The Jog
As a girl I lived in New Hampshire, and it took one hour and twenty minutes to drive to the village for the mail. The distance was eight miles, and as you may suspect, our automobile was one horsepower; type, — “ Dobbin.” This morning my son George was obliged to go out to one of the Jersey suburbs on business. It took him—by an express train — twenty minutes; the distance was fourteen miles. And as I sat at the deserted break fast-table, coffee cup in hand, my eyes still following the irate figure of the outraged George tearing toward the subway, I fell to thinking in rather a homesick fashion of Dobbin and my old-time jogs for the mail.
I have always loved jogs, whether they were along New Hampshire roads or on the pleasant mental paths of quiet thinking and reading. I have always preferred tree-shadowed, winding ways to straight avenues lighted by electric lights at regular intervals. I would rather bump over a cartroad overgrown with grass than bowl over the asphalted miles of New York. For one must pick his way slowly along my dim up-and-down roads and sedgy cowpaths; thank goodness they are realms yet unconquered by the God of Speed! But who of my children or grandchildren would stop to pick their way anywhere ? Even the tots — whose fathers used to grope slowly, candle in hand, up the dark stairs and through the hall to bed — the modern tots, I say, press a button and move rapidly bedward in a burst of electrical glory.
When I go to California each winter, George puts me on a “ Limited Flyer ” (I believe that is its reassuring name), and before I have settled myself to look and day-dream out of the window, behold! I am at the Pacific, with only the lurid unrealities of picture post-cards in my hand to assure me that Ute Pass and Pike’s Peak do exist.
And there in California my son John — is it psychologically usual, I wonder, that a jog-loving mother should have one railroading son and another who is a motor-maniac ? — John meets me with a great red thing that dashes my breath away and whisks my unfrisky gray locks all askew as we “ tool ” ten miles in fifteen minutes to his bungalow in the hills. “ Tool! ” Oh, comfortable shade of my Dobbin!
Just so in the winter’s reading, — no jogging is provided for my old-fashioned, unhurrying mind. John’s wife reads aloud to me, and she enjoys analyzing — oh, unjogging process! — the novels that we absorb together. And they are not, alas, the pleasant drowsy detail of Clarissa’s heart and wardrobe through seven unstingy volumes, — no indeed! Over a slender thing of two hundred meaty pages (meaty in the sense of beef extract) we harass our minds, watching the psychology of a nervous and usually feminine soul through a modernly-involved crisis. I say modernly-involved, because I believe that writers nowadays think that even human nature itself was in my day constructed like a childish stage-coach and is now made with the complexity of an automobile. Sometimes I smuggle up to my room one of the fat books from the dusty top shelf of the library, — Castle Rackrent, or Peregrine Pickle, or some such tale by a “ pillow-soothing author.” For while Heaven keeps me supplied with good eyes and a day of twelve long sunny hours, I shall not choose my Rocky Mountains on a post-card and pulverized human nature in literary capsules!
But I would not have any one think me either a loud-voiced crank or a patient victim. I realize well enough that on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street Dobbin would be a terrible clog in the wheels of progress, so I never try to proselyte. As for being a victim — well, I would gladly live the life of a locomotive all winter for the sake of my spring.
Every spring I go back, alone and not as an obstruction in my children’s Sixth Avenues, — back to my Dobbin days. On the first of May I leave California with very little of ticket, very much of illustrated railroad folder, and no timetables. On the first day of June I appear in New York. My son George meets me; no questions are asked. I may have spent twenty-six of my thirty-one days on the road between Los Angeles and the Grand Canyon (you may see Arizona if you take the Overland, the way-train of the desert), or I may have spent three weeks with a volume of Mandeville or Marco Polo (no MotorFlights for me, thank you!) in a certain little sea-bordered garden I know in Victoria. But wherever I have been, the journey has been a jog.
Once in a while I have the good fortune to stumble upon a tiny branch road, where as one of three passengers I may sit in a semi-baggage car and traverse a distance of eleven miles in approximately one hour. This is truly jogging. It has even more of the spirit of happygo-lucky carelessness than Dobbin and the village post-office. For suddenly, out in the middle of a field, the semi-baggage car may break into a violent stop, and while the fussy little engine goes off for half an hour on some important, mysterious business of its own, I am left as rooted among the quiet yellow barley as one of the deep-hearted “copodoras ” snuggled motionless by a fence post. The skeleton Time is locked away, and for thirty minutes the key of the closet lost. I am very happy on a journey like that.
Three thousand miles in thirty-one days is not an exact substitute for my girlhood and Dobbin. I know, — not by some eighty miles a day, — but it is comparative jogging, which is, I know, all that one can expect. And I am happy that I may spend a part of each year that is given, like our old New Hampshire cows, browsing along my by-paths, and chewing with the luxury of timelessness the contenting cud of my own care-free thoughts.