BY MOTOR TO
THE GOLDEN GATE

“Of course you are sending your servants ahead by train with your luggage and all that sort of thing,” said an Englishman.

A New York banker answered for me: “Not at all! The best thing is to put them in another machine directly behind, with a good mechanic. Then if you break down the man in the rear and your own chauffeur can get you to rights in no time. How about your chauffeur? You are sure he is a good one?”

“We are not taking one, nor servants, nor mechanic, either.”

“Surely you and your son are not thinking of going alone! Probably he could drive, but who is going to take care of the car?”

“Why, he is!”

At that everyone interrupted at once. One thought we were insane to attempt such a trip; another that it was a “corking” thing to do. The majority looked upon our undertaking with typical New York apathy. “Why do anything so dreary?” If we wanted to see the expositions, then let us take the fastest train, with plenty of books so as to read through as much of the way as possible. Only one, Mr. B., was enthusiastic enough to wish he was going with us. Evidently, though, he thought it a daring adventure, for he suggested an equipment for us that sounded like a relief expedition: a block and tackle, a revolver, a pickaxe and shovel, tinned food—he forgot nothing but the pemmican! However, someone else thought of hardtack, after which a chorus of voices proposed that we stay quietly at home!

“They’ll never get there!” said the banker, with a successful man’s finality of tone. “Unless I am mistaken, they’ll be on a Pullman inside of ten days!”

“Oh, you wouldn’t do that, would you?” exclaimed our one enthusiastic friend, B.

I hoped not, but I was not sure; for, although I had promised an editor to write the story of our experience, if we had any, we were going solely for pleasure, which to us meant a certain degree of comfort, and not to advertise the endurance of a special make of car or tires. Nor had we any intention of trying to prove that motoring in America was delightful if we should find it was not. As for breaking speed records—that was the last thing we wanted to attempt!

“Whatever put it into your head to undertake such a trip?” someone asked in the first pause.

“The advertisements!” I answered promptly. They were all so optimistic, that they went to my head. “New York to San Francisco in an X— car for thirty-eight dollars!” We were not going in an X— car, but the thought of any machine’s running such a distance at such a price immediately lowered the expenditure allowance for our own. “Cheapest way to go to the coast!” agreed another folder. “Travel luxuriously in your own car from your own front door over the world’s greatest highway to the Pacific Shore.” Could any motor enthusiasts resist such suggestions? We couldn’t.

We had driven across Europe again and again. In fact I had in 1898 gone from the Baltic to the Adriatic in one of the few first motor-cars ever sold to a private individual. We knew European scenery, roads, stopping-places, by heart. We had been to all the resorts that were famous, and a few that were infamous, but our own land, except for the few chapter headings that might be read from the windows of a Pullman train, was an unopened book—one that we also found difficulty in opening. The idea of going occurred to us on Tuesday and on Saturday we were to start, yet we had no information on the most important question of all—which route was the best to take. And we had no idea how to find out!

The 1914 Blue Book was out of print, and the new one for this year not issued. I went to various information bureaus—some of those whose advertisements had sounded so encouraging—but their personal answers were more optimistic than definite. Then a friend telegraphed for me to the Lincoln Highway Commission asking if road conditions and hotel accommodations were such that a lady who did not want in any sense to “rough it” could motor from New York to California comfortably.

We wasted a whole precious thirty-six hours waiting for this answer. When it came, a slim typewritten enclosure helpfully informed us that a Mrs. Somebody of Brooklyn had gone over the route fourteen months previously and had written them many glowing letters about it. As even the most optimistic prospectus admitted that in 1914 the road was as yet not a road, and hotels along the sparsely settled districts had not been built, it was evident that Mrs. Somebody’s idea of a perfect motor trip was independent of roads or stopping-places.

Meanwhile I had been told that the best information was to be had at the touring department of the Automobile Club. So I went there.

A very polite young man was answering questions with a facility altogether fascinating. He told one man about shipping his car—even the hours at which the freight trains departed. To a second he gave advice about a suit for damages; for a third he reduced New York’s traffic complications to simplicities in less than a minute; then it was my turn:

“I would like to know the best route to San Francisco.”

“Certainly,” he said. “Will you take a seat over here for a moment?”

“This is the simplest thing in the world,” I thought, and opened my notebook to write down a list of towns and hotels and road directions. He returned with a stack of folders. But as I eagerly scanned them, I found they were all familiarly Eastern.

“Unfortunately,” he said suavely, “we have not all our information yet, and we seem to be out of our Western maps! But I can recommend some very delightful tours through New England and the Berkshires.”

“That is very interesting, but I am going to San Francisco.”

His attention was fixed upon a map of the “Ideal Tour.” “The New England roads are very much better,” he said.

“But, you see, San Francisco is where I am going. Do you know which route is, if you prefer it, the least bad?”

