LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS
Under the stimulus, in part, of the desire for something out of the
ordinary line of subject for pictures, and in part from the hope that
going into the "desert" might quicken the spiritual faculties so
tantalized by the experience of the circles, I decided to pass the
next summer in the great primeval forest in the northern part of New
York State, known as the Adirondack wilderness. It was then little
known or visited; a few sportsmen and anglers had penetrated it, but
for the most part it was known only to the lumberers. Here and there,
at intervals of ten to twenty miles, there were log houses, some of
which gave hospitality in the summer to the sportsmen, and in the
winter to the "loggers" who worked for the great lumber companies. It
was a tract of a hundred miles, more or less, across, mainly unbroken
wildwood, cut up by rapid rivers, impossible of navigation, otherwise
than by canoes and light skiffs which could be carried from one sheet
of water to another on the backs of the woodsmen, around the cascades,
and over tracts of intervening land through virgin forests, without
roads, and, to a large extent, without paths. I hoped here to find new
subjects for art, spiritual freedom, and a closer contact with the
spiritual world--something beyond the material existence. I was
ignorant of the fact that art does not depend on a subject, nor
spiritual life on isolation from the rest of humanity, and I found,
what a correct philosophy would have before told me, nature with no
suggestion of art, and the dullest form of intellectual or spiritual
existence.
One of my artist friends--S.R. Gifford, landscape painter, like myself
on the search for new subjects--had been, the year before, to the
Saranac Lakes, and gave me the clue to the labyrinth, and I found on
Upper Saranac Lake a log cabin, inhabited by a farmer whose family
consisted of a wife, a son, and a daughter. There I enjoyed a
backwoods hospitality at the cost of two dollars a week for board
and lodging, and passed the whole summer, finding a subject near the
cabin, at which I painted assiduously for nearly three months. I
passed the whole day in the open air, wore no hat, and only cloth
shoes, hoping that thus the spiritual life would have easier access to
me. I carried no gun, and held the lives of beast and bird sacred,
but I drew the line at fishing, and my rod and fly-book provided in a
large degree the food of the household; for trout swarmed. I caught in
an hour, during that summer, in a stream where there has not been a
trout for years, as large a string as I could carry a mile. All
the time that I was not painting I was in the boat on the lake, or
wandering in the forest.
My quest was an illusion. The humanity of the backwoods was on a
lower level than that of a New England village--more material if less
worldly; the men got intoxicated, and some of the women--nothing less
like an apostle could I have found in the streets of New York. I saw
one day a hunter who had come into the woods with a motive in some
degree like mine--impatience of the restraints and burdens of
civilization, and pure love of solitude. He had become, not
bestialized, like most of the men I saw, but animalized--he had
drifted back into the condition of his dog, with his higher intellect
inert. He had built himself a cabin in the depth of the woods, and
there he lived in the most complete isolation from human society he
could attain. He interested me greatly, and as he stopped for
the night at the cabin where I was living, we had considerable
conversation. He cared nothing for books, but enjoyed nature, and only
hunted in order to live, respecting the lives of his fellow-creatures
within that limit. He only went to the "settlements" when he needed
supplies, abstained from alcoholic drinks, the great enemy of the
backwoodsman, and was happy in his solitude. As he was the first man
I had ever met who had attempted the solution of the problem which so
interested me,--the effect of solitude on the healthy intellect,--I
encouraged him to talk, which he was inclined to do when he found that
there was a real sympathy between us on this question.
