I Married Adventure Page 3
And I know I owe you a letter.. I owe all my friends letters, but there are only twenty-four hours to each day and I can’t possibly do my safari and movie work in less than thirty hours each day.. therefore I am away behind in everything.
We have a most interesting and beautiful permanent camp up here, but we never remain long.. we go out on safari with camels to the Ndoto mountains, The Mathews range, Horr valley and to the waterholes on the Kaisoot desert, then we return.. develop the films and then go right out again.. it is a strenious life but chuck full of thrills and excitement, I know that no bug game hunter ever has the fun shooting game that we have in photographing them.
Our forests are full of elephants and rhion and buffalo and leopards and kudu and bushbuck, to say nothing of monkeys and baboons.. the game comes up about our grass houses, feeds in our garden, and some of my best elephant films I have made from the back of my laboratory.
We came nearly having a most wonderful adventure in company with Carl and Mary Akeley down in Tanganyika.. we found a beautiful valley stiff with lions where they had never been shot, and for two days Carl and I photographed them.. getting sometimes as close as twenty-five feet, and we were the happiest fellows on earth.. then Carl got sick and had to be taken to Nairobi, while I had to continue the filming alone.
However, we were camped together nearly two months and had some great times.. The Akeleys are now in the Congo, we have an appointment with then in Nairobi in a couple of weeks.. when we get together we are going off somewhere in the blue and for a few weeks follow the adventure trail as we often planned while in New York.
We have had such wonderful luck during the past seven months that we think we can finish up sooner than we planned, so we expect to be on the way home in nine or ten months.
Mrs. Johnson and I are as healthy as the law allows and enjoying every minute of life.
With regards and best wishes
Sincerely yours,
Box 51, Nairobi, B. E. Africa.
Chapter 1
In light of the placid expectation that because I was born in Chanute, Kansas, I would grow up, marry, raise a family, and die there, I find it amusing to recall a certain hot September day of my seventh year, when I asked my father for ten cents. It was early morning and he was just on his way out the back screen door, his oil-blotched denim work coat over his arm. Pausing, he put down his carefully packed bright tin dinner pail and looked at me.
Ten cents was a lot of money in those days. As a brakeman on the Santa Fe, all my father earned was a dollar and a quarter a day. Ten cents would buy a pound of round steak or a gallon of kerosene, or a peck of potatoes, or two yards of calico—yes, or even a hank of wool sufficient for one of the many socks that emerged by some sort of magic from the bright, clicking needles in Grandma’s workworn hands.
Ten cents. My father pushed back his cap and looked toward my mother. She smoothed her clean, faded apron and considered me. I urged quickly that they needn’t give me another thing for a whole year, not even for Christmas.
Grandma eyed me gravely and wondered what the children of today were coming to. When she was my age there were worries about food and clothing and firewood, and even wolves; and hurried flights from marauding Indians. Why, when she was my age, she hadn’t even seen ten cents. And as for presents, she remembered a doll her mother had contrived for her out of a knobbed stick and a bit of bright cloth. Ten cents.
I knew that my request was beyond all reason and almost beyond explanation, and, as if haste could make up for logic, I told breathlessly of a young traveling photographer to whom Babe Halloran, my bosom friend, had taken her baby brother, and to whom I felt I ought to take mine. Vaughn, being three, wasn’t a baby exactly, but certainly he’d never be any younger. And, I hurried on, it was something that would have to be done right away because tomorrow the photographer was leaving Chanute and going back to Independence. That’s where he lived and went to school, I added, feeling vaguely the need of something to give weight to my plea and stability to the young traveling photographer.
A smile twitched at my father’s mouth.
“Oh, back to school,” he said.
“High school,” I replied with dignity. “And the pictures he takes are the cutest you ever saw, and only ten cents for a whole dozen.”
Williams’ Opera House was over on Main Street, four blocks away. The young photographer, according to Babe, took his penny pictures in a vacant storeroom upstairs. With the ten-cent piece clutched in one of my hands and Vaughn’s hot fist in the other, we started out, and not until then did I begin to worry about the success of the venture. Suppose the pictures were no good after all.
