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Superhuman Maps, Etc.
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (May 14, 1910) : 27
U Michigan copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
 

      One hears on the best authority that all proper touring cars are now provided with human maps, and from the description they are terrifying things. Some people, it is rumored, prefer getting lost to entering into a compact with the Evil One by providing their car with one of these curious attachments. Their workings are left for some one else to explain; it is their effect on one’s mind that interests the writer. Setting the needle to Boston — it being supposed that the occupants of the car have strong inclinations Bostonward, one starts out, blithesome and gay, knowing that nothing can prevent one’s reaching Boston eventually. For no matter what road one takes or how right the direction apparently is, that obsessed little needle points always toward Boston. No windings or turnings muddle it or induce it to change its mind. It has its ideas as to where Boston is, and it sticks to them through everything. What there is about Boston that attracts its needle-point so, no one knows. Boston’s influence is surely not as universal as that of the Magnetic Pole, but the fact remains that, if the needle had been pointed in that direction in the beginning, it never varies, no matter what infinitely more attractive places are approached.
      The effect of such a map on motoring is to be watched with avid interest. It may banish it altogether, prick with its needle motoring’s present popularity. For, if one cannot get lost, nor be in a vague, delicious ignorance of one’s whereabouts without precisely being lost, nor take a road on a guess, recklessly uncertain as to its views on destination, why, one is robbed in a great measure of the pleasure of motoring. For, if one cannot get lost, nor be in a vague, delicious ignorance of one’s whereabouts without precisely being lost, nor take a road on a guess, recklessly uncertain as to its views on destination, why, one is robbed in a great measure of the pleasure of motoring. Then there would be no arguments at cross-roads, no heated disputes with the other occupants of the motor, which so pleasantly accelerate one’s circulation, and no excuse whatever for having those agreeable conversational moments with other travellers on the road apropos of direction. All this would be rendered superfluous by that bewitched little needle. Motoring would be reduced to a business-like, cowed following of that domineering instrument.
      No one enjoys having a person about who is always right and always insists that he is right; why should such a conceit be any more endurable in a map? One’s natural combativeness could hardly help rising, and presently all other considerations would be thrown to the winds in a desire to prove that needle wrong. One would go out of one’s way, retrace one’s steps, do anything to show that, though the needle was going to Boston, the car and its driver were going where they jolly well pleased. What a capital joke it would be to let the needle work its hardest pointing the way to Boston, while all the time you were bound for Hot Springs, Virginia, and, by asking your way in whispers and controlling your convulsed delight as much as possible, arrive there unbeknownst to the needle, who, when it looked about and saw where it was, would be so beautifully sold that you, from latent decency, would have to retire to your room to laugh.

      Having long ago decided that some people are born tourists and that others travel, it is interesting to note that almost all Germans are in the former class. They are so doomed to be tourists that they sometimes look transitory and costumed when following the round of their daily activities. The waistcoats of the men give one the impression that the pockets contain coppers of unlikely countries, and the lack of fit in their clothes is easily attributable to the bulkiness of souvenirs and their known habit of leading pockets on to bulge. Then the veils of the women! There is something so exclamatory about German veils! The way in which they fly out behind suggests famous promontories on which one has had emotions. The wind whips them into streamers as if their wearers were standing on the deck of a vessel entering a world-famed harbor. The air is filled with field-glasses, consonants, and lunch-baskets. No other nation has so keen a sense of its national characteristic that it perpetually dresses in character; but the Germans positively exude accoutrements. If one announces to a maid who has seemed of no particular nationality that she is to accompany one across the ocean, she displays on the day of departure every drop of German blood in her nature. She may not have travelled for a long time, and it would be reasonable to suppose that she had lost her instinct for travelling’s minor shades But the word ship “wakes” her from her lethargy, and the German in her surges to the top. Such is her costume that out of the crowd on the deck of the vessel she is the only person one can positively say is going. Such a compact, many-buckled bag is hung over her shoulder, so woolly a wrap envelops her person, and atop of all is a hat of such condensed, concentrated touristness, that one gasps for the unmistakableness of the thing. It will make one by contrast feel at home in no matter how outlandish a country one finds oneself. The air of having dressed for the sunniness of the morning or one’s momentary inclination, or dozen reasons that govern one when dressing at home, will make one forever an alien to this person who dresses from one view-point only, that of a nation accustomed to coming from far and going farther, makes each place on the line of march wilt with the vigor of her onslaught.

      To speak enthusiastically of a ride of any sort through which one slept is very apt to bring upon one the heated scorn of those people who stayed awake, and who are, in consequence, unable to speak with your fervor of the beauty of the ride. Their wholly crass argument is that, as you were asleep, you know nothing of what happened and that they, staunchly awake through everything, were the only ones to enjoy the beauties of the occasion. Two more fallacious arguments it has never been your lot to hear. In the first place, they were not drinking in the surrounding beauties as they try to make you believe, for, when you awoke so pleased with yourself and the world at large, they were in an exceptionally bad temper, and spoke with positive asperity when you chimed out, “How heavenly it’s been.” Then, in the second place, their saying that your sleep caused you to be unaware of the delights of the night shows that they have not the faintest conception of the manner of sleep you indulge in when on the move. It is not a leaden losing of consciousness not at all. It is a film you wrap about yourself that is of the precisely proper thickness to let all delightful sensations in while keeping those of the other kind severely out. It is a film you wrap about yourself that is of the precisely proper thickness to let all delightful sensations in while keeping those of the other kind severely out. You know you are comfortable, blissfully so, and you know that you are moving, that the cool night air is blowing on your face, that the shadows are succumbing to the moon and flying from the lights of the car, and, above all, you know that you are asleep; but you know nothing else. It will be quickly seen that this is not an ordinary sleep, but is by way of being an accomplishment. It is not in the ordinary sense sleep at all, for either you leave an eighth of an eye open or — you have never been able to decide the exact merits of the case — you do close your eyes, but only to enable you the more easily to imagine things twice as beautiful as you would see if your eyes were open. Such is your complete enjoyment that you are on the point of declaring that the only way to get the best of a moonlight ride is to sleep through it, when you are stopped by the recollection of how this habit of inopportune napping affects other people. It may be that, great as the enjoyment is, you are not justified in taking it; for, on returning home, there is a lack of courteousness in the treatment that is tendered you, a huffiness which, if it were not controlled by good breeding, would, you feel sure, break out in a snort of “Oh, you —” with the fearful, inarticulate gulp afterward which leaves one so apprehensive of what the speaker intended to say.
 

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