He seemed to have no desire for companionship, but there was nothing
morose or misanthropic in his love of seclusion, and I soon saw that,
though he had no care for intellectual growth and no longing for
books, he thought a good deal in his own way, and that, mingled with
his limited thinking and tranquil emotion before nature, there was a
large element of spiritual activity, and this had kept him mentally
alive. He had heard of spiritism, and his own experience led him to
acceptance of its reality. In his solitary life, in the unbroken
silence which reigned around him, he heard mysterious voices, and only
the year before he had heard one say that he was wanted at home. He
paid no attention to it, thinking it only an illusion, but, after an
interval, it was repeated so distinctly that he packed his knapsack,
took his dog, and went out with the intention of going home. On the
way he met a messenger sent after him, who told him that his brother
had met with an accident which disabled him from all work, and begged
him to come to his assistance. The voice had come to him at the time
of the accident. As a rule, however, the voices seemed vagarious,
and he attached no importance to them, except as phenomena which
interested him slightly. There was nothing flighty about him, no
indication of monomania--he reasoned well, but from the point of view
of a man who has had only an elementary education, knowing nothing
of philosophy; he had no religious crotchets, and apparently thought
little or not at all on religious matters--was, in fine, a natural and
healthy man, a despiser of alcohol, satisfied with the moment he lived
in, and giving no consideration to that which would come after. He
had a great contempt for his fellow woodsmen and avoided contact with
them.
The backwoods life, as a rule, I found led to hard drinking, and even
the old settler with whom I had taken quarters, though an excellent
and affectionate head of his family, and in his ordinary life
temperate and hard-working, used at long intervals to break bounds,
and, taking his savings down to the settlement, drink till he could
neither pay for more nor "get it on trust," and then come home
penitent and humiliated. About two weeks after I entered the family,
the old man took me aside and informed me, mysteriously, that he was
going to the settlement for a few days, and begged me to take one of
the boats and come down for him on a fixed day, and he would row the
boat back. I rowed down accordingly, sixteen miles, and found Johnson
at the landing in a state of fading intoxication, money and credit
exhausted as usual, and begging some one to give him a half pint of
rum "to ease up on." He was "all on fire inside of him," and begged
so piteously that I got him a half pint and we started out, he at
the oars and I steering. A copious draught of rum, neat, brought his
saturated brain to overflow, and before we had gone a mile he was so
drunk that I had to guide the oars from behind to insure their taking
the water. Then he broke out into singing, beating time on the gunwale
of the boat with such violence that it menaced capsizing every minute,
and to all my remonstrances he replied by jeering and more uproarious
jollity.
It was no joke, for not to talk of him, too drunk even to hold on to
the boat, I was a poor swimmer, and in the deep and cold lake water
should never have reached the shore swimming, and I found myself
obliged to menace violence. I raised the steering paddle over his head
and assured him with a savageness that reached even his drunken brain,
that I should knock him on the head and pitch him overboard if he did
not keep perfectly quiet. There was imminent danger, for the slight
boat of that region requires to be treated with the care of a bark
canoe, and the menace cowed him so that he quieted down, and watched
me like a whipped dog. I tried to get the bottle away from him, but
his drunken cunning anticipated me and he put it far behind him, now
and then taking a mouthful of rum to keep down the burning. Thus, he
pulling and I guiding the oars, we ran through the lower lake, seven
miles, to a "carry," where the boat had to be lifted out and carried
over into the river above, around a waterfall. Here I fortunately
caught the bottle and sent it down the lake, and we labored on through
another lake, three miles, and up a crooked river to another carry
into the third lake, on which we lived. He was too drunk still to be
trusted any further, and, leaving the boat at the landing with him
beside it, I carried the load over and waited for him to get sober.
After an interval, long enough I thought for him to grow sober
enough to carry the boat, I went back and to my amazement he met me,
apparently in his right mind, intensely indignant with some one who,
having found him in the state of intoxication in which I left him, had
given him a drink of what he called "high wines," i.e. common alcohol,
the singular effect of which was to bring him immediately to his
senses, and we reached home without further incident.
