days which show blue peaks pointing skyward in the infinite distance.
Now and then a northeaster comes sweeping grandly down from Labrador,
swathing the peaks in mist wraiths torn from the weltering waves of
Baffin's Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Then he who knows the storm
only from the sea level finds in it a new mystery and delight. On the
heights you stand shoulder to shoulder with the clouds themselves,
seeing the gray genie stalk from summit to summit or anon swoop down
and bear a mountain away to cloud castles that build themselves in a
moment and vanish again in a breath. At the sea level the storm rumbles
on high above your head, tossing down upon you what it will; here you
are among the mysteries of its motion, sometimes almost above their
level, and through rifts in the clouds you may get glimpses of their
sun-gilded upper portions and see the storm as the sky does for a
moment from above. Again the clouds coast to the valleys and wrap even
them in the matrix of mist out of which rain is made.
[Illustration: Sunset light on the Southern Peaks, seen from the summit
of Mount Washington]
Most beautiful is such a storm in the hours of its passing, when the
main cohorts have swept by, when the rear guard and camp follower
clouds pass at wider and wider intervals and more and more sun comes
to paint their folds with rose and flash the meadows and dripping
woods with scattered gems set in most vivid green. Far off the high
hills loom mightier and more mysterious than ever, for their shoulders
still pass into the storm and the imagination gives them unrevealed
majesties of height, built upon the blue-black cloud plateaus that hide
them. No wonder the great gods dwelt on Mount Olympus. So they do on
cloud-capped Mount Washington, on Carrigain, Lafayette and Carter Dome.
In time of storm lesser divinities may well come down to the valleys,
and when the passing clouds are mingled with the coming sunshine is the
time to look for trolls in the woodland paths, pixies by the stream,
and to find, in the very blossoming shrubs and graceful trees of the
level river meadows a personality that is as nearly human as that which
the Greeks gave their gods. Who can know the elms of the Conway and
Intervale meadows without loving them for their femininity? Each one
"walks a goddess and she looks a queen." Yet each one flutters feminine
fripperies with a dainty grace such as never yet stepped from motor
car at the most fashionable hostelry between Bretton Woods and Poland
Spring. The summer visitors who wear hobble skirts on the piazzas and
along the lawns of the most luxurious mountain hotels need not think
they are the first to flaunt this curious inflorescence of fashion
before the stony stare of the peaks. The river-bottom elms have worn
their peek-a-boo garments of green that way ever since they began to
grow up in the meadows. Nor can the newcomers vie in grace, however
clever their artifice, with these slim mountain maids, than whom
no dryads of any grove have ever combined caprice and dignity into
more bewitching beauty. The meadow elms are the queens of all summer
exhibitions of the perfect art of wearing clothes.
* * * * *
The elms of the deep wood are far more simply dressed, losing not
one whit of dignity by it, as he who intrudes upon them in their
cool, shadowy bowers may know. But these elms of the sandy intervales
where the sun would otherwise touch them with the full warmth of his
admiration are dressed for the world, all in fluffy ruffles of green
that flow yet sheathe, that clothe in all dignity yet are of such
exquisite cut and proper fashion that the highest art of Fifth Avenue
has nothing to match them. To look beyond these to the hillsides is
to see the firs and spruces as prim Puritans of an elder day wearing
the high, pointed caps of witch-women and conical skirts that follow
the flaring lines of a time long gone; and the maples and beeches are
roundly, frankly, bourgeois, grafting the balloon sleeves of a quarter
of a century ago upon the bulge of hoop-skirts such as some of our
great-grandmothers wore in conscious pride. But the meadow elms!
Sylph-like and teasingly sweet, fluffy, fashionable and fascinating,
yet robed throughout in a gentle dignity such as might well be the aura
of purity and nobility, no tree in all the mountain world can quite
match them.
