AMONG THE NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST
You have not ridden far towards the ranger's house in the Forest before
you become aware that clothing for town is not clothing for the wilds.
No matter how hot it may be at midday, in this high, rare air a chill
comes soon as the sun begins to sink. To be comfortable, light flannels
must be worn next the skin, with an extra heavy coat available--never
farther away from yourself than the pack straps. Night may overtake you
on a hard trail. Long as you have an extra heavy coat and a box of
matches, night does not matter. You are safer benighted in the wilds
than in New York or Chicago. If you have camp fire and blanket, night in
the wilds knows nothing of the satyr-faced spirit of evil, sand-bagger
and yeggman, that stalks the town.
[Illustration: The forest-ranger in action, fighting a ground fire with
his saddle blanket in one of the National Forests of the West]
To anyone used to travel in the wilderness, it seems almost like little
boys playing Robinson Crusoe to give explicit directions as to dress.
Yet only a few years ago, the world was shocked and horrified by the
death of a town man exploring the wilds; and that death was directly
traceable to a simple matter of boots. His feet played out. He had gone
into a country of rocky portages with only one pair of moccasins. I have
never gone into the wilds for longer than four months at a time. Yet I
have never gone with less than four sets of footgear. Primarily, you
need a pair of good outing boots; and outing boots are good only when
they combine two qualities--comfort and thick enough soles to protect
your feet from sharp rock edges if you climb, broad enough soles, too,
to protect the edge of your feet from hard knocks from passing trees and
jars in the stirrup. For the rest, you need about two extras in case you
chip chunks out of these in climbing; and if you camp near glaciers or
snow fields, a pair of moccasins for night wear will add to comfort. You
may get them if you like to spend the money--$8 leggings and $8
horsehide shoes and cowboy hat and belted corduroy suit and all the
other paraphernalia by which the seasoned Westerner recognizes the
tenderfoot. You may get them if you want to. It will not hurt you; but a
$3 cowboy slicker for rainy days and a pair of boots guaranteed to let
the water out as fast as it comes in, these and the ordinary outing
garments of any other part of the world are the prime essentials.
This matter of proper preparation recalls a little English woman who
determined to train her boys and girls to be resourceful and independent
by taking them camping each summer in the forests of the Pacific Coast.
They were on a tramp one day twelve miles from camp when a heavy fog
blew in, and they lost themselves. That is not surprising when you
consider the big tree country. Two notches and one blaze mark the bounds
of the National Forests; one notch and one blaze, the trail; but they
had gone off the trail trout fishing. "If they had been good
path-finders, they could have found the way out by following the stream
down," remarked a critic of this little group to me; and a very apt
criticism it was from the safe vantage point of a study chair. How about
it, if when you came to follow the stream down, it chanced to cut
through a gorge you couldn't follow, with such a sheer fall of rock at
the sides and such a crisscross of big trees, house-high, that you were
driven back from the stream a mile or two? You would keep your
directions by sunlight? Maybe; but that big tree region is almost
impervious to sunlight; and when the fog blows in or the clouds blow
down thick as wool, you will need a pocket compass to keep the faintest
sense of direction. Compass signs of forest-lore fail here. There are
few flowers under the dense roofing to give you sense of east or west;
and you look in vain for the moss sign on the north bark of the tree.
All four sides are heavily mossed; and where the little Englishwoman
lost herself, they were in ferns to their necks.
"Weren't the kiddies afraid?" I asked.
"Not a bit! Bob got the trout ready; and Son made a big fire. We curled
ourselves up round it for the night; and I wish you could have seen the
children's delight when the clouds began to roll up below in the
morning. It was like a sea. The youngsters had never seen clouds take
fire from the sun coming up below. I want to tell you, too, that we put
out every spark of that fire before we left in the morning."
All of which conveys its own moral for the camper in the National
Forests.
