Cross Country: Notes on a Journey
Robert
Fitzgerald
I.
DRIVING
EAST
we we.e luoky. With no pa<tioula< oenoe of the oountry,
simply wanting to avoid cities, we left the lakeshore east of Chicago and
went south a little way, winding through soft and quiet Indiana hills and
small towns. The highway we hooked into was U. S. 6, a good road that
might have been a country road for all the traffic we saw on it. This was
in the third week of September, warm, sweet and hazy, the corn not yet
husked but about everything else in, of course, and what seemed a good
many new litters of small, pale pigs.
In that country, that is in northern Indiana and Ohio before Ohio goes
industrial, the stateliest thing you come to is the county seat. There is a
grove on the prairie a long way off and the trees of the grove are still
green and leafy at this time of year and high over the foliage, really quite
high, you see the court house glimmering. Those we saw were thoroughly
post classical, built up in an extravagance of tiers; surmounted by a man–
sard or hybrid dome and usually .a rain-darkened Justice suspending her
scales.
In these small towns the court house still dominates its square. In
towns that have had their boom, like my own home town, one or more
business buildings of considerable height and slick stonework overshadow
it. Hitching posts are rare anywhere, but you will still see them
in
some
of these towns. I can remark, irrelevantly, that there seem to be no kids
with B-B guns. When I was young I spent many profitable afternoons pot–
ting sparrows out of the maple trees around our court house. There was
no lawn to speak of, only grey dust for a sparrow to fall in. It was dust
of a fine, downy quality and there was nearly as much of it inside the cour t
house as outside--dust and tobacco juice.
On this route you can avoid our industrial greatness about as far as
Akron, but no farther. Once over the rim of the valley and definitely in
the smoke, we didn't come out for miles though we tacked around the cen–
ter of that city. As it happened, we got a good look at the air field and the
dirigible hangar, dark and profoundly large and profoundly empty. Little
trainer planes were taking off from the dusk at the far end of the field ,
putt-putting over us at a low altitude in the afternoon light and easing
down again for their landings.
That night we had dinner and slept at an inn in the country a few
miles west of Youngstown. It was one of those huge old houses for which
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