The red-brick walks sent up wavy lines of heat. Even the dusty elms seemed to drip heat, and my hair lay on my neck warm and heavy as freshly pulled taffy. Vaughn dragged his copper-toed shoes through the thickest dust along the way, and by the time we reached Williams’ Opera House and climbed the long flight of dark stairs, my temper was very nearly the equal of his.
Tacked on the door was a large, glossy white card, with one word lettered boldly in black. Its message, brief and doubtless simple, was nevertheless mysterious to me. “Studio” was what it said. I opened the door and pushed Vaughn, howling with protest, before me.
A tall, thin young man with a black cloth over his head and a gray rubber apron covering him from knees to chin stood behind a camera. Peering at us briefly, he said, “Sit down, you kids, and be quiet,” then went on taking the picture of a smiling pink-and-white baby girl. There were no chairs, so we sat on a pasteboard box, which promptly collapsed. Vaughn’s face was smudged and streaked with tears, and, moistening my handkerchief with my tongue, I did my best to restore him to the shining cleanness that had been his when we left home.
The smiling little girl was carried off at length by her proud mother, and I wondered vaguely whether, with all my pride in my little brother, it wasn’t a pity he had been born a boy.
The young man took something out of the camera, put something back in, then turned and spoke to me for the first time. “All right, little girl, his hair’s all right. Leave him alone and tell him to go sit on that chair.”
Well, nothing that has happened to me before or since has equaled the humiliation, struggle, and pure anger of that next fifteen minutes. The young photographer had his ideas of how the picture should be taken, I had mine, and Vaughn wanted none of any of it. And then something happened that was quite beyond my experience and to this day has me puzzled whenever I encounter it. They looked at each other, these two, and then effortlessly and without a word reached some sort of pact that completely excluded me. Off came the broad white embroidered collar, the hair which I had smoothed at regular intervals from the moment we left home was tousled deliberately, and just as the picture was snapped, Vaughn grinned.
The photographer laughed and said, “That’s fine, young fellow. This’ll be good.” Then, to me, something about, “Ten cents, please, little girl, and you’ll have to come back for the pictures this afternoon. I’m leaving Chanute in the morning.”
I looked at him and picked up the discarded white collar; I looked at Vaughn, now a perfect angel of sweetness and good intention; then I paid the ten cents in a voiceless rage and left. The name of that young itinerant photographer, I learned some eight years later, was Martin Johnson.
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Martin was born October 9, 1884, in Rockford, Illinois, where his father was foreman of the stem-winding department of the Rockford Watch Company. A new ambition stirred in John Johnson with the birth of a son. Instead of merely working at a job, he would build a business which in later years his boy could share. Word came of the railroad that was being laid through the rich farm lands of Kansas and of a newly assembled town in Saline County. A likely spot for a little jewelry store, he reasoned. Mrs. Johnson, who knew of his ambition, agreed wholeheartedly, and her careful s
aving provided the money necessary to make such a move, with the result that the spring of 1885 saw them established in that raw and thinly settled community named Lincoln Center.
This move was not as foolhardy as it appeared, for the section of the country which John Johnson had thus chosen as a home and for a new venture into business was, in part at least, familiar to him.
Brought to America from Sweden when just a baby, he spent his younger years as a newsboy in New York and Chicago. At fourteen, tales of the untamed frontier so stirred his adventurous spirit that he headed west, where he worked at odd jobs. After adding to his height and weight, John Johnson figured, rightly, that he could do better with a regular job and so began hauling buffalo hides and supplies for the army. Due to either his job or his ability at poker, young John did manage to save some money, and after this period of his life he married the fine and understanding girl who was to become Martin’s mother.
When he set out for Lincoln Center, Kansas, in 1885, Martin’s father knew exactly what to expect. The streets were un-paved, and the business section was a huddle of as-yet-unpainted stores. Wisely, he rented the one adjoining the newly erected Salina Savings Bank, gave it three coats of paint against the hot Kansas sun, and put in a modest stock of jewelry, actually little larger than would make a fine display in the brightly polished front window. Lincoln Center was heartened by the appearance of a jewelry store on its dusty main street, and the farmers around as well as the people in town gave John Johnson their business instead of going to the county seat at Salina.
