SIXTEEN MILES OF AWE
Our party of three left the railroad at Great Falls, a good two-days'
walk up river from Benton, the head of Missouri River navigation, to
which point our boat material had been shipped and our baggage checked.
A vast sun-burned waste of buffalo-grass, prickly pears, and sagebrush
stretched before us to the north and east; and on the west the filmy
blue contour of the Highwoods Mountains lifted like sun-smitten thunder
clouds in the July swelter. One squinting far look, however, told you
that these were not rain clouds. The very thought of rain came to you
with the vagueness of some birth-surviving memory of a former time. You
looked far up and out to the westward and caught the glint of snow on
the higher peaks. But the sight was unconvincing; it was like a story
told without the "vital impulse." Always had these plains blistered
under this July sun; always had the spots of alkali made the only
whiteness; and the dry harsh snarl and snap of the grasshoppers' wings
had pricked this torrid silence through all eternity.
A stern and pitiless prospect for the amateur pedestrian, to be sure;
for devotees of the staff and pack have come to associate pedestrianism
with the idyllic, and the idyllic nourishes only in a land of frequent
showers. Theocritus and prickly pears are not compatible. Yet it was not
without a certain thrill of exaltation that we strapped on our packs and
stretched our legs after four days on the dusty plush.
And though ahead of us lay no shady, amiably crooked country roads and
bosky dells, wherein one might lounge and dawdle over Hazlitt, yet we
knew how crisscross cattle-trails should take us skirting down the
river's sixteen miles of awe.
Five hundred miles below its source, the falls of the Missouri begin
with a vertical plunge of sixty feet. This is the Black Eagle Falls,
presumably named so by Lewis and Clark and other explorers, because of
the black eagles found there.
With all due courtesy to my big surly grumbling friend, the Black Eagle
Falls, I must say that I was a bit disappointed in him. Oh! he is quite
magnificent enough, and every inch a Titan, to be sure; but of late
years it seems he has taken up with company rather beneath him. First of
all, he has gone to work in a most plebeian, almost slave-like fashion,
turning wheels and making lights and dragging silly little trolley cars
about a straggling town. Also, he hobnobs continually with a sprawling,
brawling, bad-breathed smelter, as no respectable Titan should do. And
on top of it all--and this was the straw that broke the back of my
sentimental camel--he allows them to maintain a park on the cliffs above
him, where the merest white-skinned, counter-jumping pigmy may come of a
Sunday for his glass of pop and a careless squint at the toiling Titan.
Puny Philistines eating peanuts and watching Samson at his Gaza stunt! I
like it not. Rather would I see the Muse Clio pealing potatoes or
Persephone busy with a banana cart! Encleadus wriggling under a mountain
is well enough; but Enceladus composedly turning a crank for little
men--he seemed too heavy for that light work.
Leaning on the frame observation platform, I closed my eyes, and in the
dull roar that seemed the voices of countless ages, the park and the
smelter and the silly bustling trolley cars and the ginger-ale and the
peanuts and my physical self--all but my own soul--were swallowed up. I
saw my Titan brother as he was made--four hundred yards of writhing,
liquid sinew, strenuously idle, magnificently worthless, flinging
meaningless thunders over the vast arid plain, splendidly empty under
sun and stars! I saw him as La Verendrye must have seen him--busy only
at the divine business of being a giant. And for a moment behind shut
eyes, it seemed very inconsequential to me that cranks should be turned
and that trolley cars should run up and down precisely in the same
place, never getting anywhere, and that there should be anything in all
that tract but an austere black eagle or two, and my own soul, and my
Titan brother.
When I looked again, I could half imagine the old turbulent fellow
winking slyly at me and saying in that undertone you hear when you
forget the thunders for a moment: "Don't you worry about me, little man.
It's all a joke, and I don't mind. Only to-morrow and then another
to-morrow, and there won't be any smelters or trolley cars or ginger-ale
or peanuts or sentimentalizing outers like yourself. But I'll be here
howling under sun and stars."
Whereupon I posed the toiling philosopher before the camera, pressed
the bulb, and descended from the summit of the cliff (as well as from my
point of view) to the trail skirting northward up the river, leaving
Encleadus grumbling at his crank.
Perhaps, after all, cranks really have to be turned. Still, it seems too
bad, and I have long bewailed it almost as a personal grief, that
utility and ugliness should so often be running mates.
They tell me that the Matterhorn never did a tap of work; and you
couldn't color one Easter egg with all the gorgeous sunsets of the
world! May we all become, some day, perfectly useless and beautiful!