“Oh, I see.” He looked sorry. “Of course if you must cross the continent, there is the Lincoln Highway!”

“Can you tell me how much work has been done on it—how much of it is finished? Might it not be better on account of the early season to take a Southern route? Isn’t there a road called the Santa Fé trail?”

“Why, yes, certainly,” said the nice young man. “The road goes through Kansas, New Mexico and Arizona. It would be warmer assuredly.”

“How about the Arizona desert? Can we get across that?”

“That is the question!”

“Perhaps we had better just start out and ask the people living along the road which is the best way farther on?”

The young man brightened at once. “That would have been my suggestion from the beginning.”

Once outside, however, the feasibility of asking our road as we came to it did not seem very practical, so I went to Brentano’s to buy some maps. They showed me a large one of the United States with four routes crossing it, equally black and straight and inviting. I promptly decided upon the one through the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh and St. Louis when two women I knew came in, one of them Mrs. O., a conspicuous hostess in the New York social world, and a Californian by birth. “The very person I need,” I thought. “She knows the country thoroughly and her idea of comfort and mine would be the same.”

“Can you tell me,” I asked her, “which is the best road to California?”

Without hesitating she answered: “The Union Pacific.”

“No, I mean motor road.”

Compared with her expression the worst skeptics I had encountered were enthusiasts. “Motor road to California!” She looked at me pityingly. “There isn’t any.”

“Nonsense! There are four beautiful ones and if you read the accounts of those who have crossed them you will find it impossible to make a choice of the beauties and comforts of each.”

She looked steadily into my face as though to force calmness to my poor deluded mind. “You!” she said. “A woman like you to undertake such a trip! Why, you couldn’t live through it! I have crossed the continent one hundred and sixty odd times. I know every stick and stone of the way. You don’t know what you are undertaking.”

“It can’t be difficult; the Lincoln Highway goes straight across.”

“In an imaginary line like the equator!” She pointed at the map that was opened on the counter. “Once you get beyond the Mississippi the roads are trails of mud and sand. This district along here by the Platte River is wild and dangerous; full of the most terrible people, outlaws and ‘bad men’ who would think nothing of killing you if they were drunk and felt like it. There isn’t any hotel. Tell me, where do you think you are going to stop? These are not towns; they are only names on a map, or at best two shacks and a saloon! This place North Platte why, you couldn’t stay in a place like that!”

I began to feel uncertain and let down, but I said, “Hundreds of people have motored across.”

“Hundreds and thousands of people have done things that it would kill you to do. I have seen immigrants eating hunks of fat pork and raw onions. Could you? Of course people have gone across, men with all sorts of tackle to push their machines over the high places and pull them out of the deep places; men who themselves can sleep on the roadside or on a barroom floor. You may think ‘roughing it’ has an attractive sound, because you have never in your life had the slightest experience of what it can be. I was born and brought up out there and I know.” She quietly but firmly folded the map and handed it to the clerk. “I am sorry,” she said, “if you really wanted to go! By and by maybe if they ever build macadam roads and put up good hotels—but even then it would be deadly dull.”

For about five minutes I thought I had better give it up, and I called up my editor. “It looks as though we could not get much farther than the Mississippi.”

“All right,” he said, cheerfully, “go as far as the Mississippi. After all, your object is merely to find out how far you can go pleasurably! When you find it too uncomfortable, come home!”

No sooner had he said that than my path seemed to stretch straight and unencumbered to the Pacific Coast. If we could get no further information, we would start for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis, as we had many friends in these cities, and get new directions from there, but as a last resort I went to the office of a celebrated touring authority and found him at his desk.

“I would like to know whether it will be possible for me to go from here to San Francisco by motor?”

“Sure, it’s possible! Why isn’t it?”

“I have been told the roads are dreadful and the accommodations worse.”

He surveyed me from head to foot with about the same expression that he might have been expected to use if I had asked whether one could safely travel to Brooklyn.

“You won’t find Ritz hotels every few miles, and you won’t find Central Park roads all of the way. If you can put up with less than that, you can go—easy!” Whereupon he reached up over his head without even looking, took down a map, spread it on the table before him, and unhesitatingly raced his blue pencil up the edge of the Hudson River, exactly as the pencil of Tad draws cartoons at the movies.

“You go here—Albany, Utica, Syracuse.”

“No, please!” I said. “I want to go by way of Pittsburgh and St. Louis.”

“You asked for the best route to San Francisco!” He looked rather annoyed.

“Yes, but I want to go by way of St. Louis.”

“Why do you want to go to St. Louis?”

“Because we have friends there.”

“Well, then, you had better take the train and go and see them!” Indifferently he took down another map and made a few casual blue marks on the mountains of Pennsylvania. “They’re rebuilding roads that will be fine later in the season, but at the moment [April, 1915] all of these places are detours. You’ll get bad grades and mud over your hubs! Of course, if you’re set on going that way, if you want to burn any amount of gasoline, cut your tires to pieces, and strain your engine—go along to St. Louis. It’s all the same to me; I don’t own the roads! But you said you wanted to take a motor trip.”

