TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES
BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM
THE GENTLE ART OF TRAMPING
THE DIVIDING LINE OF EUROPE
IN QUEST OF EL DORADO
TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES
EUROPE--WHITHER BOUND?
THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD
CHILDREN OF THE SLAVES
A PRIVATE IN THE GUARDS
THE QUEST OF THE FACE
RUSSIA IN 1916
PRIEST OF THE IDEAL
THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL ASIA
THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY
RUSSIA AND THE WORLD
WITH POOR EMIGRANTS TO AMERICA
WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM
CHANGING RUSSIA
A TRAMP’S SKETCHES
UNDISCOVERED RUSSIA
A VAGABOND IN THE CAUCASUS
ST. VITUS DAY
TRAMPING WITH A POET
IN THE ROCKIES
BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
AUTHOR OF “EUROPE--WHITHER BOUND?”
WITH THIRTY-EIGHT EMBLEMS BY
VERNON HILL
[Illustration]
D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY
INCORPORATED
NEW YORK LONDON
1936
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_All rights reserved. This book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission of the publisher._
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
Vachel Lindsay is the poet. He is best known as the author of _General
William Booth Enters Heaven_, _The Congo_ and _Johnny Appleseed_. He
also wrote a highly comical piece called _The Daniel Jazz_. He is a
wonderful reciter, and is aided by a sonorous, heaven-reaching voice.
All his poems are written to be read aloud, chanted, or declaimed; in
some cases they are written to be danced also, and played as games.
In many of his recitations the audience is called upon to take part
in choruses and refrains. Thus, in one poem, when Lindsay says, “I’ve
been to Palestine,” the audience as one man has to cry back to him,
“_What did you see in Palestine?_” This is rapturously enjoyed by
the audience. When you have heard the poet you can well understand
that he did not starve when he used to tramp in America and recite to
the farmers for a meal and a night’s lodging. He has gained a great
popularity.
He is, however, something more than an entertainer. He has a spiritual
message to the world, and is deeply in earnest. In a large experience
of men and women in many countries, I have rarely met such a rebel
against vulgarity, materialism, and the modern artificial way of life.
At the same time, despite his poetry, he is almost inarticulate. He has
helped me, and here in a way I help him by giving in a new form part of
the richness of his thoughts and his opinions.
Vachel Lindsay visited England in 1920, and recited his poems at Oxford
and Cambridge and to several groups of friends in London. His mother,
Catharine Frazee Lindsay, who accompanied him, was a notable woman in
Springfield, Illinois, in religious and progressive activities. She
succumbed to an attack of pneumonia this year. But those who met her
in this country recognised in her a remarkable figure. At Vachel’s
invitation I visited Springfield last summer, and we went to the
Rockies, and tramped together to Canada, and this volume is a record
of our holiday. A mutual friend of ours is Christopher Morley, who
brought us together in 1919. When he heard of our projected expedition
he interposed to get some letters for the New York _Evening Post_. Some
thirty-two of these were written, mostly by the camp fire or sitting
on the rocks in the sun, and were printed in the _Post_, where they
attracted considerable attention. “Centurion” in the _Century Magazine_
for August wrote: “Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Graham are having a glorious
time. As for those of us who must spend the dog-days in stuffy cities
and stuffier offices, the picture of the two of them by a camp fire
in the Rockies waking to the freshness and glory of a mountain dawn
is--well, if there are no future issues of the _Century Magazine_,
you may be sure that the entire staff, inspired by this example, has
started vagabonding.” Another, a facetious scribe, wrote: “It is
conceded by every one that Stephen Graham’s _Tramping with a Poet_ will
some day stand on the shelf of open-air literature beside _Travels with
a Donkey_.”
My thanks are due to the representatives of the Great Northern
Railway of America, at St. Paul, who gave us a wonderful collection
of pictures, maps, and books, when they heard we were going, on the
subject of Glacier Park, which we tramped through. In fact, the railway
company would have done a great deal for us, but we eluded their kind
care, as was our wish, and got out entirely on our own.
As Vachel Lindsay was an art student before he was a poet, and wrote
his first verses as scrolls to be illuminated below emblematic figures,
we naturally discussed emblems and emblematic art and hieroglyphics as
we tramped together. The emblems in this book are an attempt to express
that side of our mutual experience. They have been done by my friend,
Vernon Hill, who drew once that very precious work, “The Arcadian
Calendar.”
One of the poems is by “Rusticus,” who, anent our adventures,
contributed it to the New York _Evening Post_.
A last point: Vachel is pronounced to rhyme with Rachel, and is spelt
with one l. It does not rhyme with satchel. The poet asked me to tell
you that.
