I Travel by Train | Page 2

saw when I got off trains, too: in the people
who produce food, in the people who must go hungry, in what people
endure, in what they dream, in what comes true and in what it all seems
to mean when you try to put it together.
"I get you!" he said. "The low-down on about everybody."
No, I protested; it would not be a book of such pretensions. But it
would at least be about the United States which one long-distance train
traveler had eventually come to see and think about.
R. W. B.

Contents
FOREWORD

I. COLOR
II. DISCOVERY
III. SUSTENANCE
IV. SOUTHBOUND
V. HUNGER
VI. PARASITE
VII. HEAT
VIII. EVERGREEN
IX. SMOKE
X. DUST
XI. WASTE
XII. CREOLE
XIII. HOME
XIV. RAIN
XV. DETOUR
XVI. FERMENT
XVII. SUNLIGHT
XVIII. NOVELTY
XIX. PANORAMA

I
Color
WHENEVER I think of traveling, I see the United States as merging
areas of color. For I always begin my travels in the autumn. It was so a
dozen years ago; it was so the year before last; it was so last year.
The day of departure carried its own announcement. Chill winds swept
across the New Hampshire hills from Mount Monadnock and whirled
the showering maple-leaves everywhere. The last lingering bluebirds
sought the protected side of the barn and chirred regretfully in the
afternoon sun. Shining pheasants, a dozen strong, marched boldly into
the open meadow, stopped, and while the wind almost blew them off
their feet, looked toward the house as if to say, "What? You still here?"
By the next morning I was without regrets at going. For the wind had
left the hills only dull, colorless pinnacles that were rendered all the
more desolate by occasional areas of evergreen and clumps of birches
the least bit too white in their fresh nakedness.
Down in the edge of Massachusetts the maples still provided a little
color until you came too near and in Concord and Arlington and
Cambridge there were almost as many yellowing leaves on the elms as
in the streets beneath them.
There was much to be done in Cambridge in two short hours if I were
to catch the noon train. As I hurried to the haberdasher's I was
reminded at the end of the summer I never fail to be that I had reverted
to type. For when all sorts of persons looked at me as though there
were a reason for doing so, I began to wonder what was wrong. Did I
have shaving cream in my ear? Did my last year's hat look worse than I
had thought? Or was I merely looking in general like the provincial that
I was? But when one man stopped me on the sunny side of Harvard
Square, introduced himself, and told me that he had read my latest book,
I felt so immeasurably better that as soon as I had visited the barber's I
ventured over into the Harvard Yard just for one brief minute, to see
how it felt. I met many old friends, and I snatched a second from all
thought of unwaiting trains to survey the trees. After the sight of

natural woodland all summer, these trees in the Yard looked carefully
pruned, a trifle over-civilized, as if they lived too constantly in an
intellectual air.
Just when I was about to rush away and take a taxi to the house, a
stranger came up to me and timidly wondered if I would be good
enough to tell him how to get to the new chapel. There it was in plain
view, but many distant, impersonal smiles along the paths had made
him hesitant. I glanced at the clock to see if I had still a precious minute
or two that I could spare. "But perhaps I shouldn't have troubled you
either," he began. I protested that it was no trouble; that I was only
thinking of a train that I had to catch; that I should have just time
enough to go with him.
Inside, while he stood and looked awesomely about, I enjoyed the quiet.
It is a white and sterilized quiet, but quiet none the less. I once came
upon the architect of the building sitting in there alone. He told me that
he never knew how he happened to produce that great sense of quiet,
but that it was there, and that he sometimes came and sat for fifteen
minutes just to enjoy it. When the stranger at last regained speech, he
felt a little better toward the people in the Yard. We said good-bye, and
I sped to the house to rediscover a half-dozen things after our six
months' absence things that I had suddenly thought of in the quiet of
the chapel.
Nobody of consequence in Boston ever takes his