Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862
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Often, when a portage was not quite necessary, a dangerous bit of white
water would require the birch to be lightened. Cancut must steer her
alone over the foam, while we, springing ashore, raced through the thick
of the forest, tore through the briers, and plunged through the punk of
trees older than history, now rotting where they fell, slain by Time the
Giganticide. Cancut then had us at advantage. Sometimes we had laughed
at him, when he, a good-humored malaprop, made vague clutches at the
thread of discourse. Now suppose he should take a fancy to drop down
stream and leave us. What then? Berries then, and little else, unless we
had a chance at a trout or a partridge. It is not cheery, but dreary, to
be left in pathlessness, blanketless, guideless, and with breadths of
lake and mountain and Nature, shaggy and bearish, between man and man.
With the consciousness of a latent shudder in our hearts at such a
possibility, we parted brier and bramble until the rapid was passed, we
scuffled hastily through to the river-bank, and there always, in some
quiet nook, was a beacon of red-flannel shirt among the green leaves
over the blue and shadowy water, and always the fast-sailing Cancut
awaiting us, making the woods resound to amicable hails, and ready again
to be joked and to retaliate.
Such alternations made our voyage a charming olla. We had the placid
glide, the fleet dash, the wild career, the pause, the landing,
the agreeable interlude of a portage, and the unburdened stampede
along-shore. Thus we won our way, or our way wooed us on, until, in
early afternoon, a lovely lakelet opened before us. The fringed
shores retired, and, as we shot forth upon wider calm, lo, Katahdin!
unlooked-for, at last, as a revolution. Our boat ruffled its shadow,
doing pretty violence to its dignity, that we might know the greater
grandeur of the substance. There was a gentle agency of atmosphere
softening the bold forms of this startling neighbor, and giving it
distance, lest we might fear it would topple and crush us. Clouds, level
below, hid the summit and towered aloft. Among them we might imagine the
mountain rising with thousands more of feet of heaven-piercing height:
there is one degree of sublimity in mystery, as there is another degree
in certitude.
We lay to in a shady nook, just off Katahdin's reflection in the river,
while Iglesias sketched him. Meanwhile I, analyzing my view, presently
discovered a droll image in the track of a land-avalanche down the
front. It was a comical fellow, a little giant, a colossal dwarf, six
hundred feet high, and should have been thrice as tall, had it had any
proper development,--for out of his head grew two misdirected skeleton
legs, "hanging down and dangling." The countenance was long, elfin,
sneering, solemn, as of a truculent demon, saddish for his trade, an
ashamed, but unrepentant rascal. He had two immense erect ears, and in
his boisterous position had suffered a loss of hair, wearing nothing
save an impudent scalp-lock. A very grotesque personage. Was he the
guardian imp, the legendary Eft of Katahdin, scoffing already at us as
verdant, and warning that he would make us unhappy, if we essayed to
appear in demon realms and on Brocken heights without initiation?
"A terrible pooty mountain," Cancut observed; and so it is.
Not to fail in topographical duty, I record, that near this lakelet
flows in the river Sowadehunk, and not far below, a sister streamlet,
hardly less melodiously named Ayboljockameegus. Opposite the latter we
landed and encamped, with Katahdin full in front, and broadly visible.
CHAPTER XII.
CAMP KATAHDIN.
Our camping-place was worthy of its view. On the bank, high and dry, a
noble yellow birch had been strong enough to thrust back the forest,
making a glade for its own private abode. Other travellers had already
been received in this natural pavilion. We had had predecessors, and
they had built them a hut, a half roof of hemlock bark, resting on a
frame. Time had developed the wrinkles in this covering into cracks, and
cracks only wait to be leaks. First, then, we must mend our mansion.
Material was at hand; hemlocks, with a back-load of bark, stood ready to
be disburdened. In August they have worn their garment so long that they
yield it unwillingly. Cancut's axe, however, was insinuating, not to
say peremptory. He peeled off and brought great scales of rough
purple roofing, and we disposed them, according to the laws of
forest architecture, upon our cabin. It became a good example of the
_renaissance_. Storm, if such a traveller were approaching, was shut
out at top and sides; our blankets could become curtains in front and
completely hide us from that unwelcome vagrant, should he peer about
seeking whom he might duck and what he might damage.
Our lodge, built, must be furnished. We need a luxurious carpet, couch,
and bed; and if we have these, will be content without secondary
articles. Here, too, material was ready, and only the artist wanting, to
use it. While Cancut peeled the hemlocks, Iglesias and I stripped off
armfuls of boughs and twigs from the spruces to "bough down" our camp.