STEPHEN GRAHAM
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. TRAMPING AGAIN 1
II. FINDING THE POET 7
III. TAKING THE ROAD 14
IV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT 21
V. GOING UP TO THE SNOW 28
VI. DIFFERENT WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD 34
VII. SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS 40
VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS 47
IX. “WIFE, GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER” 54
X. CLEAR BLUE 62
XI. NATIONAL WILDERNESS 71
XII. GOING WEST 77
XIII. CLIMBING RED EAGLE 82
XIV. DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE 89
XV. PEOPLE IN CAMP 95
XVI. VISITED BY BEARS 101
XVII. LINDSAY’S STONE COFFEE 108
XVIII. MAKING MAPS OF THE WORLD 114
XIX. A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW 121
XX. BY THE CAMP FIRE 127
XXI. DOWN CATARACT MOUNTAIN 133
XXII. “GO WEST, YOUNG MAN” 139
XXIII. THE SUN-WORSHIPPERS 146
XXIV. TWO VOICES 151
XXV. STOPPED BY THE CLOUDS 158
XXVI. LINDSAY ON ROOSEVELT 165
XXVII. THE WILLOWS 171
XXVIII. JOHNNY APPLESEED 177
XXIX. LOG-ROLLING 184
XXX. TOWARD THE KOOTENAI 190
XXXI. AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD 196
XXXII. THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD 201
XXXIII. FLAT TOP MOUNTAIN 213
XXXIV. CROSSING THE CANADIAN LINE 221
XXXV. THE DIFFERENCE 231
XXXVI. DUKHOBORS 239
XXXVII. A VISIT TO THE MORMONS 247
XXXVIII. “BLOOM FOR EVER, O REPUBLIC!” 274
TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES
[Illustration: HAIL TO ALL MOVING THINGS]
I. TRAMPING AGAIN
WELL, it’s good to be going tramping again. I’ve been sitting in
European cafés and reading newspapers half a year, from Constantinople
to Berlin, and I’ve only stretched my legs when in strange cities I
needed to find a hotel, beating it pleasurelessly on asphalt. Last
autumn, yes, I was tramping over the ruins and wreck of the war in
France, and the year before that walked across Georgia on the track of
old Sherman. But with a purpose, and in lands where after all there are
hotels, and one pulls the blinds down when the stars appear.
But now I’ve had a real call from Hesperus and the wilds, and am off
with a knapsack and a pot and a blanket, and a free mind--yes, and, I
confess, a few yards of mosquito netting. I’ve left a notice, “Not at
home,” at my Soho flat, though I don’t spend much time there, anyhow;
“Back in half an hour or so,” and there are already four thousand miles
between my arm-chair and me.
And as I hasten to the West the link stretches, stretches. Not that my
flat could ever be lasting home. Where the lady of your heart is, there
is home! And where is she not? The worst thing man ever did to man was
to nail him down. So hail to all things and men which move and keep
moving.
* * * * *
I AM called by one of the most wonderful men who ever broke silence
with a song. He belongs to the same sub-species. Yes, a tramping
species. His hat has got a hole in it, and so have his breeches. But he
is a poet, and he sings of what the world will be when the years have
passed away. He can charm a supper out of a farmer with a song. And I
who have tramped without music know what a miracle that is. They always
said to me, “Chop this wood,” or “Turn that hay,” or “If a man do not
work, then neither shall he eat.”
_Grande erreur_, Mr. Farmer!
“Well, _I_ can’t take to the road,” says Mrs. Farmer. “Look at
me!--it’s wuk, wuk, wuk, all day!” Mrs. Farmer was born on a Saturday.
I always feel sorry for Saturday’s children. They were born a day
before I was. For I was born on a Sunday. How sadly we used to
intone it when we were children--“Saturday’s child works _hard_ for
his living!” And then the relief, “But the child who is born on the
good Sunday, is happy and loving and blithe and gay.” That is the
tramp-baby, born on the day of rest.
* * * * *
I AM sitting at this moment in the St. Louis train heading for
Missouri. The little negro marionette with set smile and the borrowed
voice of a ventriloquist has offered coffee, ice-cream, oranges,
without response, and now the car-conductor has just put into my hand
a tract. It is entitled “Millions Now Living Will Never Die,” and costs
25 cents.
“The emphatic announcement that millions now living on earth will never
die must seem presumptuous to many people; but when the evidence is
carefully considered I believe that almost every fair mind will concede
that the conclusion is a reasonable one.” So the book begins. And you
who are spiritually a citizen of Missouri will doubtless require, like
doubting Thomas of old, to be shown the very truth in substance and
reality.
But the car-conductor has made a mistake. I have not read this book,
but I believe. Though I have not seen, I believe and am blessed.
And though in the Missouri train, I am not going to Missouri. I am
stepping off at Flora, Illinois, to catch the Beardstown local train to
Springfield, which unlike St. Louis and Jerusalem and Capernaum, and
perhaps more like Tyre and Sidon, is a city of faith where they have
bread from heaven to eat.
Not that I am staying in Springfield. But there I pick up the poet.
That is where he haunts--“where Lincoln dreamed in Illinois.” The
poet thinks that the world could be regenerated from a centre in
Illinois--this beautiful state upon which Chicago has thought fit to
rear its awful form.
Some one of Illinois, not the poet, wrote to me, “What do you think
of Springfield as a centre of world thought?” Now I know the craze
of “Boost your home town” can be, and often is, carried to excess,
and little Springfield is not even on a main line from New York. But
neither is Bethlehem nor the human heart. If you want to regenerate
your wicked world you can begin here and now--or, to use the language
of the country, put your hand to your bosom and say it--“_You can begin
right here._” And then, to quote the poet himself, you will have--
Crossed the Appalachians,
And turned to blazing warrior souls
Of the lazy forest.
Springfield will not hold us. But we shall take Springfield with us. We
are going to take it in our hearts and place it on the top of the Rocky
Mountains, at the Triple Divide, where the waters of the new world
flow north and east and west--
[Illustration]
_Going tramping again,
Going to the mountains,
To recapture the stars,
To meet again the nymphs of the fountains.
