is carried on above your horizon and loses its terror in familiarity.
When you come to think about it, the disastrous storms are on the
levels, sea or sand or plains. There you get only a hint of what is
about to happen, the fume of the gods rising from their meeting place
under the rim of the world; and when it breaks upon you there is no
stay nor shelter. The terrible mewings and mouthings of a Kansas wind
have the added terror of viewlessness. You are lapped in them like
uprooted grass; suspect them of a personal grudge. But the storms of
hill countries have other business. They scoop watercourses, manure
the pines, twist them to a finer fibre, fit the firs to be masts and
spars, and, if you keep reasonably out of the track of their affairs,
do you no harm.
[Illustration]
They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and warnings,
and they leave you in no doubt about their performances. One who builds
his house on a water scar or the rubble of a steep slope must take
chances. So they did in Overtown who built in the wash of Argus water,
and at Kearsarge at the foot of a steep, treeless swale. After twenty
years Argus water rose in the wash against the frail houses, and the
piled snows of Kearsarge slid down at a thunder peal over the cabins
and the camp, but you could conceive that it was the fault of neither
the water nor the snow.
The first effect of cloud study is a sense of presence and intention
in storm processes. Weather does not happen. It is the visible
manifestation of the Spirit moving itself in the void. It gathers
itself together under the heavens; rains, snows, yearns mightily in
wind, smiles; and the Weather Bureau, situated advantageously for that
very business, taps the record on his instruments and going out on the
streets denies his God, not having gathered the sense of what he has
seen. Hardly anybody takes account of the fact that John Muir, who
knows more of mountain storms than any other, is a devout man.
Of the high Sierras choose the neighborhood of the splintered peaks
about the Kern and King’s river divide for storm study, or the short,
wide-mouthed cañons opening eastward on high valleys. Days when the
hollows are steeped in a warm, winey flood the clouds come walking on
the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath, rounded and pearly
white above. They gather flock-wise, moving on the level currents
that roll about the peaks, lock hands and settle with the cooler air,
drawing a veil about those places where they do their work. If their
meeting or parting takes place at sunrise or sunset, as it often
does, one gets the splendor of the apocalypse. There will be cloud
pillars miles high, snow-capped, glorified, and preserving an orderly
perspective before the unbarred door of the sun, or perhaps mere ghosts
of clouds that dance to some pied piper of an unfelt wind. But be it
day or night, once they have settled to their work, one sees from the
valley only the blank wall of their tents stretched along the ranges.
To get the real effect of a mountain storm you must be inside.
One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say: What if it
should rain? It always does rain somewhere among the peaks: the unusual
thing is that one should escape it. You might suppose that if you took
any account of plant contrivances to save their pollen powder against
showers. Note how many there are deep-throated and bell-flowered like
the pentstemons, how many have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how
many grow in copse shelters and grow there only. There is keen delight
in the quick showers of summer cañons, with the added comfort, born
of experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high
altitudes. The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the cañon wall,
slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy pass, obscures your
sun. Next you hear the rain drum on the broad-leaved hellebore, and
beat down the mimulus beside the brook. You shelter on the lee of some
strong pine with shut-winged butterflies and merry, fiddling creatures
of the wood. Runnels of rain water from the glacier slips swirl through
the pine needles into rivulets; the streams froth and rise in their
banks. The sky is white with cloud; the sky is gray with rain; the sky
is clear. The summer showers leave no wake.
Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August weather.
Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs about the
lake gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away harmlessly.
Sometimes one has the good fortune from a heather-grown headland to
watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air. Out over meadow or lake region
begins a little darkling of the sky,--no cloud, no wind, just a
smokiness such as spirits materialize from in witch stories.
It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret cañons.
Rain begins, “slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;” a wind comes up and
drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pitted by the
glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such rains relieve like tears.
