one may see the somewhat astonishing spectacle during a heavy downpour
of rain of a great rock pinnacle absorbing the water as fast as it
falls. One would expect miniature cataracts and a rush of a thousand
streams down such a summit at such a time. Yet the downpour gets
hardly beyond the spatter of the drops. The loose rocks absorb and
hide it. Hence after every rainfall welling springs on the summits,
and farther down the gurgle of waters running in unseen crevices one
never knows how far below the surface. Hence, also, lakes of the
clouds. After every rain there are well-filled springs on the very
top of Washington, and it is only after many days of dry weather that
these begin to dwindle. There are chunks of ledge up there so hollowed
out toward the sky that they hold the rain by the first intention, so
to speak, and every cloud that touches them oozes from its fold more
water for their sustenance. Often for weeks these pools reflect the
stars by night and evaporate under the shine of the sun by day. In one
of them in late June of this year I found a pair of water striders
skipping merrily about on the calm surface. Two weeks of drought
dried the pool up completely, and I thought these daring adventurers
on the ultimate heights dead, and indeed wondered much how they came
there at all. But later a good rain filled the pool again and my two
water striders appeared on its surface once more, merry as grigs. I am
divided in my mind as to what they did meanwhile. Perhaps they simply
survived the drought by main strength; perhaps they followed the dew
down into cracks between the rocks and there abided in at least some
moisture till the rain came. But I am more of the opinion that they
simply skipped down the caverns toward the interior and there found an
underground pool for a refuge until they could return to the sunlight.
I can think of no other excuse for water striders on the summit of
Mount Washington.
This pool, of course, like a half score others that one can find on
the very top of the summit cone after rain, was a mere puddle. But the
Lakes of the Clouds are substantial bodies of water the summer through,
and in the winter substantial bodies of ice, for they freeze to the
bottom as soon as winter sets in. Water striders they have and larvæ
of caddis flies and water beetles of many varieties, but never a fish
swims in them, and I doubt if any other form of aquatic animal life
ever wanders to their shores. Clear as crystal, shallow, ever renewed,
they are but mirrors in which by day the peaks can see if their clouds
are on straight and through which by night fond stars may look into
the eyes of other stars near by without being noticed by envious third
parties. Their source is the clouds, yet their waters are if possible
clearer and even more sparkling than new fallen rain. Even the air
above the highest peaks has its dust and soot which the rain washes
out of it as it comes down. In the spring the snow at the head of the
Tuckerman Ravine was dazzling in its pure whiteness. Now the dwindling
arch is flecked with black; dust blown from the peaks above, soot
washed to its surface from the sky by the rain, and without doubt also
the cinders of burned-out stars that perpetually sift down to earth out
of the void of space.
* * * * *
All this the rain brings out of the sky when it comes in deluge from
the clouds to the peaks, but nothing of it does it take into the Lakes
of the Clouds. The crushed rock through which it must filter on its
way down the ledges takes out all impurities, and the mosses of the
lower slopes aid the process. But they do more than that. By mysterious
methods of their own the mountains aerate this rain water in its
passage till it finally reaches the lakes, as it reaches all mountain
springs, filled with a prismatic brilliancy that is all its own.
Whether we assume these lakes to be eyeglasses of the slumbering giant
which is the Range, or mirrors for the peaks and the stars, they are
crystalline lenses of no ordinary brilliancy and power of refraction.
High as these tiny mirrors of the sky are, by actual measurement
5053 feet above the sea level, the highest lakes east of the Rocky
Mountains, the tree line creeps up to them, and firs, dwarfed but
beautiful in their courage, set spires along portions of their borders,
dark, straight lashes for clear blue eyes. In other spots along their
margin the ground is bluish early in the season with the leaves of the
dwarf bilberry, pink-sprayed with their tiny, cylindrical petals of
deciduous bloom, and, now that August is here, blue in very truth with
the berries themselves. These are not large, but they are firm-fleshed
and sweet as any lowland blueberry, and whether the flavor they have is
inherent in themselves or draws its subtlety from the surroundings I am
never sure, but as I sit among them and eat I know that it is worth the
climb to their Alpine altitudes.
