UP KATAHDIN.
Next morning, when we awoke, just before the gray of dawn, the sky was
clear and scintillating; but there was a white cotton night-cap on
the head of Katahdin. As we inspected him, he drew his night-cap down
farther, hinting that he did not wish to see the sun that day. When
a mountain is thus in the sulks after a storm, it is as well not to
disturb him: he will not offer the prize of a view. Experience taught us
this: but then experience is only an empiric at the best.
Besides, whether Katahdin were bare-headed or cloud-capped, it would be
better to blunder upward than lounge all day in camp and eat Sybaritic
dinners. We longed for the nervy climb. We must have it. "Up!" said
tingling blood to brain. "Dash through the forest! Grasp the crag, and
leap the cleft! Sweet flash forth the streamlets from granite fissures.
To breathe the winds that smite the peaks is life."
As soon as dawn bloomed in the woods we breakfasted, and ferried the
river before sunrise. The ascent subdivides itself into five zones. 1. A
scantily wooded acclivity, where bears abound. 2. A dense, swampy forest
region. 3. Steep, mossy mountain-side, heavily wooded. 4. A belt of
dwarf spruces, nearly impenetrable. 5. Ragged rock.
Cancut was our leader to-day. There are by far too many blueberries in
the first zone. No one, of course, intends to dally, but the purple
beauties tempted, and too often we were seduced. Still such yielding
spurred us on to hastier speed, when we looked up after delay and saw
the self-denying far ahead.
To write an epic or climb a mountain is merely a dogged thing; the
result is more interesting to most than the process. Mountains, being
cloud-compellers, are rain-shedders, and the shed water will not always
flow with decorous gayety in dell or glen. Sometimes it stays bewildered
in a bog, and here the climber must plunge. In the moist places great
trees grow, die, fall, rot, and barricade the way with their corpses.
Katahdin has to endure all the ills of mountain being, and we had all
the usual difficulties to fight through doggedly. When we were clumsy,
we tumbled and rose up torn. Still we plodded on, following a path
blazed by the Bostonians, Cancut's late charge, and we grumblingly
thanked them.
Going up, we got higher and drier. The mountain-side became steeper than
it could stay, and several land-avalanches, ancient or modern, crossed
our path. It would be sad to think that all the eternal hills were
crumbling thus, outwardly, unless we knew that they bubble up inwardly
as fast. Posterity is thus cared for in regard to the picturesque.
Cascading streams also shot by us, carrying light and music. From
them we stole refreshment, and did not find the waters mineral and
astringent, as Mr. Turner, the first climber, calumniously asserts.
The trees were still large and surprisingly parallel to the mountain
wall. Deep soft moss covered whatever was beneath, and sometimes this
would yield and let the foot measure a crevice. Perilous pitfalls; but
we clambered unharmed. The moss, so rich, deep, soft, and earthily
fragrant, was a springy stair-carpet of a steep stairway. And sometimes
when the carpet slipped and the state of heels over head seemed
imminent, we held to the baluster-trees, as one after wassail clings to
the lamp-post.
Even on this minor mountain the law of diminishing vegetation can be
studied. The great trees abandoned us, and stayed indolently down in
shelter. Next the little wiry trees ceased to be the comrades of our
climb. They were no longer to be seen planted upon jutting crags, and,
bold as standard-bearers, inciting us to mount higher. Big spruces,
knobby with balls of gum, dwindled away into little ugly dwarf spruces,
hostile, as dwarfs are said to be always, to human comfort. They grew
man-high, and hedged themselves together into a dense thicket. We could
not go under, nor over, nor through. To traverse them at all, we must
recall the period when we were squirrels or cats, in some former state
of being.
Somehow we pierced, as man does ever, whether he owes it to the beast or
the man in him. From time to time, when in this struggle we came to an
open point of rock, we would remember that we were on high, and turn to
assure ourselves that nether earth was where we had left it. We always
found it _in situ_, in belts green, white, and blue, a tricolor of
woods, water, and sky. Lakes were there without number, forest without
limit. We could not analyze yet, for there was work to do. Also,
whenever we paused, there was the old temptation, blueberries. Every
out-cropping ledge offered store of tonic, ozone-fed blueberries, or
of mountain-cranberries, crimson and of concentrated flavor, or of the
white snowberry, most delicate of fruits that grow.
As we were creeping over the top of the dwarf wood, Cancut, who was in
advance, suddenly disappeared; he seemed to fall through a gap in the
spruces, and we heard his voice calling in cavernous tones. We crawled
forward and looked over. It was the upper camp of the Bostonians. They
had profited by a hole in the rocks, and chopped away the stunted scrubs
to enlarge it into a snug artificial abyss. It was snug, and so to the
eye is a cell at Sing-Sing. If they were very misshapen Bostonians, they
may have succeeded in lying there comfortably. I looked down ten feet
into the rough chasm, and I saw, _Corpo di Bacco!_ I saw a cork.