To visit the bear,
To salute the eagles,
To be kissed all night by wild-flowers in the grass!_
[Illustration: TO HEART’S DESIRE]
II. FINDING THE POET
FLORA, Illinois, where one changes for Springfield, has a Main Street,
and, like many a little town of the Middle West of America, looks
rather self-consciously askance at visitors, like the village that
voted the earth was flat in Kipling’s tale. For the novel of the hour
is called _Main Street_ and is sold to hundreds of thousands of people
and read by every American who reads anything, and is bitterly or
jocularly discussed at every tea-table. It sheds a bright light on
the life of a typical little town in the Middle West. It names the
town Gopher Prairie--because the Middle West is prairie land and the
gopher-rats or marmots live there in myriads in their little burrows.
The novelist seems to suggest that the people themselves are a species
of gopher, a little people, limited of view, good-natured, of the earth
earthy, but always bobbing-up. Because of the criticism implied in this
novel the Middle West would rather now be called the “Central West.”
These Main Streets, however, except for the sophisticated eyes of a
college girl inauspiciously married, are probably not so bad as the
realist paints them. They are dull, but genuine. They exhibit our
modern civilisation without too many shams. See the people working
in the heat. The minds of the young are set on their dull jobs and
not thinking of drink or sex--it is sufficiently wonderful. There
are “Main Street” towns in every country in Europe, and life is dull
in them though adorned by fights and drinks and “hussies”--but where
will you find such an unexhausted _élan_ and zest for the unornamented
reality that America affords? Where else moreover will you find the
working-men to-day working in silk shirts? Life in Main Street seems
worth while, at least to those who live there.
It’s a by-line from Flora to Springfield, and you plough iron slowly
through Illinois corn. An old mechanical car-conductor with grey straw
hat and fat stubby face calls the stations one by one in an outlandish
accent which to a stranger is entirely baffling. He collects the
tickets, and if you are for Springfield he puts a red check in your
hat-band; if you are for anywhere else it is a white check. Springfield
is now in the mind’s eye as a large place and is printed everywhere in
big type. The Springfield _Register_ and the Springfield _Journal_ make
showing.
* * * * *
I READ the newspapers and then tick off the names of the stations on
the printed time-table of the B. and O. folder and patiently await
the city and its bard. A four-hour journey in a slow train in England
would seem intolerable, but America has a different sense of time and
space, and a long time is not thought so long. At last, in the late
dusk, behold Springfield, Illinois, and the unmistakable marble of the
poet’s face under a small black felt--“waitin’ for me, prayin’ for me,”
and certainly not really believing in the act of faith which can bring
the mountain to Mahomet. In the literary world when invitations are
rife there is a golden rule--_Promise everything and do just what you
like._ So one never really knows whether “Yes, I’ll come,” means yea,
yea or nay, nay.
It meant yea, yea this time, and so, getting out of the Beardstown
local which pulled up outside the station, behold--two strong men
stand face to face and they come from the ends of the earth. Vachel
Lindsay rasped out sentences of welcome in broad Illinois and I replied
in whispering English, and we bundled along Fifth Street for home.
Then mother, of seventy years, tiptoed and curtsied and smiled with
the roguishness of a young maid, and brought us in. So we sit now on
rocking-chairs and talk while beads of moisture roll ticklingly adown
our brows, and it is home.
Vachel is a poetical vagabond. I also am a vagabond. There lies our
common ground. He is an old-fashioned hiker of the tramping parson
type. He leaves home, as it were to post a letter, and does a thousand
or so miles. He made a rule once to travel without money, and he
recited his poems to the farmers and their wives for food and a night’s
lodging. Like Weston, who tramped with ice-blocks under his hat and
water streaming down his neck, he can do his twenty miles a day over a
long time and has travelled some huge distances in his day. I for my
part hardly believe in tramping for tramping’s sake, but in living with
Nature for what that is worth.
To sleep under the stars, to live with the river that sings as it
flows, to sit by the embers of morning or evening fire and just dream
away time and earnestness, to gather sticks to keep the old pot
a-boiling, to laze into the company of strangers and slip out of their
company in time, to make friends with bird and beast, and watch insects
and grubs--to relax and to be; that’s my idea of tramping. The blessed
nights full of dew or rain and breeze, the full length of a ferny bed
that Mother Earth provides--don’t they attract, don’t they pull one
away from the town! And then the day, with celestial, unadvertised,
unpaid-for sunshine or shade, on the rocks, on the tufty hills, beside
tiny springs or stream on the stairs of the mountains!
* * * * *
I HAD an idea I was finding my poet at Springfield--well, I know
I shall not find him now till we get to the wilderness. He is yet
incarcerated in the home town. He reflects in his soul the grey walls
and squat architecture of the city; his nerves are still tied to the
leading strings of audiences and friends; his soul, like a rare singing
bird lately caught by the curious, flings itself against the bars and
pines for the wilderness. All is going to go well with him and us, I
surmise, and his eyes will have mountains and stars in them, and his
nerves get free of strings and sink into their natural beds for a rest,
and his soul, that rarely plumaged, wingéd wanderer ’twixt heaven and
earth--well, some one has come to open the cage door and let him fly
away, to heart’s desire.
The world will have to send a fowler after him with a net, if it wants
to get him back. And to find him--it will be “a long ways.”
[Illustration]
_The poet was in Fifth Street
Mewed up as in a prison.
