richer than any above, so that in April its banks become a garden.
While scarcely a flower is to be seen on the hillsides, the fertile
floor of the ravine is carpeted with spurred violets, groundnut and
spring beauties.
One such as this falls into a glen over a little precipice, spreading
itself out like a fine veil which ceaselessly undulates in the breeze,
and now and again floats away in mist ere it can reach the pool below.
Under the overhanging rock, Alpine woodsia and cliff-brake thickly
cluster, while on narrow shelves are hanging gardens of dicentra, and
in the crannies, little patches of mountain saxifrage.
Below is a golden sheen where the spicebush is in flower, and a shimmer
of pale green about the early willows. From the glen comes the song of
the ruby kinglet, bubbling up and dying away. Incomparably wild, it
seems to express the abandon of a spirit ever free. All the while the
companionable brook gurgles and tinkles its reposeful melody, and the
white veil of the waterfall undulates softly in its dark cavern. The
air is full of that indescribable suggestion of spring, which is like
hashish, and casts a glamor over the world. Gradually one is imbued
with a sylvan consciousness and attains to a rapt and intimate point of
view.
It is curious, as one follows down the ravine, to hear the different
voices. The brook seems as if inhabited by a number of spirits
throughout its length, some whispering, some laughing, others singing.
Not only are the voices pitched in various keys, but the quality of
tone differs essentially. Some are loud and portentous; others,
melodious, liquid gurgles. In one place the voice implies an intimate
and confidential mood, so gentle, so exquisite, that the full import of
the musical conversation is felt only in midstream,--whispers and
murmurs which have almost a ventriloquial effect.
Countless bubbles glide down the current and vanish one by one.
Sunbeams dance over the rapids and out upon the pool, and then, as the
sun goes under a cloud, the stream as quickly takes on a somber mood.
Presently comes the melodious patter of rain-drops on the ground, an
even, sustained note, very different from any voice of the brook as it
dimples and answers the rain, one soft voice replying to the other.
Already little pools form in hollows of the rock and reflect light, so
that the face of Nature is perceptibly brighter.
Considering this aspect of the streams, it is easy to see how the
primitive mind came to personify them, since the brooks have motion,
voice and expression, ripple and laugh in the sunshine and are
responsive to the wind and the sky. They are still divinities to the
fisherman with whom he comes into an ever closer affiliation, as gentle
and poetic as he may be qualified to enjoy. The murmuring waters, the
whispering trees, the silver and cupreous gleams of trout are the facts
with which he becomes enamored, while he loses affinity with the world,
which slips into the background.
THE MOUNTAINS
He knew the mountains, who said, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the
hills from whence cometh my help"; knew them in some intimate,
spiritual way, for his words imply a noble association and
companionship. Wordsworth understood them in this way, but not as the
mountaineer knows them. They are ethereal dream-mountains the poet
sees, rather than actual rock and soil.
On the horizon the mountains wrap themselves in mysterious light and
color and seem invested with certain qualities which they lose near at
hand,--as a cloud, so beautiful an object floating in the heavens, is
but a fog bank once we are enveloped in it. Distance does actually lend
enchantment. The range beyond has always some attraction this one
lacks. In truth, mountains are illusory objects, and, to the most
matter-of-fact point of view, are something more than rock. That
marvelous purple of the distant hills, assumed as an imperial robe,
slips away as we approach, and we find them dressed in plain brown
homespun. Never do we as much as touch the hem of that royal mantle.
A symbol of the unchangeable, they are none the less marvelously
sensitive to the play of light, and thus appear to vary with the
conditions of the atmosphere. There are days when they seem to
approach, and times again when they recede and become distant and
nebulous. This magic-play of light proceeded from their birth, and goes
on forever, the unceasing illusion, the beautiful witchery.
From the violet shadows of their bases they rise through a stratum of
ethereal blue to emerge glistening white. Now they are savage and
defiant in their somber shadows, ramparts and battlements; again,
opalescent, lying like cumulous clouds on the horizon. What a vast bulk
is yonder spur, massy and ponderous in this light, but tomorrow it may
appear immaterial as thistle-down and to hang suspended in the ambient
air. In the morning the crags and cliffs stand out naked and dazzling
on the great rock mass of the peak; yet before night every detail may
be obliterated and the mountain appear a lowering mass, dull and grim.