To this station our predecessors had come in an easy day's walk from the
river; here they had tossed through a night, and given a whole day to
finish the ascent, returning hither again for a second night. As we
purposed to put all this travel within one day, we could not stay and
sympathize with the late tenants. A little more squirrel-like skipping
and cat-like creeping over the spruces, and we were out among bulky
boulders and rough _débris_ on a shoulder of the mountain. Alas! the
higher, the more hopeless. Katahdin, as he had taken pains to inform us,
meant to wear the veil all day. He was drawing down the white drapery
about his throat and letting it fall over his shoulders. Sun and wind
struggled mightily with his sulky fit; sunshine rifted off bits of the
veil, and wind seized, whirled them away, and, dragging them over the
spruces below, tore them to rags. Evidently, if we wished to see the
world, we must stop here and survey, before the growing vapor covered
all. We climbed to the edge of Cloudland, and stood fronting the
semicircle of southward view.
Katahdin's self is finer than what Katahdin sees. Katahdin is distinct,
and its view is indistinct. It is a vague panorama, a mappy, unmethodic
maze of water and woods, very roomy, very vast, very simple,--and these
are capital qualities, but also quite monotonous. A lover of largeness
and scope has the proper emotions stirred, but a lover of variety very
soon finds himself counting the lakes. It is a wide view, and it is a
proud thing for a man six feet or less high, to feel that he himself,
standing on something he himself has climbed, and having Katahdin under
his feet a mere convenience, can see all Maine. It does not make Maine
less, but the spectator more, and that is a useful moral result. Maine's
face, thus exposed, has almost no features: there are no great mountains
visible, none that seem more than green hillocks in the distance.
Besides sky, Katahdin's view contains only the two primal necessities
of wood and water. Nowhere have I seen such breadth of solemn forest,
gloomy, were it not for the cheerful interruption of many fair lakes,
and bright ways of river linking them.
Far away on the southern horizon we detected the heights of Mount
Desert, our old familiar haunt. All the northern semicircle was lost to
us by the fog. We lost also the view of the mountain itself. All the
bleak, lonely, barren, ancient waste of the bare summit was shrouded
in cold fog. The impressive gray ruin and Titanic havoc of a granite
mountain top, the heaped boulders, the crumbling crags, the crater-like
depression, the long stern reaches of sierra, the dark curving slopes
channelled and polished by the storms and fine drifting mists of aeons,
the downright plunge of precipices, all the savageness of harsh rock,
unsoftened by other vegetation than rusty moss and the dull green
splashes of lichen, all this was hidden, except when the mist, white and
delicate where we stood, but thick and black above, opened whimsically
and delusively, as mountain mists will do, and gave us vistas into the
upper desolation. After such momentary rifts the mist thickened again,
and swooped forward as if to involve our station, but noon sunshine,
reverberated from the plains and valleys and lakes below, was our
ally; sunshine checked the overcoming mist, and it stayed overhead, an
unwelcome parasol, making our August a chilly November. Besides what our
eyes lost, our minds lost, unless they had imagination enough to create
it, the sentiment of triumph and valiant energy that the man of body and
soul feels upon the windy heights, the highest, whence he looks far and
wide, like a master of realms, and knows that the world is his; and they
lost the sentiment of solemn joy that the man of soul recognizes as one
of the surest intimations of immortality, stirring within him, whenever
he is in the unearthly regions, the higher world.
We stayed studying the pleasant solitude and dreamy breadth of
Katahdin's panorama for a long time, and every moment the mystery of the
mist above grew more enticing. Pride also was awakened. We turned
from sunshine and Cosmos into fog and Chaos. We made ourselves quite
miserable for nought. We clambered up into Nowhere, into a great, white,
ghostly void. We saw nothing but the rough surfaces we trod. We pressed
along crater-like edges, and all below was filled with mist, troubled
and rushing upward like the smoke of a volcano. Up we went,--nothing but
granite and gray dimness. Where we arrived we know not. It was a top,
certainly: that was proved by the fact that there was nothing within
sight. We cannot claim that it was the topmost top; Kimchinjinga might
have towered within pistol-shot; popgun-shot was our extremest range of
vision, except for one instant, when a kind-hearted sunbeam gave us
a vanishing glimpse of a white lake and breadth of forest far in the
unknown North toward Canada.
When we had thus reached the height of our folly and made nothing by it,
we addressed ourselves to the descent, no wiser for our pains. Descent
is always harder than ascent, for divine ambitions are stronger and
more prevalent than degrading passions. And when Katahdin is befogged,
descent is much more perilous than ascent. We edged along very
cautiously by remembered landmarks the way we had come, and so, after
a dreary march of a mile or so through desolation, issued into welcome
sunshine and warmth at our point of departure. When I said "we," I did
not include the grave-stone peddler. He, like a sensible fellow, had
determined to stay and eat berries rather than breathe fog. While we
wasted our time, he had made the most of his. He had cleared Katahdin's
shoulders of fruit, and now, cuddled in a sunny cleft, slept the sleep
of the well-fed. His red shirt was a cheerful beacon on our weary way.
We took in the landscape with one slow, comprehensive look, and, waking
Cancut suddenly, (who sprang to his feet amazed, and cried "Fire!") we
dashed down the mountain-side.