He was moping in his bedchamber
All the day long
Far from the mountains and the flowers,
But see, a visitor has arrived
From strange parts._
[Illustration]
III. TAKING THE ROAD
WE packed our knapsacks at Springfield, and stowed away blankets and
socks, a coffee-pot, and a frying-pan. We bought at a ten-cent store
knife and fork and spoon, skillet, towels which we sewed into sacks,
mugs, and what was labelled “The Mystic Mit--the greatest discovery
since soap for cleaning pots and pans.” Lindsay had hobnails put
in his old boots and bought a handsome pair of corduroy breeches,
which, together with his old black hat, made him look like a tramping
violinist. Springfield bade us farewell. We were one night in the
train to Chicago and travelled all day north to St. Paul. We were then
two nights and a day crossing the great land ocean of Minnesota, North
Dakota, and eastern Montana--what was once an unending stage-coach
trail to the West.
“This is what I like,” said Lindsay--“the prairie to the horizon,
no fences, no stone walls, as in New England. It is all broad and
unlimited; that is why since the days of Andrew Jackson all the great
politicians have come from the West--the unfenced West. I’d like to put
all the Boston and New York people out here on the plains and let the
plain men run the East.”
To me, however, it looked a land of endless toil as I saw it from train
windows, and I thought of the toiling pioneers and the Russians in
the Dakotas, the Swedes and the Germans content to live and toil and
be swallowed up at last by the distances and the primitive. European
life-rivers have flowed into these deserts and made them what they are.
One day their children perhaps will have a Western consciousness, an
American consciousness.
* * * * *
WE stepped off the train at Glacier Park Station. Some dozen women in
khaki riding breeches were waiting on the platform, and six or seven
people got out from the tourist and Pullman cars to cross to the great
log-built hotel opposite. Then the train started again and toiled
onwards to the heights of the divide, whence, as Kipling put it:
They ride the iron stallions down to drink;
To the canyons and the waters of the West.
We spent a night at the hotel and were much amused by the idea of a
room with a bath in such a place, and by the notice that you could have
your linen laundered in twenty-four hours. There was dancing in the
evening in an immense hall lit by red Chinese lanterns and adorned by
bear-skins and Alaskan ornaments--a fair company of people, too, though
mostly from the West.
We, however, were eager for the road, and set out next morning with
blankets and provisions and steered a north-westerly or west by
north-westerly course by our compasses, abjuring trails and guides. Our
idea was to obtain a cross-section view of the Rockies in their most
primitive state unguided by convention. We hoped to realise something
of what America was like for at least a hundred years after Columbus
discovered it. We were headed for the virgin land.
How quickly did we leave that hotel with its “stopping over” crowd
behind! In an hour we were in the deep silence of the mountains
encompassed on each side by exuberant pink larkspurs and blanket
flowers and red paint-brush. We clambered upward, ever upward, through
fresh, young, chattering aspens and then green tangled pinewood--and
then also through old dead forests lying in black confusion, uprooted,
snapped, stricken, in heaps like the woods of the Somme Valley. Then
we walked through new dead forests, burned only last year, and then
through brown scorched forests that did not burn, but died merely of
the great heat which their neighbours’ burning had caused.
We stepped from log to log and tree to tree, making for the open
and the light, with the gaiety of troubadours, and Lindsay seemed
romantically happy. I also was happy, and thought of the happy days
before the war, when I tramped in this fashion back and forth across
the Caucasus Mountains and along hundreds of miles of Black Sea shore.
It was pure joy to light the first fire and fry our bacon and make our
coffee in the full effulgence of the sun.
* * * * *
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, which we passed through first, is a preserve.
It is God’s holy mountain on which no man may shoot. By the laws you
are not allowed even to frighten a bird. You may not carry firearms
into the region. We were therefore not very agreeably surprised to hear
in the thickets the whiz-ping of a gun which some Indians were using.
Lindsay nearly got a shot in the head as he got up from luncheon. The
fact is, Glacier adjoins the Blackfeet Indian reservation, and the
Indians are all hunters by instinct and preference. It is difficult
to restrain them. They are a gay, independent, and wild lot. We saw a
number of these men with an array of plumes round their heads, steel
padlocks in their ears for ear-rings, cow-bells on their sleeves,
and chequer-work embroidery on their gay vests and cloaks. They had
with them their squaws, fat and handsome women, all swollen out and
weather-beaten like fishwives, with high cheek-bones and red-ochre
faces. They danced together and skirled in wild Asiatic strains while
four intent ruffians in ordinary attire beat upon one small drum with
sticks. I seemed to recognise in them some sort of acquaintance to my
old friends, the nomads of Central Asia, the Kirghiz--the same sort of
faces and the same way of being musical. I have had a similar musical
entertainment during weeks and months tramping in Turkestan and Seven
Rivers Land. Both Kirghiz and Indians are dying out and both are red. I
was struck by the feminine expression of the faces of the Indians and
the absence of hair on their lips and chins--as if their males were not
male.
However, we soon left the Blackfeet behind, and came out of their
forests, and in late afternoon stood high above the lovely length of
water which we identified as Medicine Lake.
[Illustration]
_The Indians are dancing as we enter their paradise,
Our hearts are dancing too.
We love the Indians because they never bent their backs
To slavery,
To civilisation,
To office-desks.
What matter if they are dying out,
They have at least lived once._
[Illustration:
I WENT TO A HOUSE
AND I KNOCKED AT THE DOOR
BUT THE OLD LADY SAID
I HAVE SEEN YOU BEFORE]
IV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT
WE spent our first night in a burned forest beside a sunken pink and
grey rock. There was a green carpet of unblossoming flowers as green
and romantic as ideal spring, and beside it in contrast the stark
blackness of the charred trees all up and down the hill. Hidden from
view but twenty yards away was a foaming rivulet with pools.