And while all this was going on, the small boy who had inspired it found life good in and about the spotless white house on Second Street, two blocks from the Johnson jewelry store.
School for the first year or two offered no serious problem beyond having to sit in a stuffy room long hours every day with a lot of girls and other boys. The lessons were repetitious and therefore dull; the droning recitations put Martin to sleep; and the girl in the seat just in front of him wore purple plaids, smelled of strong soap, and had a coarse, black braid which swept his slate pencils onto the floor and broke them. Martin didn’t like that. Her ears were pierced, and she had little pieces of toothpick in them to keep the holes open. He didn’t like that either. Then when she appeared with little rings in place of the toothpicks, he felt relieved somehow in the pit of his stomach, but he didn’t like the rings either. He maneuvered for a different seat, but where you sat in school seemed as fixed and nailed down as the seats themselves, so, shamelessly, he played hookey at least once a month.
His father taught him to swim when he was five, and every Saturday morning found him up early, barefooted, and off in bibbed blue overalls and wide-brimmed straw hat to explore the infinite wonders of the Saline River. Ben Marshall and the Everett boys usually went with him on these expeditions, and the Reese brothers, whose father owned the mill, made up a noisy, lusty six. They took paper bags of lunch, packed the night before, and fishing poles and bait according to the season. The Saline River, except at flood time, was an orderly stream, and so the boys liked best that spot at the foot of the mill where a cataract tumbled and gave the sound and feeling of danger to a place that in reality was as safe as a wooden washtub. The willows spread grateful shadows on the sloping bank, and the mill, built of native yellow stone, bulked large and solid and was, Martin knew, one of the biggest buildings in the world—anyhow, bigger than anything in Lincoln Center. Darkly cool inside, it had the sweet, clean smell of ripe crushed wheat and a ghostly powdering of white that drifted and clung even to the highest spiderwebs, and often went home with him on the seat of his blue denim overalls.
An amiable youngster, Martin nevertheless had definite likes and dislikes. Routine of any sort was an abomination, and chores, whether cutting wood, hoeing the garden, mowing the lawn, or even going to the store, fell into this category. He figured it out, however, so that everybody was happy, his mother included. Gathering up old bottles, for one thing, he’d pile them in his wagon, haul them to the river and wash them carefully, then haul them to the drugstore on Main Street and sell them for half a cent apiece. Or he washed the windows of the bank, the grocery, and the hardware store for a nickel apiece. Then, with perhaps thirty cents in his pocket, he would pick up one or both of the Everett boys and pay them twenty cents to do general chores for his mother. They were happy to have the twenty cents, his mother was happy to have the chores done, and Martin was twice happy in having dodged the chores and in gaining possession of the ten cents remaining in his pocket.
Martin was ten when his sister, Freda, was born. He didn’t like the name Freda, so he called her Tom, and he was very proud of her. He was especially pleased the day she started to walk, but it bothered him to see her fall down, so he put casters on an old cane-bottom chair, removed the seat, and, with an arrangement of straps, fastened Freda in so that her feet touched the floor and she couldn’t fall down even if she wanted to. This might have been the forerunner of the somewhat less clumsy contrivance in use today.
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My husband’s life seems always to have had a clean and clear design. With perfect instinct for selection, he always knew what he wanted to do and did it, regardless of consequences to himself. It was as simple as that, and as unconfused.
For this directness, both of impulse and thought, his mother and father deserve much credit. Their part in Martin’s achievements was neither obvious nor greatly considered.
That his body was sound and his instincts right was taken for granted; his failure to distinguish himself in school according to the system of the day left them, wisely, undisturbed. From his Swedish father, Martin inherited a keen mechanical sense and a Viking’s love of adventure. From his mother, whose forebears had fought in both the Revolutionary and Civil wars, came the urge to push back new frontiers.
