Part 2 (2/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: From a lookout point in the Coconino Forest of Arizona]
You come through those upper tunnels still higher. Below, no longer lie the plains, but seas of clouds; and it is to the everlasting credit of the sense and taste of Denver people, that they have dotted the outer margin of this rock wall with slab and log and s.h.i.+ngle cottages, built literally on the very backbone of the continent overlooking such a stretch of cloud and mountain and plain as I do not know of elsewhere in the whole world. In Sundance Canon, South Dakota, summer people have built in the bottom of the gorge. Here, they are dwellers in the sky.
Rugged pines cling to the cliff edge blasted and bare and wind torn; but dauntlessly rooted in the everlasting rocks. Little mining hamlets composed of matchbox houses cling to the face of the precipice like cardboards stuck on a nail. Then, you have pa.s.sed through the clouds, and are above timber line; and a lake lies below you like a pool of pure turquoise; and you twist round the flank of the great mountain, and there is a pair of green lakes below you--emerald jewels pendant from the neck of the old mountain G.o.d; and with a b.u.mp and a rattle of the wheels, clear over the top of the Continental Divide you go--believe me, a greater conquest than any Napoleon's march to Moscow, or Alva's shambles of headless victims in the Netherlands.
You take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of the Continental Divide. I wish you could taste the air. It isn't air. It's champagne. It isn't champagne, it's the very elixir of life. There can never be any shadows here; for there is nothing to cast the shadow. Nightfall must wrap the world here in a mantle of rest, in a vespers of wors.h.i.+p and quiet, in a crystal of dying chrysoprase above the green enameled lake and the forests below, looking like moss, and the pearl clouds, a sea of fire in the sunset, and the plain--there are no more plains--this is the top of the world!
Yet it is not always a vesper quiet in the high places. When I came back this way a week later, such a blizzard was raging as I have never seen in Manitoba or Alberta. The high spear gra.s.s tossed before it like the waves of a sea; and the blasted pines on the cliffs below--you knew why their roots had taken such grip of the rocks like strong natures in disaster. The storm might break them. It could not bend them, nor wrench them from their roots. The telegraph wires, for reasons that need not be told are laid flat on the ground up here.
When you cross the Divide, you enter the National Forests. National Forests above tree line? To be sure! These deep, coa.r.s.e upper gra.s.ses provide ideal pasturage for sheep from June to September; and the National Forests administer the grazing lands for the general use of all the public, instead of permitting them to be monopolized by the big rancher, who promptly drove the weaker man off by cutting the throats of intruding flocks and herds.
Then, the train is literally racing down hill--with the trucks b.u.mping heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggish team; and a new tang comes to the ozone--the tang of resin, of healing balsam, of cinnamon smells, of incense and frankincense and myrrh, of spiced sunbeams and imprisoned fragrance--the fragrance of thousands upon thousands of years of dew and light, of pollen dust and ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of Persian roses, but of the everlasting pines.
The train takes a swift swirl round an escarpment of the mountain; and you are in the Forests proper, serried rank upon rank of the blue spruce and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles of light hitting back from the rocks in sparks of fire! The light here is sifted pollen dust--pollen dust, the primordial life principle of the tree--with the purple, cinnamon-scented cones hanging from the green arms of the conifers like the chevrons of an enranked army; and the cones tell you somewhat of the service as the chevrons do of the soldier man. Some conifers hold their cones for a year before they send the seed, whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviating pixy parachutes, airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growth, though the process may take the trifling aeon of a thousand years or so.
At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is full of the yellow pollen of the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy, could we but know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another season--the season when I happened to be in the Colorado Forests--the very atmosphere is alive with these forest airs.h.i.+ps, conifer seeds sailing broadside to the wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't you? If they dropped plumb like a stone, the ground would be seeded below the heavily shaded branches inches deep in self-choking, sunless seeds; but when the broadside of the sail to the pixy's airs.h.i.+p tacks to the veering wind, the seed is carried out and away and far beyond the area of the shaded branches; to be caught up by other counter currents of wind and hurled, perhaps, down the mountain side, destined to forest the naked side of a cliff a thousand years hence. It is a fact, too, worth remembering and crediting to the wiles and ways of Dame Nature that destruction by fire tends but to free these conifer seeds from the cones; so that they fall on the bare burn and grow slowly to maturity under the protecting nursery of the tremulous poplars and pulsing cottonwoods.
The train has not gone very far in the National Forests before you see the sleek little Douglas squirrel scurrying from branch to branch. From the tremor of his tiny body and the angry chitter of his parted teeth, you know he is swearing at you to the utmost limit of his squirrel (?) language; but that is not surprising. This little rodent of the evergreens is the connoisseur of all conifers. He, and he alone, knows the best cones for reproductive seed. No wonder he is so full of fire when you consider he diets on the fruit of a thousand years of sunlight and dew; so when the ranger seeks seed to reforest the burned or scant slopes, he rifles the _cache_ of this little furred forester, who suspects your noisy trainload of robbery--robbery--sc--scur--r--there!
Then, the train b.u.mps and jars to a stop with a groaning of brakes on the steep down grade, for a drink at the red water tank; and you drop off the high car steps with a glance forward to see that the baggage man is dropping off your kit. The brakes reverse. With a scrunch, the train is off again, racing down hill, a blur of steamy vapor like a cloud against the lower hills. Before the rear car has disappeared round the curve, you have been accosted by a young man in Norfolk suit of sage green wearing a medal stamped with a pine tree--the ranger, absurdly young when you consider each ranger patrols and polices 100,000 acres compared to the 1,700 which French and German wardens patrol and daily deals with criminal problems ten times more difficult than those confronting the Northwest Mounted Police, without the military authority which backs that body of men.