We bathed and we cooked and we talked and we slept. A great mountain
like God Almighty in the midst of His creation was visible to us
through the trees. We made our beds soft by pulling the dead red
foliage from scorched trees and heaping it under our blankets beside
the pink rocks. Lindsay made hot a large stone in the embers of our
fire to keep him warm. So we lay down and waited for the night. I
looked through black masts and great entanglements to the hills.
Lindsay faced a scorched section of the forest all hanging in brown
tresses. We listened to the stream below, its music becoming every
moment more insistent. We knew that it would lull us all night long.
The mountain cloud then began to come down and roll over the tree-tops,
giving them ghostly semblance. That passed, and the stars and the moon
appeared and stillness ruled. An hour before dawn we were awakened by
the sudden patter of a shower of rain and it was followed by the birth
of a wind which came roaring along a ravine and started all the air
moving everywhere and all the dead forest creaked and whined. It was
our signal to arise.
* * * * *
LINDSAY rose like a young lion roaring, rrrah!... and making the
mountains echo with his roar. “Let us go up higher,” says he. I read
him this. “Put it, ‘Lindsay arose groaning and grunting like a pig
under a gate--and let people choose,’” said the poet.
He was in great spirits. “I have never been so free. I start afresh.
All is behind me. We’ll tramp to the coast. We’ll tramp to Alaska.
We’ll do all the national parks, the same way,” were his impulsive
speeches.
As we climbed aloft, following the North-west by our wrist-compasses,
and careless of time and space, he sang a disreputable song belonging
no doubt to that disreputable past of his when he hiked and begged and
recited his poems to farmers--
Why don’t you go to work
Like other men do?
How can we work when there’s no work to do?
Hallelujah, on the bum!
Hallelujah, bum again!
Hallelujah! Give us a hand-out
To revive us again!
“You do look a real honest-to-God tramp this morning,” said I in the
language of the country, “with your corduroys burst out at the knees,
old red handkerchief round your neck, and devil-may-care look in your
eyes.”
We reached the top of a mountain where there was a perfect “cyclorama,”
as he called it, and he balanced on his toes, and half closed his eyes
in his half upturned face, and turned round and about like a teetotum.
Last time I had seen him do this was on the carpet of a London
drawing-room in Queen Anne’s Gate to the strains of “_Let Samson be
a-coming in to your mind_.”
This mountain was our first _ne plus ultra_, for having got to the top
of it there was only one thing to do, and that was to go down again.
Lindsay tested the echoes from it with “_Rah for Bryan!_” apparently
his favourite war-cry, and then as if in response a slim Indian youth
on horseback appeared and seemed much amused by us. He was very red
and swarthy, with bright teeth, and rode his horse as if he and it
made one. He told us he knew all the mountains and had been to the top
of every one except Rising Wolf, which had never been climbed by any
one. “It is called ‘Wolf gets up’ in our language,” he explained, and
pointed to its snarling and menacing mass upstarting through clouds. “A
storm comes from the mountain,” said he in warning, and passed on. He
passed and we remained, and we saw no other human being the whole day.
“Just think of the children these flowers would amuse,” said Lindsay.
“Millions of flowers--and the only human being we see is an Indian. I’d
like to write a song on it.”
* * * * *
BUT the poetic mood passed. Thunderclouds rose in spectral peaks behind
the mountains. Mount Helen grew dark and dreadful, and four phantasmal
Mount Helens appeared behind her, the first of white mist, the second
of lead, the third of streaming cloud, the fourth of shadow. Rising
Wolf entered heaven; a howling, gathering, tumultuous wind roared over
all the pines of the valleys and lightning like the glint of an eye
traversed the ravine. Clouds swept forward to embrace us and indeed
overtook us and soaked us while we sat together on a downward slide and
sheltered under a blanket.
The storm passed, but we got drenched to our necks as we walked through
dense undergrowth downward to a strikingly prominent clump of gigantic
pines which from aloft we had chosen as harbourage for the night. These
lifted their fine forms from immemorial heaps of old pine mould, soft
and brown and porous. There was a stream near them and we lit a great
fire by the water’s edge and hung out a line to dry blankets, coats,
pants, socks, and all we possessed.
The heat flew up in armfuls of smoke, in showers of sparks, up to our
sagging shirts and heavy blankets. Sparks in hundreds lighted on them,
and went out or burned small holes. We walked about like savages the
while, wresting dead wood to build ever higher the fire. I pulled down
a branch with a tree-wasp’s nest upon it, and brought a cloud of wasps
after our bodies, and I paid the penalty in a sting. Thus, however, we
dried everything, and we were able at last to make a dry bed in a wet
place. But rain came on again at night, and in the intense darkness
under the giant pines we lay and heard it, and slept, and then waked to
hear it again.
[Illustration]
_If it rains in the town and if you get caught in the rain
And soaked to the bone--ah what a calamity!
You must have a hot bath, and take some hot toddy;
You must swallow an aspirin and sleep under blankets,
Whilst your clothes on two chairs by the fire will be drying;
You must put on dry clothes in the morning.
It’s different in the mountains,
You can sleep wet and wake wet,
And dry when the weather gets drier,
That’s more fun: try it._
[Illustration: SERAPHICAL SUNRISE]
V. GOING UP TO THE SNOW
IT cleared up before dawn, but it rained for three hours after dawn.