At the foot of the first fall, a mammoth spring wells up out of the
rock. Nobody tells you about it; you run across it by chance, and it
interests you much more in that way. It would seem that a spring
throwing out a stream equivalent to a river one hundred yards wide and
two feet deep would deserve a little exploitation. Down East they would
have a great white sprawling hotel built close by it wherein one could
drink spring water (at a quarter the quart), with half a pathology
pasted on the bottle as a label. But nobody seems to care much about so
small an ooze out there: everything else is so big. And so it has
nothing at all to do but go right on being one of the very biggest
springs of all the world. This is really something; and I like it better
than the quarter-per-quart idea.
In sixteen miles the Missouri River falls four hundred feet.
Incidentally, this stretch of river is said to be capable of producing
the most tremendous water-power in the world.
After skirting four miles of water that ran like a mill-race, we came
upon the Rainbow Falls, where a thousand feet of river takes a drop of
fifty feet over a precipice regular as a wall of masonry. This was much
more to my liking--a million horse-power or so busy making rainbows!
Bully!
It was a very hot day and the sun was now high. I sat down to wipe the
sweat out of my eyes. I wished to get acquainted with this weaver of
iridescent nothings who knew so well the divine art of doing nothing at
all and doing it good and hard! After all, it isn't so easy to do
nothing and make it count!
And in the end, when all broken lights have blended again with the
Source Light, I'm not so sure that rainbows will seem less important
than rows and rows of arc lights and clusters and clusters of
incandescent globes. Are you? I can contract an indefinable sort of
heartache from the blue sputter of a city light that snuffs out moon and
stars for tired scurrying folks: but the opalescent mist-drift of the
Rainbow Falls wove heavens for me in its sheen, and through its
whirlwind rifts and crystal flaws, far reaches opened up with all the
heart's desire at the other end. You shut your eyes with that thunder in
your ears and that gusty mist on your face, and you see it very
plainly--more plainly than ever so many arc lights could make you see
it--the ultimate meaning of things. To be sure, when you open your eyes
again, it's all gone--the storm-flung rainbows seem to hide it again.
A mile below, we came upon the Crooked Falls of twenty feet. Leaving the
left bank and running almost parallel with it for some three hundred
yards, then turning and making a horseshoe, and returning to the right
bank almost opposite the place of first observation, this fall is nearly
a mile in length, being an unbroken sheet for that distance. This one,
also, does nothing at all, and in a beautifully irregular way. Somehow
it made me think of Walt Whitman! But we left it soon, swinging out
into the open parched country. We knew all this turbulence to be merely
the river's bow before the great stunt.
As we swung along, kicking up the acrid alkali dust from the
cattle-trail that snaked its way through the cactus and sagebrush, the
roar behind us died; and before us, far away, dull muffled thunders grew
up in the hush of the burning noon. Thunders in a desert, and no cloud!
For an hour we swung along the trail, and ever the thunders
increased--like the undertone of the surf when the sea whitens. We were
approaching the Great Falls of the Missouri. There were no sign posts in
that lonesome tract; no one of whom to ask the way. Little did we need
direction. The voice of thunder crying in the desert led us surely.
A half-hour more of clambering over shale-strewn gullies, up sun-baked
watercourses, and we found ourselves toiling up the ragged slope of a
bluff; and soon we stood upon a rocky ledge with the thunders beneath
us. Damp gusts beat upward over the blistering scarp of the cliff. I lay
down, and crawling to the edge, looked over. Two hundred feet below
me--straight down as a pebble drops--a watery Inferno raged, and
far-flung whirlwinds all but exhausted with the dizzy upward reach,
whisked cool, invisible mops of mist across my face.
Flung down a preliminary mile of steep descent, choked in between
soaring walls of rock four hundred yards apart, innumerable crystal tons
rushed down ninety feet in one magnificent plunge. You saw the long bent
crest--shimmering with the changing colors of a peacock's back--smooth
as a lake when all winds sleep; and then the mighty river was snuffed
out in gulfs of angry gray. Capricious river draughts, sucking up the
damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiral
towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond
and pearl and amethyst.
[Illustration: GREAT FALLS FROM CLIFF ABOVE.]
[Illustration: GREAT FALLS FROM THE FRONT.]
