SOMETUB'S
CRUISE
ON THE C. & O. CANAL

Amid nature's most magnificent scenery we linked the romance of yesterday with the humdrum of the workaday present. We established a new maxim, namely: To avoid the beaten path take the towpath!

We enjoyed to the superlative degree the rare privilege of "Seeing America First," because we saw it as the first American saw it.

Sunlight Vista on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

I.

"Sometub" narrowly escaped being christened "Kitchen Maid." It is literally a kitchen-made craft, that is, it was put together in the kitchen after its knockdown frame was received from a Michigan boatbuilder. When culinary activities in the aforesaid kitchen were partially suspended it afforded an ideal boatyard, but the fact that a kitchen would be put to such extraordinary use there was attracted thither a constant line of spectators, the majority of whom had as little nautical knowledge as the builders. Propped up on a stepladder the bony frame of the future boat looked like one of those uncanny paleontological specimens in the Carnegie museum, and drew from the visitors a flow of remarks entirely irrelevant to boatbuilding. Nearly everyone doubted that the thing would be made to float, but a few who were too polite to express their views went to the opposite extreme and indulged in a line of flattery that was more irritating than the skeptcism of the doubting Thomases.

"Well, that's some tub!" The oft repeated phrase trickled away somewhere into the damaged wall paper of the kitchen or into the big paint spot that ruined the linoleum, and when the time came to name the boat the words came back sufficiently anglicized and properly compounded—"Sometub." And it stuck!

"Sometub" has been laughed at by hundreds of persons who will never know how it received its name. It looks less tub-like than the majority of motorboats. The Brooks Manufacturing Company up in Saginaw, from whom I bought the knockdown frame, doubtless would object to the innuendo suggesting tubbiness because they boast of it as one of their latest and most graceful models—a semi-V bottom shape which is especially noted both for speed and seaworthiness. And it is all they claim for it, and more, too!

"Sometub" is 15 feet long by 43 inches on the beam. We took liberties with the Brooks plan by constructing a bulkhead which enclosed five feet of the bow. This left a 10-foot cockpit, over which was erected a portable canopy top. Curtains that hung on the sides of the canopy made a snug cabin 10 × 3½ feet. For motive power we use an Evinrude motor. By the way, it is one of those coffee mill affairs that you screw on the stern of a skiff or rowboat. "Sometub" was designed for this very sort of equipment and the theory worked out beautifully—until the motor went wrong. And there lies the key to all the villainy that will be divulged in this plain tale of the cruise of "Sometub" from Oakmont to Washington.

On account of the 150-mile portage from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Md., it is advisable to allow seven days from the time of your departure on the Allegheny until your expected sailing from the other terminal of the portage. In these seven days you will make the run down to the Pittsburgh Baltimore & Ohio freight station at Water street, pack your engine and duffle, bail out the boat, cart it to the Cumberland local freight car, see it stowed away and spend four days hoping that it will arrive in Cumberland before you and your cargo. Of course, your hopes will be blasted, but to hope is human. Anyhow, you might as well realize at the outset that cross-country cruising is to be an intensely human experience.

There was no ceremony when we backed out of a stall at the Oakmont Boat Club in the late afternoon of the 9th of last July and picked our way between the bathers, canoes and rowboats that clustered there. Even if there had been occasion for ceremony, the thought that we had to reach the Aspinwall lock before 6 o'clock or wait another hour, "on the hour," caused us to lay a course straight for Nine-mile Island. With its balky Evinrude five miles an hour is "Sometub's" best speed. Past colonies of summer camps on the O'Hara township bank of the Allegheny we continued our way hearing a giggle now and then as a maid in a canoe or on shore caught sight of the aluminum letters on our bow and spelled out "S-o-m-e-t-u-b." The tables were turned when we passed the "Ye Gauds" camp. Phonetic spelling is epidemic among river campers. Their's is not simplified, but rather perplexified spelling.

For a mile above Aspinwall dam the Allegheny in breezy weather has all the choppiness of a landlocked lake and affords the exhileration of boating that is enjoyed on a much larger body of