Vachel got up in the night and relit the fire and made himself a hot
rock. Coming back into our dark and gloomy thicket, he mistook my form
for a bear, and his heart jumped. We lived in expectation of meeting
bears. “There’ll just be one heading in the _Illinois Register_,” says
Vachel--“ATE BY BEARS.” We placed our bacon twenty yards away from
where we slept, and hoped tacitly that they would take the bacon and
spare us.
Our knapsacks weighed double next morning because of the wet in our
things. We got wetter still as we ploughed out through flower fields
of a drowned paradise. But an hour before noon the sun broke free and
started a miraculous drying of Nature and of ourselves. We seemed to
cook in the steam of our own clothes. On the hillside, at last, we
decided to rest and we spread out everything to dry, dispensing with
most of our clothes, and we lay in the sun in the hot damp of the
flowers and let Old Sol stream into us.
Early in the afternoon most of our clothes were dry and, following
the compass, we climbed up and up to a great height through primeval
forest. The trees were so close that often we could not squeeze
between them with our packs. We hustled and bustled and impolitely
pushed through branches and umbrage and crossed tiny glades filled
with ineffably lovely basket grass, holding aloft their cream crowns
of blossom. It seemed to us a great struggle, and Lindsay and I held
different opinions as to what we should find when we got to the end
of the wood, and both of us were wrong. He thought it would be “the
divide.” I thought it might be another _ne plus ultra_ and a sheer
descent.
But instead it was a sort of end of the world. Our primeval forest came
sharply to an end on a deep, green, wind-bitten line where the branches
of the trees were gnarled and twisted and beaten downward. Beyond that
was a boulder-strewn upper-mountain region and a wall of rock. We asked
no questions as to the morrow, but camped beside a huge stone. It was
twelve feet high, but one could creep under it and be safe from the
rain. And a few feet away was our first snow-bank. We built a big fire
and made tea of melted snow, and Lindsay made ice-cream of sugar and
condensed milk and snow which we voted very good, and we made eight or
nine hot rocks for our bed.
* * * * *
BECAUSE of the mountain-wall above us sunset took place at about four
in the afternoon here. But a beautiful evening endured long in the east
below us. We were so exalted that we looked a hundred miles over the
plains and saw, as it were, the whole world picked out in shadow and
sunshine below. Sunset slowly advanced over it all, and with reflected
rays from an unseen west the day passed serenely away.
Lindsay, being the colder man, slept under the great boulder, and I
smoothed out a recess at the side. I lay beside scores of daintily
hooded yellow columbines and looked out to the occasional licked-sweet
redness of an Indian paint brush. A chipmunk rudely squeaked at us,
and as a last visitor a humming bird boomed over our heads like a
night-awakened beetle.
We slept serenely. At two I awoke to see a fleeting half moon, all
silver, tripping homeward over the high wall of the mountain with
attendant stars behind. But away in the east there was a faint rose
light over a bank of darkness. The darkness slowly took sharp contour,
and the light that comes before the light of day picked out ten or
twelve lakes and tarns which we had not noticed until then. The
darkness below the rose quivered with lightning; the zenith clearness
grew clearer and clearer, and then, with uplifting hands of glory and
light, came seraphical sunrise.
Our bonfire, which had burned red all night, now burned a pallid yellow
in the new light, and we brought out our blankets into the open and lay
down and slept again in the increasing light and warmth of the new day.
Then breakfast at seven and God’s in his heaven. And we washed in the
snow, and scores of curlews screamed from rock to rock above us on the
road that we should take.
“How new it all is!” said the poet. “It is as if no one ever slept here
before and wakened to see what we see or to do the things we do.”
Wrapped in our thoughts we put our packs on our shoulders and
meditatively turned our steps to the downward-dropping corner of the
mountain-wall which obscured the adventures of the new day.
[Illustration]
We cut off the top of the snow with a sharp piece of slate,
And took the purer under-snow to make our coffee,
To make ice-cream:
_Fastidious creatures!_
And then we stood in the snow-hole
And washed with warm water,
And rubbed ourselves all over with handfuls of sloppy snow--
_Disgusting old tramps!_
The discreet birds watched us,
The chipmunks squeaked at us,
You didn’t see us.
[Illustration: THE DOWNWARD WAY]
VI. DIFFERENT WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD
FOR several days now we did not meet a human being or see evidence of
the existence of one; nor, though continually imagining that we had
found a bit of a trail, did we find either a footstep or a hoof-mark.
“I’ve never been before in a place where you did not see tin cans,”
said Lindsay. “Why, some of the popular canyons of the West are
literally filled with cans. It is not only tourist parties that leave
them, but the cowboys live on canned goods and fill the valley with
their cans.” Another relief is the absence of advertisements, of all
the signs of modern civilisation. You are given without reserve to
America as she was.
“I don’t believe in class war,” says Lindsay, as we turn the corner of
the mountain-wall. “I believe in the war of the mountain and the desert
with the town. Only the deserts and mountains of America can break the
business-hardened skulls of the East.”
He wants me to seek with him the source of the American spirit in the
mountains of the West. However, reality confronts us and not a dream.
We see beyond the wall of the mountain, terrace after terrace and
cascade upon cascade, gleaming upward on a sort of endless stairway. To
the first waterfall we count eight bays of loose stone and shale. We
step from rock to rock, and as my legs are longer this hinders Lindsay
more than it does me. He is all for diagonalising downward, or even
going straight down, and finding an imaginary easier course skirting
the edge of the forest. We, however, try to keep our level, but whether
we wish it or no we slide downward at each uncertain step.
