showed me a portfolio of descriptions of them when he was in London,
and he did much to persuade young Englishmen interested in America to
visit them, go tramp in them. And though of course we had heard in a
dim way of Yellowstone Park and of the Indian reservations both in the
United States and in Canada it was a novelty for us. But Englishmen are
born trampers and lovers of the wilderness, and are ready to reverse
the American proverb--Why walk if you can ride?--and put it, Why ride
when you can walk? And I shall not be the first Englishman to seek
refreshment hiking through the wild places of the West.
We talked of this exuberantly as we clambered through the forests on
the side of Little Chief Mountain, and it was still our theme in the
evening when we lighted our fires in a vast rock temple and chasm down
into which tumbled dark water, glittering and hastening as it flowed
downward to the valleys. How to say a word for national wildernesses
in this sedentary era of the world’s history, how to say a word for
true religion and quiet and the things of the spirit! Vachel Lindsay
will no doubt dramatise the subject in one fine Western epic some day,
and I make my appeal, as I have done before, in prose, as for the
wildernesses of Europe, so also for the wildernesses of America. But
whether we write or sing of what we feel or see, one thing is sure when
we are done--we shall have lived apart and tramped and meditated upon
the mountains and far in the wilderness and it will mean something in
our lives.
[Illustration]
_What wish you to-day, dear tramp?
What wish you for brother-man?
Why, just this:--
The quality of mountain-sides in the colour of his eyes,
The deep of stars in the lake of his soul,
Feet that have learned to leap,
And a spirit that longs to fly.
That’s what I wish, dear brother, to-day,
Said the tramp._
[Illustration: THE SUN SEES EVERYTHING]
XII. GOING WEST
WE love inspirational phrases such as to “go West” which sprang on to
men’s lips in the Great War, and was a way of saying “to die,” which
was startlingly poetic, seeing that it came from the soul of those
masses usually admitted to be so vulgar. “He’s gone West,” men said
with a hushed voice, meaning that like so many who had passed before,
he had gone--to another world, to beyond the setting sun. The phrase
was not current among the American soldiers, but I have heard of an
equally wonderful expression used by the mountaineers, who said: “He
has crossed the Great Divide.”
My mind is inevitably drawn to these thoughts as we face so often the
setting sun, as we cross the pinnacles of our momentary aspirations,
the passes, the divides which separate sky from sky and valley from
valley.
Lindsay is also constantly enwrapped by the romance of Going West--the
historic and poetic Western movement which has pulsated humanity since
the hordes and their caravans stampeded across Asia in the days which
are almost before history. What was it, what is it that hypnotises
us--is it not the sun which, rising in the morning, calls all his
children after him all day and bids them follow when at last he plunges
into night and nothingness?
* * * * *
“HAVE courage,” says the sun in the evening. “Have faith,” say the
stars all the night long. “You see, I rise again; you will rise,” says
the sun in the morning. “This way, this way,” he says till noon, and
“Follow, follow,” all the afternoon, and then once more, “Behold! I
go. Have courage!” he says in the evening again. And that sets young
hearts a-beating, that kindles the poet’s flame and enlarges the spirit
and makes the way of the world.
That makes us all nomads, all gypsies, all pilgrims. That draws the
steps of the willing, and even the unwilling find themselves borne
along by a human tide and a sliding sand of time--away to the west and
the night and the other country. No one can stay, even if he will. In
time all must go, all must follow the sun and cross the Divide and go
down the slopes of the unimaginable other side and be with the stars
in the long, hungry night, the myriads of stars that never do anything
else but look down on human souls and ask of us and stare at us and
dream of us. The night of stars for all of us, and then with our Father
and guide, far o’er these mountains, wan and tired, but gleaming
and then resplendent, we lift our eyes to the other country, the
dreamed-of, hoped-for country--and it is morning and we are still with
the light that we followed yesterday.
* * * * *
“THE old prairie-schooners,” says Lindsay, “blundered forward on the
western way, day after day, season after season, sometimes for years,
for the pioneers often worked their way to the Virgin Land which they
had taken for goal. Often, indeed, they died on the way, they broke
down on the way. Each yearned to the West even as they failed and threw
their spirits westward, like Douglases carrying the heart of Bruce to
the Promised Land. The primitive instinct for moving was awakened by
the road and many a pioneer found happiness in the going as much as in
the attainment.”
