The Bismarck Tribune

IN NEW YORK

New York, Sept. 10.—Notes from a recent vacation in Canada—Montreal is Manhattan's week-end Paris. Possessed of $22.50 for a week-end excursion ticket or, better still, possessed of a gasoline buggy and a pup tent, any arid American can set forth on a Friday or Saturday and find himself upon the following dawn looking upon the almost forgotten word "Tavern." By noon papa can have "joined the boys" about a tankard-laden table and, sipping deeply of his ale or lager, can be heard sighing for the election of an Al Smith.

By 4 o'clock in the afternoon he is vowing never to return to his native heath. From one table or another come mutterings that "something must be done about it at home," or "now why can't we have a nice glass of beer like this at home?"

By 7 o'clock he is on St. Denis street, where quiet French restaurants suddenly grow hectic and noisy as the bibulous Americanos attempt to compensate in a single evening for months of aridity. The old atmosphere of many of these places has long since been erased by the roistering tourists, just as have been many a quaint Paris cafe.

Even the orchestra has learned its tricks. By 8:30 it is playing "The Sidewalks of New York," to the tune of which the visitors engage in minor hysterics. One hour later the orchestra plays "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" with results such as George M. Cohan once achieved by waving the flag at the fall of each curtain.

Having known Montreal in those quiet pre-tourist days, your correspondent went out into the night just a bit depressed.

There is, it seems, no longer such a place as "20 miles from nowhere." For here I am, something like "40 miles from nowhere," and the choppy, rut-filled country roads are lined with cars. Most of them bear Ohio licenses. They have chugged their way via Buffalo or Toronto into the fir-scented air of the Ontario wilderness. Fifteen miles from Peterboro, as the Canadian National flies, a "musky" fishing club is dedicated to the good Ike Waltons of Youngstown, Akron, Lima, Toledo, Cleveland and way cities. Where Ohio leaves off Pennsylvania begins, and where Pennsylvania ends Missouri starts. Connecticut, New York and Jersey are commonplaces upon the road.

Fifty-five miles from a railroad, on roads that put one in training for camel riding, one comes upon the unexpected that inevitably happens. A newspaper reporter, with a yen for the outdoors and a fancy for black bass, has purchased a wilderness lake—heaven only knows where he got the money! He has taken a tumble-down farm-house and turned it into a camp and when the stress of newspapering in New York grows too irksome he ups and disappears into the wilds. Al Green is his name and he's on the staff of the United Press in the Manhattan bureau. His wife conducts the resort which, with true newspaper instinct, he has given the typographical title of "Six Point Lodge."

Fifty-five miles from railroad one gets an excellent idea of the meaninglessness of distance to the urban dweller. To the hill people, to the backwoods ruralites, distance still is a dreadsome, fearsome thing. They speak, almost in awed whispers, of having once been so far from home as Toronto or Montreal. An old lady, encountered on the highway, tells proudly of having almost got to New York at one period of her life. She got as far as Bangor, Maine, having set out from New Brunswick.

Whereas the citizens of St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati and Kansas City flit by in their cars, children parked in the rear seats, tents parked on the running board, camp equipment stored in odd places—quite unaware of space and time, ready to rechart the world and penetrate the unknown.

The "map hound" is a curious product of the motor age. He's the fellow who, equipped with a road map, must go where flivvers fear to tread. You've all met him at some time or other. At night he spreads his map out upon the table and, to the light of a flickering lamp, runs his chubby fingers over obscure roadways and wonders dreamily where this highway and that may lead. In another day he might have proved the explorer who found new continents in his trusty galleon.

GILBERT SWAN.
(Copyright, 1928, NEA Service, Inc.)