[Illustration: "Dwarfed firs, beautiful in their courage, set spires
along portions of their borders, dark, straight lashes for clear blue
eyes"]
In the first part of the Alpine springtime, which comes to the Lakes of
the Clouds with the early days of July, the country round about them
was a veritable flower garden. The water in the lakes was ice water
then, though the ice had disappeared from their surfaces and lingered
only in the shadow of the low cliff which forms the southern boundary
of one. Often the nights brought frost, and sometimes with the rain
sleet sifted down as well. But little the dwellers in these Alpine
heights care for these things. If the sun but shines it warms the
tundra to their root tips and they push their blossoms forth to meet
it with all speed. The geum flecked everything with yellow gold. In
the crevices of the cliffs it clung where there was little but coarse
gravel for its roots, and its radiate-veined, kidney-shaped root leaves
flapped in the gales and were tattered in spite of their toughness. In
such soil as the rocks gave the sandwort put forth tiny innumerable
cups of white. Down in the tundra-clad slopes the geum throve as well,
but there the white of the sandwort was replaced by that of countless
stars of Houstonia. White and gold was everywhere in this flower-garden
of the clouds, subtended here and there by the lavender delicacy of
the Alpine violet, Viola palustris. Everywhere, too, was the honest,
plebeian white and green of the dwarf cornel, and the æsthetic,
green-yellow blooms of the Clintonia. It is strange that of two flowers
that touch leaf elbows all through the woods of this northern country,
high and low, one should be so hopelessly bourgeois as the Cornus
canadensis and the other so undeniably aristocratic from root to anther
as Clintonia borealis.
* * * * *
To tramp the slopes and hollows of this garden about the two lovely
lakes is to alternate the rasping surface of pitted and weather-worn
cliffs and scattered boulders of mica-schist with plunges half-knee
deep in a soft and close-knit tundra moss. Here are mosses and lichens
in close communion that ordinarily grow far apart. The sphagnums are to
be expected, and they are plentiful, but with them grows the hairy-cap
moss, sturdier and with larger caps than I often find it elsewhere.
With these also grows the gray-green cladonia, the reindeer lichen,
all massed in together in a springy sponge that holds water and plant
roots and continually builds peaty earth. Because of this building of
earth by the tundra mosses there are fewer Lakes of the Clouds than
there were once. In half a dozen levels above and below the present
lakes this constructive vegetation has built up a bog where once was
open water, and makes tiny meadows for the quick-blooming plants of the
mountain season.
Meadows of this sort climb from the Lakes of the Clouds up the ridge
toward Boott's Spur, connected by underground rills and having little
springs scattered through them where even in dry weather the thirsty
may find good water. Up the side of the peak of Monroe they go as
well, and it is not difficult to trace the moisture they hold by a
glance from a distance, so green and pleasant does it make their
flower-spangled surfaces. In the lowlands meadows are level or they are
not meadows. On the mountains they sometimes run up at a pretty sharp
angle and are meadows still.
In August the spring color scheme of white and gold stippled on the
tundra moss by the geums, the sandwort and the Houstonia becomes blue
and gold, built out of harebell blooms and those of the dwarf Alpine
goldenrod, Solidago cutleri. There is much more of the gold than in the
springtime and the blue of the harebells by no means is so prevalent as
the white of Houstonia and of Arenaria. But clumps of Spirea latifolia
put out their pale pink flowers in many nooks among the rocks and even
insert patches of color among the dark firs that under the high banks
of the lakes dare stand erect, though they are at the top of the tree
line.
Most picturesque of all plants about the Lakes of the Clouds, in
midsummer as in early spring, is the Indian poke, Veratrum viride. Next
to the firs and spruces it spires highest, but unlike them it is of no
obviously tough and hardy fibre. On the contrary, here is an endogenous
plant, one of the lily family, that ought from its appearance to grow
in a Florida swamp rather than on the great ridges of the Presidential
Range, five thousand feet and more above sea level. Here is a place
for low-growing Alpine plants like the sandwort, the Alpine azalea,
the Lapland rose-bay, and the little moss-like Diapensis lapponica;
and they grow here. But in the boggiest part of the tundra grows also
this rank succulent herb, the Indian poke, spiring boldly with its
light green stem, bearing three feet in air its big pyramidal panicle
of yellowish green blossoms in early July, seed pods in middle August,
but yellowish green and pyramidal still. Beneath the pyramid on the
single stem stand the close-set, broadly oval, plaited and strongly
veined leaves, and there the whole will stand till the freezing cold of
October cuts down its succulent strength. The more I see of the Indian
poke on Alpine heights the more I admire it. It does not quite reach
the tip of the summit cone of Washington, but it climbs as near it as
many a seemingly tougher fibred plant and would, I believe, reach as
high as the sandwort could it have roothold in the necessary moisture.