We ourselves are going westward now, rather than north-west, and the
sun beckons us. For the mountain we are now setting out to reach has
been called by the Indians “Going-to-the-Sun.” It stands over and
beyond St. Mary’s Lake and climbs heavenward in gigantic steps of
stone. It steps from the forest to the rocks, from the rocks to the
snow, from the snow to the sky. It is a mighty cathedral, standing in
the midst of prosaic mountains, surely one of the most beautiful and
majestic of these mountains, symbolic in its shape and its ancient
name. We have slept on the mossy earth at the foot of the pines. We
will arise and go to the sun.
[Illustration]
_There’s some one calling you:
Arise, sleepy-head,
Arise from your bed!
A messenger is peeping,
There where you’re sleeping:
For the day’s been begun
By your master the sun,
And you surely will follow._
[Illustration: CROSSING THE GREAT DIVIDE]
XIII. CLIMBING RED EAGLE
WE journeyed through the primeval forest without a trail to guide us,
through the jagged, thorny, tumultuous pine wilderness. It was not so
easy for Lindsay, whose legs are shorter than mine, but he took it as
a game of banter leader and moved forward doggedly into the openings I
made. We were glad to take advantage of the thousands of wind-smitten
trees which lay dead, piled at every angle and piled on one another.
We climbed upward for miles on the white, smooth, dead timber of fallen
trees, balancing and jumping, transferring from trunk to trunk, and
clambering over the immense stars of upturned roots. We were rewarded
at length by a view of the rocks above the tree line and of a tumbling
cascade. This was in the direction we required and we made for it
and lunched by the cascade become rivulet, and then climbed all the
afternoon by rock stairs to the snow.
At six beside a “bride-veil waterfall,” we had supper. Above us was an
amphitheatre of red rocks and ruined slate and it seemed but a small
climb to the top of the mountain. The gradient was steep and there were
large quantities of loose stones. We climbed without intermittence
until 9 o’clock at night, and as one top was nearly conquered another
top seemed to be added. The amphitheatre receded upward to heaven.
How arduous it was and at times how risky! Massive stones on which we
relied to place our feet proved to be only passengers like ourselves
upon the mountain and at a touch from us resumed their downward track,
clashing and smashing from rock to rock. We came to steep banks of
shale which moved _en masse_ with the weight of our bodies and we lay
flat on them and slid with them unwillingly and fearfully. Nevertheless
we did make great progress upward, and if we did not conquer the
mountain on which we were we at least conquered some peaks that
were behind us. We entered the society of the mountains. The mighty
eminences and august personalities of the southward view came into our
ken.
* * * * *
THE sun went down, the shadows below us deepened, the snow banks
multiplied themselves in number, and their outlines and suggestiveness
intensified as the valley whence we had arisen lost its trees and
changed to a vast blank abyss. Our unfailing wonder when we sat down
on a stone to regain our lost breath was the multitudinous terrain of
awful, wrathful mountain peaks which in indescribable promiscuity had
climbed the horizon wall to stare at us.
Vachel confessed to being dizzy and dared hardly look downward whence
we had come. He preferred to look upward, and it was always “three
more dashes and we’ll be there,” though instead of three we made thirty.
Our mountain at length seemed to show the last limits and to be crowned
by a sort of Roman wall. We came in view of a long, serried, level grey
rock which ran evenly along the mountain brow like a fortification, and
in the midst of it was a way of stone steps and a gap. I got up through
the hole in the wall and hauled up Lindsay’s pack after me, and he
followed.
But when we got on top it was flat, but it was not the top. We lay
full length there and ate raisins and looked upward over another field
of shale and loose boulders, and a cold wind as from the Pole swept
across. We watched the first stars appear and talked of finding a
sheltered ledge somewhere and sleeping on it or at least waiting on it
till morning. But secretly we still had a strong hold on hope. Mountain
tops are only to be conquered, and we would not give in.
* * * * *
“THE other sky beyond the mountain ridge is on tiptoe waiting for us,”
said I.
It should be explained that the mountains here are nearly all
“razor-edges.” When you have climbed sheer up to the top you have to
climb sheer down the other side. Plateaus and table mountains are rare.
The mountain “cirques” and ridges actually cut the great sky in two and
you can only join the two pieces of it at the top.
