Day 73 Coast Walk Conclusion

Thursday July 6, 1931

At Belle's [her sister, Matt's mother]

Conclusion

It is not satisfactory to travel in this modern civilized world in the primitive fashion we have used.

This is the age of the Automobile and the Cottage and mere hikers are out of place like a bathing suit in the city.

Next year I should like to take a cottage in or near Yahats and study the surroundings closely.

This is my last long hike in the rough – Were I to take another I would carry a light weight aluminum bucket for water – a bucket shaped to fit in the pack.

I would not carry three lipsticks nor a broad brimmed hat unless I intended to park for sometime on the beach in one spot.

Thus ends the journal except for a few photos (two on the back of this page, something not done elsewhere) and two on the back of one of the expenses pages (the final postcard of Twin Rocks was stuck behind one of the last two photos, not mounted). I assume the incorrect month above is simply a faux pas. As a student of westering journals I find her insistence on this now being the age of the Automobile and no longer fit for primitive travel in line with all earlier frontier journals which always insist that the period just prior to their story was when the west was still wild. That said it is striking that the infrastructure of the automobile age is fully in place, even though the Roosevelt Highway (whose construction they witness) would be the first road that actually traversed the state along the coast rather than short stretches between rivers across which one took a ferry, or the beaches themselves, where they exist. More importantly for Ruth in the long run was that the days of homesteading were over and her dream of establishing one would not happen. But as I said at the start, 25 years later she would join the automobile age and take many more journeys.