That night, somewhere near midnight, poor Mrs. Johnson awoke me,
begging piteously that I would help her and her daughter to search for
her husband, who had disappeared from the house. Then she told me
that he had the habit of falling into desperate melancholy after his
drunken fits, and had even attempted suicide, and they had on one
occasion cut the rope by which he had hanged himself, barely in time,
and she always expected to find him dead somewhere. We ransacked the
house, the loft, the barn, the stable, in all their corners, every
shed and nook about the premises and were returning hopeless, to
wait for daylight to look for him in the lake, when, as I passed the
wood-yard (where the fire-wood was stored and chopped), I heard a
groan, and, guided by it, found him lying amongst the chips in the
torpor of drunken sleep. The poor wife, with my assistance, dragged
him home and put him to bed, and when I saw him the next morning
I heard over and over again his vows and resolutions, his sermons
against drink, his repentance and pledges never to touch liquor again.
When I showed incredulity, he offered to bet with me his best yoke of
oxen against one hundred dollars that he never would drink another
drop as long as he lived. I thought the bet a safe one for me, at all
events, and took it and made him write it down, and it probably kept
him from another spree as long as I remained there, but when I saw him
again the next summer he was as drunk as ever. I asked him about my
oxen, and he leered and jeered and joked with drunken cunning, but
said nothing more.
I passed a very happy summer, enjoying my work and wandering in the
forest or exploring the streams which flowed into the lake, for
subjects. The pure air and the tranquillity of the life, as well as
its simplicity, and a certain amount of boating exercise which I went
through every day in going to my subject, brought me to the highest
point of physical health I had ever known.
The great danger to the uninitiated in the forest life is that of
getting lost in this wild maze of trees, with no kind of landmark to
serve as a clue. Not a few rash beginners have become bewildered, lost
all conception of their whereabouts, and perished of starvation within
a short walk of a place of refuge. The houses there were invariably
built by the waterways, and the lines of communication were by water,
so that there was no necessity for roads. One finds the "runways" or
paths made by the deer traversing the woods in every direction,--a
perfect labyrinth of byways, ending nowhere and often bringing the
incautious wanderer, who supposes them to be paths, back to his
starting-place, with the result that he is at once bewildered beyond
recovery.
Years before, during one of my college vacations, I had made a fishing
excursion to the northern edge of the great woods, in company with
a classmate to the manner born, and had learned the need in my
excursions of precautions against the bewilderment which follows
the loss of one's sense of direction. He told me of one of the
inexperienced assistants of a surveying party of which he was a
member, engaged in running a township line in the trackless forest,
who ventured to leave the line a few minutes, and, before he could
recover it, though only a short distance from his party, had become
quite insane, and could only be compelled to return with his
companions by force. An artist friend who had sketched on the southern
border of the Wilderness told me of a similar experience of an English
shoemaker who came to settle in a village on the southern edge of the
woods, and who, after a short residence, went out to fish in a stream
not far from home. He did not return, and, though protracted search
was made for him, no trace of him, nor even of his clothing, was ever
discovered, except that a resident in a neighboring village said that,
a day or two after the stranger had disappeared, a man answering to
the description came to his door, his clothes in tatters, and, in a
wild and incoherent manner, asked the way to the village from which he
had gone, but, before any reply could be made, started off running and
disappeared in the woods again. He had contracted the woods madness
and so perished.
Of this danger I was well informed, and, beside, I was more or less
a child of the woodlands, and had no apprehension of it, having,
moreover, an implicit faith in what I considered a kind of spiritual
guidance in all I did,--a delusion which at least served to keep me in
absolute self-control under all circumstances. It was probably this
which kept me during my wanderings from falling into the panic which
constituted the real danger, depriving the victim temporarily of the
use of his reasoning powers. I had, however, an interesting experience
which gave me a clearer comprehension of the phenomenon, which is a
very curious one.