* * * * *
Much has been written about the beauty of the Alpine Garden between the
base of the summit cone of Washington and the head wall of Huntington
Ravine. All that has been said of this and more is true of the rough
rocks, the slopes, and the meadows about the two little Lakes of the
Clouds. Traces of animal life indeed are rare on their borders. The
most that I have seen was a deer that came at dawn over the ridge from
Oakes Gulf, nibbled grass and moss in the meadows, drank from the
larger lake, and bounded off again, leaving the tundra moss punctured
by slender hoof marks. Birds are as numerous here as about those other
wooded lakes of the clouds that lie below in the ravines, Hermit Lake
in Tuckerman's and Spaulding at the head of the Great Gulf. I suspect
the Myrtle and Magnolia warblers of building their nests in the
dwarf firs not far from the shores, though I am unable to prove it.
White-throated sparrows sing among the evergreens, though in August, in
these altitudes, the white throats rarely give their full song. Often
it is but a note or two and pauses there as if the bird were in doubt
about the propriety of singing at this season. But the birds of the
place beyond all others are the juncos. They sit on the bare ledges and
sing, morning, noon and night, their gentle, melodious trill. It makes
the place home to the listener at once as it is to the singers whose
nests are tucked away in holes under many an overhanging stone along
the ledges.
[Illustration: Spaulding Lake at the head of the Great Gulf, Mounts
Adams and Madison in the distance]
"The wind that beats the mountain blows more gently round the open
wold" in which lie the two little Lakes of the Clouds. Into their tiny
hollows the August sunshine wells and seems to tip with gold the plumes
of the spinulose wood ferns which grow in the tundra moss and snuggle
up against the mica-schist ledges that make miniature cliffs along the
shores. Around the base of the mountain these ferns are everywhere,
taking the place in higher altitudes of the Osmunda claytonia, which
is the prevalent variety of lower lands. The progress of claytonia is
interrupted not far from the entrances to the Gulf and to Tuckerman
Ravine. Thence the Aspidium spinulosum goes on and is plentiful in many
places up to and on the Alpine Garden. It makes the neighborhood of
the Lakes of the Clouds beautiful with its feathery fronds and sends
out to the lingerer in this beauty spot its ancient woodsy fragrance
of the world before the coal age. Among all the beauties of the place
it is hard to tell what is dearest, but I think, after all, the
decision should be with the feathery, fragrant Aspidium spinulosum, the
spinulose wood fern.
But for all their beauty by day and their cosy friendliness, the Lakes
of the Clouds are at their best after nightfall. As the sunshine
welled in them, so at dusk the purple shadows grow dense there and the
shallows disappear. A boy can throw a stone across these lakes. He can
wade them, but as the darkness falls upon them and the juncos pipe the
last notes of their evensongs the little lakes widen and grow vastly
deep. The farther shores slip away and become ports of dreams, and he
who stands on the margin looks down no longer at bare rocks through
transparent shallows, but into a universe of fathomless depth where
star smiles back at star through infinite distances of blue. Who shall
say it is not for this that the little lakes lie through the brief
summer, clear mirrors under the shadow of the peak of Monroe?
XIII
CRAWFORD NOTCH
_The Mighty Chasm in the Mountains and Its Perennial Charms_
In the nick of the Notch--Crawford Notch--the narrow highway so
crowds the Saco River that, tiny as it is, it has to burrow to get
through, thereby meeting many adventures in a half mile. If Mount
Willard had flowed over to the north just a few rods farther, when it
was fluid, there would have been no Notch, but only a gulf like that
between Washington and the northern peaks, or like Oakes Gulf, barred
completely by the vast head wall of metamorphic rock. It came so near
that originally there was room only for the Saco to pass down, a
slender stream, new-born at the shallow lake on the plain just above.
Then the famous old "Tenth Turnpike" of New Hampshire came along and
by smashing away the rock and crowding the Saco men made a way through
for it. As for the railroad, its case was hopeless. It had to burrow
a nick of its own through the base of Mount Willard, and out of the
débris of this blasting the road makers built a series of fantastic
rock piles, monuments to the heathen deities of Helter-Skelter, which
serve to make the gateway in which these three jostle one another,
road, railroad and river, more weird even than it was before.
