The Sun-fast Road
THE SUN-FAST ROAD enthusiasm with which one greets the approach of vacation time is no longer unrestrained. Far from it. Many a harassed father-of-the-family now looks forward to these weeks...
...The problem is to do something about all this...
...Perhaps a number of summer complaints are being slowly cured by what in other respects must be termed a depression...
...A man who does not care to drive from Virginia to Maine, but who would like to have his own automobile when he arrives, finds it virtually impossible to transport the vehicle...
...On the other hand, a man going from Buffalo to Duluth can drive his car aboard ship and forget all about it...
...THE SUN-FAST ROAD enthusiasm with which one greets the approach of vacation time is no longer unrestrained...
...Meanwhile the vacationist, too, is progressing...
...Similarly, the lack of coordination between train and motorbus schedules is one of the seven wonderful curses of the age...
...but he found only one person who manifested any real, civilized enthusiasm—the librarian who presides over the Widener Memorial Collection at Harvard...
...As a result one's memory of a trip—and everybody now makes trips—includes a certain dissatisfaction with what can only be termed Catholic inhospitality...
...But it is disguised under a mantle of welcome, chatter, intimacy which adds to one's pleasure and costs no more...
...In other lands, the desire for emolument is probably keener...
...Or has the word vacation come to mean not a "vacancy," which is its proper import, but a "vacuum" which pulls us about like some elemental force not to be resisted...
...Our wayside hosts have never taken the business of vacationing seriously...
...Whereas your Frenchman can travel from awesome mountain scenes to bucolic pasture lands and then to rugged sea-coast within a few hundred miles, we Americans can live through similar changes only by working our sevenleague boots very hard...
...Even so he has reasons for self-congratulation...
...It proves difficult to find out where the church is situated, and the hours of Masses and devotions are kept a dark secret...
...Why do not the railroads find some way of affording such easy and cheap transportation of passenger automobiles as is now offered by steamships...
...Nevertheless each region affords a more varied fare than is generally realized...
...In days which we can still faintly recall, our fathers led their flocks to some cottage a few miles out of town...
...and if he were cheered by any signs of welcome, he would be disposed to prove still more generous...
...And will a trip of a few miles length satisfy...
...Which leads one to believe that the nation's greatest need is a revival of the old-fashioned fondness for post-cards and pansies...
...Those who cater to tourists are still, as a rule, frightfully professional about the matter...
...This extensiveness breeds a certain amount of monotony and, also, of boredom...
...This is his one big lark of the year, and he may becomingly expect to meditate (for the time being) on other things than motor death-rates and garage bills...
...Many New England hosts are among the best in the country, but even they are unable to realize that half a dozen tricks of cuisine or custom are the whole difference between picturesqueness and tepidity...
...It has been estimated that if all the ruined radiators, smashed fenders, splintered bodies and widely distributed motor parts could be piled up in one place, the result would be a veritable (if fragmentary) Tower of Babel...
...Can anything be done about the others...
...Let us grant that this lack of savoir faire in ourselves is not wholly uncomplimentary...
...After a more or less leisurely trip through New England, the present writer is convinced that the district possesses treasures really comparable with those of the old world...
...Minor injuries have produced a larger crop of hospital patients than came out of the Argonne...
...Smith and Jones, purchasers of straight eights, are theoretical owners of the road...
...We are supposed to have impressed our individuality upon them...
...Messrs...
...From the vacationist's point of view church is one of the most troublesome of matters...
...May the little things—the individual things—come to honor once again...
...This is an age of machinery and perspectives, wherefore the family must be conveyed somehow to places having the following advantages: bathing, good roads, dancing, hot water, scenery, excellent clientele, educational advantages, tinted plumbing, accessibility to Canada or its products...
...Somehow they seem to feel ashamed of the business of making money out of hospitality, and so hurry to get it over with as fast as possible...
...Possibly the reforms here hinted at are not easy...
...and part of their purpose was the shrewd conviction that these weeks off would save in clothes what they added by way of increased appetites...
...The causes underlying this varied and almost catastrophic damage have recently been studied by a national commission...
...Today the vacation wardrobe, like the generosity of Santa Claus, is in itself enough to guarantee the prosperity of the textile industry and the financial ruin of a mere householder...
...The multiplication of vehicles has led to some interesting, in not a few respects frightening, results...
...Many a harassed father-of-the-family now looks forward to these weeks of repose with all the pleasure with which he confronts a modern Christmas...
...They have the right to go where and i78 THE COMMONWEAL June 18, 1930 when they will—to stop at any one of a thousand hostels, and even to picnic under the greenwood tree...
...Doubtless there are genuine reasons why voyaging on a grand scale appeals to Americans...
...It seems to us that a few rather simple measures would help him a great deal...
...Drive into a little town...
...First, he could be emancipated from the idea of making long distances in a sport coupe...
...From another point of view it may be affirmed that the vacationist frequently deserves more ecclesiastical attention than he gets...
...Usually he makes a contribution...
...But as a matter of fact, this quasi-liberty has been grossly exaggerated...
...Your average citizen spends the major portion of this leisure period getting out of bed at five, settling with the innkeeper and whirling the family on to the next pause in its tour...
...that many drivers are incompetent folk who ought not even to be permitted to wheel a baby carriage...
...The point is no longer to lay off work, don old clothes and greet the alarm clock with a superior air...
...It harks back to the ancient rural tradition which entitled every stranger to drop into a farmhouse at meal-time and leave only a blessing behind...
...It may be that these varied indispositions testify to a national peculiarity...
...A modicum of extra care—ivy over the door, an individualistic image of Our Lady, a memorial tablet to the memory of some distinguished deceased parishioner— would cause many people to stop, enter, say a prayer...
...Then there is the matter of religion...
...and that numerous cars are defective, because of mechanical imperfections, age or insufficient care...
...But even in our lordly times necessity is the mother of discovery...
...The country is built that way, with immense plains and mountain ranges, vast coast lines and row upon row of industrial cities...
...May the Lord have mercy on him...
...This reported what we have all known before: that high speeds create a hazard, because the impact of a body increases in proportion to its rate of motion...
...Many a little church, too, is attractive enough in essence but bare of outline...
...In Germany tourist societies—Verkehrsvereine, as they are called—would long since have ironed this pestiferous wrinkle from the transportation map...
...We simply must proceed to something else...
...One notices, therefore, with a certain pleasure (while feeling duly sorry for so many porters dwelling amid unoccupied berths) that a decline in transcontinental vacation travel is reported...
...Modesty, commendable enough in itself, leads Catholics in particular to hide knowledge under half a dozen bushels...
...Who knows but what such moments, sandwiched into a busy vacation, might bring peace to souls who never find it in any other way...
...Normally, however, the vacationist is not the proper person for such a job...
...Even the French Canadian—who is not a born entertainer—surpasses us in this regard...
...Those days are gone forever...
...To begin with, there is the contemporary attitude toward highways...
...During the past year more than thirty thousand people were killed by automobiles...
...He has escaped loading himself down with indescribably long railway tickets—escaped likewise the comforts of tourist-sleeping across plains where the sun never lets off, the bears of the Yellowstone and all the ilk of tip-hungry bellboys...
...It is high time some of this were developed with genuine imagination...
Vol. 12 • June 1930 • No. 7