At last we come to a bay of tiny, trickling silt, so steep and smooth
that a glass marble might roll from the top of the mountain to the
bottom. Decent progress along this is impossible, so we decide to
toboggan to the bottom, and seat ourselves on broad, flat stones,
and guiding ourselves with our hands go off at a rare pace for that
imaginary better way at the skirting of the mid-mountain forest. The
device reminds Lindsay of an Indian Government agent who had the task
of supplying the Indians with all they needed on their reservation.
There came, consigned to him, some very large skillets or frying-pans,
which the Indians repeatedly refused to take away, having no use for
them. At last one day the chief came in and gladly took away the lot.
The agent, curious to know what they were going to do with them, went
out to see. He found half the tribe on the hillside and a very gay game
in progress--Indians sitting in the frying-pans and tobogganing on the
loose shale.
We slid to the bottom like the Indians, but we found no better way
down there. The skirting of the mid-mountain forest ran unevenly, now
up three hundred feet, now down again, and it was too arduous a way
for us. “Let us go down through the forest and seek a trail,” said my
companion. Once more we entered the primeval crowd of vegetation, and
like police hurrying to some scene of accident, pushed our way through.
In half an hour we made good progress downward and came to a sheer
cliff over the rivulet of the valley. The cliff was feathered with
pines, and we let ourselves down with our hands from the tops of trees,
from branches, from stem to stem and trunk to trunk, to the verdant
pit of the stream. We clambered downward like two curious Mowglis, but
with large humps on our backs, and the humps were our packs. And how
these packs of ours pulled us about! We seldom touched earth with our
feet and therefore constantly slewed around and dangled with our packs
entangled in thick growth.
There was little to console the poet when the water was reached, unless
it was the mess of tea we made on a fire on a dank, red rock standing
out of the stream. But he was all for fording the water and for trying
to find a better way on the other side. This we did, and we climbed up
again and then we climbed down. And we found no better way. For no one
had been there before us to make it for us.
But we found beautiful quarters at last among the snows and the
waterfalls below the pass, and we slept under innumerable stars, lulled
by the choruses of many waters. We made breakfast at dawn and talked
till it was warm. Vachel told me of his past--how he had struggled
always against the downward way. People had said to him, “You must
make money. You must enter a profession.” When as an art student he
had gained some power with the pencil, they had said, “You must enter
commercial art”; when as poet he had been recognised, they had said,
“You must let us organise and commercialise your gift, turn it into
money for you.” “They wanted to Barnumise me,” said my companion, “and
take me all over America as a reciting freak. When I refused, they
said, ‘You’ll end in the poor-house,’ and I replied, ‘I don’t care:
show me the poor-house--let me go to it.’” He had taken to the road
to regain his self-respect. He had gone without any money, and in the
hospitality and kindness of the farmers he had won a personal faith in
the common man and a reliance which was not merely on success. When he
harvested in Kansas for two dollars fifty a day, that daily wage was
like millions to him. And now with me, when all the world was telling
him he must do thus and so, he was finding in the wilderness of the
Rockies a new means of escape.
“To-morrow,” said he, “we will climb right away to the top and find the
pass into new country.”
[Illustration]
_Who said it was easier to go down,
Facilis decensus and the rest?
I’ll say it is more painful
Than to go up.
You think it was great fun a-sliding down the shale
On large flat rocks.
But it leaves me cold,
As the saying is,
For the seat of my pants is much thinner._
[Illustration: THEY OUTSTAYED US AND WILL OUTSTAY US]
VII. SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS
MY companion’s secret thought is that he is a Virginian. But how, since
he was born in Illinois and his parents in Kentucky? “I am a follower
of Poe and Jefferson,” he answers. Kentucky was largely colonised from
Virginia, and the poet is ready to claim allegiance to the chivalric,
leisurely and flamboyant genius of the South. “If only as a protest
against the drab, square-toed, dull, unimaginative America which is
gaining on us all,” he adds. He has a passion for ideal democracy,
and his great hero of the hour as we stride over the rocks is John
Randolph, of Roanoke, who could enter Congress with four hounds and
a dog-whip and make speeches to which all must listen. “America,”
Lindsay insists, “simply _needs_ the flamboyant to save her soul.” I
suppose, because of that faith, he also, Vachel Lindsay, the poet, is a
flamboyant genius.
The higher we rose in the mountains the more serious became our
conversation. We were silent only when we lost our breath. Upon
occasion, in this grand and lonely scene, the poet would lift his voice
so high that it could have been heard on the mountain on the other side
of the valley. His enthusiasm naturally lifted his resonant voice. His
political hero is John Randolph or Andrew Jackson, his literary hero
is Ruskin, his artist in marble is Saint-Gaudens, his pet hobby is
Egyptian hieroglyphics, his passion is the road, and his ideal is St.
Francis. Tell it to the mountains and the streams; tell it out! They
hear and so do I.
* * * * *
WHERE we stand is where never man has stood before, or foot of man has
trod, and the fresh and virginal flowers on every hand look up at us
with mute surprise. We carry our argument higher and higher. We sit
and boil our pot beside a bank of purple heather, exalted upon the bare
scarp of a sun-drowned mountain, and crackling of roots in the fire
blends with strident Middle-West American. We pull up to the black door
of a great rock, and the splashing of a cascade splashes through his
vibrant tones.