One of the woodsmen had told me of a waterfall on a trout stream of
considerable size which emptied into a lake near by us, and, in the
hope of finding a subject in it, I took the boat one afternoon and
began to follow the course of the stream up from the mouth. After
a half mile of clear and navigable water it became so clogged with
fallen trees that more lifting than paddling was required, and, as its
course was extremely tortuous, I occasionally got out and examined the
vicinity of the stream bed and the course above, if, perchance,
there might be better navigation beyond. On one of the digressions I
suddenly came on the stream running back on its previous course and
parallel to it. Instantly, in the twinkling of an eye, the entire
landscape seemed to have changed its bearings,--the sun, which was
clear in the sky, it being about three o'clock, shone to me out of
the north, and it was impossible to convince myself that my senses
deceived me, or accept the fact that the sun must be in the southwest,
the general direction from which the stream was flowing, and that, to
get home again, I must turn my back to it, if I had lost my boat, as
seemed certain. Then began to come over me, like an evil spell, the
bewilderment and the panic which accompanied it. Fortunately, I
recognized this panic from the experiences I knew of, and was aware
that if I gave way to it I was a lost man, beyond any finding by the
woodsmen, even if they attempted to track me.
Fresh wolf tracks were plenty all along the bank of the stream;
panthers and bears abounded in that section, and the wilderness
beyond me was never explored, and hardly penetrable, so dense was the
undergrowth of dwarf firs and swamp cedars. I had one terrible moment
of clear consciousness that if I went astray at that juncture no human
being would ever know where I was, and the absolute necessity of
recovering my sense of the points of compass was clear to me. By a
strong effort of the will, I repressed the growing panic, sat down on
a log and covered my face with my hands, and waited, I had no idea
how long, but until I felt quite calm; and when I looked out on the
landscape again I found the sun in his proper place and the landscape
as I had known it. I walked back to my boat without difficulty and
went home, and I never lost my head again while I frequented the
wilderness. I grew in time to know the points of the compass, even
when the sky was covered, and often came home from my excursions after
sunset without confusion, but I know that I then owed my escape from
the most terrible of deaths entirely to my presence of mind, and this
I probably owed then, and always, to that supreme confidence in the
protection of a superior power which never deserted me.
My studies in spiritism had developed in me another feeling which was
kin to this--a belief in a spiritual insight, the possession of which
would always, if entire confidence were placed in it, tell one at the
moment what should be done; an intuition which would guide him, but
only on the condition that it was trusted absolutely. And at that
period of my life I followed it with unfaltering trust. A curious
illustration of this state of mind and its effect had already occurred
to me in the spring, and, as it relates to this topic and involves a
very curious psychological phenomenon, I describe it in connection
with the so similar experience of the backwoods. I had made an
engagement with Mr. Brown, the sculptor, to meet him on the trout
brook that ran through my uncle's farm in Rensselaer County, New York,
a hundred and fifty miles from New York city, but I lost the last
train by which I should have met him at the appointed time,--daybreak
of the following day. Determined to keep the engagement, I took a
parallel railway, which ran through western Massachusetts and a
section of country which was entirely strange to me. From the station
at which I left the railway, that of Pittsfield, there was a distance
of several miles to the place of rendezvous, which was in the town
of Hancock, close to the boundary line between New York and
Massachusetts. On leaving the station I inquired the way to Hancock,
and was told that as the crow flies, i.e. across an intervening
mountain, it was twelve miles without even a footpath; but, by
the road around the mountain, twenty, and that, unless I knew the
mountain, I could not possibly find my way over it. It was just
sunset as I left Pittsfield, and I decided to risk the mountain, and,
following a wood road, I climbed the steep declivity, and, going in
what seemed to me a nearly direct course, after an hour's walk I
recognized a gap in the hill-crest and a distant view with two little
lakes reflecting the sky which I had seen the hour before. I had been
following a charcoal-burner's road in a circle; daylight had gone, and
the mists were coming on heavy as rain, making it impossible to see
ten yards before me. There was no recourse, if I was to keep the
rendezvous, but to follow the guidance of the inner sense. I
determined to obey the monitor, and plunged into the forest, in
unhesitating obedience to it. I did not guess, nor did I try to make
any kind of calculation. I felt that I must go in a certain direction,
and, as the darkness deepened, I had, literally, to grope my way, walk
with my hands out before me, not to run against the trees, for, with
little exception, the way lay through dense woodland, amidst which
were scattered boulders and fallen tree trunks. I could not--and
I speak without the least exaggeration--see the trees at my arm's
length. The fog was so dense and the trees so wet that every leaf or
twig dripped on me till I was soon drenched as completely as if I had
been plunged into a lake. I passed the crest of the mountain and began
to descend. I felt with my foot before me, and when the foot could
find nothing to rest on I drew it back and moved sidewise till I found
a step down, hanging on all the time to the branches of the trees. I
descended in this way a long distance, then came to a marsh which I
recognized only by the croaking of the frogs in it; and, skirting
the sound, made my way past it, always keeping the general direction
through the divergences made necessary by the nature of the land.