It is with mountains somewhat as it is with people--there must be
perspective if they are to appear all serene and beautiful. In the
distant chain the details are lost, and we receive a single distinct
impression of serenity, as though they stood there a type of the fixed
and eternal. But in among them there are everywhere signs of
convulsion, everywhere evidence of change and decay. It is in the
distance, then, that the poet loves them best, as a beautiful vision,
which lures and beckons him. It is to these he lifts his eyes, from
these he receives his inspiration, for they are ethereal and opalescent
and play upon his fancy, provoking him to subtle thoughts of the Ideal,
rose-colored as themselves.
They who do not live where they can see the mountains miss somewhat in
their lives, as do they who never hear the sea. It would seem as though
one or the other were essential to a normal human environment,
providing that changeful beauty which forever stimulates the
imagination. We necessarily lift up our eyes to the mountains with some
corresponding elevation of thought. Again, from those desolate heaps of
granite we receive the suggestion of something immutable and
permanent--delusion though it may be. Whatever convulsions they may
have known were birth throes and growing pains. Venerable beyond human
conception, their life is measured, not in years, nor yet in centuries,
but in epochs and eons of time; and out of this inconceivable
antiquity, with its tumultuous youth, has come repose at last--a serene
old age.
One readily understands in the mountains how the old myths of the gods
and giants arose. Why should not the gods have dwelt on Olympus--and
here in the Rockies as well? What place more fitting? A setting, stern
and heroic, and not altogether hospitable to the puny race of man.
There are places of such sublimity and desolation, you feel you have
looked in upon Olympus when the gods were away, and that any moment
they may return with their thunderbolts. Wandering alone in these
regions is like an excursion into legendary lore--and one would better
wander alone, for in our deepest moments the mountains are company
enough.
One companion you may have--should have, in the mountains--a horse, a
kindly and sociable animal, who knows your foibles as you know his,
and is willing to humor them. He must be a trail-horse, sure-footed and
not finicky about fording mountain streams. If you do not come into
some renewed sense of freedom, if the solitude does not speak to you,
if you do not become better acquainted with yourself, it is because you
really have not surrendered to the genius of the hills but have come
preoccupied with other and lesser things. Thoreau did not so greatly
exaggerate when he said one must make his will and settle his affairs
before he was ready to walk.
One does not tire of sauntering through the mountains. They seem always
to invite. Mystery lurks in the ravines. There is no sound but the
distant tinkle of a cow-bell, which is pleasant music. Over the ranges
and the velvet folds of the _mesa_ the lights and shadows play like a
passing smile.
Though the ideal eludes on a nearer view, we nevertheless derive some
larger sense of freedom from personal contact with the range. The foot
must know the trail; and this association yields that which no road can
ever give--a good understanding with the mountain itself. As far as the
eye can see, neither fence, nor house, nor road; only the somber
forest, the naked ledge. While this tramping over trails hardens the
muscles, it toughens also the sinews of the mind. One has mountain
thoughts as well as mountain air. The single drop of aboriginal blood
tingles in the veins, while the tendency is strong to revert to the
wild and to a more rude and savage life. There is experienced some
furtive desire, as of a wild animal, to scurry away into these grim
ravines, or to leap from crag to crag with the bighorn,--presumably a
sort of mountain madness, which is dispelled on the descent to the
village.
Who can hear the wild song of the ouzel and not feel an answering
thrill? Perched upon a rock in the midst of the rapids, he is the
incarnation of all that is untamed, a wild spirit of the mountain
stream, as free as a rain-drop or a sunbeam. How solitary he is, a lone
little bird, flitting from rock to rock through the desolate gorge,
like some spirit in a Stygian world. Yet he sings continually as he
takes his solitary way along the stream, and bursts of melody, so eery
and sylvan as to fire the imagination, come to the ear, sounding above
the roar of the torrent. Like Orpheus, he seeks in the nether world of
that wild gorge for his Eurydice, now dashing through the rapids, now
peering into some pool, as if to discover her fond image in its depths,
and calling ever to lure her thence from that dark retreat up into the
world of light and love. This bird, more than all others, embodies the
wild. In him the spirit of the mountain finds a voice.
