Beyond the Black Stump Read Free Page B

Abercrombie and Fitch and spent a delightful hour looking over the new styles in fishing rods with reels incorporated with the handle, the new styles in outboard motors and fibreglass boats, in camping gear and sleeping bags. A stainless steel barbecue set with fork, spoon, and skewer three feet long, with steel hand shields gleaming and bright, took his fancy and he bought it as a present for his father though his luggage was already overweight for the air line, and then the shops were closing and he made his way happily through the thronging crowds around Grand Central Station towards his friends in Peter Cooper Village. It was grand to be back in the United States again, but it would be even better to be back in Oregon again tomorrow, his own place.
    He was a Westerner, born and raised in Oregon and educated in California. All the United States was good in his eyes, the meanest part better than the best of the outside world, but of the United States some parts were better than others. He did not greatly care for the Eastern states, infiltrated as they were with European influences and already burdened with three centuries of tradition. The racial problems of the South distressed him mildly, to the extent that he would not have chosen to live there, and although the technical advances of the Middle West were stimulating he knew a better country to live in than the plains of Michigan or Ohio. It was not until you crossed the mountains that you came, in his opinion, to the vital and virile heart of the United States, the states where men were men.Less than a hundred years ago the immigrants had poured into his home country over the Oregon trail, travelling hard by covered wagon, fighting the Indians, facing death and injury each day of the six months’ journey that would lead them to the glorious new country in the West. The men, the women, and the children who had opened up the Pacific slopes were hard, competent, and virile types, and they influenced their country still. Stanton’s grandfather had made that journey as a child in 1861; at the age of eight he had seen men killed in an attack by Indians upon the wagon convoy, had helped his father hew a farm out of the wilderness a little to the east of where the town of Hazel now stood. Stanton knew that old man intimately for he had lived till the boy was fifteen, and he had heard from him the history of Hazel as it had grown in one man’s lifetime from the first shack in the virgin prairie on the edge of the forests and the mountains to the place that it was now, a place of paved streets, of drug stores, of quiet, decent homes in shaded avenues, of theatres and railroad tracks and airplanes, of the Safeway and the Piggy-Wiggy café. In his view the people of Washington, Oregon, and Northern California constituted the best stock in the United States because their descent from the pioneers was the shortest; he was proud to be one of them, and infinitely happy now that he was going home.
    He did not think of these things in that detail, but they formed together to create the general happiness that stayed with him all next day as he flew westwards in the Constellation. He changed planes at Chicago about noon, and flew on through the interminable afternoon, stretched out by changes in the local time, over South Dakota and Montana to the high mountains that delighted him, that heralded the Coast. In the evening light Mount Rainier showed up ahead, snow-capped and symmetrical and lovely, and the aircraft started to lose height; they landed at Seattle in the dusk. The fresh, salt-laden breeze from the Pacific was a tonic as he stepped out of the airplane.
    He could not get home that night, but he could at least sleep in his own state. He telephoned from the airport for a hotel reservation and took a Convair southwards from Seattle to Portland. With each hour that he flew the sense of coming home grew stronger in him, the airports less magnificent and friendlier. He had not been