At length I got through the fog and came to an open field, beyond
which I saw the outlines of trees against the clouded sky, and,
keeping on, came to a road. A few yards further on a light was visible
in a roadside cottage, and other houses were near, but all dark, as it
was late and all in them were asleep. I knocked at the door where I
saw the light and asked the way to Hancock. "Why, you are in Hancock,"
the man of the house replied; and, on my inquiry as to an inn, he
informed me that a hundred yards further on there was an inn, to which
I went. The rain had ceased, but I was soaking, and I asked for a fire
by which to dry my clothes, and a bed, both of which were quickly
prepared; and then the landlord asked me where I came from and by what
road. When I told him that I came from Pittsfield by the mountain, he
exclaimed in amazement, "Why, there is no place by which a white
man could come over in broad daylight;" an exaggeration, as I could
testify, but it proved that the passage was held to be dangerous to
the ordinary foot traveler. The incident in itself has no importance,
but the singular feeling under which I made the passage of a trackless
mountain, in complete darkness for the most difficult part of the way,
in perfect confidence in a mysterious guidance which justified that
confidence, was a mental phenomenon worthy of note, the more that it
was in keeping with the invariable feeling which had grown up in me
from the cogitations of years. As I am telling the story of my life,
and the spiritual influences of my early years are an essential part
of that life, it cannot be irrelevant to the general result that I
should show how the springs of it acted. While I was on the wood road
in the earlier portion of the walk, I followed unhesitatingly the
visible path and made no question of guidance; but, when thrown on
the occult influence in which I confided, I walked unerringly to my
destination with the precision of an animal which nature had never
deserted. In the subsequent years, of which a great part was always
spent in the wilderness, the fascination of which became absorbing,
this occult faculty strengthened, so that I was never at a loss, when
in the trackless forest, for my path homeward. I then thought it a
newly acquired faculty. I now regard it as simply a recovered one,
inherent in all healthy minds, but lost, as many others have been, in
civilization.
And in this connection I will deal, once for all, with the gifts to me
from this wild nature to which I abandoned myself with all the ardor
of a quest. The tendency of the imagination, even healthy, acting in
a vacancy, is to create illusions, or, if there be a certain occult
mental activity, such as that I have alluded to in my Pittsfield
experience, to intensify its action to such a degree that it finally
usurps the function of the senses. In the solitude of the great
Wilderness, where I have passed months at a time, generally alone, or
with only my dog to keep me company, airy nothings became sensible;
and, in the silence of those nights in the forest, the whisperings of
the night wind through the trees forced meanings on the expecting ear.
