down every twenty paces in breathlessness. Vachel sits with his head on
my shoulder and I with my head on his. In a minute or so we recover and
sit up straight, in the half darkness, and pick up flat stones and try
to make them skid over the snow patches. For a moment I was taken back
to the romantic vein of “Parsifal” as I saw it in Vienna, last May, and
we were Wagnerian pilgrims, toiling upwards in the ecstacy of mystical
opera. Somewhere below us, in the lake, all the violins should sob and
croon together and aspire, yes, aspire and throb, and the drums should
start the gods to look at us. But we treated the matter in light vein.
“The Bacon-eaters,” said Vachel _sotto voce_. “Seventh reel.”
* * * * *
A MIGHTY final effort brought us to the top. I shall not soon forget
the dramatic sensation of seeing the new sky which suddenly began to
lift itself into our view from out the other side of the mountain,
a sky with more light, for it lay in the West. It was as if the
prison-wall of the mountain had been thrown down and that which
prisoners dream about and rave about had been given us.
And there was a way down. It was night and nothing, but we found a
narrow gully on the other side, five or six feet broad, two or three
thousand feet down, and an appalling steepness. This gully was all
loose stones and boulders which the slightest touch sent clattering or
thundering to the bottom. We were nerved to the descent by what we had
gone through and by our joy at finding a way out.
I took the lead, clutched the rock wall for support, and began to
slip downward, tentatively and cautiously. But directly I started,
a wonderful thing occurred. I found the whole body of loose stones
under my feet moved with me, and I began a progress as on a moving
staircase, down, down, down, as in Jules Verne’s _Journey to the Centre
of the Earth_--easily, steadily. Pleasure in this was, however, rudely
disturbed. Lindsay had started downward behind me and was naturally
starting a movement of rocks on his own, and suddenly a leg-breaking
boulder flew past on my track with dumfounding acceleration. I climbed,
therefore, away from the moving staircase into a cleft of the rock and
waited for the poet to draw level.
* * * * *
IT was dark night now, and as the rocks from Lindsay’s feet rushed
past they struck bright sparks in the gloom. How they crashed! How
they thundered and lurched and thumped, and thumped again, and thudded
into the abyss below, and how the little stones rattled after them! We
agreed to go downward in short spells, one at a time, and then go into
shelter and wait till we drew level again. And as we sat side by side
in the gloom we looked to the great mountains on the other side of the
new valley and discerned a colossal figure nine in snow, staring at us
out of the darkness. It was eerie. It needed a deal of nerve to go on.
And we did not go much further. At one point I thought I saw two human
beings, or they might have been bears, struggling slowly upward toward
us. I shouted to them and they stopped. But they made no reply and
just glowered menacingly upward. That was the end for me. I would
go no further. I gave the halloo to Lindsay and got into shelter.
He came down the way I had come, laboriously, cautiously, like some
weather-beaten old soldier, a skulker from beyond human ken. And he
also desired to do no more that night. So we lay in a lair of a beast
on the brink of a sheer cliff, far, as it happened, above mist and
cloud and a rain that was falling below, and slumbered the night away.
[Illustration]
_The Guardsman and the Western Bard_[1]
_Went hiking hand in hand.
They felt uplifted much to see
The prospects wide and grand.
“A thousand leagues,” said one, “Oh Steve,
From any boardwalk band.”_
_“How fine the air, immense the view!
The trees are large and green.
See! Here are glades and crystal rills,
And every scent and petal fills_
_Our souls with pure ecstatic thrills.
Afflatus holds the scene!”
The Guardsman pointed to the sun.
“It’s supper time, I mean.”_
_And as they munched the cracker thin
And quaffed eau naturel,
The gates of heaven were oped--and all
Its liquid contents fell.
They felt the truth that bards have sung:
Heaven is a limpid well._
_Then night came on, that covers all
Of high and mean degree,
The king, the clown, the russet gown,
The land, the clouds, the sea.
“And yet I scarcely feel,” said one,
“It really covers me.”_
_Long time they sought sweet slumber’s balm,
Kind antidote to care.
“O soft embalmer,” was their psalm
That filled the mountain air.
Embalmer! Something rough in pine
Was as all they wanted there._
_A chilly dawn illumed the East,
Most wonderfully wet.
And evermore their pangs increased,
Nor heaven’s libations ever ceased ...