However, when, after another forty minutes of picking our way upward,
we did actually reach the summit no new sky greeted us. Indeed, I
shrank back aghast from the dreadful view that I saw. For the mountain
swept downward in long, swift and severe lines into a funnel of Erebus
darkness. We stood perched at a gigantic height above the world, and it
was black night with an abyss both behind and in front of us.
You could stand on the top of the mountain and see the two dreadful
views, on the one side scores and fifties of wrathful, staring
mountains and on the other a purgatorial abyss for lost souls.
We dared not start a descent so we slept on the top of the mountain.
I lay on a narrow ledge and slumbered and waked. And Vachel, who was
hypnotised by the abyss, would not lie down for fear he might fall off
or might get up in his sleep and jump. So he sat like a fakir the whole
night long, looking unwaveringly on one fixed spot.
“Our friends all lie in their soft beds with their heads on pillows of
down,” I thought, “far away in the valleys and across the plains, in
snug, comfortable homes, and we lie on rocky, jagged edges on the very
top of a great mountain, far from human ken.”
We seemed as much nearer the stars as we were further away from
mankind. Venus was like a diamond cut out of the sun, and she lifted
an unearthly splendour high into the sooty devouring darkness of the
night. In other parts of the sky the meteors shot laconically in and
out as if on errands for the planets. Cold winds ravaged the heights,
but they did not roar. For the forests were far away. And there was
no sound of waters--only the long slow threatening roll and splurge
of loose rocks continually detaching themselves from the heights and
slipping downward to perdition.
I lay and I lay, and Vachel sat unmoving, and we heard, as it were, the
pulse of the world. We did not see humanity’s prayers going up to God.
We only saw the stars and the night.
[Illustration]
_If you join the mountain-peak club
You’ll notice the old members stare at you,
Call you silently a parvenu, interloper, upstart.
Upstart you are, of course,
But never mind, you’ve got a rise in the world.
No use trying to outstare the mountains
Sitting in their arms-chairs, nursing their gouty feet.
Be a social climber still,
Aspire higher,
And be put up as soon as you can
For the club of Heaven’s stars._
[Illustration: WHERE THE ANTELOPE WILL GO THE BEAR WILL FOLLOW]
XIV. DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE
BLESSINGS for dawn and the rosy lights and for the cloudlessness of the
morning! Had mist enshrouded us we should have had to have remained
high up on the slippery knife-edge of the mountain till the mist had
passed. We were able to descend, cautiously, cautiously, for three
hours in a trackless precipitous zig-zag to the red peak of a lower
mountain and a high snow-bound lake, where we made a good fire and
made coffee with our last coffee, and lay down again and slept. Then
we washed in the snow and ceased to be old weather-beaten tramps and
recaptured our yesterdays and our youth, and Vachel began to sing again
and our knapsacks felt lighter, as indeed they were, for we had eaten
up all the rations, even the iron rations.
Then we walked to the valley of the Sun Mountain adown the rocks of a
continuous cascade. The descent to the snow-bound lake and the red peak
had seemed impossible, and we essayed the impossible again. It was not
merely a polite walk downstairs. Every step that we took was a problem.
We used our hands and the strength of our wrists as much as our feet
and the tension of our ankles. Constantly were we faced with fifteen
to twenty-foot drops on to narrow ledges, where a balance must be kept
when we alighted.
No doubt I am by nature a mountaineer and hillsman, half a Highlander,
at least, and Vachel’s genius is the genius of the plains. I am an
antelope and he is a bear, we tell each other.
“You lead,” says Vachel. “Where the antelope will go the bear will
follow after him, but the antelope will not follow the bear.”
So he followed downward, and we took the most abominable chances of
breaking our legs or our necks--we had to take them. Then presently we
came to what seemed a full forty-foot sheer drop of foaming water--an
impossible descent, you would say, for all the grasp and grip in it
was water-washed and water-smoothed by ages of water--impossible,
impossible. But no, face it, think it over, it can be managed. O
caution, caution! Trust yourself to the Almighty Protector and grit
your teeth!
* * * * *
TIMIDITY fought daring all the way down. We sat once or twice, and
regarded the view. One thing was certain: we could not climb back to
the places we had come from. If we did not continue downward we had to
remain where we were.