It was long after noon; we were some dozen of miles from camp; we must
speed. No glissade was possible, nor plunge such as travellers make down
through the ash-heaps of Vesuvius; but, having once worried through the
wretched little spruces, mean counterfeits of trees, we could fling
ourselves down from mossy step to step, measuring off the distance by
successive leaps of a second each, and alighting, sound after each, on
moss yielding as a cushion.
On we hastened, retracing our footsteps of the morning across the
avalanches of crumbled granite, through the bogs, along the brooks;
undelayed by the beauty of sunny glade or shady dell, never stopping to
botanize or to classify, we traversed zone after zone, and safely ran
the gantlet of the possible bears on the last level. We found lowland
Nature still the same; Ayboljockameegus was flowing still; so was
Penobscot; no pirate had made way with the birch; we embarked and
paddled to camp.
The first thing, when we touched _terra firma_, was to look back
regretfully toward the mountain. Regret changed to wrath, when we
perceived its summit all clear and mistless, smiling warmly to the
low summer's sun. The rascal evidently had only waited until we were
out of sight in the woods to throw away his night-cap.
One long rainy day had somewhat disgusted us with the old
hemlock-covered camp in the glade of the yellow birch, and we were
reasonably and not unreasonably morbid after our disappointment with
Katahdin. We resolved to decamp. In the last hour of sunlight, floating
pleasantly from lovely reach to reach, and view to view, we could choose
a spot of bivouac where no home-scenery would recall any sorry fact of
the past. We loved this gentle gliding by the tender light of evening
over the shadowy river, marking the rhythm of our musical progress by
touches of the paddle. We determined, too, that the balance of bodily
forces should be preserved: legs had been well stretched over the bogs
and boulders; now for the arms. Never did our sylvan sojourn look so
fair as when we quitted it, and seemed to see among the streaming
sunbeams in the shadows the Hamadryads of the spot returned, and
waving us adieux. We forgot how damp and leaks and puddles had forced
themselves upon our intimacy there; we remembered that we were gay,
though wet, and there had known the perfection of Ayboljockameegus
trout.
As we drifted along the winding river, between the shimmering birches on
either bank, Katahdin watched us well. Sometimes he would show the point
of his violet gray peak over the woods, and sometimes, at a broad bend
of the water, he revealed himself fully--and threw his great image down
beside for our nearer view. We began to forgive him, to disbelieve in
any personal spite of his, and to recall that he himself, seen thus, was
far more precious than any mappy dulness we could have seen from his
summit. One great upright pyramid like this was worth a continent of
grovelling acres.
Sunset came, and with it we landed at a point below a lake-like stretch
of the river, where the charms of a neighbor and a distant view of the
mountain combined. Cancut the Unwearied roofed with boughs an old frame
for drying moose-hides, while Iglesias sketched, and I worshipped
Katahdin. Has my reader heard enough of it,--a hillock only six thousand
feet high? We are soon to drift away, and owe it here as kindly a
farewell as it gave us in that radiant twilight by the river.
From our point of view we raked the long stern front tending westward.
Just before sunset, from beneath a belt of clouds evanescing over the
summit, an inconceivably tender, brilliant glow of rosy violet mantled
downward, filling all the valley. Then the violet purpled richer and
richer, and darkened slowly to solemn blue, that blended with the gloom
of the pines and shadowy channelled gorges down the steep. The peak
was still in sunlight, and suddenly, half way down, a band of roseate
clouds, twining and changing like a choir of Bacchantes, soared around
the western edge and hung poised above the unillumined forests at the
mountain-base; light as air they came and went and faded away, ghostly,
after their work of momentary beauty was done. One slight maple,
prematurely ripened to crimson and heralding the pomp of autumn,
repeated the bright cloud-color amid the vivid verdure of a little
island, and its image wavering in the water sent the flame floating
nearly to our feet.
Such are the transcendent moments of Nature, unseen and disbelieved by
the untaught. The poetic soul lays hold of every such tender pageant of
beauty and keeps it forever. Iglesias, having an additional method of
preservation, did not fail to pencil rapidly the wondrous scene. When
he had finished his dashing sketch of this glory, so transitory, he
peppered the whole with cabalistic cipher, which only he could interpret
into beauty.
Cancut's camp-fire now began to overpower the faint glimmers of
twilight. The single-minded Cancut, little distracted by emotions, had
heaped together logs enough to heat any mansion for a winter. The warmth
was welcome, and the great flame, with its bright looks of familiar
comradery, and its talk like the complex murmur of a throng, made a
fourth in our party by no means terrible, as some other incorporeal
visitors might have been. Fire was not only a talker, but an important
actor: Fire cooked for us our evening chocolate; Fire held the
candlestick, while we, without much ceremony of undressing, disposed
ourselves upon our spruce-twig couch; and Fire watched over our
slumbers, crouching now as if some stealthy step were approaching, now
lifting up its head and peering across the river into some recess where
the water gleamed and rustled under dark shadows, and now sending far
and wide over the stream and the clearing and into every cleft of the
forest a penetrating illumination, a blaze of light, death to all
treacherous ambush. So Fire watched while we slept, and when safety came
with the earliest gray of morning, it, too, covered itself with ashes
and slept.