The same season brings the rains that have work to do, ploughing
storms that alter the face of things. These come with thunder and
the play of live fire along the rocks. They come with great winds
that try the pines for their work upon the seas and strike out the
unfit. They shake down avalanches of splinters from sky-line pinnacles
and raise up sudden floods like battle fronts in the cañons against
towns, trees, and boulders. They would be kind if they could, but
have more important matters. Such storms, called cloud-bursts by
the country folk, are not rain, rather the spillings of Thor’s cup,
jarred by the Thunderer. After such a one the water that comes up in
the village hydrants miles away is white with forced bubbles from the
wind-tormented streams.
All that storms do to the face of the earth you may read in the
geographies, but not what they do to our contemporaries. I remember one
night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by the houseless cry
of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family, had been buried under
a slide of broken boulders on the slope of Kearsarge. We had heard the
heavy denotation of the slide about the hour of the alpenglow, a pale
rosy interval in a darkling air, and judged he must have come from
hunting to the ruined cliff and paced the night out before it, crying
a very human woe. I remember, too, in that same season of storms, a
lake made milky white for days, and crowded out of its bed by clay
washed into it by a fury of rain, with the trout floating in it belly
up, stunned by the shock of the sudden flood. But there were trout
enough for what was left of the lake next year and the beginning of a
meadow about its upper rim. What taxed me most in the wreck of one of
my favorite cañons by cloudburst was to see a bobcat mother mouthing
her drowned kittens in the ruined lair built in the wash, far above
the limit of accustomed waters, but not far enough for the unexpected.
After a time you get the point of view of gods about these things to
save you from being too pitiful.
The great snows that come at the beginning of winter, before there is
yet any snow except the perpetual high banks, are best worth while to
watch. These come often before the late bloomers are gone and while
the migratory birds are still in the piney woods. Down in the valley
you see little but the flocking of blackbirds in the streets, or the
low flight of mallards over the tulares, and the gathering of clouds
behind Williamson. First there is a waiting stillness in the wood; the
pine-trees creak although there is no wind, the sky glowers, the firs
rock by the water borders. The noise of the creek rises insistently and
falls off a full note like a child abashed by sudden silence in the
room. This changing of the stream-tone following tardily the changes
of the sun on melting snows is most meaningful of wood notes. After
it runs a little trumpeter wind to cry the wild creatures to their
holes. Sometimes the warning hangs in the air for days with increasing
stillness. Only Clark’s crow and the strident jays make light of it;
only they can afford to. The cattle get down to the foothills and
ground inhabiting creatures make fast their doors. It grows chill,
blind clouds fumble in the cañons; there will be a roll of thunder,
perhaps, or a flurry of rain, but mostly the snow is born in the air
with quietness and the sense of strong white pinions softly stirred. It
increases, is wet and clogging, and makes a white night of midday.
There is seldom any wind with first snows, more often rain, but later,
when there is already a smooth foot or two over all the slopes, the
drifts begin. The late snows are fine and dry, mere ice granules at the
wind’s will. Keen mornings after a storm they are blown out in wreaths
and banners from the high ridges sifting into the cañons.
Once in a year or so we have a “big snow.” The cloud tents are widened
out to shut in the valley and an outlying range or two and are drawn
tight against the sun. Such a storm begins warm, with a dry white mist
that fills and fills between the ridges, and the air is thick with
formless groaning. Now for days you get no hint of the neighboring
ranges until the snows begin to lighten and some shouldering peak
lifts through a rent. Mornings after the heavy snows are steely blue,
two-edged with cold, divinely fresh and still, and these are times
to go up to the pine borders. There you may find floundering in the
unstable drifts “tainted wethers” of the wild sheep, faint from age and
hunger; easy prey. Even the deer make slow going in the thick fresh
snow, and once we found a wolverine going blind and feebly in the white
glare.
[Illustration]
No tree takes the snow stress with such ease as the silver fir. The
star-whorled, fan-spread branches droop under the soft wreaths--droop
and press flatly to the trunk; presently the point of overloading
is reached, there is a soft sough and muffled dropping, the boughs
recover, and the weighting goes on until the drifts have reached
the midmost whorls and covered up the branches. When the snows
are particularly wet and heavy they spread over the young firs in
green-ribbed tents wherein harbor winter loving birds.