It ought not to be necessary to say that you cannot go to the National
Forests expecting to billet yourself at the ranger's house. Many of the
rangers are married and have a houseful of their own. Those not married,
have no facilities whatever for taking care of you. In my visit to the
Vasquez Forest, I happened to have a letter of introduction to the
ranger and his mother, who took me in with that bountiful hospitality
characteristic of the frontier; but directly across the road from the
ranger's cabin was a little log slab-sided hotel where any comer could
have stayed in perfect comfort for $7 a week; and at the station, where
the train stopped, was another very excellent little hotel where you
could have stayed and enjoyed meals that for nutritious cooking might
put a New York dinner to shame--all to the tune of $10 a week. Also, at
this very station, is the Supervisor's office of the Forestry
Department. By inquiry here, the newcomer can ascertain all facts as to
tenting outfit and camping place. Only one point must be kept in
mind--do not go into the National Forests expecting the railroads, or
the rangers, or Providence, to look after you. Do not go unless you are
prepared to look after yourself.
And now that you are in the National Forests, what are you going to do?
You can ride; or you can hunt; or you can fish; or you can bathe in the
hot springs that dot so many of these intermountain regions, where God
has landscaped the playground for a nation; or you can go in for
records mountain climbing; or you can go sightseeing in the most
marvelously beautiful mountain scenery in the whole world; or you can
prowl round the prehistoric cave and cliff dwellings of a race who
flourished in mighty power, now solitary and silent cities,
contemporaneous with that Egyptian desert runner whose skeleton lies in
the British Museum marked 20,000 B. C. It isn't every day you can wander
through the deserted chambers of a king's palace with 500 rooms. Tourist
agencies organize excursion parties for lesser and younger palaces in
Europe. I haven't heard of any to visit the silent cities of the cliff
and cave dwellers on the Jemez Plateau of New Mexico, or the Gila River,
Arizona, or even the easily accessible dead cities of forgotten peoples
in the National Forest of Southern Colorado. What race movement in the
first place sent these races perching their wonderful tier-on-tier
houses literally on the tip-top of the world?
The prehistoric remains of the Southwest are now, of course, under the
jurisdiction of the Forestry Department; and you can't go digging and
delving and carrying relics from the midden heaps and baked earthen
floors without the permission of the Secretary of Agriculture; but if
you go in the spirit of an investigator, you will get that permission.
* * * * *
The question isn't _what is there to do_. It is _which of the countless
things there are to do_ are you going to choose to do? When Mr.
Roosevelt goes to the National Forests, he strikes for the Holy Cross
Mountain and bags a grizzly. When ordinary folk hie to this Forest, they
take along a bathing suit and indulge in a daily plunge in the hot pools
at Glenwood Springs. If the light is good and the season yet early, you
can still see the snow in the crevices of the peak, giving the Forest
its name of the Holy Cross. People say there is no historic association
to our West. Once a foolish phrase is uttered, it is surprising how
sensible people will go on repeating it. Take this matter of the "Holy
Cross" name. If you go investigating how these "Holy Cross" peaks got
their names from old Spanish _padres_ riding their burros into the
wilderness, it will take you a hard year's reading just to master the
Spanish legends alone. Then, if you dive into the realm of the cliff
dwellers, you will be drowned in historic antiquity before you know. In
the Glenwood Springs region, you will not find the remnants of
prehistoric people; but you'll find the hot springs.
Just two warnings: one as to hunting; the other, as to mountain
climbing. There is still big game in Colorado Forests--bear, mountain
sheep, elk, deer; and the ranger is supposed to be a game warden; but a
man patrolling 100,000 acres can't be all over at one time. As to
mountain climbing, you can get your fill of it in Grand Canyon, above
Ouray, at Pike's Peak--a dozen places, and only the mountain climber and
his troglodyte cliff-climbing prototype know the drunken, frenzied joy
of climbing on the roof of the earth and risking life and limb to stand
with the kingdoms of the world at your feet. But unless you are a
trained climber, take a guide with you, or the advice of some local man
who knows the tricks and the moods and the wiles and the ways of the
upper mountain world. Looking from the valley up to the peak, a patch of
snow may seem no bigger to you than a good-sized table-cloth. Look out!