(No further messages released
They’re on that mountain yet)._
[1] Contributed by “Rusticus” to the _New York Evening Post_ at this
point in our adventures.
[Illustration: WHEN HE IS IN PAIN HE CALLETH FOR THE BOTTLE]
IX. “WIFE, GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER”
“I SUFFERED forty-seven separate chills,” said the poet. “And
forty-seven separate cramps,” said I. Did we sleep? Six hours passed
somehow and it seemed not so long as waiting that time for a train or
for a theatre to open. Lindsay lay in a sort of hole. I lay with my
head half over the abyss. I watched the stars swim out of the clouds
above. I saw the blackness of the bottomless below us become grey as
the clouds formed there. Lindsay cried out once: “I’m getting up to
light a fire.” “Impossible!” I rejoined. “There’s no wood, and no
place to light it.”
“I am afraid the clouds are below us; we may have to stay up here all
day,” I whispered, an hour before dawn. But it was all the same to the
poet, whose thoughts were entirely in the present.
Destiny, however, was kind to us. The clouds at last lifted and
drifted, and angels at sunrise lifted white curtains and smiled at us.
A couple of old woe-begone weather-beaten tramps lifted themselves
up cautiously and peeped at the wilderness. Last night’s nerve had
gone. With backs bent, and sometimes on hands and knees, they picked
their way gingerly down to the far snow dump beneath, to the first
wind-missed bits of mountain forest, to the first tinkling stream, and
to the first chalice anemones and pink paint-brush flowers. We washed
and we dressed, and we slept and washed again, and put snow inside our
hats--for the morning had become rapidly hot--and we descended. The
streamlet foamed down its rocky bed, and we waded and jumped and clung
to its sides. And other streams flowed into it and made it deeper and
the current stronger, and it splashed us above the waist. We waded
knee-high through pools where shadowy fishes darted, and we sat to rest
on shiny rocks in the water and talked of desirable foods. We scanned
the map of the Geological Survey and stared at our compasses and
considered the contours of the hills, and at length were rewarded by
the sight of a real human horse trail with indisputable hoof-marks upon
it.
* * * * *
WE found this in the afternoon, and for three hours followed doggedly,
without meeting a soul. At last, to our great joy, we came upon a
trivial enough thing, and that was a piece of candy wrapping. “Those
who eat candy do not stray far from the place where candy was bought,”
said I sententiously.
“Well argued, sir,” said Lindsay. “I fully agree.”
And, indeed, before sunset the happy augury was fulfilled, and we found
a camp much used by Montana fishermen. Curiously enough, though all
other wild things are preserved in the National Park, the fishes are
allowed to be caught. In our opinion, however, after some experience,
the fishes do not stand in need of protection.
At the camp we resumed acquaintance with the human race in the person
of the keeper and his wife, a fire-ranger, and a hired maid called
Elsie. They filled up our cans and gave us a pail of boiling water to
wash our clothes, and thread for our trousers and coats, and a week’s
rations to take us to “The Sun.” They were disappointed that we would
not buy bacon.
“Bacon,” said the camp keeper, “is my long suit.” But Vachel vowed he
had gone over to the Mosaic point of view, and didn’t care if he never
tasted bacon again.
Instead, we “filled up” with corn-beef hash and took into our packs
raisins and grape-nuts and butter; double quantities of bread and
sugar and milk, and nine packets of comforting lozenges. And we saw by
the Spokane _Advertiser_ of some remote date that the King and Queen
of England had been to Ascot races in person, and no one knew what
was happening in Ireland, or whether De Valera was a Protestant or a
Catholic, and the fire-ranger confessed he did not know the ins and
outs of Sinn Fein. And no, there had not been a forest fire this year
yet, though he evidently lived in hope.
* * * * *
SO the poet and I fortified ourselves materially and spiritually, and
set off again for the North-west. We started on our new rations and had
one of the most jovial of meals in a place where evidently people had
once camped before. We found the charred circles of old camp-fires in
the grass.
While we were resting under the trees, and in the gleam of the
firelight, Vachel told me the story of how once, in Kansas, he “ate
down” his landlord. He had hired himself out with a gang of others
to harvest the wheat on the land of a certain German farmer. All the
week-days they “piled the golden sheaves,” and it was a red-hot July.