[Illustration]
All storms of desert hills, except wind storms, are impotent. East and
east of the Sierras they rise in nearly parallel ranges, desertward,
and no rain breaks over them, except from some far-strayed cloud
or roving wind from the California Gulf, and these only in winter.
In summer the sky travails with thunderings and the flare of sheet
lightnings to win a few blistering big drops, and once in a lifetime
the chance of a torrent. But you have not known what force resides in
the mindless things until you have known a desert wind. One expects it
at the turn of the two seasons, wet and dry, with electrified tense
nerves. Along the edge of the mesa where it drops off to the valley,
dust devils begin to rise white and steady, fanning out at the top
like the genii out of the Fisherman’s bottle. One supposes the Indians
might have learned the use of smoke signals from these dust pillars as
they learn most things direct from the tutelage of the earth. The air
begins to move fluently, blowing hot and cold between the ranges. Far
south rises a murk of sand against the sky; it grows, the wind shakes
itself, and has a smell of earth. The cloud of small dust takes on the
color of gold and shuts out the neighborhood, the push of the wind is
unsparing. Only man of all folk is foolish enough to stir abroad in it.
But being in a house is really much worse; no relief from the dust, and
a great fear of the creaking timbers. There is no looking ahead in such
a wind, and the bite of the small sharp sand on exposed skin is keener
than any insect sting. One might sleep, for the lapping of the wind
wears one to the point of exhaustion very soon, but there is dread, in
open sand stretches sometimes justified, of being over blown by the
drift. It is hot, dry, fretful work, but by going along the ground with
the wind behind, one may come upon strange things in its tumultuous
privacy. I like these truces of wind and heat that the desert makes,
otherwise I do not know how I should come by so many acquaintances with
furtive folk. I like to see hawks sitting daunted in shallow holes, not
daring to spread a feather, and doves in a row by the prickle bushes,
and shut-eyed cattle, turned tail to the wind in a patient doze. I like
the smother of sand among the dunes, and finding small coiled snakes in
open places, but I never like to come in a wind upon the silly sheep.
The wind robs them of what wit they had, and they seem never to have
learned the self-induced hypnotic stupor with which most wild things
endure weather stress. I have never heard that the desert winds brought
harm to any other than the wandering shepherds and their flocks. Once
below Pastaria Little Pete showed me bones sticking out of the sand
where a flock of two hundred had been smothered in a bygone wind. In
many places the four-foot posts of a cattle fence had been buried by
the wind-blown dunes.
It is enough occupation, when no storm is brewing, to watch the cloud
currents and the chambers of the sky. From Kearsarge, say, you look
over Inyo and find pink soft cloud masses asleep on the level desert
air; south of you hurries a white troop late to some gathering of their
kind at the back of Oppapago; nosing the foot of Waban, a woolly mist
creeps south. In the clean, smooth paths of the middle sky and highest
up in air, drift, unshepherded, small flocks ranging contrarily.
You will find the proper names of these things in the reports of
the Weather Bureau--cirrus, cumulus, and the like--and charts that
will teach by study when to sow and take up crops. It is astonishing
the trouble men will be at to find out when to plant potatoes, and
gloze over the eternal meaning of the skies. You have to beat out for
yourself many mornings on the windly headlands the sense of the fact
that you get the same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the
spray of your garden hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to
it.
THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES
[Illustration]
There are still some places in the west where the quails cry
“_cuidado_”; where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle;
where all the dishes have _chile_ in them, and they make more of the
Sixteenth of September than they do of the Fourth of July. I mean in
particular El Pueblo de Las Uvas. Where it lies, how to come at it, you
will not get from me; rather would I show you the heron’s nest in the
tulares. It has a peak behind it, glinting above the tamarack pines,
above a breaker of ruddy hills that have a long slope valley-wards and
the shoreward steep of waves toward the Sierras.
