CHAPTER 3. MARRIAGE—TRAVEL IN 48 STATES 41
with atlas, and a few other things that we knew we would never buy if we did not do it right then. In June we hiked in the breezy weather to the Valley of the Moon and slept near Jack London's place. Hiked over the snow to sleepy Carson City, where we spent a week with Abe Cohen and his hanger-on Dot-so-Lallee renowned basket maker. We sent home Navajo rugs from here. We rushed through the Babylon of Reno, through beautiful Truckee, (by Lake Tahoe) and crisscrossed California several times, ending up in Whittier, to work a month at an apiary run by a young Quaker woman. Then we had a ride with friends across the worst of the desert. Spent a week at Taos pueblo where we were friends of Juanita, sister of Tony who later married Mabel Dodge.
We zig-zagged here and there to cover some portion of every state. Although we were in many perilous escapades we were never injured in the 22,000 miles we covered; 2,200 of this was on foot. We went by mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and consider this sight by far the best of any in the country.
No matter what church I have attended or what religious teaching I have been studying my conception of God has not been that of a Super-Santa Claus or of a Benevolent Despot, but among other attributes a Force which brings together that of good which every sincere, although misguided, individual, is seeking. At least that much of the good that the person can understand and assimilate at the time. This is not a pantheistic or impersonal approach; it really regards God as dealing more with the person every day than many do who howl about Him on Sunday and especial holy days. So, no matter how many chances we took with people and places unknown we felt that it would all work together for good. (My Celestial Bulldozer again.) We had needed this running around: Selma to counteract the staid, comfortable bourgeois Milwaukee outlook, and I to balance my confinement in solitary. Now we would appreciate settling in one place, while before this any one place would have been a prison in our minds.
On my birthday, July 24, 1925 we arrived in Milwaukee with $105. We bought ten acres of woods with $100 down, built one room in a cozy section of the woods and rested after our long hike. Here, June 17, 1927 I helped the doctor when our daughter Carmen was born, and likewise on Oct. 23, 1929 (the day the Depression started) when Sharon was born. We did not notify a doctor until a few months before that a baby was expected, and had a Christian Science nurse both times. In 1931 I led a strike in a dairy in Waukesha which we won, but I was discharged. We had been happy with our cow and calf, sheep and lamb, police dogs, and life in the woods. We had built with our own hands and with the help of Selma's kid brother, Edmund, four more rooms. I had dug a cellar and carried beautiful rocks of all colors and had a mason build a huge fireplace. Here by the blazing wood, on the Navajo rug near Fritz, our police dog, and mother and child, with the wind whistling outside and June, the Jersey cow securely nestled in the small barn, was a feeling hardly to be improved upon. This house was at the top of a small hill surrounded by woods. I erected a long rope swing for Carmen and Sharon and when I ran under it full speed they would swing over the tree tops below like over the top of the world with screeches of delight. "Daddy, just one more swing," was a never ending request. When Sharon was three she climbed to the top of a ladder to help