The men ate as much as they were able, slept in barns on the hay
when the day was done, slept like the dead, rose with the dawn, and
certainly did bring in the wheat. For this they got two dollars fifty a
day and were proud of their gains.
On Sunday, however, work was suspended, and the gang just lazed and
dozed and ate. The German was a pious Catholic, and said a longish
grace before and after meals. As the gang were rather sheepish
regarding religion, they generally let one course pass, just to avoid
the grace, and came slouching in as the meal went on. But Vachel
started in with the first grace, right level with the farmer himself.
Whatever he had Vachel had. He had several helpings of everything on
the table, and as each of the ten harvest hands came in Vachel started
afresh with him, and as he had hash he had hash. As each man thought he
had done, he slunk out so as to avoid the second grace. The farmer kept
piously waiting for all the men to get finished, and helping himself
with them, too, just for company.
At last all seemed to have finished and gone, and the farmer was about
to pronounce the final blessing when he had an afterthought and took
another piece of pie. So Vachel also took another piece of pie. Then
mechanically the last grace was said. “I went over to the barn and lay
down and slept,” says Vachel. “By supper time I was ready for another
meal, and I sat down again with the farmer before the rest of the gang
had arrived and grace was said. The farmer was about to help himself
when suddenly he paused, spoon in hand, and sat back in his chair,
looking ill.”
Then, in a loud, stentorian voice he called to the kitchen: “Wife, give
me the pain-killer.”
He had a violent fit of indigestion. Wife then brought a large bottle
labelled PAIN-KILLER, an astonishing bottle, about a foot long, that
looked as if it might be horse liniment, and the farmer took his dose
with a large iron spoon. “A terrible stuff,” says Vachel, “a stuff that
just eats the inside out of you, one part turpentine, three alcohol,
and the rest iron rust. It gives you such a heat you forget about your
indigestion.”
So the farmer had his pain-killer, but he did not eat any supper, and
the poet and the rest of the gang as they came went gaily on and ate to
the end. “I began with each man as he came in and ate him down,” says
my hungry companion suggestively. “And the farmer, tasting nothing, had
to wait till all were through to say the final grace. We finished at
last and went all of us to the barns to sleep till Monday morning and
the hour when we returned again to the golden line.”
_The kiss by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others,
Does not compare with the imaginary meal
You eat when the wallet is empty.
The kiss too, when you get it,
Oft proves a disillusion;
But the first meal after an involuntary fast,
Well!
It takes a real poet to describe that!_
[Illustration]
X. CLEAR BLUE
AFTER telling me how he “ate down” the farmer, Vachel rested and passed
into a halcyon mood. We had a heavenly day climbing towards a heaven of
unclouded blue. Swinburne flowed more naturally from the poet’s lips
than conversation:
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears,
Grief with a glass that ran.
His thought soared with our steps.
As the sea gives her shells to the shingle
The earth gives her streams to the sea,
he declaimed to the streams. I promised to arrange a Swinburne recital
for him next time he came to England. For I soon found that he knew as
much Swinburne by heart as he did of his own poetry. Ellery Sedgwick
wrote me from Boston that to tramp with a poet would be “Some punkins,”
and one may say it was when the poet all day long was a living fountain
of verse. I had but to mention a poem and Lindsay poured it forth to
the skies. We bathed in a waterfall in the heat of noon, which was also
a Swinburnian joy, and we splashed in melting snow whilst our shoulders
were burned by the sun and inured ourselves to sun and ice.
The sun literally blistered the skin, and we reclined in it on scarlet
shelving rocks and cooked our luncheon. All the while Vachel recited
Swinburne’s “Ode to Athens,” addressing the walls of a great mountain
cirque which drooped in snow curtains and hanging gardens of silver
water.
Up there came to us after lunch a yellowish-grey animal with sprawling
hind legs and stupid benevolent snout and whistled at us--_fee-fo,
fee-fo_,--a whistling marmot. As I tried to approach him he snuggled
off to the snow-field whence he had come, disappeared under the crust,
and presently reappeared from a hole in the midst of the snow and began
chasing chipmunks in and out of the snow holes.
* * * * *
WE resumed our journey upward, and all was well. The grass was emerald,
the paint-brush was bright ruby. Swallow-tailed butterflies aeroplaned
to our feet. The valley was broad and clear without mystery or horror.