Here we make the acquaintance of the rocks as no where else. One
discovers their individuality and comes to feel that even they may be
companionable. They have much to say if only one can hear it; but like
the aged, their conversation is all of the past. The foibles of their
youth are still to be traced in faulting and non-conformity. How
tumultuous was that youth; how serene their old age! Stratified or
volcanic, each tells its own story. The sandstone cliffs speak of the
sea, which preceded them, and of which they are the sediment merely.
Upon that shore no human eye ever looked, and yet it is registered
here, as the ruins of Mitla record a race unknown to history. The cliff
is a chapter in a biography written before the advent of man. Long
after the sea had disappeared, some convulsions upheaved the strata and
threw them on end. Here and there in the cañons glimpses are to be had
of the granite or porphyry which underlies the sandstone--the very
corner-stone of the hills. It is as though one had come upon the most
ancient papyrus of the world or unearthed the first Babylonian
inscription.
It seems incredible the stream should have sawed its way through so
many feet of rock and produced the cañon. Day and night it eats its way
inward, like a saw cutting to the heart of a forest tree. But see what
the rain will do--so gentle a thing as the falling rain. Together they
have hewn the cliffs, which are like vast rock tombs with their
Egyptian massiveness. A filmy cloud floats down the gorge, trailing
along the edge of the precipices, an intangible and shadowy form,
spiritlike and ethereal, receiving the rays of the setting sun and
becoming golden and then rose-colored, and dissolving away at last into
the invisible. This fugitive, shadowy thing, this bit of mist, is the
mountain sculptor.
The rocks were the prototype of the temple, as was the forest of the
Gothic cathedral, the date-palm of the Byzantine dome. But there
worships here only the cañon-wren. He is the high priest who lifts up
his voice in these rock temples--a sweet utterance delivered with the
usual abandon of the wrens.
Above the cliffs, on the precipitous slopes, is the impress of still
another agent. The ledge, smoothed as by a plane, and the scattered
boulders amidst the dead timber and small aspens, give it an appearance
of extreme desolation. Here, where now the Indian paint-brush glows in
summer, the glacier crept snail-like down the mountain, from its cradle
in some _cirque_ above the forest. Timber-line is the frontier, the
boundary between the verdant world and the land of snow and ice.
It was the glaciers which in the days of their strength chiseled the
lake basins every one, and began the great cañons on which the streams
have been at work ever since. At the same time they laid out the
_moraines_, like so many parks, where the pines and the spruce have
planted themselves. They did the rough work and prepared the great rock
masses for the finer work of the rain and frost and wind--as the
stone-cutter precedes the sculptor.
These lakes in many cases became the glacial meadows of today, which
are like jewels set in the vast matrix of rock. Out of elemental
changes, terrible in their immensity, came some of the most charming
of all wild gardens,--as a rainbow follows a thunder-storm. These
serene and altogether beautiful aspects of Nature were the outcome of
tumult and passion--earthquakes, avalanches, lava-flows, glaciers, and
now these idyllic meadows, beloved of bees and blossoms.
There is a certain cañon hereabout which is closed abruptly at one end
by a precipice, over which descends a considerable stream. This fall is
a thing of beauty, and so holds the eye that few think of scaling the
cliffs to see what may be beyond. But, as it happens, there lies above,
and sundered from the world beneath, one of the most delightful little
valleys in the Rockies--a long, narrow defile, flanked by perpendicular
cliffs of pink and red and buff sandstone.
All day the black-headed grosbeak sings in the aspens, dropping from
one reverie into another. You may hear the voice of the green-tailed
towhee, and the cañon-wren singing from his rock temple. The stream
winds along the floor of the little valley, which is some eight
thousand feet above the sea, now through quaking aspens and now under
spruce, and its voice is as the murmuring of pines. This is the haunt
of the shooting-star and the Alpine mertensia, delicate and exquisite
blossoms, wooed by fugitive sunbeams and by the floating mist; which
dwell in a subdued and tempered light amidst the Alpine silence, as in
some floral cloister. Such are the rare and beautiful places of earth,
which the mountain barriers defend and the clouds veil, as if they
cherished here the last vestige of the fading youth and innocence of
the old world.
