PODCAST · arts

The Friendly Road, New Adventures in Contentment

by Ray Stannard Baker

My grandmother Gertrude received a copy of The Friendly Road for Christmas in 1919. It must have been a special gift book--green leather binding, gold embossing, a sheet of tissue paper protecting the color plate facing the title page--this a painting of a solitary man enjoying a swim in a sun dappled stream with the caption "Surely it is good to be alive at a time like this." Written in first person, pseudo autobiographical style, the “author” of The Friendly Road, David Grayson, is a writer,* living on a farm with cows to milk, and ducks and pigs to feed, and fields in need of plowing. One day he just slings a few belongings in a pack and walks off, leaving the cows unmilked and his sister Harriet standing in the doorway. "My sober friend," Grayson writes, "have you ever tried to do anything that the world at large considers not quite sensible, not quite sane? Try it!" The rest of the book is an odd mixture of nostalgia for a gentler, kinder age; adventures, as Grayson relies on the