Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy
to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do
not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and
delicious. And why shouldn’t it be?—it is the same the angels breathe. I
think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a
man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a
roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer
time. I know a man who went there to die. But he made a failure of it.
He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand. He had no
appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future.
Three months later he was sleeping out-of-doors regularly, eating all he
could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three
thousand feet high for recreation. And he was a skeleton no longer, but
weighed part of a ton. This is no fancy sketch, but the truth. His
disease was consumption. I confidently commend his experience to other
skeletons.
... As soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in the boat and skirted
along the lake shore about three miles and disembarked. We liked the
appearance of the place, and so we claimed some three hundred acres of
it and stuck our “notice” on a tree. It was yellow pine timber land—a
dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and from one to five feet
through at the butt. It was necessary to fence our property or we could
not hold it. That is to say, it was necessary to cut down trees here and
there and make them fall in such a way as to form a sort of enclosure
(with pretty wide gaps in it). We cut down three trees apiece, and found
it such heart-breaking work that we decided to “rest our case” on those;
if they held the property, well and good; if they didn’t, let the
property spill out through the gaps and go; it was no use to work
ourselves to death merely to save a few acres of land. Next day we came
back to build a house—for a house was also necessary, in order to hold
the property. We decided to build a substantial log-house and excite the
envy of the Brigade boys; but by the time we had cut and trimmed the
first log it seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate, and so we concluded
to build it of saplings. However, two saplings duly cut and trimmed,
compelled recognition of the fact that a still modester architecture
would satisfy the law, and so we concluded to build a “brush” house. We
devoted the next day to this work, but we did so much “sitting around”
and discussing that by the middle of the afternoon we had achieved only
a half way sort of affair which one of us had to watch while the other
cut brush, lest if both turned our backs we might not be able to find it
again, it had such a strong family resemblance to the surrounding
vegetation. But we were satisfied with it.... We slept in the sand close
to the water’s edge, between two protecting boulders, which took care of
the stormy night winds for us. We never took any paregoric to make us
sleep. At the first break of dawn we were always up and running
footraces to tone down excess of physical vigor and exuberance of
spirits. That is, Johnny was—but I held his hat. While smoking the pipe
of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory
of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept among the
shadows, and set the captive crags and forests free. We watched the
tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little
detail of forest, precipice, and pinnacle was wrought in and finished,
and the miracle of the enchanter complete. Then to “business.”
That is, drifting around in the boat. We were on the north shore. There,
the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white. This gives
the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage than it has
elsewhere on the lake. We usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from
the shore and then lay down on the thwarts in the sun, and let the boat
drift by the hour whither it would. We seldom talked. It interrupted the
Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams, the luxurious rest and
indolence brought.... So singularly clear was the water, that where it
was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct
that the boat seemed floating in air! Yes, where it was even _eighty_
feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every
hand’s-breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite
boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom
apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently
it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to
seize the oar and avert the danger. But the boat would float on, and the
boulder descend again, and then we could see that when we had been
exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or thirty feet below
the surface. Down through the transparency of these great depths, the
water was not _merely_ transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. All
objects seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of
outline, but of every minute detail, which they would not have had when
seen simply through the same depth of atmosphere. So empty and airy did
all spaces seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high
aloft in mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions
“balloon-voyages.” ... Sometimes, on lazy afternoons, we lolled on the
sand in camp, and smoked pipes and read some old well-worn novels. At
night, by the camp-fire, we played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the
mind—and played them with cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole
summer’s acquaintance with them could enable the student to tell the ace
of clubs from the jack of diamonds.
We never slept in our “house.” It never occurred to us, for one thing;
and besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. We
did not wish to strain it.