There are days when the clouds shut down upon the little valley,
veiling it from mortal eyes. The cliffs and buttes seem to float in
air; the trail becomes a path to the clouds. You have only to go up on
some ridge, and the pinnacles, looming in the fog, appear to be forlorn
rocks in mid-ocean. It is the isolation again of the sea and of the
desert.
At such times one receives impressions from the mountains which bring
to mind the ocean, as if these retained memories--as they still bear
traces--of the waters which gave them birth. This relation, once so
intimate, is now sundered and only to be inferred. Where is the ancient
sea which mothered the Rockies? The desert is its vast bed, now
unoccupied. It vanished forever, leaving its impress upon the
mountains. And now this sea-child is in its dotage, and it too dwindles
and wanes century by century. But the fog still recalls the mother-sea,
and out of the forgotten past conjures up little waves to dance upon a
primordial beach.
THE FOREST
One who is accustomed only to our eastern woods can have little idea of
the true forest as it occurs in the Sierra Nevada, which is a world of
itself, as distinct from any idea of the "woods" as the snow peaks, the
colossal granite domes and the great cañons of the Sierra are different
from the mild topography of the Berkshires.
Here is a forest primeval such as was never known east of the Cascade,
not, at least, since that remote period when the sequoia flourished in
Greenland. Man wanders, a mere pygmy, in a Brobdingnagian world of vast
columnar trunks. This is the true home of the great conifers, the
sequoia, silver fir, sugar-pine and Douglas spruce,--the magnificent of
the earth. There is no wilderness of saplings as in the woods, and the
general openness of the forest is remarkable, so that one has
far-reaching vistas through splendid arches and is able to appreciate
the size and character of individual trees.
Distinct from all others, the sequoias are a race apart. The big tree
and the redwood of the Coast Range are the only surviving members of
that ancient family, the giants of the foreworld. Their immense trunks
might be the fluted columns of some noble order of architecture,
surviving its builders like the marble temples of Greece,--columns
three hundred feet high and thirty feet through at the base. Such a
vast nave, such majestic aisles, such sublime spires, only the forest
cathedrals know. Symmetrical silver firs, giant cedars and spruce grow
side by side with sugar-pines of vast and irregular outline, whose huge
branches, like outstretched arms, hold aloft the splendid cones--such
is the ancient wood.
It is doubtful if these giant conifers are really as companionable as
our eastern beeches and maples and oaks. The company is almost too
grandiose; their dignity is overpowering. One could never, for
instance, form such a pleasant acquaintance with a great sugar-pine as
with a slender white birch. Fatherly white oaks and village elms seem
to ally themselves with man as protecting deities of the wood. But this
great race of trees has little affinity with our world. Be that as it
may, there is perhaps no loftier association in Nature than contact
with the forest. It is the force of a tremendous personality--calm,
inspiring, majestic. Like the sea, it is not to be grasped in its
entirety, and the mind responds to it, as some giant sugar-pine to the
wind. These sequoias, which may easily be from two to four thousand
years old, have seen men come and go as so many squirrels, or as
bubbles on the stream; they have outlived empires, and may again.
As the forest inspires in sensitive minds the religious sentiment, so
does it impose upon all alike, silence. Self-effacement is the law.
Wild animals merge into their environment and have acquired protective
coloration through force of necessity. The Indian has come to imitate
them; it has become second nature to him to move stealthily, to stand
and sit immovable for long at a time, to speak little. To the woodsman,
silence is more congenial than speech; his wood life has made him
alert; he has the habit of listening, and talk interferes.