At last, however, the mountains silenced us. They outstayed us, and
will outstay us. They ate up our provisions, and swallowed our breath,
and beguiled us deceptively to climb higher. “Upward and onward!” was
invisibly written on every crag. And we always expected to get to
the top in an hour. We finished the coffee, we finished the milk, we
finished the bread, we finished the sugar. We got down to a rasher of
bacon a day and tea without sugar and milk. Then even the much-loathed
bacon got finished, and the problem was to find a “camp” and get more
supplies. So we set ourselves seriously to the task of finding a pass
over the range.
The poet became much exhausted, and the high altitude evidently
affected him more than it did me. We walked quarter-hours and rested
quarter-hours, and every time we rested we fell fast asleep. I led up
the steep inclines, and we stopped every twenty paces and listened to
our breath, I to his breath, he to mine--_ao, ao, ao_--almost a sob,
and waited for the _ahoo_ sound, which meant that the lungs had filled
again. After some arduous hours in this wise, we came on our first
destitute afternoon, to our first topmost ridge. A cold hurricane
seemed to try to stop our final conquest of it, and it went through our
bodies like swords. But when we exultantly bore through it we came to a
sheer precipice going down to a narrow corridor which led always to the
northward.
* * * * *
VACHEL punctuates most of his remarks with a wild native yell--“Whoopee
Whuh!” but he was down to a whisper now, and could no longer move the
mountains with a “Hurrah for Bryan.” Silently and rather mournfully we
diagonalised downward to a far blue lake which was the ultimate end
of the valley, and the source of the stream we had followed for days.
Devastating winds blew across us, and we watched how they descended
upon the surface of that lake and tore it off in sprays and circles of
water and steam. We found what seemed to be a horse trail over the
shingle, but it led to an extensive field of snow, and we recognised
only the footsteps of a bear. The lake was not blue, but green when we
got near to it, and was banked on three sides by snow.
Said Vachel: “Here, Stephen, is the place to catch a fish.”
I said: “No, Vachel, this is just a snow-melt; there never were any
fish here.”
“Nevertheless try!” said the poet.
Now we had purchased fishing tackle, though we had no rods. And Vachel
had a large red wooden grasshopper, and I had a large green one.
Vachel said: “You must throw your grasshopper in, and I’ll go light a
fire so as to be ready to cook the fish.”
So I fastened my fat green wooden gentleman to the gut, and the gut to
the line, and attaching a stone, flung him in the air. Behold, he flew
like a grasshopper and disported with the winds. But when he settled at
last on the surface of that green and snowy lake, he always made a most
rapid progress toward the shore. I sailed him like a boat. No fish
came, and even our faith remained unrewarded.
Was not this adventure prophetically put in verses in _Alice_, where
some one sent a message to the fish, telling them, this is what I
wish. And the little fishes’ answer was--“We cannot do it, sir,
because,”--the little fishes, as was disclosed later, were in bed.
We sat down together in a place like the heath in Macbeth, and the
weird sisters were ready to appear, had we been evil. The sun had
set, winds were blowing from four directions at the same time, and
it was bitterly cold. A tiny fire of roots peeped at us and smoked
and chattered, and we tried hard to get warm at it. We looked at the
mountain-walls, we looked at our maps and compasses. We thought of the
night and of our empty wallets and insides. “Just think of Broadway at
this minute,” said Vachel. “Still sweltering in heat, not yet lighted
up for evening pleasure.” We felt far from civilisation, and sighed
at last for what we despised. “Or think of Piccadilly and Shaftesbury
Avenue,” said I, “all a-swarm with the light-hearted summer crowd of
London.”
“Well, we can’t sleep here,” said I at length.
“Let us make one last attempt to get over to the other side.”
Vachel seemed surprised, but agreed with alacrity: “I’m for it,” said
he.
[Illustration]
_The greedy old mountains have been to our knapsacks
And eaten up most of our food.
They’ve swallowed our breath and silenced our speech.
But they haven’t broken our hearts.
It takes more than a mountain to do that!_
[Illustration: IMPRISONED IN THE VIEWLESS WINDS]
VIII. NIGHT AND NOTHING ON THE MOUNTAINS
MY companion has a curious old-man-of-the-woods appearance. It is not
his loose red handkerchief round his neck so much as his hanging,
dead-branch-like arms. His face sleeps even when he is awake. He walks
when he is tired in a patient, dog-like way, treading in my very steps.
No ribald songs, now, of tramping days--but as if hushed by the hills
he croons ever to himself--
O Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,
Lo, on thy topmost mount I stand,
and in a sort of hymnal marching step, like way-worn pilgrims, we take
the trackless way upward once again. And it is late twilight. Sombre
hope and patience dwell in our hearts as we trudge, trudge upward.
By slow stages we reach a new possible pass, and every time we stop and
turn round and sit down to rest we face the lake. On three sides the
descent to the water is precipitous, and an overhanging snow-crust goes
round. In the late light the surface of the lake is a still, viscous
green and the mountain above it a calm blood-red. The snow patches
on the mountain are of fantastic shape and give an idea of futurist
designs. We stare at the patches and see in one of them a ferocious
white tiger, stalking forward with a demented white cat on its back.
In another we see an Egyptian figure, slender, with veiled features of
awful and eternal significance. These grow in the dusk. The winds chase
over us, and when they pass there are moments of windlessness, and we
watch hurrying grey rags of clouds running over the brow of the ridge
above us and losing themselves in thin air.