I came to hear voices in the air, words so clearly spoken that even an
incredulous mind could not ignore them. I sat in my boat one evening,
out on the lake, watching the effects of the sky between the gaunt
pines which, under the prevalence of the west winds, grew up with an
easterly inclination of their tops, like that of a man walking, and
thus seemed to be marching eastward into the gathering darkness. They
gave a sudden impression of a procession, and I heard as distinctly
as I ever heard human speech, a voice in the air which said "the
procession of the Anakim." Over and over again, as I sat alone by my
camp-fire at night, dreaming awake, I have heard a voice from across
the lake calling me to come over and fetch it, and one night I rowed
my boat in the darkness more than a mile, to find no one. Watching for
deer from a treetop one day, in broad sunlight, and looking over a
mountain range, along the crest of which were pointed firs and long
level ridges of rock in irregular alternation, the eerie feeling
suddenly came over me, and the mountain-top seemed a city with spires
and walls, and I heard bands of music, and then hunting-horns coming
down with the wind, and there was a perfect illusion of the sound of a
hunting party hurrying down into the valley, which gave me a positive
panic, as if I were being pursued and must run. I remember also on
another occasion a transformation--transfiguration rather--of the
entire landscape in colors, such as neither Titian nor Turner ever
has shown me. It was a glorification of nature such as I had never
conceived and cannot now comprehend.
The fascination of indulgence in this illusory life became such that
I lingered every summer longer, and finally until November, when, in
that high and northerly locality, the snow had fallen and the lake
began to freeze, living only under a bark roof, open to the air and to
the snow, which fell on my bed during the night. I can easily imagine
the life leading to insanity. Probably my interest in nature and
my painting kept me measurably free from this danger, but not from
illusions as unaccountable as spiritism, and sometimes more real than
the physical facts. I had one evening, when I was lying awake in a
troubled state of mind, a vision of a woman's face, utterly unlike
anybody I had ever seen, and so beautiful that with the sheer delight
of its beauty I remained for several days in a state of ecstasy, as if
it were constantly before me, and I remember it still, after more than
forty years, as more beautiful than any face I ever saw in the flesh.
It was as real while it lasted as any material object could have
been, though it was a head without a body, like one of the vignetted
portraits which used to be so fashionable in my early days.
In all these years, whether in the wilderness or in the city, I lived
a life more or less visionary, and absorbed in mental problems, in
the solution of which I passed days of intense thought, and, when
no solution appeared to my unaided reason, I used to fast until the
solution appeared clear, which was often not until after days
of entire abstinence from food of any kind,--the fast lasting
occasionally three days,--by which time the diminishing mental energy
brought with it a diminution of the perplexity, and I came out of the
morbid state in which I had been, and probably found that there was
generally an intellectual delusion in the problem. I do not remember
the particular character of these perplexities, save that they were
generally questions of right and wrong in motive or conduct; but, from
the fact that they did not leave a permanent impression, I suppose
they were of the _quisquilioe_ which seem at times to perplex the
theological world, the stuff that dreams are made of. Up to this time
all the doctrines of my early creed held me in bondage: the observance
of the Seventh-Day Sabbath, and the exigencies of the letter of the
law, which entirely hid the worth of its spirit, were imperative on
me, and out of the complication I derived little happiness and much
distress. This kind of Christianity seems to me now of the nature of
those burdens which the Pharisees of old laid on the consciences of
their day, and it was only years later than the time I am here writing
of, when I finally moved to Cambridge and came under the influence of
the broadest form of Christianity, that they were removed. I owe it to
one of the truest friends of my early manhood,--Charles Eliot Norton,
the friend as well of Emerson, Lowell, and Longfellow,--that the real
nature of these questions of formal morality was finally made clear to
me, and life made a relatively simple matter.
This is an anticipation of the sequence of my development, and given
here not to leave occasion to recur to the subject again. On my return
from the first summer in the Wilderness, I took a studio again in New
York, and entered more formally into the fellowship of the painters of
landscape. Being under no necessity of making the occupation pay, I
probably profited less than I ought by the regime, and followed
my mission of art reformer as much by a literary propaganda as by
example. This, as all know who have ventured it, was more or less the
effectual obstacle to practical attainment in art.