But the gateway is as beautiful as it is fantastic. The road south to
it comes along a smiling plain and the mountains draw in to meet it,
indeed as if to bar it. On the left Mount Clinton sends down two long
ridges between which flows Gibb's Brook. On the right Mount Willard
shoulders its rough rock bulk boldly into the way, and down these the
spruces stride like tall plumed Indians come to bar the passage of the
white man. But the road winds on and just as it seems as if it must
stop it finds a way and, fairly burrowing as does the river, flows
down the Notch. With the rocks alone the gateway would be a forbidding
tangle of débris. Clothed in the hardwood growth, it would be but a
greenwood gap. But these pointed spruces and the firs that mingle with
them bring to it an architectural dignity of pillars and spires, a
jutting of Gothic pinnacles, a suggestion of Ionic columns, that makes
it the gateway of a vast woodland cathedral, a place through which one
passes to worship and be filled with awe and veneration of the mighty
forces that shaped it.
[Illustration: "Profile of Webster," looking toward Crawford Notch from
the old Crawford farm-house site]
* * * * *
It is a cathedral that has its gargoyles, too; everywhere through
the spiring spruces and the softening outlines of deciduous trees
protrude the rocks in fantastic shapes that show strange creatures to
the imaginative onlooker. Just at the gateway, lumbering out from the
mountain, comes an elephant, head and trunk, little eye and flapping
ears plainly visible, poised in granite, but ready at any moment to
take the one step onward that will reveal the whole gigantic animal
standing in the roadway. Beyond, the whole left side of the Notch shows
a gigantic face, the mountain's brow itself a noble dome of thought,
the nose huge and Roman, and the whole weird and misshapen, but not
without a strange dignity of its own. And so it is with the whole
formation of the Notch. Its once molten rocks cooled or have been
water-worn into strange forms that greet the eye of the imagination at
every turn. It is well that the narrow turnpike flows so swiftly down
into the depths of the wood and hides the traveller from the sight of
too many portents. To get down the nick of the Notch just a little way
by road is to be shaded by the overhanging deciduous growth and to be
able to forget, as does the Saco, the crowding together of those weird
forms carved by the ages from enduring granite.
The railroad hangs to its grade on the mountain side, but the road
descends rapidly, though not so rapidly as the river that, here a
little released from its pressure between the two, comes to sight again
and slips in purling shallows or babbles down miniature cascades, the
thinnest of slender streams, to the depths of a shaded cleft in the
cliffs known as "The Dismal Pool." Dismal this may be to look at from
the height of the train as it winds along the steep face of the Mount
Willard cliff. But it is not dismal when one gets down to it, in the
very bottom of the nick of the Notch. In places rough gray cliffs,
in others black spruces, climb one another's shoulders from this
little level of grass and placid water where flows the Saco. A pair of
spotted sand-pipers make this their home and they did not resent my
coming to join them. Instead they bobbed a greeting and then went on
industriously picking up dinner, wading leg deep in the shallows and
often putting their heads as well as their long bills under water in
search of food. Spotted sand-pipers nest in the summer from Florida to
Labrador, but I fancy no pair has a finer home than this little pool in
the very bottom of the vast cleft in the mountains which is Crawford
Notch. Its shores were netted with the tracks of their nimble feet.
No other bird track was there, but the sand-pipers by no means
monopolize the borders of this shallow water. Here were the marks
of hedgehog claws, and there was a track which led me to pause in
astonishment. What plantigrade had set foot of such size on the soft
sand of the shore? I looked over my shoulder after the first glimpse,
half expecting to see an old bear, for here was what looked very like
the track of a young one. A second look told me better. This footmark,
not unlike that of a human baby, save for the claws, was no doubt that
of a raccoon, but certainly the biggest raccoon track I have seen yet.
It was perfectly fresh, and I dare say the owner, interrupted in his
frog hunt by the sound of my scrambling approach beneath the black
growth, had but then shambled to some den in the nearby cliffs and was
impatiently awaiting my departure.