“Then Chicago is much the best way?”

“It is the only way!”

He did not wait for my agreement, but throwing aside the second map and turning again to the first, his pencil swooped down upon Buffalo and raced to Cleveland as though it fitted in a groove. He seemed to be in a mental aeroplane looking actually down upon the roads below.

“There is a detour you will have to take here. You turn left at a white church. This stretch is dusty in dry weather, but along here,” his pencil had now reached Iowa and Nebraska, “you will have no trouble at all—if it doesn’t rain.”

“And if it rains?”

“Well, you can get out your solitaire pack!”

“For how long?” The vision of the sort of road it must be if that man thought it impassable was hard to imagine.

“Oh, I don’t know; a week or two, even three maybe. But when they are dry there are no faster roads in the country. What kind of a car are you going in?”

I told him proudly. Instead of being impressed by its make and power he remarked: “Humph! You’d better go in a Ford! But suit yourself! At any rate, you can open her wide along here, as wide as you like if the weather is right.” At the foot of the Rocky Mountains his pencil swerved far south.

“Way down there?” I asked. “That is all desert. Can we cross the desert?”

“Why can’t you?” He looked me over from head to foot. I had felt he held small opinion of me from the start. “I only wondered if the roads were passable,” I answered meekly.

“The roads are all right.” He accented the word “roads.”

“I was wondering if there were hotels.”

“And what if there aren’t? Splendid open dry country; won’t hurt anyone to sleep out a night or two. It’d do you good! A doctor’d charge you money for that advice. I’m giving it to you free!”

On the doorstep at home I met my amateur chauffeur.

“Have you found out about routes?” he asked.

“We go by way of Cleveland and Chicago.”

He looked far from pleased. “Is that so much the best way?”

“It is the only way,” and I imitated unconsciously the voice of the oracle of the touring bureau.

One would have thought that we were starting for the Congo or the North Pole! Friends and farewell gifts poured in. It was quite thrilling, although myself in the rôle of a venturesome explorer was a miscast somewhere. Every little while Edwards, our butler, brought in a new package.

One present was a dark blue silk bag about twenty inches square like a pillow-case. At first sight we wondered what to do with it. It turned out afterward to be the most useful thing we had except a tin box, the story of which comes later. The silk bag held two hats without mussing, no matter how they were thrown in, clean gloves, veils, and any odd necessities, even a pair of slippers. The next friend of mine going on a motor trip is going to be sent one exactly like it!

By far the most resplendent of our presents was a marvel of a luncheon basket. Edwards staggered under its massiveness, and we all gathered around its silver-laden contents; bottles and jars, boxes and dishes, flat silver and cutlery, enamelware and glass, food paraphernalia enough to set before all the kings of Europe.

“I could not bear,” wrote the giver, “to think of your starving in the desert.”

Mr. B. brought us a block and tackle and two queer-looking canvas squares that he explained were African water buckets. All we needed further, he told us, were fur sleeping-bags and we would be quite fixed!

Another thing sent us was an air cushion. Air cushions make me feel seasick, but the lady who traveled with us loved them. By the way, we added a passenger at the last moment. On Friday afternoon, a member of our family announced she was going with us to protect us.

“The only thing is,” we said, “there is no place for you to sit except in the back underneath the luggage.”

“I adore sitting under luggage; it is my favorite way of traveling,” she replied. And as we adore her, our party became three.

We had expected to leave New York about nine o’clock in the morning, but at eleven we were still making selections of what we most needed to take with us, and finally choosing the wrong things with an accuracy that amounted to a talent. Besides our regular luggage, the sidewalk was littered with all the entrancing-looking traveling equipment that had been sent us, and nowhere to stow it. By giving it all the floor space of the tonneau, we managed to get the big lunch basket in. Then we helped in the lady who traveled with us and added a collection of six wraps, two steamer rugs, and three dressing-cases, a typewriter, a best big camera and a little better one—with both of which we managed to take the highest possible percentage of worst pictures that anyone ever brought home—a medicine chest, and various other paraphernalia neatly packed over and around her. Of this collection our passenger was allowed one of the dressing-cases, two wraps and a big bag. As there was not room for three bags on the back, my son and I divided a small motor trunk between us; I took the trays and he the bottom. It seemed at the time a simple enough arrangement.

On our way up Fifth Avenue, two or three times in the traffic stops, we found the motors of friends next to us. Seeing our quantity of luggage, each asked: “Where are you going?”

Very importantly we answered: “To San Francisco!”

“No, really, where are you going?”

“SAN-FRAN-CIS-CO!!!” we called back. But not one of them believed us.