Below the Town of the Grape Vines, which shortens to Las Uvas
for common use, the land dips away to the river pastures and the
tulares. It shrouds under a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome
of cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. Hereabouts are
some strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up the creek for the
village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of the arrastra. Wild vines
that begin among the willows lap over to the orchard rows, take the
trellis and roof-tree.
There is another town above Las Uvas that merits some attention, a town
of arches and airy crofts, full of linnets, blackbirds, fruit birds,
small sharp hawks, and mockingbirds that sing by night. They pour out
piercing, unendurably sweet cavatinas above the fragrance of bloom and
musky smell of fruit. Singing is in fact the business of the night
at Las Uvas as sleeping is for midday. When the moon comes over the
mountain wall new-washed from the sea, and the shadows lie like lace
on the stamped floors of the patios, from recess to recess of the vine
tangle runs the thrum of guitars and the voice of singing.
At Las Uvas they keep up all the good customs brought out of Old Mexico
or bred in a lotus-eating land; drink, and are merry and look out for
something to eat afterward; have children, nine or ten to a family,
have cock-fights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes and wait for the
sun to go down. And always they dance; at dusk on the smooth adobe
floors, afternoons under the trellises where the earth is damp and has
a fruity smell. A betrothal, a wedding, or a christening, or the mere
proximity of a guitar is sufficient occasion; and if the occasion
lacks, send for the guitar and dance anyway.
All this requires explanation. Antonio Sevadra, drifting this way from
Old Mexico with the flood that poured into the Tappan district after
the first notable strike, discovered La Golondrina. It was a generous
lode and Tony a good fellow; to work it he brought in all the Sevadras,
even to the twice-removed; all the Castros who were his wife’s
family, all the Saises, Romeros, and Eschobars,--the relations of his
relations-in-law. There you have the beginning of a pretty considerable
town. To these accrued much of the Spanish California float swept out
of the southwest by eastern enterprise. They slacked away again when
the price of silver went down, and the ore dwindled in La Golondrina.
All the hot eddy of mining life swept away from that corner of the
hills, but there were always those too idle, too poor to move, or too
easily content with El Pueblo de Las Uvas.
Nobody comes nowadays to the town of the grape vines except, as we say,
“with the breath of crying,” but of these enough. All the low sills run
over with small heads. Ah, ah! There is a kind of pride in that if you
did but know it, to have your baby every year or so as the time sets,
and keep a full breast. So great a blessing as marriage is easily come
by. It is told of Ruy Garcia that when he went for his marriage license
he lacked a dollar of the clerk’s fee, but borrowed it of the sheriff,
who expected reëlection and exhibited thereby a commendable thrift.
Of what account is it to lack meal or meat when you may have it of
any neighbor? Besides, there is sometimes a point of honor in these
things. Jesus Romero, father of ten, had a job sacking ore in the
Marionette which he gave up of his own accord. “Eh, why?” said Jesus,
“for my fam’ly.”
“It is so, señora,” he said solemnly, “I go to the Marionette, I work,
I eat meat--pie--frijoles--good, ver’ good. I come home sad’day nigh’
I see my fam’ly. I play lil’ game poker with the boys, have lil’ drink
wine, my money all gone. My family have no money, nothing eat. All
time I work at mine I eat, good, ver’ good grub. I think sorry for my
fam’ly. No, no, señora, I no work no more that Marionette, I stay with
my fam’ly.” The wonder of it is, I think, that the family had the same
point of view.
Every house in the town of the vines has its garden plot, corn and
brown beans and a row of peppers reddening in the sun; and in damp
borders of the irrigating ditches clumps of _yerba santa_, horehound,
catnip, and spikenard, wholesome herbs and curative, but if no peppers
then nothing at all. You will have for a holiday dinner, in Las Uvas,
soup with meat balls and chile in it, chicken with chile, rice with
chile, fried beans with more chile, enchilada, which is corn cake with
a sauce of chile and tomatoes, onion, grated cheese, and olives, and
for a relish chile _tepines_ passed about in a dish, all of which is
comfortable and corrective to the stomach. You will have wine which
every man makes for himself, of good body and inimitable bouquet, and
sweets that are not nearly so nice as they look.