Another influence is for sanity. It cannot fail to communicate a little
of its imperturbable calm, that stable equilibrium of the granite ledge
and the great tree trunks. There being none of the external and
artificial excitations which constantly play on the mind in cities, a
tremendous force of complex suggestion is removed, and the thought
naturally works more simply and directly. The multiplicity of desires
lies dormant. Everything conspires for simplicity, as in the city all
things are in conspiracy against it.
A certain resourcefulness is the portion of the woodsman, a little of
the independence and dexterity of the Indian, but more than this, an
intellectual and spiritual resourcefulness. It devolves upon him in the
solitude to become acquainted with himself--to be his own friend. A
sturdy content grows out of this association with the forest. He does
not require to be amused. It does not necessarily promote an unsocial
state, but it does make him independent of much society. Thus the
forest has its finer or spiritual influence.
Even greater is the suggestion of primitive vigor. The display of vast
rude strength induces a robust state of mind quite as readily as the
open-air life gives appetite and sleep. With the savage this influence
is direct and may almost be classed as instinct. With the refined and
cultivated mind it must first pierce the outer shell, the veneer, and
filter into the subconscious depths, as the sunlight penetrates the
forest twilight and brings to life dormant seeds lying there. A new
class of ideas comes to life. The seeds of thought planted long ago in
the nomadic period of evolution--in the hunter stage--germinate under
the forest influence and send forth shoots. It is memory--the
race-memory--coming blindly to the surface, and amounts to a reversion,
not so great, however, but it may be wholesome. We speak of men being
_animal_ when they are sensual or dissipated, unmindful that animals
are neither, but eminently sane, rendering a complete and unconscious
obedience to the laws of Nature. Some men make the mistake of trying to
take the city to the wilderness, and, as a result, get neither one nor
the other. The forest has its luxuries, and they consist, in a measure,
of freedom from those things considered luxuries in the city.
Here in the Sierras we live in a wickiup, a sort of a roofless wigwam.
The camp overlooks the forest in which the cañons and ranges are as
folds and wrinkles. Neighbors are few, for animals conceal themselves,
while song-birds are not properly of the forest, but seek the clearing
and the settlement. An Oregon snowbird has her nest near by and comes
hopping about on her marketing expeditions. A pair of lazuli-finches
also live on the edge of the clearing, and the male is, perhaps, the
most beautiful bird in the forest. His demure little mate is seldom
seen, as she is preoccupied with her domestic cares, but he constantly
flits about in the chaparral, where he gleams in the sunlight like a
jewel.
One other neighbor we have, an Audubon hermit-thrush, which might be a
voice merely--like Echo haunting the mountain--and no bird at all. He
appears to sing in the twilight only, and his song, like that of all
thrushes, is spiritual and unworldly. A single white lily, tall and
branching, stands near the camp, and day after day opens its ghostly
racemes in the dusk to white moths which come flitting out of the
forest like winged Psyches; and with the opening of the spirit-like
flower comes the vesper song of the thrush.
Night in the forest is a spell, an enchantment. It descends suddenly
and envelopes us in darkness, tangible and real. The wickiup stands at
the edge of a little clearing, and, as we roll ourselves in our
blankets, we seem to float in inky blackness, while the pines are like
beetling cliffs against the starlit heavens. Darkness and light
confront each other; it is as if we hovered between them and had made
our camp for the night on the borderland. But with the dawn, that
luminous world has vanished and we are again under the familiar pines.
One is impressed most by the wonderful stillness of the night. Not only
is the world blotted out in the enveloping darkness, but it is
voiceless, and there prevails absolute silence. Rarely this is broken
by the yapping of coyotes, or a dry twig snaps sharply under the foot
of some animal.
Not until the wind rises does the forest recover its voice. During the
day there is always music; it is as constant as noise in the city.
Impalpable currents descend from the empyrean to caress only the tops
of the tallest pines, coming no nearer to earth than this, and while
all is silent below there arises a distant chant in the tree tops,
which have been touched by an invisible hand and made to respond to
moods of the sky. Full and resonant, yet with that muffled quality of
tone which makes it appear always to come from a distance, the rhythmic
force of this chant sways one like the vibrations of an orchestra.
Starting at some center, as if at a signal, these tremulous waves of
sound recede farther and farther into the forest and die away in a
sigh.