If it is steep beneath that "table-cloth" and the forest shows a slope
clean-swept of trees as by a mighty broom, be careful how you cross and
recross following the zigzag trail that corkscrews up below the far
patch of white! I was crossing the Continental Divide one summer in the
West when a woman on the train pointed to a patch of white about ten
miles up the mountain slope and asked if "that" were "rock or snow." I
told her it was a very large snow field, indeed; that we saw only the
forefoot of it hanging over the edge; that the upper part was supposed
to be some twenty miles across. She gave me a look meant for Mrs.
Ananias. A month later, when I came back that way, the train suddenly
slowed up. The slide had come down and lay in white heaps across the
track three or four miles down into the valley and up the other side.
The tracks were safe enough; for the snow shed threw the slide over the
track on down the slope; but it had caught a cluster of lumbermen's
shacks and buried eight people in a sudden and eternal sleep. "We saw it
coming," said one of the survivors, "and we thought we had plenty of
time. It must have been ten miles away. One of the men went in to get
his wife. Before he could come out, it was on us. Man and wife and
child were carried down in the house just as it stood without crushing a
timber. It must have been the concussion of the air--they weren't even
bruised when we dug them out; but the kid couldn't even have wakened up
where it lay in the bed; and the man hadn't reached the inside room; but
they were dead, all three."
And near Ouray another summer, a chance acquaintance pointed to a peak.
"That one caught my son last June," he said. "He was the company's
doctor. He had been born and raised in these mountains; but it caught
him. We knew the June heat had loosened those upper fields; and his wife
didn't want him to go; but there was a man sick back up the mountain;
and he set out. They saw it coming; but it wasn't any use. It
came--quick--" with a snap of his fingers--"as that; and he was gone."
It's a saying among all good mountaineers that it's "only the fool who
monkeys with a mountain," especially the mountain with a white patch
above a clean-swept slope.
And there is another thing for the holiday player in the National
Forests to do; and it is the thing that I like best to do. You have been
told so often that you have come to believe it--that our mountains in
America lack the human interests; lack the picturesque character and
race types dotting the Alps, for instance. Don't you believe it! Go
West! There isn't a mountain or a forest from New Mexico to Idaho that
has not its mountaineering votary, its quaint hermit, or its sky-top
guide, its refugee from civilization, or simply its lover of God's
Great Outdoors and Peace and Big Silence, living near to the God of the
Great Open as log cabin on a hilltop capped by the stars can bring him.
Wild creatures of woodland ways don't come to your beck and call. You
have to hunt out their secret haunts. The same with these Western
mountaineers. Hunt them out; but do it with reverence! I was driving in
the Gunnison country with a local magnate two years ago. We saw against
the far sky-line a cleft like the arched entrance to a cave; only this
arch led through the rock to the sky beyond.
"I wish," said my guide, "you had time to spend two or three weeks here.
We'd take you to the high country above these battlements and palisades.
See that hole in the mountain?"
"Rough Upper Alpine meadows?" I asked.
"Oh, dear no! Open park country with lakes and the best of fishing. It
used to be an almost impossible trail to get up there; but there has
been a hermit fellow there for the last ten years, living in his cabin
and hunting; and year after year, never paid by anybody, he has been
building that trail up. When men ask him why he does it, he says it's to
lead people up; for the glory of God and that sort of thing. Of course,
the people in the valley think him crazy."
Of course, they do. What would we, who love the valley and its dust and
its maniacal jabber of jealousies and dollars do, building trails to
lead people up to see the Glory of God? We call those hill-crest
dwellers the troglodytes. Is it not we, who are the earth dwellers, the
dust eaters, the insects of the city ant heaps, the true troglodytes
and subsoilers of the sordid iniquities? Perhaps, by this, you think
there are some things to do if you go out to the National Forests.
* * * * *
You have been told so often that the National Forests lock up timber
from use that it comes as a surprise as you ride up the woodland trail
to hear the song of the crosscut saw and the buzzing hum of a
mill--perhaps a dozen mills--running full blast here in this National
Forest. Heaps of sawdust emit the odors of imprisoned flowers. Piles of
logs lie on all sides stamped at the end U. S.--timber sold on the stump
to any lumberman and scaled as inspected by the ranger and paid by the
buyer. To be sure, the lumberman cannot have the lumber for nothing; and
it was for nothing that the Forests were seized and cut under the old
regime.