In these valleys among the high hills the man from the lowland regions
is apt to miss and long for the sheen of placid waters. All descents
are so abrupt that streams rush impetuously always downward toward
the sea, carrying with them whatever may obstruct, whether flotsam of
blown leaves or the very granite ledges themselves if they impede the
advance too long. They burst ledges, smash boulders to pebbles and
grind pebbles to sand and then to silt and spread it over the meadows
where the elms grow or hurry it on to make deltas and vex ships on
the very sea itself. If they may not smash the ledges or the boulders
they slowly dissolve them or more rapidly wear them away by constant
scouring with the passing sand of their freshets, and always in the
ravines they have dug sounds the uproar of their perpetual attrition
and unrest. Far away this comes intermittently in a soothing sibilation
which seems to be saying to itself "Hush, hush." It is as if one heard
the voices of little mother levels of still pools trying to quiet the
fretful child-foam of the cascades.
But sitting on the rock itself by the stream as it dashes down one
gets, through this, a deep vibration which has almost too few beats to
the second to be a tone, that is as much a jar as a sound, the deep
diapason of the quivering granite itself. A beaten ledge responds like
a mighty gong with a humming roar that is strangely disproportionate
to the means employed to produce the sound. Sometimes to stamp with
the foot over a rounded surface of earth-covered granite is to produce
an answering, drumlike boom that makes one suspect that he stands on a
thin film of rock over a cavern. The music of a fall has many parts.
One of these is the sand-dance sibilation of the shuffling waters,
another this boom of the rock drum on which the green flood beats with
padded blows.
* * * * *
As the heart of the listener is tuned so it answers to the mingled
voices of the waters. One may hear in them the well-harmonized parts of
a runic lullaby and be soothed to peace and belief in all things good
by the music. To many another their perpetual turmoil and unrest find
too loud an echo from the depths within him, and he longs for still
lakes that look friendlily up to him with the blue of the sky in their
clear eyes, fringed with the dark-pencilled lashes of firs beneath the
brow of the hill. The valleys of the high white hills have so few of
these that one may count them on the fingers of a hand. "Echo Lake" or
"Mirror Lake" we find them named, and all summer long they have their
throng of admirers, who in the lowland regions would pass such tiny
tarns with little thought of their beauty. They may be so set that they
mirror no mountain peak. Their echo may be no more silvery in tone or
more frequently repeated than one would get if he blew a bugle in some
dusty, forgotten city square where red brick blocks would toss the
call from one to another, yet the little lakes have a charm of placid
personality that the cataracts cannot give.
Some day, without doubt, man will fill the blind ravines of the upper
mountain region with a thousand eyes of these, binding the waters
for use and thereby adding to their beauty. Every narrow ravine has
its stream, dashing uproariously downward. It needs but a barrier of
boulders set in cement to make at once a little lake and a cascade. The
water, set for a moment to turn a turbine, will again dash on with its
full gift of flashing foam and musical uproar for all who watch and
listen, but its momentary restraint will have helped the men of the
mountains with power and have helped the hills themselves to greater
permanency and added beauty. Man must do this if he would keep the
beauty of the hills whence cometh his strength, or indeed if he would
keep the hills themselves. The black spruce growth that once clothed
them from base to summit, holding the winter's snow and ice beneath
their sheltering boughs to melt slowly almost all summer long, making
deep, cool shadows for the growth of water-holding, spongy mosses,
he has ruthlessly cut away. For many years, winter after winter,
out of the Glen Ellis River Valley, right up under the slope of the
Presidential Range, went half a hundred million feet of this growth,
and in all the other valleys where spruce remained it was the same.
The sudden freshets are more sudden, the disintegrating droughts more
severe now because of this, and by these the very mountains themselves
are torn down.
Such a little lake, built not to turn a wheel but to please the eye
of the lovers of mountain beauty, has lately been made just north of
Jackson. There it sits in a little bowl of a hollow among spruce-clad
hills and its waters purl gently over a cement dam, to splash for
the square-tailed trout under the shadows farther down the ravine.
Creatures that already knew the little stream and the marshy hollow
where the lake had welled have taken kindly to its presence, but the
wider ranging woodland folk are still surprised at finding it there
and shy about trusting themselves on it or its borders. It is too
young to be adopted by the water birds that have known the region long.
