Irvin Cobb - Roughing it De Luxe

It is generally conceded that the Grand Cañon of Arizona beggars description. I shall therefore endeavor to refrain from doing so. I realize that this is going to be a considerable contract. Nearly everybody, on taking a first look at the Grand Cañon, comes right out and admits its wonders are absolutely indescribable—and then proceeds to write anywhere from two thousand to fifty thousand words, giving the full details. Speaking personally, I wish to say that I do not know anybody who has yet succeeded in getting away with the job.

In the old days when he was doing the literature for the Barnum show, Tody Hamilton would have made the best nominee I can think of. Remember, don't you, how when Tody started in to write about the elephant quadrille you had to turn over to the next page to find the verb? And almost any one of those young fellows who write advertising folders for the railroads would gladly tackle the assignment; in fact, some of them already have—but not with any tumultuous success.

In the presence of the Grand Cañon, language just simply fails you and all the parts of speech go dead lame. When the Creator made it He failed to make a word to cover it. To that extent the thing is incomplete. If ever I run across a person who can put down on paper what the Grand Cañon looks like, that party will be my choice to do the story when the Crack of Doom occurs. I can close my eyes now and see the headlines: Judgment Day a Complete Success! Replete with Incident and Abounding in Surprises—Many Wealthy Families Disappointed—Full Particulars from our Special Correspondent on the Spot!

Starting out from Chicago on the Santa Fé, we had a full trainload. We came from everywhere: from peaceful New England towns full of elm trees and oldline Republicans; from the Middle States; and from the land of chewing tobacco, prominent Adam's apples and hot biscuits—down where the r is silent, as in No'th Ca'lina. And all of us—Northerners, Southerners, Easterners alike—were actuated by a common purpose—we were going West to see the country and rough it—rough it on overland trains better equipped and more luxurious than any to be found in the East; rough it at ten-dollar-a-day hotels; rough it by touring car over the most magnificent automobile roads to be found on this continent. We were a daring lot and resolute; each and every one of us was brave and blithe to endure the privations that such an expedition must inevitably entail. Let the worst come; we were prepared! If there wasn't any of the hothouse lamb, with imported green peas, left, we'd worry along on a little bit of the fresh shad roe, and a few conservatory cucumbers on the side. That's the kind of hardy adventurers we were!

Conspicuous among us was a distinguished surgeon of Chicago; in fact, so distinguished that he has had a very rare and expensive disease named for him, which is as distinguished as a physician ever gets to be in this country. Abroad he would be decorated or knighted. Here we name something painful after him and it seems to fill the bill just as well. This surgeon was very distinguished and also very exclusive. After you scaled down from him, riding in solitary splendor in his drawing room, with kitbags full of symptoms and diagnoses scattered round, we became a mixed tourist outfit. I would not want to say that any of the persons on our train were impossible, because that sounds snobbish; but I will say this—some of them were highly improbable.

There was the bride, who put on her automobile goggles and her automobile veil as soon as we pulled out of the Chicago yards and never took them off again—except possibly when sleeping. I presume she wanted to show the rest of us that she was accustomed to traveling at a high rate of speed. If the bridegroom had only bethought him to carry one of those siren horns under his arm, and had tooted it whenever we went around a curve, the illusion would have been complete.

There was also the middle-aged lady with the camera habit. Any time the train stopped, or any time it behaved as though it thought of stopping, out on the platform would pop this lady, armed with her little accordion-plaited camera, with the lens focused and the little atomizer bulb dangling down, all ready to take a few pictures. She snapshotted watertanks, whistling posts, lunch stands, section houses, grade crossings and holes in the snowshed—also scenery, people and climate. A two-by-four photograph of a mountain that's a mile high must be a most splendid reminder of the beauties of Nature to take home with you from a trip.

There was the conversational youth in the Norfolk jacket, who was going out West to fill an important vacancy in a large business house—he told us so himself. It was a good selection, too. If I had a vacancy that I wanted filled in such a way that other people would think the vacancy was still there, this youth would have been my candidate.

And finally there was the corn-doctor from a town somewhere in Indiana, who had the upper berth in Number Ten. It seemed to take a load off his mind, on the second morning out, when he learned that he would not have to spend the day up there, but could come down and mingle with the rest of us on a common footing; but right up to the finish of the journey he was uncertain on one or two other points. Every time a conductor came through—Pullman conductor, train conductor or dining-car conductor—he would hail him and ask him this question: "Do I or do I not have to change at Williams for the Grand Cañon?" The conductor—whichever conductor it was—always said, Yes, he would have to change at Williams. But he kept asking them—he seemed to regard a conductor as a functionary who would deliberately go out of his way to mislead a passenger in regard to an important matter of this kind. After a while the conductors took to hiding out from him and then he began cross-examining the porters, and the smoking-room attendant, and the baggageman, and the flagmen, and the passengers who got aboard down the line in Colorado and New Mexico.

At breakfast in the dining car you would hear his plaintive, patient voice lifted. "Yes, waiter," he would say; "fry 'em on both sides, please. And say, waiter, do you know for sure whether we change at Williams for the Grand Cañon?" He put a world of entreaty into it; evidently he believed the conspiracy against him was widespread. At Albuquerque I saw him leading off on one side a Pueblo Indian who was peddling bows and arrows, and heard him ask the Indian, as man to man, if he would have to change at Williams for the Grand Cañon.

When he was not worrying about changing at Williams he showed anxiety upon the subject of the proper clothes to be worn while looking at the Grand Cañon. Among others he asked me about it. I could not help him. I had decided to drop in just as I was, and then to be governed by circumstances as they might arise; but he was not organized that way. On the morning of the last day, as we rolled up through the pine barrens of Northern Arizona toward our destination, those of us who had risen early became aware of a terrific struggle going on behind the shrouding draperies of that upper berth of his. Convulsive spasms agitated the green curtains. Muffled swear words uttered in a low but fervent tone filtered down to us. Every few seconds a leg or an arm or a head, or the butt-end of a suitcase, or the bulge of a valise, would show through the curtains for a moment, only to be abruptly snatched back.

Speculation concerning the causes of these strange manifestations ran—as the novelists say—rife. Some thought that, overcome with disappointment by the discovery that we had changed at Williams in the middle of the night, without his knowing anything about it, he was having a fit all alone up there. Presently the excitement abated; and then, after having first lowered his baggage, our friend descended to the aisle and the mystery was explained. He had solved the question of what to wear while gazing at the Grand Cañon. He was dressed in a new golf suit, complete—from the dinky cap to the Scotch plaid stockings. If ever that man visits Niagara, I should dearly love to be on hand to see him when he comes out to view the Falls, wearing his bathing suit.