# Travels in Philadelphia/Up the Wissahickon

| “ | The Fairmont Park is the Soothsayer's favorite relaxation. He carries its contours and colors and sunsets in the spare locker of his brain, and even on the most trying day at his office he is a little happier because he knows the Wissahickon Drive is but a few miles away. | ” |
UP THE WISSAHICKON
The Soothsayer is a fanatical lover of Fairmount Park. His chief delight is to send his car spinning along the Lincoln Drive about the time the sun drops toward setting; to halt at a certain hostelry (if the afternoon be chilly) for what Charles Lamb so winningly describes as "hot water and its better adjuncts"; and then, his stormy soul for the moment at armistice with life, to roll in a gentle simmer down gracious byways while the Park ​gathers her mantle of dusk about her. Sometimes he halts his curricle in some favorite nook, climbs back into the broad, well-cushioned tonneau seat and lies there smoking a cigarette and watching the lights along the river. The Park is his favorite relaxation. He carries its contours and colors and sunsets in the spare locker of his brain, and even on the most trying day at his office he is a little happier because he knows the Wissahickon Drive is but a few miles away. Wise Soothsayer! He should have been one of the hermits who came from Germany with Kelpius in 1694 and lived bleakly on the hillsides of that fairest of streams, waiting the millennium they expected in 1700.
The Soothsayer had long been urging me to come and help him worship the Wissahickon Drive, and when luck and the happy moment conspired I found myself carried swiftly past the Washington Monument at the Park entrance and along the margin of the twinkling Schuylkill. At first there was nothing of the hermit in the Soothsayer's conversation. He was bitterly condemning the handicraft of a certain garage mechanic who had done something to his "clutch." He included this fallacious artisan in the class of those he deems most degraded: The People Who Don't Give a Damn. For intellectual convenience, the Soothsayer tersely ascribes all ills that befall him to Bolshevism. If the waitress is tardy in delivering his cheese omelet, she is a bolshevixen. If a motortruck driver skims his polished fender, he is ​a bolshevik. In other words, those who Don't Give a Damn are bolsheviks.
The Soothsayer lamented that I had not been in the Park with him two weeks ago, when the autumn foliage was a blaze of glowing color. But to my eye the tints (it was the first of November) were unsurpassably lovely. It was a keen afternoon, the air was sharp, the sky flushing with rose and massed with great banks of cloud the bluish hue of tobacco smoke. When we neared the corner of Peter's Island the sun slid from under a cloudy screen and transfused the thin bronze-yellow of the trees with a pale glow which sparkled as the few remaining leaves fluttered in the wind. Most of the leafage had fallen and was being burnt in bonfires at the side of the road, where the gusts tossed and flattened the waving flames. But the trees were still sufficiently clothed to show a rich tapestry of russet and orange and brown, sharpened here and there by wisps and shreds of yellow. And where the boughs were wholly stripped (the silver-gray beeches, for instance) their delicate twigs were clearly traced against the sky. I think one hears too much of the beauty of October's gold and scarlet and not enough of the sober, wistful richness of November buffs and duns and browns.
The Wissahickon Drive is the last refuge of the foot and the hoof, for motors are not allowed to follow the trail up the ravine, which still remains a haunt of ancient peace—much more so, indeed, ​than in former years, when there must have been many and many a smart turnout spanking up the valley for supper at the Lotus Inn. Over the ruins of this hostelry the Soothsayer becomes sadly eloquent, recalling how in his salad days he used to drive out from town in a chartered hansom and sit placidly on a honeysuckled balcony over chicken and waffles served with the proper flourish by a colored servitor named Pompey. But we must take things as we see them, and though my conductor rebuked me for thinking the scene so lovely—I should have been there not only two weeks ago to see the autumn colors, but ten years ago to see Pompey and the Lotus Inn—still, I was marvelously content with the dusky beauty of the glades. The cool air was rich with the damp, sweet smell of decaying leaves. A tiny murmur of motion rose from the green-brown pools of the creek, ruffled here and there with a milky bubble of foam below some boulder. In the feathery tops of evergreen trees, blackly outlined against the clear arch of fading blue, some birds were cheeping a lively squabble. We stopped to listen. It was plainly an argument, of the kind in which each side accuses the other of partisanship. "Bolshevism!" said the Soothsayer.
It is wonderfully still in the Wissahickon ravine in a pale November twilight. Overhead the sky darkened; the sherry-brown trees began to shed something of their rich tint. The soft earth of the roadway was grateful underfoot to those too ​accustomed to pavement walking. Along the drive came the romantic thud of hoofs: a party of girls on horseback perhaps returning from tea at Valley Green. What a wonderful sound is the quick drumming of horses' hoofs! To me it always suggests highwaymen and Robert Louis Stevenson. We smoked our pipes leaning over the wooden fence and looking down at the green shimmer of the Wissahickon, seeing how the pallor of sandy bottom shone up through the clear water.
And then, just as one is about to sentimentalize upon the beauty of nature and how it shames the crass work of man, one comes to what is perhaps the loveliest thing along the Wissahickon—the Walnut Lane Bridge. Leaping high in air from the very domes of the trees, curving in a sheer smooth superb span that catches the last western light on its concrete flanks, it flashes across the darkened valley as nobly as an old Roman viaduct of southern France. It is a thrilling thing, and I scrambled up the bank to note down the names of the artists who planned it. The tablet is dated 1906, and bears the names of George S. Webster, chief engineer; Henry H. Quimby, assistant engineer; Reilly & Riddle, contractors. Many poets have written verses both good and bad about the Wissahickon, but Messrs. Reilly & Riddle have spanned it with a poem that will long endure.
We walked back to the Soothsayer's bolshevized car, which waited at the turning of the drive where a Revolutionary scuffle took place between ​American troops and a detachment of redcoats under a commander of the fine old British name of Knyphausen. As we whirred down to the Lincoln Drive and I commented on the lavender haze that overhung the steep slopes of the glen, the Soothsayer said: "Ah, but you should have seen it two weeks ago. The trees were like a cashmere shawl!"
I shall have to wait fifty weeks before I can see the Wissahickon in a way that will content the fastidious Soothsayer.