The sand-pipers that move leisurely north up Ellis River, feeding and
teetering as they go, do not light in on the borders of the new-born
lake, and though the loons have no doubt seen it as they fly over,
they, too, go by. I have never yet seen a loon plunge over the ridge
to ripple its waters with his splash or set the goblin echoes of the
forest laughing with his eerie cry. A mountain lake without one loon is
lonely. In the tiny "mirror lake," which is a mountain tarn that has
been an eye to the woodland for countless centuries over beyond the
southeast slope of Kearsarge, a loon family dwells, and I watch them
from the summit, diving, feeding and making great sport in their world.
Over on Chocorua there are two such, and I fancy they are equally
numerous on all still waters of the high mountain world, but they have
not yet trusted this new-born mountain lake, nor have the spotted
sand-pipers come to nest among the ferns on its margin.
But the little lake mirrors many a bird wing nevertheless, mainly
those of the eave swallows that nest in a long row under the eaves of
a Jackson barn. These know that man loves them, and the things that he
has made, whether barn roofs or little lakes, are to be adopted and
used without fear. So they swoop over the fir tops and skim the surface
of the unruffled waters, dipping to touch their own reflections and
twittering mightily about it as they sweep the dust of tiny insects out
of the shimmering air. Nor does the lake mirror lack for the reflection
of many even more beautiful wings. When the sun breaks through the
passing storm a thousand gauzy, white-bodied dragon-flies magically
appear. They cluster on sunny margins and dash into the air and clash
wings in infinitesimal rustlings. Their fellows of a score of varieties
of coloration and shape are here too, spirits of the air but children
of its love for the waters and born of the lake itself. While the storm
passes I watch their miracles of recreation. When the sun lights up the
shallow margins they come swimming beneath the surface, strange little
slender submarines with filmy propellers behind and round conning
towers in front. They come to a projecting twig and climb up on this
with hitherto unsuspected legs till they are many inches above the
surface, where the sun and wind will dry them.
How do they know the appointed time? Whence comes this impulse to leave
the water which has been their home since the first faint beginnings of
individuality were theirs? There is no answer to these questions in any
depth to which scientific investigation has yet probed. Yet the impulse
is there and they do know the appointed time. Moreover they know if
they have obeyed the promptings of the impulse too soon. Now and then
one climbs out and rests for a moment, then in a sudden panic lets go
his hold on the twig and drops into the water again, scuttling back to
the depths in haste. For him the hour has not yet struck. But most of
them come out to stay. They cling motionless with the sun drying their
backs and filling them with such new life and vigor that they burst.
The submarine is itself a shell, and as it bursts out of it comes the
life that animated it, in a new form, to dry and stretch its wings and
presently dart into the air on them, henceforth a creature of the sun.
Behind each remains its water-world husk, still clinging to the twig
to which it crawled. Sometimes I put a finger into the water in front
of the swimming insect, and it as readily crawls out on that as on a
twig, but neither of us has yet had patience to wait thus till the
transformation is complete.
The larger dragon-flies, with their clashing wings and darting flight,
which is so swift sometimes that the eye fails to record it clearly,
seeing the insect at the beginning and again at the end but unable to
receive an impression of the passage, seem well named. Here are small
creatures, indeed, but veritable dragons nevertheless that may well
carry apprehension to the human watcher as well as to the tiny midges,
which they capture in this darting flight and summarily devour. It may
be that they will not sew up the mouth of the boy that swears in their
presence, but no boy is to be blamed if he believes that they can.
Their gorgon-like build and their uncanny swiftness of motion might
well prompt the superstitious to believe that they could be a terror
to evil-doers. But no one could think the gentle demoiselles capable
of wrong, though they are dragon-flies too and are born of the same
waters and eat tiny insects in the same way. Appearances count for much
with all of us, and the demoiselles flit so softly and fold their wings
on alighting in such prayerful demureness of attitude that they seem
instead the good folk of the fairy world that margins the little lake,
created to bring rewards to the good rather than to punish evil.
