Some such trip as this I should take instead of a conventional New England tour. And before starting I should buy a copy of Louise Closser Hale's delightful book, "Into the Old Dominion."
One beauty of the trip that I suggest is that it isn't all the same. In one place you get a fair country hotel, in another an inn, and somewhere along the way you may have to spend a night in a private house. Also, though the roads through Maryland, and the part of West Virginia I speak of, are generally good, my experience of Virginia roads, especially through the mountains, leads me to conclude that in respect to highways Virginia remains a backward State. But who wants to ride always over oiled roads, always to hotels with marble lobbies, or big white porches full of hungry-eyed young women, and old ladies, knitting? Only the standardized tourist. And I am not addressing him.
I am talking to the motorist who is not ossified in habit, who has a love of strangeness and the picturesque--not only in scenery but in houses and people and the kind of life those people lead. For it is quite true that, as Professor Roland C. Usher said in his "Pan Americanism," "the information in New York about Buenos Aires is more extended, accurate, and contemporaneous than the notions in Maine about Alabama.... Isolation is more a matter of time than of space, and common interests are due to the ease of transportation and communication more often than geographical location."
Mad Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, With his eighteen other crazy men, went in and took the town.
Three States meet at Harper's Ferry, and the line dividing two of them is indicated where it crosses the station platform. If you alight at the rear end of the train, you are in Maryland; at the front, you are in West Virginia. This I like. I have always liked important but invisible boundaries--boundaries of states or, better yet, of countries. When I cross them I am disposed to step high, as though not to trip upon them, and then to pause with one foot in one land and one in another, trying to imagine that I feel the division running through my body.
Harper's Ferry is an entrancing old town; a drowsy place, piled up beautifully, yet carelessly, upon terraced roads clinging to steep hills, which slope on one side to the Potomac, on the other to the Shenandoah, and come to a point, like the prow of a great ship, at the confluence of the two.