How was the spoliation effected? Two or three ways. The law of the
public domain used to permit burn and windfall to be taken out free.
Your lumberman, then, homesteaded 160 acres on a slope of forest
affording good timber skids and chutes. So far, no wrong! Was not public
domain open to homesteading? Good; but your homesteading lumberman now
watched his chance for a high wind away from his claim. Then, purely
accidentally, you understand, the fire sprang up and swept the entire
slope of green forest away from his claim. Your homesteading lumberman
then set up a sawmill. A fire fanned up a green slope by a high wind did
less harm than fire in a slow wind in dry weather. The slope would be
left a sweep of desolate burn and windfall, dead trees and spars. Your
lumberman then went in and took his windfall and his burn free.
Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of acres of the public
domain, were rifled free from the public in this way. If challenged, I
could give the names of men who became millionaires by lumbering in this
manner.
That was the principle of Congress when it withdrew from public domain
these vast wooded areas and created the National Forests to include
grazing and woodland not properly administered under public domain. The
making of windfall to take it free was stopped. The ranger's job is to
prevent fires. Also he permits the cutting of only ripe, full-grown
trees, or dead tops, or growth stunted by crowding; and all timber sold
off the forests must be marked for cutting and stamped by the ranger.
But the old spirit assumes protean forms. The latest way of working the
old trick is through the homestead law. You have been told that
homesteaders cannot go in on the National Forests. Yet there, as you
ride along the trail, is a cleared space of 160 acres where a Swedish
woman and her boys are making hay; and inquiry elicits the fact that
millions of acres are yearly homesteaded in the National Forests. Just
as fast as they can be surveyed, all farming lands in the National
Forests are opened to the homesteader. Where, then, is the trick? Your
farmer man comes in for a homestead and he picks out 160 acres where the
growth of big trees is so dense they will yield from $10,000 to $40,000
in timber per quarter section. Good! Hasn't the homesteader a right to
this profit? He certainly has, if he gets the profit; but supposing he
doesn't clear more than a few hundred feet round his cabin, and hasn't a
cent of money to pay the heavy expense of clearing the rest, and sells
out at the end of his homesteading for a few hundred dollars? Supposing
such farmer men are brought in by excursion loads by a certain big
lumber company, and all sell out at a few hundred dollars, claims worth
millions, to that certain big lumber company--is this true homesteading
of free land; or a grabbing of timber for a lumber trust?
The same spirit explains the furious outcry that miners are driven off
the National Forest land. Wherever there is genuine metal, prospectors
can go in and stake their claims and take lumber for their preliminary
operations; but they cannot stake thousands of fictitious claims, then
yearly turn over a quarter of a million dollars' worth of timber free to
a big smelting trust--a merry game worked in one of the Western States
for several years till the rangers put a stop to it.
To build roads through an empire the size of Germany would require
larger revenues than the Forests yet afford; so the experiment is being
tried of permitting lumbermen to take the timber free from the space
occupied by a road for the building of the road. When you consider that
you can drive a span of horses through the width of a big conifer, or
build a cottage of six rooms from a single tree, the reward for road
building is not so paltry as it sounds.
Presently, your pony turns up a by-path. You are at the ranger's
cabin,--picturesque to a degree, built of hewn logs or timbers, with
slab sides scraped down to the cinnamon brown, nailed on the hewn wood.
Many an Eastern country house built in elaborate and shoddy imitation of
town mansion, or prairie home resembling nothing in the world so much as
an ugly packing box, might imitate the architecture of the ranger's
cabin to the infinite improvement of appearances, not to mention
appropriateness.