Thus by the man-made mountain tarn one may find the dragons and the
pixies that man has made too, out of the débris of dreams that the
race has accumulated since it too grew up out of placid waters which
in ages past seem to have sheltered all elementary forms of life as it
shelters the dragon-fly nymphs before they have grown up to use their
wings. While the storm wraps the world in the illusions of romance the
half-gods of Greek myth stalk the mist-entangled meadows and shout in
the winding valleys, across the mountain streams. As the storm breaks,
the clouds pass, and the sun floods the thin air with his gold, these
mayhap, like the pixie dreams, will vanish. The half-gods go, but the
gods arrive. The eye lifts with the clouds to wider and wider spaces
and greater and greater heights, up stepping-stones of glistening
cliffs, along rugged ranges to where the peaks sit enthroned in
splendor, the great gods themselves. Vulcan looms vaguely by his black
anvil, the distant storm swathing him in the smoke of his forge fire.
The chariot of Apollo rides beyond, his arrows flashing far and fast.
Cytherea passes with the clouds and flames them with her opalescent
presence, and high over all, mighty and storm-compelling, sits Zeus
himself, enthroned in white majesty on the carved nimbus of the passing
rain.
[Illustration: Clouds on Mount Washington, from the Glen Road,
Jackson]
VI
CARTER NOTCH
_Its Mingling of Smiling Beauty and Weird Desolation_
Sometimes, even in midsummer, there comes a day when winter swoops
down from boreal space and puts his crown of snow-threatening clouds
on Mount Washington. They bind his summit in sullen gray wreaths, and
though the weather may be that of July in the valleys to the south,
one forgets the strong heat of the sun in looking upward to the sullen
chill of this murky threat out of the frozen northern sky. Thus for a
day or two, it may be, the summit is withdrawn into cloudy silence,
which may lift for a moment and let a smile of sunlight glorify the
gray crags, and flash swiftly beneath the portent, then it shuts down
in grim obsession once more.
At other times winds come, born of the brooding mass of mists, and
sweep its chill down to the very grasses of the valley far below, but
this shows the end of the portent to be near. The morning of the next
day breaks with a bright sun, and you go out into a crisp air that
sends renewed vitality flashing with tingling delight through every
vein down to the very toe tips. The clouds that blotted out the summits
with their threat of winter are gone, and the mountains leap at you,
as you look at them, out of a clarity of atmosphere that one learns to
expect where the hills rise from the verge of the far Western plains
but which is rare in New England.
[Illustration: Carter Notch seen over Doublehead from Kearsarge
summit]
The mystical haze that has for weeks softened all outlines and
magnified all distances till objects within them took on a vague
unreality, is gone, and we see all things enlarged and clarified as if
we looked at them from the heart of a crystal. And as with outlines, so
with colors. No newly converted impressionist, however enthusiastic in
his conversion, could paint the grass quite such a green as it shows
to the eye, or get the gold in its myriad buttercup blooms so flashing
a yellow as it now has. All through the soft days these have been a
woven cloth of gold. Now the cloth is unmeshed, the very warp has
parted, the woof separated and the particles stand revealed, a thousand
million scattered nuggets instead, each individual and glowing, a sun
of gold set in the green heaven of the meadow. The wild strawberries
that nestled by thousands in the grasses so shielded that one must hunt
carefully to see them, seeming but blurred shadows complementing the
green, now flash their red to the eye of the searcher rods away. Here
for a day is the atmosphere of Arizona, which there reveals deserts,
drifting in from the north over the lush growth and multiple rich
colors of a New England hillside country.
It is a scintillant country on such a day. The twinkling leaves of
birch and poplar flash like the mica in the rocks far up the hillsides,
the surface of each dancing river vies with these, and through the
crystal waters you look down upon the bottom where silvery scales of
mica catch the light and send it back to the eye. It is no wonder the
early explorers from Massachusetts Bay colonies came back from the
white hills with stories of untold wealth of diamonds and carbuncles to
be found here. You may find these jewels on such a day at every turn,
though they are fairy gems only and must not be covetously snatched,
lest they turn to dross in the hand.
The meadows above Jackson Falls flash with this beauty from one
hillside across to another, and through them winds the Wildcat River,
luring the casual passer to wade knee deep in the grass and clover from
curve to curve, always fascinating with new enticement till it is not
possible to turn back. Nor are the fairy gems which the long, winding
valley has to show confined to the sands of the river bottom or the
boulders scattered along its way. At times the air over the clover
blooms is full of them, quivering in the sun, borne on the under wings
of the spangled fritillary butterflies that swarm here in early July.