We did things which one does not do without guides and ropes and the
paraphernalia of mountaineering, and when we got down to the tortured
fissured rocks below the cataract we looked up whence we had come and
said again to ourselves, “Impossible, impossible!”
And as in going up the mountain the winning of the summit was
continually deferred, so in descending to the valley we only conquered
one steep mountain slope to be presented with another steep mountain
slope and another series of terraces and another impossibility.
Perhaps no one ever came this way over the mountains unless it was some
adventurous Indian, but even Indians do not venture where horse cannot
go. I remember as one of the most remarkable passages of our descent an
hour we spent in a subarboreal channel shut out from the light of day,
a jagged downward plunge where the stream fell away in darkness while
in voluminous curves the thick sallow roofed it in. We made a hanging
descent, clinging to handfuls of branches of sallow and swaying and
sagging and dropping, and then touching rock with a dangling foot, and
then clutching another lower bunch of branches and letting ourselves
down again, downward, downward.
* * * * *
BUT it all ended well, for we came at last to sheets of sliding
shale and then to a spacious forest. And we had been saved from all
mischance, and the silence which danger had gradually imposed on us
was broken.
“Bread, beauty, and freedom is all that man requires,” cried Vachel,
“and now I’ll translate it into fire, water, and a place to sleep.”
These we found, and one by one the stars discovered us when they peeped
through the branches of the lofty pines. They saw us where we lay
now far away below, stretched out beside the embers of our fire and
luxuriating in its warmth like cats.
We boiled a pot of black currants and wild gooseberries and we ate
it to the last berry, though, as the poet said afterwards, it was
a quart of concentrated quinine. And we made a rosy layer of wild
black-currant candy in the frying-pan which was not allowed to remain
long unconsumed. We had no food in our knapsacks, only a little sugar,
but we counted ourselves happy though hungry because we had been up on
top of a great mountain and had come down.
“A joy to the heart of a man is a goal that he may not reach,” says
Swinburne. And a greater joy still is the joy of reaching it. That is
what we have been doing all day.
“Call it ‘Doing the Impossible’ and thinking well of ourselves,” adds
the poet when I read this to him:
[Illustration]
_“My master builder!” said the lady
When she made the master builder
Climb to the top of his new building,
Risking his life and doing the impossible a second time.
She made him do it, but he doing it was a hero.
He showed his manhood to her
By doing something that could not be done.
“The impossible or nothing” be our cry.
Don’t you loathe the perfectly possible?
I do._
[Illustration: SWEET LADIES DO STOP ROLLING YOUR EYES]
XV. PEOPLE IN CAMP
A DAY’S steady tramping brought us to a camp, and then we bathed in St.
Mary’s Lake and washed every separate item of linen, even that which
we wore, and we sun-baked ourselves on the hot beach while the clothes
dried, and we made a clean appearance at last among fair women and
brave men, and we took supplies on which to vagabondise for days on the
slopes of Going-to-the-Sun Mountain.
It was a curious experience to be absolutely alone on the mountains so
long and then suddenly to come on a large congregation of tourists.
Going-to-the-Sun Camp is a spectacular point in the recognised tour of
Glacier Wilderness.
“We are doing the four days’ tour,” is the common explanation which
visitors gave us. Or, “We are making the triangular trip.”
One’s eyes naturally rest on the ladies, who are nearly all in seeming
male attire, and some of this attire fits and some does not; some of it
suggests homes where men are rare and breeches have to be imported. But
they all look pretty well in this simplicity. Girls in mauve and violet
jumpers, shiny leather belts, and leg-o’-mutton breeches sit with us
at supper and explain that to-day was their first day on a horse--and
they know it. “Are you tired?” say I. “You can tell the world,” is the
reply. Near us stands a girl in tan riding costume, violet stockings,
white shoes, and bobbed brown hair in a hair net. She is talking to
two well-built youths, standing with their legs apart, and the girl,
imitating their styles, droops forward to them as they chaff one
another. She will not stray far. The same may be said of a well-fed
lady of sixty, pampered and neurotic, but sitting in a riding jacket
and very baggy breeches and nervously smelling at an ammonia bottle.
Grandma in trousers is rather portentous.