The flower of the place was the little, herbaceous St.-John's-wort,
Hypericum ellipticum, in whose linear petals such sunlight as reached
the bottom of the cleft seemed tangled. It grew everywhere on the
narrow margin between the black shade of the spruces and the clear,
shallow water, and its petals shone out of a soft mist of tiny
white aster blooms in many places. Farther up stream, and indeed
in most woodland shadow throughout the Notch, grows the Eupatorium
urticæfolium, which, though its common name is "white snake root," is
nevertheless the daintiest of the thoroughworts. Its flowers are a
finer, whiter fluff of mist than are those of the aster, so plentiful
on the shore of the not dismal pool and which I take to be aster
ericoides. In late August they seem to me quite the most beautiful
flowers of the Notch woodlands. In this I do not except the blue
harebells which grow so plentifully on the sandy flats down by the
Willey House site. Above the tree line the harebells are beautiful.
Here they are straggling and pale and are not to be compared with their
hardier, sturdier sisters.
* * * * *
As railroad, highway and river draw together and touch elbows in
passing through the gateway of the Notch, so do all other tides of
travel. Here in spring should be the finest place in the world to see
all migrant birds on their way farther north. The valley of the Saco
catches them as in the flare of a wide tunnel and gradually draws them
together here. At certain corners in London all the world is said,
sooner or later, to pass. So at the gateway of the Notch one should see
in May and June all north-bound varieties of birds. Even at this time
of year the wandering tribes concentrate at this spot and bird life
seems far more plentiful than at any other equal area in the mountains.
On the bare heights of the Presidential Range, which I had been
travelling for long, the juncos are one's only bird companions. Here in
deep forest glades variety after variety passed singing or twittering
by. Here were robins, song sparrows, chipping sparrows, white-throated
sparrows, chickadees in flocks. Red-eyed vireos preached in the tops
of yellow birches. A yellow-throated vireo twined and peered among the
twigs, gathering aphids. Here were myrtle and magnolia warblers and a
blackpoll, all residents in the neighborhood without doubt, but all on
their way, and seen in a brief time.
[Illustration: "Where railroad, highway, and river draw together and
touch elbows in passing through the gateway of the Notch"]
Most pleasing of all to me was a strange new chickadee voice which sang
something very like the ordinary black-capped chickadee song, but with
a slower and far different intonation. I followed the maker of this
old song with new words over some very rough country, from one side of
the Notch just below the nick to the other, for I was very eager to
see him. By and by I found him with others of his kind swinging head
down from twigs, climbing and flitting in a fashion that is that of
all chickadees, but had a quality of its own, nevertheless. Here was
a flock of chickadees, with less of nervousness in their manner and a
little more poise, if I may put it that way, than the blackcaps have,
chickadees with brown crowns instead of black, and, I thought, a little
more of buff in their under parts. All summer I had looked for the
Hudsonian chickadee on one mountain slope after another, and I had not
found him. But here in the nick of the Notch a flock had come to me and
I did my best to see and hear as much as possible of them. They, too,
were on their way, but were probably residents of the neighborhood,
for I took them to be one family, father, mother and five youngsters,
just learning to forage for themselves. This they did in true chickadee
fashion, swinging and singing, flitting and sitting, and always
following and swallowing food, to me invisible, with great gusto.
The song was what pleased me most. One authority on birds has written
it down in a book that the song of the Hudsonian chickadee is not
distinguishable from that of the blackcap, though uttered more
incessantly. Another, equally reliable, says the notes are quite unlike
those of the blackcap. My Hudsonian chickadees sang the blackcap's
song, but they sang it a trifle more leisurely and with a bit of
a lisp. But that is not all. There is something in the quality of
the tone that reminded me at once of a comb concert. It was as if
these roguish youngsters had put paper about a comb and were lustily
singing the prescribed song through this buzzing medium. It may be
that other Hudsonian chickadees sing differently. Birds are intensely
individualistic, and it is hardly safe to generalize from one flock.
This may have been a troupe doing the mountain resorts with a comb
concert specialty and tuning up as they travelled, as many minstrels
do, but the results were certainly as I have described them. I am
curious to see more birds of this feather and see if they, too,
conform, but I fancy Crawford Notch is about the southern limit of the
variety in summer, and I may not hear another serenade in passing.
These certainly found me as interesting as I did them. They fearlessly
flew down on twigs very near me and looked me over with bright eyes,
the while talking through their combs about my characteristics and how
I differed from the Hudsonian variety of man. It was a genuine case of
mutual nature study.
* * * * *