of road there and then. A five minutes' struggle followed, in which "Khaki Lizz" was withdrawn from her ditch.

By way of nourishment to sustain me in any further fights with the road, I slowly and meditatively consumed one only orange before proceeding once more.

But things did not improve. Here and there, where the ridges of soil and gravel had not been disturbed, grew tufts of grass and weeds. Huge ruts, crossing and recrossing in the remaining sand, showed where cars were wont to pass as fancy dictated, and with only two wheels it was barely possible to maintain any progress at all.

"Hang it all! This is TOO much!" I exclaimed, after a few more precipitate dismounts—and took another photo and ate another orange.

A mile or two farther on I came to a weird-looking machine at the side of the road. It was a sort of combination of steam tractor and automatic plough, but very much bigger and more complicated. Its main function was to chop down en masse the sides and banks of the road and shovel the debris into the middle. Grass, shrubs, bushes, and young trees alike fell victims to its activities. Now this really was the limit! Not satisfied with the condition of the road as it was, they sent forth this "Heath Robinson" mechanism to improve it. I stopped and left the bike standing in the road where it was—there was no need to prop it up against anything—and went back to question the driver of this implement as to its function in life.

He was not perturbed in the slightest either at my question or at the heated state of mind and body in which I approached him. Punctuated by intervals in which he slowly masticated a worn-out chunk of chewing-gum, he explained that all good motorists liked wide roads; that the State Council had decided that motorists should have wide roads; that they had provided machines for widening roads that at present were not up to standard width; and finally that he was there to see that this machine did its work properly!