I caught myself tightly gripping the ledge and shrinking with a
shuddering instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle
all memory of sound--and left only the silent universe with myself and
this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I
loved it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself
so magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a
mountain, or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean,
or a thunderstorm has to do in this world. And it was doing it right
out in the middle of a desert, bleak, sun-leprosied, forbidding, with
only the stars and the moon and the sun and a cliff-swallow or two to
behold. Thundering out its message into the waste places, careless of
audiences--like a Master! Bully, grizzled old Master-Bard singing--as
most of them do--to empty benches! And it had been doing that ten
thousand thousand years, and would do so for ten thousand thousand more,
and never pause for plaudits. I suspect the soul of old Homer did
that--and is still doing it, somehow, somewhere. After all there isn't
much difference between really tremendous things--Homer or waterfalls or
thunderstorms--is there? It's only a matter of how things happen to be
big.
I was absent-mindedly chasing some big thundering line of Sophocles when
Bill, the little Cornishman, ran in between me and the evasive line:
"Lord! what a waste of power!"
There is some difference in temperaments. Most men, I fancy, would have
enjoyed a talk with a civil engineer upon that ledge. I should have
liked to have Shelley there, myself! It's the difference between poetry
and horse-power, dithyrambics and dynamos, Keats and Kipling! What is
the energy exerted by the Great Falls of the Missouri? How many
horse-power did Shelley fling into the creation of his _West Wind_? How
many foot-pounds did the boy heart of Chatterton beat before it broke?
Something may be left to the imagination!
We backtrailed to a point where the cliff fell away into a rock-strewn
incline, and clambered down a break-neck slope to the edge of the
crystal broil. There was a strange exhilaration about it--a novel sense
of discovering a natural wonder for ourselves. We seemed the first men
who had ever been there: that was the most gripping thing about it.
Aloof, stupendous, terriffic, staggering in the intensity of its wild
beauty, you reach it by a trail. There are no 'busses running and you
can't buy a sandwich or a peanut or a glass of beer within ten miles of
its far-flung thunders. For twentieth century America, that is doing
rather well!
Skirting the slippery rocks at the lip of the mad flood, we swung
ourselves about a ledge, dripping with the cool mist-drift; descended to
the level of the lower basin, where a soaking fog made us shiver; pushed
through a dripping, oozing, autumnal sort of twilight, and came out
again into the beat of the desert sun, to look squarely into the face of
the giant.
A hawk wheeled and swooped and floated far up in the dazzling air.
Somehow that hawk seemed to make the lonely place doubly lonely. Did you
ever notice how a lone coyote on a snow-heaped prairie gives you a
heartache, whereas the empty waste would only have exhilarated you?
Always, it seemed, that veering hawk had hung there, and would hang so
always--outliving the rising of suns and the drifting of stars and the
visits of the moon.
A vague sense of grief came over me at the thought of all this eternal
restlessness, this turbulent fixity; and, after all, it seemed much
greater to be even a very little man, living largely, dying, somehow,
into something big and new; than to be this Promethean sort of thing, a
giant waterfall in a waste.
I have known men who felt dwarfed in the presence of vast and awful
things. I never felt bigger than when I first looked upon the ocean. The
skyward lift of a mountain peak makes me feel very, very tall. And when
a thunderstorm comes down upon the world out of the northwest, with
jagged blades of fire ripping up the black bellies of the clouds, I know
all about the heart of Attila and the Vikings and tigers and Alexander
the Great! So I think I grew a bit out there talking to that water-giant
who does nothing at all--not even a vaudeville stunt--and does it so
masterfully.
By and by they'll build a hotel in the flat at the edge of the lower
basin; plant prim flowers in very prim beds; and rob you on the genteel
European plan. Comfortably sitting in a willow chair on the broad
veranda, one will read the signs on those cliffs--all about the best
shoes to wear, and what particular pill of all the pills that be, should
be taken for that ailing kidney. But it will not be I who shall sit in
that willow chair on that broad, as yet unbuilt, veranda.
The sun was glinting at the rim of the cliffs, and the place of awe and
thunders was slowly filling with shadow. We found a steep trail,
inaccessible for vehicles, leading upward in the direction of Benton. It
was getting that time of day when even a sentimentalist wants a
beefsteak, especially if he has hiked over dusty scorching trails and
scrambled over rocks all day.
Some kind man back in the town, with a fund of that most useless
article, information, had told us of a place called Goodale,
theoretically existing on the Great Northern Railroad between Great
Falls and Benton. We had provided only for luncheon, trusting to fate
and Goodale for supper.