Above, the fritillaries have the orange tint of burnt gold, plentifully
sprinkled with dots of black tourmaline, but beneath they have caught
the silver scintillation of the mica-flecked rocks and sands on which
they love to light when sated with the clover honey. These too are gems
of the mountain world which, if not found elsewhere, one might well
come many miles to seek. It is easy to believe, too, that the spangled
fritillaries know the source of the silver beauty of their under wings
and cunningly seek further nourishment for it. You find them hovering
in golden cloud-swarms over bare spots of scintillant sand along the
reaches of the river or in the paths of the roadside which rambles
down from the hills with it, anon lighting upon this bare and shining
earth to probe with long probosces and draw from the mica-flecked sand
perhaps the very essence of its silvery glitter, for the renewing of
their wing spots. The white admirals are with them, not in such swarms
to be sure, but in considerable numbers, eager also for the same
unknown booty. It may be that they too thus renew the silver of their
white epaulets.
I found all these and a thousand other beauties on my trip up the
Wildcat to its source in Carter Notch, through this region of mica-made
fairy gems. They lured me from curve to curve and from one rapid to
the next beyond, always climbing by easy gradients toward the great V
in the Carter-Moriah range, whose mysteries, to me unknown, were after
all the chief lure. The crystal-clear air out of the north, which
had swept the gloom from the high brow of Mount Washington, made the
mountains seem very near and sent prickles of desire for them through
all the blood. On such a day it is a boon to be allowed to climb, nor
can one satiate his desire for the achievement of heights except by
seeking them from dawn till dusk. Little adventures met me momentarily
on the way. Here in a mountain farmer's field was a great mass of ruddy
gold, showing its orange crimson for rods around a little knoll. Yet
this was but fairy gold as the gems of the Wildcat meadows are fairy
gems, a colony of composite weeds which no doubt the farmer hates, but
which produce more wealth for him than he could win from all the rest
of his farm for a decade--if he could but gather it. The fritillary
butterflies know its value and flock to it, losing their own burnished
coloration in it, and the wild bees are drawn far from the woodland
to it by its soft perfume. To come suddenly on this was as good as
discovering a new peak.
[Illustration: "Always climbing by easy gradients toward the great V in
the Carter-Moriah Range"]
To hear a tiny shriek in the wayside bushes and on search to rescue
a half-grown field sparrow from the very jaws of a garter snake,
sending the snake to gehenna with a stamp of a big foot and seeing the
fledgling snuggle down again into the nest with the others, was as
pleasant as finding the way to a new cascade. But after all, the great
lure of such a crystalline day is toward the high peaks. The Wildcat
River has its very beginning in the height of Carter Notch, and its
prattle over every shallow teased me to follow its trail back to this
high source and see what the spot might be. To do this step by step
with the falling water would be a herculean task, for the gorges down
which it runs are choked with boulders and forest débris and tangled
with thickets as close-set and difficult of passage as any tropical
jungle. But there is no need to seek its source by that route. You may
go within four miles of it by motor, if you will, up the good road
from Jackson that finally dwindles and vanishes on the slope up toward
Wildcat Mountain, but not before it has taken you through a gate and
showed you the entrance to the A. M. C. trail to the top of the Notch.
All the way up to this point the outlook to the south has been growing
more extensive and more beautiful. Black Mountain still lifts its broad
ridge from pinnacle to pinnacle on the east side of the Wildcat, but
Eagle Mountain, Thorn, Tin, and the little height between these last
two have been dropping down the sky line till Kearsarge, Bartlett,
Moat, and even the distant Sandwich and Ossipee ranges far to the
south, loom blue and beautiful above them, while the valley of the
Wildcat unrolls its slopes, checkered with farm and woodland, to where
the river vanishes from sight around the turn at Jackson Falls. Fifty
miles of sylvan beauty lie before you as you look down the narrow
valley, over the green heights that rim it to the blue ones far beyond,
and up again to the amethystine sky.