The waterfalls hung like the gardens of Babylon. An opal lake below us
changed and waxed in iridescent glory and caused whispers of rapturous
interest. And the mountain we were on was the one of the great figure
nine made of snow, which had so thrilled us and appalled us when we saw
it afar at night some days before. When we had gone to the top of it
we had reached the great divide, where the waters flow north, south,
and west toward Hudson’s Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific.
At least, so the topographers assure us, and we must take their word.
Vachel says we will not wait for rain and see the rain-drops hit the
mountain-top and divide automatically into three parts.
So we descended at dusk into a verdant valley, with low trees growing
wide apart, and waist-high flowering daisies and basket grass, and
sunflowers--all as fresh and fair as if gardened for us yesterday.
There were serried ranks of flowers. The tall mullein stalks became
so thick that they looked like a wooden fencing in the twilight.
Looking upward we saw a crimson mountain, a brown mountain, and a green
mountain. Looking downward, afar, we saw many forests, separated by
streams, sleeping before us. And we slept in a thicket and were made
music to by the nymphs of the seven waterfalls of Shadow Mountain.
* * * * *
VACHEL LINDSAY belongs to a sect of primitive Christians called
“Disciples of Christ.” They are followers of Alexander Campbell, and
are called “Campbellites” in America, much as members of the Catholic
and Apostolic community are called Irvingites in England. They are
akin to the Baptists, being emphatically “immersionists.” Among other
notable people who belong to this brotherhood is Mr. Lloyd George, and
it has been suggested that the British statesman be asked to address a
general convention of the Disciples if he comes to America. The chief
virtue in the sect lay doubtless in an attempted return to primitive
historical Christianity in all its simplicity. Not that the poet is
a narrow sectarian. How could a poet be? But he has drunk deep of
the primitive spirit in Christianity, and is very near to children,
negroes, Indians, and the elemental types in men and women. He loves
oratory more than reason, and impulse more than thought. Hence, no
doubt, the well of his poetry.
We talked of the modern cult of mediævalism and the Chesterton-Belloc
group as we resumed our tramp, and we discussed G. K. Chesterton’s
visit to America. Lindsay felt that Chesterton counted for a great deal
in America. He was not merely a celebrity. He had the reputation of
a Socrates eager to converse with youth. But when he came to America
he did not really come. “He has been Barnumised as Oliver Lodge
was Barnumised,” said the poet. “It’s the worst of commercialised
lecturing. Literary lions are imported by speculative impresarios and
then put to the American people entirely from a dollar point of view.
The organisations that can pay five hundred dollars for a visit get
their Chesterton. But how about the universities and colleges and small
groups, the real intelligentsia of America--the people who have a
creative interest in what a thinker and critic has said and in what he
says? A similar mistake was made with Alfred Noyes, who was booked as
the man who made poetry pay. It created a false impression and did much
injury when there was an opportunity for great good.” Vachel Lindsay’s
idea is that two or three literary men and women should be chosen each
year as the guests of the nation, and that they should be sponsored by
the magazines and the universities. In that way they would meet the
American nation and not merely the brassy front of American business.
* * * * *
WITH this subject we plunged through the rank undergrowth of the
forest, following our north-westerly way, which should bring us to
St. Mary’s Lake and the steps of “Going to the Sun Mountain.” We
gathered our first potful of black currants and stewed them with sugar
for our luncheon, and we had our daily dip in the rushing waters of
Red Eagle Creek. It was a warm valley, and the west wind, surcharged
with moisture from the Pacific, had expressed itself in a great floral
exuberance, in ripe raspberries, currants, and gooseberries, and in
forests of firs, which lay against the steep mountain-sides like
feathers against a bird’s wing.
Vachel indulged his passion for the West and all that the West means
to an American. He has memorised at some time or other the map of
the United States, and can draw it and put in all the States in a
few minutes. He drew it on a scrap of paper as we rested at sunset,
putting in the far Western States first--Washington and Oregon like
two sugar-boxes on top of one another, and then the key-shape of
Utah, whose southern line is roughly the southern line of Colorado,
Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia, and whose northern line is
the northern line of California and Nevada, and approximately of
Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
“California,” says he, “is a whale swimming around the desert of
Nevada; Idaho is a mountain throne and its curve is the curve of
Montana. Wyoming fits into the angle of Utah. New Mexico is under
Colorado, and its capital, Sante Fé, is the spiritual capital of
America. Texas plunges southward like a root--don’t draw it too
small. Oklahoma is a pistol pointing west. Nebraska is another
pistol pointing west. North and South Dakota are western blankets.