There are two occasions when you may count on that kind of a meal;
always on the Sixteenth of September, and on the two-yearly visits of
Father Shannon. It is absurd, of course, that El Pueblo de Las Uvas
should have an Irish priest, but Black Rock, Minton, Jimville, and
all that country round do not find it so. Father Shannon visits them
all, waits by the Red Butte to confess the shepherds who go through
with their flocks, carries blessing to small and isolated mines, and
so in the course of a year or so works around to Las Uvas to bury and
marry and christen. Then all the little graves in the _Campo Santo_
are brave with tapers, the brown pine headboards blossom like Aaron’s
rod with paper roses and bright cheap prints of Our Lady of Sorrows.
Then the Señora Sevadra, who thinks herself elect of heaven for that
office, gathers up the original sinners, the little Elijias, Lolas,
Manuelitas, Josés, and Felipés, by dint of adjurations and sweets
smuggled into small perspiring palms, to fit them for the Sacrament.
[Illustration]
I used to peek in at them, never so softly, in Doña Ina’s living-room;
Raphael-eyed little imps, going sidewise on their knees to rest them
from the bare floor, candles lit on the mantel to give a religious air,
and a great sheaf of wild bloom before the Holy Family. Come Sunday
they set out the altar in the schoolhouse, with the finedrawn altar
cloths, the beaten silver candlesticks, and the wax images, chief glory
of Las Uvas, brought up mule-back from Old Mexico forty years ago. All
in white the communicants go up two and two in a hushed, sweet awe to
take the body of their Lord, and Tomaso, who is priest’s boy, tries not
to look unduly puffed up by his office. After that you have dinner and
a bottle of wine that ripened on the sunny slope of Escondito. All the
week Father Shannon has shriven his people, who bring clean conscience
to the betterment of appetite, and the Father sets them an example.
Father Shannon is rather big about the middle to accommodate the large
laugh that lives in him, but a most shrewd searcher of hearts. It is
reported that one derives comfort from his confessional, and I for my
part believe it.
The celebration of the Sixteenth, though it comes every year, takes
as long to prepare for as Holy Communion. The señoritas have each a
new dress apiece, the señoras a new _rebosa_. The young gentlemen
have new silver trimmings to their sombreros, unspeakable ties, silk
handkerchiefs, and new leathers to their spurs. At this time when the
peppers glow in the gardens and the young quail cry “_cuidado_,”
“have a care!” you can hear the _plump, plump_ of the _metate_ from
the alcoves of the vines where comfortable old dames, whose experience
gives them the touch of art, are pounding out corn for tamales.
School-teachers from abroad have tried before now at Las Uvas to have
school begin on the first of September, but got nothing else to stir in
the heads of the little Castros, Garcias, and Romeros but feasts and
cock-fights until after the Sixteenth. Perhaps you need to be told that
this is the anniversary of the Republic, when liberty awoke and cried
in the provinces of Old Mexico. You are aroused at midnight to hear
them shouting in the streets, “_Vive la Libertad!_” answered from the
houses and the recesses of the vines, “_Vive la Mexico!_” At sunrise
shots are fired commemorating the tragedy of unhappy Maximilian, and
then music, the noblest of national hymns, as the great flag of Old
Mexico floats up the flag-pole in the bare little plaza of shabby Las
Uvas. The sun over Pine Mountain greets the eagle of Montezuma before
it touches the vineyards and the town, and the day begins with a
great shout. By and by there will be a reading of the Declaration of
Independence and an address punctured by _vives_; all the town in its
best dress, and some exhibits of horsemanship that make lathered bits
and bloodly spurs; also a cock-fight.
[Illustration: BY NIGHT THERE WILL BE DANCING]
By night there will be dancing, and such music! old Santos to play the
flute, a little lean man with a saintly countenance, young Garcia whose
guitar has a soul, and Carrasco with the violin. They sit on a high
platform above the dancers in the candle flare, backed by the red,
white, and green of Old Mexico, and play fervently such music as you
will not hear otherwhere.
[Illustration]