It might have been worse

We had wired to our cousins, Mr. and Mrs. H., of Fargo, to make a reservation for our party, which they did at the Gardner Hotel. We found a big comfortable hotel, with large rooms, good table, and excellent service. We enjoyed our “stop off” of two days here more than in any other city on our trip. Fargo spells hospitality and “pep.” Our greeting was, “What can we do for you?”

“Find the Packard service station, give us some home-cooking, and let us play golf and tennis.”

“There are only two Packard cars in town, but the manager of the garage owns one and can help you out.”

He did—kind, obliging person! Our second request was granted to the full. Never did fried chicken and creamed potatoes covered with gravy taste so good. We went back the next day and finished up the rest of the chicken. After driving about this charming “up-to-tomorrow” Western city, we went out to the Country Club and the links, and met many truly delightful people.

Western people in the same walk of life as your friends at home are traveled, cultured, broad-minded, most interesting people. I was especially impressed by the women. They think for themselves on the public questions of the hour, and voice their opinions in no uncertain terms. As Philip Gibbs said in his article in Harper’s (“Some People I met in America”), “Desperately earnest about the problems of Peace, intrigued to the point of passion about the policy of President Wilson, divided hopelessly in ideals and convictions, so that husbands and wives had to declare a No Man’s Land between their conflicting views.” It is so in our family. My brother has expressed it aptly: “President Wilson is a state of mind. You are all for him, or not at all.” But Heaven help me to keep politics out of this peaceful narrative!

We found many golfers ahead of us. Mrs. W., the chairman of the house committee, and especial hostess of the day, played with us. She played, as all Western women enter into everything, with enthusiasm. The course was flat, easy, and of nine holes.

But the grasshoppers! I had seen plenty of them on the trip while going through the farming country. They would jump into the car, take a ride on the hood or windshield, get on your veil or down your neck, or collect in family parties on the luggage or in your lap; but that was utter isolation compared to the crop on those links. The seventeen-year locust had nothing on these grasshoppers! On the fairway, when you hit your ball, hundreds would fly up in a cloud and your ball was lost to sight. You walked on a carpet of them. It reminded you of “the slaughter of the innocents.” Your clothes were covered with them. When I sat down at the third tee, I heard a crunching noise, unlike anything I ever experienced. Mrs. W. called out—alas! too late—“Oh, you mustn’t sit down until you shake the grasshoppers out of your skirts. You will ruin your clothes.” That white satin skirt has been boiled, parboiled, dry-cleaned, and hung in the sun, but the back looks bilious and pea-green in spots! When I got back to the hotel, I found them inside of my blouse and under-linen, and even in my hair and shoes. It is fortunate that they did not bite, or someone else would be writing this tale.

After real afternoon tea, with toast, hot biscuits, and sandwiches (not our ice-cream cones), we drove back to the city and dined and talked until the lights were put out in the hotel and the elevator man had gone to sleep. We were told of the fine roads through North Dakota, “but not in bad weather; then you will have to reckon with the gumbo.” “Gumbo” is described by Webster as “soup, composed of okra, tomatoes, etc.” But that learned gentleman never drove after a rainstorm in North Dakota.

The next morning the sky looked threatening, but we started out for Jamestown, one hundred miles away. All went well until noon, when a gentle drizzle set in, and we put up the top, stopped under a big tree, had our lunch, and waited until the supposed shower was over. Farther west it had poured; we noticed that the cars coming in were covered with mud, and concluded that they had come over country roads. Surely not the National Parks Highway! So down went the top, and off we started in a wet atmosphere, but not really raining. The chains had not been disturbed since they were comfortably stowed away on leaving New York. One man advised us to put them on, but with a superior don’t-believe-we-will-need-them air we left our tree shelter. He called out after us, “Say, strangers, you don’t know what you all are getting into.” We didn’t, but we jolly soon found out! In ten minutes we had met gumbo, and were sliding, swirling, floundering about in a sea of mud! I will try to describe it. A perfectly solid (apparently) clay road can become as soft as melted butter in an hour. Try to picture a narrow road, with deep ditches, and just one track of ruts, covered with flypaper, vaseline, wet soap, molasses candy (hot and underdone), mire, and any other soft, sticky, slippery, hellish mess that could be mixed—and even that would not be gumbo!

“Thank God for the ruts!” we devoutedly exclaimed. If you once got out of the ruts, your car acted as if it were drunk. It slid, zigzagged, slithered, first headed for one ditch, and then slewed across the road. It acted as if bewitched. We had passed several cars abandoned in the ditch, and those ahead of us, even with chains on, were doing a new version of a fox trot. The road grew worse, the mire deeper. The ruts were now so deep that we just crawled along, and, to prevent getting stalled, we pulled out of them. In a shorter time than it takes to write it, our left front wheel was down in the ditch and the car lying across the road, and stuck fast. That was all that prevented us from being ditched. There we were, unable to move. We had not tried to walk in gumbo. That was an added experience. All three of us got out to see what could be done. It would be impossible to jack the car up there and put on the chains; the jack would have sunk out of sight. And no car could pass us. Your feet stuck in the gumbo so that when you pulled up one foot a mass of mire as large as a market-basket stuck to it, or your shoe came off, and you frantically slid and floundered around until you got it on again. We thought of a dozen clever things to do, if we could only have walked. There was a farmhouse half a mile ahead where no doubt we could have hired a team to pull us out. But how could we get there? My sympathies are all with the fly caught on sticky flypaper! In a short time, a Dodge car came up back of us, a man driving it, with his wife, his son, a boy of fifteen, and a small girl. Being a light car in comparison, and having chains on, they fared better; but they could not pass. They offered to pull us back onto the road. Fortunately we had brought a wire cable with us. This was attached to both cars, and then both tried to back. Did we budge? No such luck! All hands got to work, sliding around like drunken sailors, and filled in back of our wheels with stones, sticks, cornstalks, and dry grass. After being stuck there just one hour, we got back onto the road and into the ruts, and slowly we crawled up to the top of a hill, where some guiding angel had scattered ashes and sand. We got to a dry, grassy spot, where a sadder and wiser driver put on the chains. How did we get there, Toodles and I? Those blessed Dodge people invited us to stand on their running-boards while they crawled up the hill. Later we overtook them having tire troubles, and we were glad to be able to return their kindness. The next lovely job was to clean our shoes. Nothing can stick worse than gumbo, and we had been soaked in it. Needless to say that our shoes were ruined, but we were lucky it was not the car.

So, with care, and crawling about five miles an hour, still slipping and sliding like eels, we covered the forty miles into Jamestown. The hotel dining-room was closed, and we had supper in a Chinese restaurant, then went to have our shoes cleaned in what had been before July 1st a typical Western saloon. It was filled with miners and cowboys playing billiards, and a villainous automatic piano playing rag-time. We sat up in the chairs while a “China-boy” dug at the gumbo, now hard as stone. One Westerner stood there taking us all in, and drawled, “You folks must have struck gumbo.” We had; but then again—“It might have been worse.”