This is America—a town of a few thousand,
in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little
groves.
The town is, in our tale, called “Gopher Prairie,
Minnesota.” But its Main Street is the
continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story
would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or
Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would
it be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills.
Main Street is the climax of civilization. That
this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton
Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in
Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says
to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London,
Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever
Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy,
worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.
Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture.
Sam Clark’s annual hardware turnover is the
envy of the four counties which constitute God’s
Country. In the sensitive art of the Rosebud Movie
Palace there is a Message, and humor strictly moral.
Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith.
Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who should
otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens
by speculating whether there may not be other faiths?
On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas
camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief
against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.
She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the
blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and
St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and
portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows
were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut
fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels
run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor
had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her
ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands
bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so
full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart
of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to
wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom.
She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind,
her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild.
A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking
the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal
aching comedy of expectant youth.
It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett
College.
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets,
and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are
deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is
the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American
Middlewest.