Appropriateness! That is the word. It is a forest world; and the ranger
tunes the style of his house to the trees around him; log walls, log
partitions, log veranda, unbarked log fences, rustic seats, fur rugs,
natural stone for entrance steps. In several cases, where the cabin had
been built of square hewn timber with tar paper lining, slabs scraped of
the loose bark had been nailed diagonally on the outside; and a more
suitable finish to a wood hermitage could hardly be devised--surely
better than the weathered browns and dirty drabs and peeling whites that
you see defacing the average frontier home. Naturally enough, city
people building cottages as play places have been the first to imitate
this woodsy architecture. You see the slab-sided, cinnamon-barked
cottages among the city folk who come West to play, and in the lodges of
hunting clubs far East as the Great Lakes. Personally I should like to
see the contagion spread to the farthest East of city people who are
fleeing the cares of town, "back to the land;" but when there are taken
to the country all the cares of the city house, a regiment of servants
or hostiles, and a mansion of grandeur demanding such care, it seems to
me the city man is carrying the woes that he flees "back to the farm."
[Illustration: Pueblo boys at play in the streets of Zuni, New Mexico.
The dome-like tops on the houses are bake ovens]
What sort of men are these young fellows living halfway between heaven
and earth on the lonely forested ridges whose nearest neighbors are the
snow peaks? Each, as stated previously, patrols 100,000 acres. That is,
over an area of 100,000 acres he is a road warden, game warden, timber
cruiser, sales agent, United States marshal, forester, gardener,
naturalist, trail builder, fire fighter, cattle boss, sheep protector,
arrester of thugs, thieves and poachers, surveyor, mine inspector, field
man on homestead jobs inside the limits, tree doctor, nurseryman. When
you consider that each man's patrol stretched out in a straight line
would reach from New York past Albany, or from St. Paul to Duluth,
without any of the inaccuracy with which a specialist loves to charge
the layman, you may say the ranger is a pretty busy man.
What sort of man is he? Very much the same type as the Canadian
Northwest Mounted Policeman, with these differences: He is very much
younger. I think there is a regulation somewhere in the Department that
a new man older than forty-five will not be taken. This insures
enthusiasm, weeding out the misfits, the formation of a body of men
trained to the work; but I am not sure that it is not a mistake. There
is a saying among the men of the North that "it takes a wise old dog to
catch a wary old wolf;" and "there are more things in the woods than
ever taught in l'pe'tee cat--ee--cheesm." I am not sure that the
weathered old dogs, whose catechism has been the woods and the world,
with lots of hard knocks, are not better fitted to cope with some of the
difficulties of the ranger's life than a double-barreled post-graduate
from Yale or Biltmore. So much depends on fist, and the brain behind the
fist. I am quite sure that many of the blackguard tricks assailing the
Forest Service would slink back to unlighted lairs if the tricksters had
to deal not with the boys of Eastern colleges, gentlemen always, but
with some wise and weathered old dog of frontier life who wouldn't
consult Departmental regulations before showing his fangs. He would
consult them, you know; but it would be afterwards. Just now, while the
rangers are consulting the red tape, the trickster gets away with the
goods.
In the next place, your Forest ranger is not clothed with the authority
to back up his fight which the N.W.M.P. man possesses. In theory, your
ranger is a United States marshal, just as your Mounted Policeman is a
constable and justice of the peace; but when it comes to practice, where
the N.W.M.P. has a free hand on the instant, on the spot, to arrest,
try, convict and imprison, the Forest ranger is ham-strung and hampered
by official red tape. For instance, riding out with a ranger one day, we
came on an irate mill man who opened out a fusillade in all the
profanity his tongue could borrow. The ranger turned toward me aghast.
"Don't mind me! Let him swear himself out! I want to see for myself
exactly what you men have to deal with!"
Now, if that mill man had used such language to a Mounted Policeman, he
would have been arrested, sentenced to thirty days and a fine, all
inside of twenty-four hours. What was it all about? An attempt to
bulldoze a young government man into believing that the taking of logs
without payment was permissible.
"What will you do to straighten it all out?" I asked.
"Lay a statement of the facts before the District Supervisor. The
Supervisor will forward all to Denver. Denver will communicate with
Washington. Then, soon as the thing has been investigated, word will
come back from Washington."
Investigated? If you know anything about government investigations, you
will not stop the clock, as Joshua played tricks with the sun dial, to
prevent speed.