There was always much of the little boy in Martin, and it showed itself in his delight in pure nonsense, his excitement sometimes over small rather than large achievements. Often I would look up at him, and for all his six feet one, which was nearly eleven inches more than I boasted, I could see in him the small boy he must have been. I think my greatest delight on some of our long safaris was to hear about those little-boy days, when, stimulated every now and then by a gentle prod from me, he would conjure up a thin, taller-than-average lad with curly yellow hair and sea-green eyes born just nine years before I was.
Driving all night, as we often did in Africa, with all of our resources and hopes of success staked on outdistancing the dreaded rains, dodging pig-holes, anthills, and sleeping rhinos, we would make a game of comparing dates. When he first ran away in Lincoln Center, for instance, I was first seeing the light of day in Chanute. I shall always love the memory of his mother for her rare understanding of her only boy on that night when he first decided to leave home. He had failed to pass his grades and had been marked “poor” in everything but geography. Worse, he was being put back into the sixth grade. There was nothing to do, he decided, but to run away. During supper that night he managed to slip some of the food off his plate into a paper bag, and, when he thought no one was looking, he left by the back door. He stopped at the pump for a drink, and there, to his astonishment, his mother overtook him, carrying an old carpetbag packed with his things. Giving it to him, she wished him a cheerful good-bye and sent him on his way. Martin got as far as a cave which he and his friend Ben Marshall had dug in the railroad embankment, crawled in, then crawled out again and ran straight home, where he was received without surprise or comment.
Thanks to Martin’s mother, the return to school and the lower grade the following day was completely without embarrassment. He had his mother’s and his father’s support; their belief in him at a time when his pride in himself and his confidence might have suffered a damaging blow helped to keep intact a free, courageous, and imaginative spirit. His almost excessive love for animals turned the neat backyard of the Johnson ho
me into a sort of cemetery, not only for the occasional cat or dog that happened to die in the neighborhood but for wild squirrels, turtles, rabbits, mice, sparrows, canaries, pigeons, and even a four-foot bull snake killed by some of the boys up the street. All were given a place marked out with orderly precision in the Johnson flower garden. It was not until the headstones inscribed by Martin with appropriate epitaphs began to crowd the rose bushes that the vacant lot next door was suggested as an extension, if not a more suitable place for this boyish challenge to oblivion. In no sense was there anything morbid about all this. It was rather that Martin’s perceptions were acute, his sympathies alive, and his imagination active. A squirrel, for instance, wasn’t vaguely just another of an undetermined number of lively and impudent rodents. Each was an individual—one with perhaps a tuft of hair missing from his left shank, another with a scar across his nose, another with a finer and longer tail or with more audacity, cleverness, or drollery, as the case might be. And out of this keen awareness, it seems to me, grew his interest in the camera, his determination to learn and master all its possibilities, his ardent wish to capture all he could of living things in its lens.
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At the beginning of the nineties, Lincoln Center was the unfortunate target of some of nature’s more afflictive moods. Damaging droughts, frightening floods, and ruinous pests impoverished this section, which depended almost entirely upon agriculture for its existence. John Johnson saw that it would take years for the country to reach again its former level of prosperity. So, in the spring of 1895, he moved his business and his family to Independence, Kansas, a small town in the southeast corner of the state, and it was from here that Martin started out on some of his larger adventures. Martin was just eleven years of age when the move was made, and he was distinctly unhappy about it, for apparently he’d lost everything and gained nothing. The boys, the mill, the places where he used to go fishing and swimming—all were left behind, and here he was in school again, and as far as he could see all schools were exactly alike. They even had the same smell of disinfectant, varnish, and chalk dust. Then, wholly unexpectedly, there developed a new and absorbing interest, and day after day he sat reluctantly at his desk and thought about it, and the voice of his teacher became a meaningless drone. His father, on opening the new jewelry store in Independence, had acquired the exclusive sales agency for Eastman Kodaks and supplies. Martin helped him unpack the first boxes to arrive on an eventful Saturday morning, and told himself with a deep inner excitement that here was something he wanted to know about—know all about.