You have mounted your pony--men and women alike ride astride in the Western States. It heads of its own accord up the bridle trail to the ranger's house, in this case 9,000 feet above sea level, 1,000 feet above ordinary cloud line. The hammer of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, the scur of a rasping blue jay, the twitter of some red bills, the soft _thug_ of the unshod broncho over the trail of forest mold, no other sound unless the soul of the sea from the wind harping in the trees. Better than the jangle of city cars in that stuffy hotel room of the germ-infested town, isn't it?
If there is snow on the peaks above, you feel it in the cool sting of the air. You hear it in the trebling laughter, in the trills and rills of the brook babbling down, sound softened by the moss as all sounds are hushed and low keyed in this woodland world. And all the time, you have the most absurd sense of being set free from something. By-and-by when eye and ear are attuned, you will see the light reflected from the pine needles glistening like metal, and hear the click of the same needles like fairy castanets of joy. Meantime, take a long, deep, full breath of these condensed sunbeams spiced with the incense of the primeval woods; for you are entering a temple, the temple where our forefathers made offerings to the G.o.ds of old, the temple which our modern churches imitate in Gothic spire and arch and architrave and nave. Drink deep in open, full lungs; for you are drinking of an elixir of life which no apothecary can mix. Most of us are a bit ill mentally and physically from breathing the dusty street sweepings of filth and germs which permeate the hived towns. They will not stay with you here! Other dust is in this air, the gold dust of sunlight and resin and ozone. They will make you over, will these forest G.o.ds, if you will let them, if you will lave in their sunlight, and breathe their healing, and laugh with the chitter and laughter of the squirrels and streams.
And what if your spirit does not go out to meet the spirit of the woods halfway? Then, the woods will close round you with a chill loneliness unutterable. You are an alien and an exile. They will have none of you and will reveal to you none of their joyous, dauntless life secrets.
CHAPTER II
AMONG THE NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST
You have not ridden far towards the ranger's house in the Forest before you become aware that clothing for town is not clothing for the wilds.
No matter how hot it may be at midday, in this high, rare air a chill comes soon as the sun begins to sink. To be comfortable, light flannels must be worn next the skin, with an extra heavy coat available--never farther away from yourself than the pack straps. Night may overtake you on a hard trail. Long as you have an extra heavy coat and a box of matches, night does not matter. You are safer benighted in the wilds than in New York or Chicago. If you have camp fire and blanket, night in the wilds knows nothing of the satyr-faced spirit of evil, sand-bagger and yeggman, that stalks the town.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The forest-ranger in action, fighting a ground fire with his saddle blanket in one of the National Forests of the West]
To anyone used to travel in the wilderness, it seems almost like little boys playing Robinson Crusoe to give explicit directions as to dress.
Yet only a few years ago, the world was shocked and horrified by the death of a town man exploring the wilds; and that death was directly traceable to a simple matter of boots. His feet played out. He had gone into a country of rocky portages with only one pair of moccasins. I have never gone into the wilds for longer than four months at a time. Yet I have never gone with less than four sets of footgear. Primarily, you need a pair of good outing boots; and outing boots are good only when they combine two qualities--comfort and thick enough soles to protect your feet from sharp rock edges if you climb, broad enough soles, too, to protect the edge of your feet from hard knocks from pa.s.sing trees and jars in the stirrup. For the rest, you need about two extras in case you chip chunks out of these in climbing; and if you camp near glaciers or snow fields, a pair of moccasins for night wear will add to comfort. You may get them if you like to spend the money--$8 leggings and $8 horsehide shoes and cowboy hat and belted corduroy suit and all the other paraphernalia by which the seasoned Westerner recognizes the tenderfoot. You may get them if you want to. It will not hurt you; but a $3 cowboy slicker for rainy days and a pair of boots guaranteed to let the water out as fast as it comes in, these and the ordinary outing garments of any other part of the world are the prime essentials.
This matter of proper preparation recalls a little English woman who determined to train her boys and girls to be resourceful and independent by taking them camping each summer in the forests of the Pacific Coast.
They were on a tramp one day twelve miles from camp when a heavy fog blew in, and they lost themselves. That is not surprising when you consider the big tree country. Two notches and one blaze mark the bounds of the National Forests; one notch and one blaze, the trail; but they had gone off the trail trout fis.h.i.+ng. ”If they had been good path-finders, they could have found the way out by following the stream down,” remarked a critic of this little group to me; and a very apt criticism it was from the safe vantage point of a study chair. How about it, if when you came to follow the stream down, it chanced to cut through a gorge you couldn't follow, with such a sheer fall of rock at the sides and such a crisscross of big trees, house-high, that you were driven back from the stream a mile or two? You would keep your directions by sunlight? Maybe; but that big tree region is almost impervious to sunlight; and when the fog blows in or the clouds blow down thick as wool, you will need a pocket compa.s.s to keep the faintest sense of direction. Compa.s.s signs of forest-lore fail here. There are few flowers under the dense roofing to give you sense of east or west; and you look in vain for the moss sign on the north bark of the tree.
All four sides are heavily mossed; and where the little Englishwoman lost herself, they were in ferns to their necks.
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