"Then, it's a matter of six weeks before you can put decency and respect
for law in that gentleman's heart?" I asked.
"Perhaps longer," said the college man without a suspicion of irony,
"and he has given us trouble this way ever since he has come to the
Forests."
"And will continue to give you trouble till the law gives you a free
hand to put such blackguards to bed till they learn to be good."
"Yes, that's right. This isn't the first time men have tried to get away
with logs that didn't belong to them. Once, when I came back to the
first Forest where I served, there was a whole pile of logs stamped U.
S. that we had never scaled. By the time we could get word back from
Washington, the guilty party had left the State and blame had been
shunted round on a poor half-witted fellow who didn't know what he was
doing; but we forced pay for those logs."
It is a common saying in the Northwest that it takes eight years to make
a good Mounted Policeman--eight years to jounce the duffer out and the
man in; but in the Forest Service, men over forty-five are not taken.
For men who serve up to forty-five, the inducements of salary beginning
at $65 a month and seldom exceeding $200 are not sufficient to retain
tested veterans. The big lumber companies will pay a trained forester
more for the same work on privately owned timber limits; so the rangers
remain for the most part young. Would the same difficulties rise if wise
old dogs were on guard? I hardly think so.
* * * * *
What manner of man is the ranger? As we sat round the little parlor of
the cabin that night in the Vasquez Forest, an army man turned forester
struck up on a piano that had been packed on horseback above cloud-line
strains of Wagner and Beethoven. A graduate of Ann Arbor and
post-graduate of Yale played with a cigarette as he gazed at his own
fancies through the mica glow of the coal stove. A Denver boy, whose
mother kept house in the cabin, was chief ranger. In the group was his
sister, a teacher in the village school; and I fancy most of the ranger
homes present pretty much the same types, though one does not ordinarily
expect to hear strains of grand opera above cloud-line. Picture the men
dressed in sage-green Norfolk suits; and you have as rare a scene as
Scott ever painted of the men in Lincoln green in England's borderland
forests.
Of course, there are traitors and spies and Judas Iscariots in the
Service with lip loyalty to public weal and one hand out behind for
thirty pieces of silver to betray self-government; but under the present
regime, such men are not kept when found out, nor shielded when caught.
For twenty years, the world has been ringing with praise of the
Northwest Mounted Police; but the red-coat men have served their day;
and the extension of Provincial Government will practically disband the
force in a few years. Right now, in the American West, is a similar
picturesque body of frontier fighters and wardens, doing battle against
ten times greater odds, with little or no authority to back them up, and
under constant fire of slanderous mendacity set going by the thieves and
grafters whose game of spoliation has been stopped. Let spread-eagleism
look at the figures and ponder them, and never forget them, especially
never forget them, when charges are being hurled against the Forest
rangers! _In the single fire of 1909 more rangers lost their lives than
Mounted Policemen have died in the Service since 1870, when the force
was organized._
Was it Nietzsche, or Haeckel, or Maeterlinck, or all of them together,
who declared that Nature's constant aim is to perpetuate and surpass
herself? The sponge slipping from vegetable to animal kingdom; the
animal grading up to man; man stretching his neck to become--what?--is
it spirit, the being of a future world? The tadpole striving for legs
and wings, till in the course of the centuries it developed both. The
flower flaunting its beauty to attract bee and butterfly that it may
perfect its union with alien pollen dust and so perpetuate a species
that shall surpass itself. The tree trying to encompass and overcome the
law of its own being--fixity--by sending its seeds sailing, whirling,
aviating the seas of the air, with wind for pilot to far distant clime.
You see it all of a sun-washed morning in a ride or walk through the
National Forests. You thought the tree was an inanimate thing, didn't
you? Yet you find John Muir and Dante clasping hands across the
centuries in agreement that the tree is a living, sensate thing, sensate
almost as you are; with its seven ages like the seven ages of man; with
the same ceaseless struggle to survive, to be fit to survive, to battle
up to light and stand in serried rank proud among its peers, drawing
life and strength straight from the sun.