But how describe the charm of the little boy and girl, children of
twelve and thirteen, accoutred also for the horse and sitting on their
steeds with the grace of Indians. The old and middle-aged are stiff and
only the children look as if they could never get tired. In any case,
all is good humour and jollity. Mme. Censure is not here. There are
people with crumpled faces and there are people made of dimples and
curves--but happiness holds all.
* * * * *
WE did not see very much of the tourist life. There is not much of it
up here. There ought probably to be more. While Yosemite, Grand Canyon
and Yellowstone are visited by hundreds of thousands of Americans,
Glacier is left unused. We do not want its canyons also to be filled
up to the top with cans, but no one would grudge a few more people in
a wilderness where you can travel weeks without meeting a soul--a few
more sharers in the loveliness of the Northern Rockies.
A number of camps have been made with log-cabins and canvas tents, and
there are two large hotels on the fringe of the wilderness. But an
especial charm lies in the fact that the people in charge of the camps
and the little inns called “chalets” are mostly university students
and college girls of the institutions of Minnesota and Montana, and
they do the needful work on the self-help principle of earning a little
money in their holidays to pay their way during term. There is nothing
of the low commercial spirit, no one hanging around for a tip, no one
with any interest to treat you shabbily, but instead the natural good
manners of unspoiled people. You see the choleric “colonel” trying to
get more than his share of attention and service, but he doesn’t effect
anything, and you may see the millionaire cheerfully and shrewdly
recognising the fact that he must take his turn after his stenographer
and perhaps after a couple of ragged old tramps like ourselves.
* * * * *
VACHEL is devoted to the universities and high schools of America
and the life they represent. He has almost completely changed his
constituency from the “ladies’ club” and the heavy society of Mr. and
Mrs. Leo Hunter and is now a poetic voice of young germinal America.
He has “covered the map” of the United States singing his songs to
college youths. And in return college youth recognises him quickly. He
is a natural favourite among those who run the “chalets.” And they all
wanted him to “sing” to them.
Not that the visitors do not also make friends with us and we with
them. Such coats of sunshine as we have make ordinary sunburn pale and
give us much glamour. Souvenir huntresses grab us from a “big ballyhoo”
Western town. Likewise, a girl from Chicago, pronounced in three facial
contortions. And when we set off to vagabondise for some days we were
followed by a beautiful creature who wished for a minute to come with
us to the world’s end.
[Illustration]
_The tramps have gone to sleep
Nearer to the skies;
Oh ladies, sweet ladies,
Do stop rolling your eyes.
The tramps have gone away
To seek their paradise;
Oh ladies, sweet ladies,
Do stop rolling your eyes.
The tramps have taken with them
The best of apple pies,
They’re not prepared to-day
To take on extra ties.
So ladies, sweet ladies,
Do stop rolling your eyes._
[Illustration: ST. SERAPHIM
HE IS ONLY A WILD BEAST WHEN TREATED LIKE A WILD BEAST]
XVI. VISITED BY BEARS
I RETAIN very cheerily in mind from Russia the memory of the typical
Russian saint who lived in the woods and was so holy that the bears
approached without malice and took what the saint could spare of the
store of crusts on which he lived. The unfortunate Tsarina when she
desired so religiously a male heir, went to the shrine of Seraphim in
the “empty place” of Arzamas to pray for one. And the most famous
thing about St. Seraphim was his love of the bears. He is nearly always
depicted in popular oleographs feeding the bears with bread, and in
Russian ikons the bear is the national emblem of the primitive nature
of Russia and the saint is the emblem of Christ.
On the other hand, I remember also my good old friend Alexander Beekof,
a hunter of bears who had himself snapshotted facing in the snowy
forest the upstanding, snarling, dangerous beast which presently he
was to lay low. And since we are thinking of bears, I call to mind how
I saw last winter little baby bears, dressed up in ribbons and fed
with milk from a pap-bottle, hawked for sale by refugee Russians from
street to street in Constantinople--pets to put in the nursery with
your children, astonishing little rompers and ideal players of hide and
seek. I have wondered about the bear as we wonder now about the Russian
as to just what sort of an animal he is. Is he only a wild beast when
treated like a wild beast, but otherwise tame in the presence of saints
and children? Or is he a wild beast all the while?
This problem we evidently went to the Rocky Mountains to solve. For
there we met the bears, and even if we may not have the haloes of the
saints we hope to find a place among the children.
* * * * *