Goodale! A truly beautiful name! No doubt in some miraculous way the
character of the country changed suddenly just before you got there
merely to justify the name. Surely no one would have the temerity to
conjure up so beautiful a name for a desert town. Yet, half unwillingly,
I thought of a little place I once visited--against my will, since the
brakeman put me off there--by the name of Forest City. I remembered with
misgivings how there wasn't a tree within something like four hundred
miles. But I pushed that memory aside as a lying prophet. I believed in
Goodale and beefsteak. Goodale would be a neat, quiet little town, set
snugly in a verdant valley. We would come into it by starlight--down a
careless gypsying sort of country road; and there would be the sound of
a dear little trickling bickering cool stream out in the shadows of the
trees fringing the approach to Goodale. And we'd pass pretty little
cottages with vines growing over the doors, and hollyhocks peeping over
the fences, and cheerful lights in the windows.
Goodale! And then, right in the middle of the town (no, _village_--the
word is cosier somehow)--right in the middle of the village there would
be a big restaurant, with such alluring scents of beefsteak all about
it.
I set the pace up that trail. It was a swinging, loose, cavalry-horse
sort of pace--the kind that rubs the blue off the distance and paints
the back trail gray. Goodale was a sort of Mecca. I thought of it with
something like a religious awe. How far was Goodale, would you suppose?
Not far, certainly, once we found the railroad.
We made the last steep climb breathlessly, and came out on the level. A
great, monotonous, heartachy prairie lay before us--utterly featureless
in the twilight. Far off across the scabby land a thin black line swept
out of the dusk into the dusk--straight as a crow's flight. It was the
railroad. We made a cross-cut for it, tumbling over gopher holes,
plunging through sagebrush, scrambling over gullies that told the
incredible tale of torrents having been there once. I ate quantities of
alkali dust and went on believing in Goodale and beefsteak. Beefsteak
became one of the principal stations on the Great Northern Railroad, so
far as I was concerned personally. That is what you might call the
geography of a healthy stomach.
With the falling of the sun the climate of the country had changed. It
was no longer blistering. You sat down for a moment and a shiver went up
your spine. At noon I thought about all the lime-kilns I had ever met.
Now I could hear the hickory nuts dropping in the crisp silence down in
the old Missouri woods.
We struck the railroad and went faster. Since my first experience with
railroad ties, I have continued to associate them with hunger. I need
only look an ordinary railroad tie in the face to contract a wonderful
appetite. It works on the principle of a memory system. So, as we put
the ties behind us, I increased my order at that restaurant in the sweet
little pedestrian's village of Goodale. "A couple of eggs on the side,
waiter," I said half audibly to the petite woman in the white apron who
served the tables in the restaurant there. She was very real to me. I
could count the rings on her fingers; and when she smiled, I noted that
her teeth were very white--doubtless they got that way from eating
quantities and quantities of thick juicy beefsteak!
The track took a sudden turn ahead. "Around that bend," I said aloud,
"lies Goodale." We went faster. We rounded the bend, only to see the
dusky, heartachy, barren stretch.
"Railroads," explained I to myself, "have a way of going somewhere; it
is one of their peculiarities." No doubt this track had been laid for
the express purpose of guiding hungry folks to the hospitable little
village. We plunged on for an hour. Meanwhile my orders to the trim
little woman in the white apron increased steadily. She smiled broadly
but winsomely, showing those charming beefsteak-polished teeth. They
shone like a beacon ahead of me, for it was now dark.
Suddenly we came upon a signboard. We went up to it, struck a match, and
read breathlessly--"GOODALE."
We looked about us. Goodale was a switch and a box car.
Nothing beside remains,
I quoted,
'round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Alas for the trim little lady with the white teeth and the smile and the
beefsteak!
We said bitter things there in that waste about the man with the
information. We loaded his memory with anathemas. One cannot eat a
signboard, even with so inviting a name upon it. An idea struck me--it
seemed a very brilliant one at the moment. I sat down and delivered
myself of it to my companions, who also had lusted after the flesh-pots.
"We have wronged that man with the information," said I. "He was no
ordinary individual; he was a prophet: he simply got his dates mixed. In
precisely one hundred years from now, there will be a town on this
spot--and a restaurant! Shall we wait?"
They cursed me bitterly. I suspect neither of them is a philosopher.
Thereat I proceeded to eat a thick juicy steak from the T-bone portion
of an unborn steer, served by the trim little lady of a hundred years
hence, there in that potential village of Goodale. And as I smoked my
cigarette, I felt very thankful for all the beautiful things that do not
exist.
And I slept that night in the great front bedroom, the ceiling of which
is of diamond and turquoise.