Louisiana is a cavalier’s boot. Illinois is like an ear of Indian
corn. Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa move westward with the slant of
the mountains and the rivers. All America, as you will see, has a
grandiose north-westerly-south-easterly direction or kink caused by the
Rocky Mountains primarily, and by the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers
secondarily. The Rocky Mountains control the continent. That is why we
are travelling north-west. It is quite natural. It is America’s way. It
is written in her rocks and by her waters.
“As the families migrated from Virginia to Kentucky and Illinois and
Minnesota--so we go following nature’s trail out to the wilderness.”
[Illustration]
_North-west, north-west!
Give us north-westerly breezes.
Let us be mad north-north-west,
Rather than southerly sober and sane.
Some one once wrote on a madhouse wall,
That the madder we were the nearer to God;
The saner, the further from Man.
God give us the divine kink
North-north-west, north-north-west,
When you can’t tell a hawk from a handsaw,--
Hamlet only became Hamlet when he learned the secret._
[Illustration: YOU HAVE COME TO BE ALONE WITH YOUR HEART]
XI. NATIONAL WILDERNESSES
GLACIER in Montana, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Sequoia and Yosemite in
California, Grand Canyon in Arizona, besides Mount McKinley in Alaska
and many minor reservations and national forests--they ought truly to
be called by some name other than parks. The same also is true for
Canada, which possesses its wonderful Dominion Parks such as those of
Waterton and Lake Louise. The name “park” has evidently been given to
popularise them. Such places in Russia are called “wildernesses,”
and are resorted to for meditation. They are called literally “empty
places,” the same word that is used in the Bible for wilderness.
Tolstoy when he died was on his way to the wilderness--to the “Empty
Place of Optin.” In England, in our conventional phrase, we should be
likely to call them “retreats,” like the retreat on the Island of Iona.
But the idea is that they should provide in our life what is meant when
it is written: _The Spirit drove Him into the wilderness_; or _He went
up into the mountain to pray._ In the midst of the hurly-burly comes
the happy thought--“I will arise now and go to my wilderness, to my
retreat, to my empty place.”
The spiritual background of Great Britain is in the mountains of the
North, among the Cumberland Lakes and on the wild border. Or it is in
the obscure grandeur of the Sussex Downs, or on Dartmoor, or on the
Welsh hills. Small though the mountains may be, they are continually in
the minds of English people. The way of escape is clear. And many of
the bright spirits of England and Scotland have derived their strength
direct from the hills. Byron and Scott and Ruskin and Wordsworth drew
their strength from the hills. Carlyle super-imposed Ecclefechan upon
Chelsea. Even he who once said “London’s streets are paved with gold”
was driven by the spirit from Battersea to Buckingham. I find a belief
in the wilderness strong in Vachel Lindsay. He holds that the wild West
has been and still must be the spiritual lodestone of American men.
Untamed America has remade the race. Andrew Jackson was the voice of
the West of his day, Abraham Lincoln of his. And though New England
has held the hegemony of letters he divines that the wilderness--the
mountains--will be the source of the inspiration of the coming time.
Early America derived most of her inspiration from across the Atlantic.
Her heart was outside her body. But mature America, conscious of
herself as a whole, will know more surely that she has a heart and a
soul and a way to God in herself.
* * * * *
I LOOK to a time when national wildernesses will have an acknowledged
significance in our public life, when men and women of all classes of
life will naturally retire to them for recreation--as naturally as
people used to go to church on Sundays and for a similar reason. All
praise to the foresight and energy of Franklin Lane, the late American
Minister of the Interior, that enterprising Canadian who did so much to
bring the people’s heritage before their eyes!
The “See America First” is a poor slogan. It is like “Do Everything
Once” and “Buy him a Fountain Pen.” The question should be raised to a
higher level. People need not visit Glacier as they visit Switzerland,
in a spirit of curiosity. Even in this sophisticated age they can
come as pilgrims of Nature as easily as they can come as tourists.
“Triangular trips,” “Four-day tours,” are not in the right spirit. Time
is immaterial.
But there is virtue in shoe-leather, virtue in the saddle of the horse.
Not much virtue in guides, in hotels. You come to these places to be
alone with Nature or you do not arrive.
* * * * *