The storm wind ramps through its thrashing branches; and what do you
suppose it is doing? Precisely what the storm winds of adversity do to
you and me: blowing down the dead leaves, snapping off the dead
branches, making us take tighter hold on the verities of the eternal
rocks, teaching us to anchor on facts, not fictions, destroying our
weakness, strengthening our flabbiness, making us prove our right to be
fit to survive. Woe betide the tree with rotten heart wood or mushy
anchorage! You see its fate with upturned roots still sticky with the
useless muck. Not so different from us humans with mushy creeds that
can't stand fast against the shocks of life!
You say all this is so much symbolism; but when the First Great Cause
made the tree as well as the man, is it surprising that the same laws of
life should govern both? It is the forester, not the symbolist, who
divides the life of the tree into seven ages; just as it is the poet,
not the philosopher, who divides the life of man in seven ages; and it
needs no Maeterlinck, or Haeckel, to trace the similarity between the
seven ages. Seedling, sapling, large sapling, pole, large pole, standard
and set--marking the ages of the trees--all have their prototypes in the
human. The seedling can grow only under the protecting nursery of earth,
air, moisture and in some cases the shade of other trees. The young
conifers, for instance, grow best under the protecting nursery of
poplars and cottonwoods, as one sees where the fire has run, and the
quick growers are already shading the shy evergreens. And there is the
same infant mortality among the young trees as in human life. Too much
shade, fire, drought, passing hoof, disease, blight, weeds out the
weaklings up to adolescence. Then, the real business of living
begins--it is a struggle, a race, a constant contention for the top, for
the sunlight and air and peace at the top; and many a grand old tree
reaches the top only when ripe for death. Others live on their three
score years and ten, their centuries, and in the case of the sugar pines
and sequoias, their decades of centuries. First comes the self-pruning,
the branches shaded by their neighbors dying and dropping off. And what
a threshing of arms, of strength against strength, there is in the storm
wind, every wrench tightening grip, to the rocks, some trees even
sending down extra roots like guy ropes for anchorhold. The tree
uncrowded by its fellows shoots up straight as a mast pole, whorl on
whorl of its branches spelling its years in a century census. It is the
crowded trees that show their almost human craft, their instinct of will
to live--cork-screwing sidewise for light, forking into two branches
where one branch is broken or shaded, twisting and bending, ever seeking
the light, and spreading out only when they reach room for shoulder
swing at the top, with such a mechanism of pumping machinery to hoist
barrels of water up from secret springs in the earth as man has not
devised for his own use. And now, when the crown has widened out to sun
and air, it stops growing and bears its seeds--seeds shaped like
parachutes and canoes and sails and wings, to overcome the law of its
own fixity--life striving to surpass itself, as the symbolists and the
scientists say, though symbolist and scientist would break each other's
heads if you suggested that they both preach the very same thing.
And a lost tree is like a lost life; utter loss, bootless waste. You see
it in the bleached skeleton spars of the dead forest where the burn has
run. You see it where the wasteful lumberman has come cutting
half-growns and leaving stumps of full-growns three or four feet high
with piles of dry slash to carry the first chance spark. The leaf litter
here would have enriched the soil and the waste slash would keep the
poor of an Eastern city in fuel. Once, at a public meeting, I happened
to mention the ranger's rule that stumps must be cut no higher than
eighteen inches, and the fact that in the big tree region of the Rocky
Mountains many stumps are left three and four feet high. Someone took
smiling exception to the height of those stumps. Yet in the redwood and
Douglas fir country stumps are cut, not four feet, but nine feet high,
leaving waste enough to build a small house. And it will take not a
hundred, not two hundred, but a thousand years, to bring up a second
growth of such trees.
* * * * *
Sitting down to dinner at a little mountain inn, I noticed only two
families besides ourselves; and they were residents of the mountain. I
thought of those hotels back in the cities daily turning away health
seekers.
"How is it you haven't more people here, when the cities can't take care
of all the people who come?" I asked the woman of the house.
"People don't seem to know about the National Forests," she said. "They
think the forests are only places for lumber and mills."