"Boughing down" is shingling the floor elaborately with evergreen
foliage; and when it is done well, the result counts among the high
luxuries of the globe. As the feathers of this bed are harsh stems
covered with leafage, the process of bed-making must be systematic, the
stems thoroughly covered, and the surface smooth and elastic. I have
slept on the various beds of the world,--in a hammock, in a pew, on
German feathers, on a bear-skin, on a mat, on a hide; all, all give but
a feeble, restless, unrecreating slumber, compared to the spruce or
hemlock bed in a forest of Maine. This is fragrant, springy, soft,
well-fitting, better than any Sybarite's coach of uncrumpled
rose-leaves. It sweetly rustles when you roll, and, by a gentle
titillation with the little javelin-leaves, keeps up a pleasant
electricity over the cuticle. Rheumatism never, after nights on such a
bed; agues never; vigor, ardor, fervor, always.
We despatched our camp-building and bed-making with speed, for we had
a purpose. The Penobscot was a very beautiful river, and the
Ayboljockameegus a very pretty stream; and if there is one place in the
world where trout, at certain seasons, are likely to be found, it is in
a beautiful river at the mouth of a pretty stream. Now we wanted trout;
it was in the programme that something more delicate than salt-pork
should grace our banquets before Katahdin. Cancut sustained our _a
priori_, that trout were waiting for us over by the Aybol. By this
time the tree-shadows, so stiff at noon, began to relax and drift down
stream, cooling the surface. The trout could leave their shy lairs
down in the chilly deeps, and come up without fear of being parboiled.
Besides, as evening came, trout thought of their supper, as we did of
ours.
Hereupon I had a new sensation. We made ready our flies and our rods,
and embarked, as I supposed, to be ferried across and fish from _terra
firma_. But no. Cancut dropped anchor very quietly opposite the Aybol's
mouth. Iglesias, the man of Maine experience, seemed nought surprised.
We were to throw our lines, as it appeared, from the birch; we were to
peril our lives on the unsteady basis of a roly-poly vessel,--to keep
our places and ballast our bowl, during the excitement of hooking
pounds. Self-poise is an acrobatic feat, when a person, not loaded at
the heels, undertakes trout-fishing from a birch.
We threw our flies. Instantly at the lucky hackle something darted,
seized it, and whirled to fly, with the unwholesome bit in its mouth, up
the peaceful Ayboljockameegus. But the lucky man, and he happened to be
the novice, forgot, while giving the capturing jerk of his hook, that
his fulcrum was not solid rock. The slight shell tilted, turned--over
not quite, over enough to give everybody a start. One lesson teaches the
docile. Caution thereafter presided over our fishing. She told us to sit
low, keep cool, cast gently, strike firmly, play lightly, and pull in
steadily. So we did. As the spotted sparklers were rapidly translated
from water to a lighter element, a well-fed cheerfulness developed in
our trio. We could not speak, for fear of breaking the spell; we smiled
at each other. Twenty-three times the smile went round. Twenty-three
trout, and not a pigmy among them, lay at our feet. More fish for one
dinner and breakfast would be waste and wanton self-indulgence. We
stopped. And I must avow, not to claim too much heroism, that the fish
had also stopped. So we paddled home contented.
Then, O Walton! O Davy! O Scrope! ye fishers hard by taverns! luxury was
ours of which ye know no more than a Chinaman does of music. Under
the noble yellow birch we cooked our own fish. We used our scanty
kitchen-battery with skill. We cooked with the high art of simplicity.
Where Nature has done her best, only fools rush in to improve: on the
salmonids, fresh and salt, she has lavished her creative refinements;
cookery should only ripen and develop. From our silver gleaming pile
of pounders, we chose the larger and the smaller for appropriate
experiments. Then we tested our experiments; we tasted our examples.
Success. And success in science proves knowledge and skill. We feasted.
The delicacy of our food made each feaster a finer essence.
So we supped, reclined upon our couch of spruce-twigs. In our good cheer
we pitied the Eft of Katahdin: he might sneer, but he was supperless. We
were grateful to Nature for the grand mountain, for the fair and sylvan
woods, for the lovely river and what it had yielded us.
By the time we had finished our flaky fare and sipped our chocolate from
the Magdalena, Night announced herself,--Night, a jealous, dark lady,
eclipsed and made invisible all her rivals, that she might solely
possess us. Night's whispers lulled us. The rippling river, the rustling
leaves, the hum of insects grew more audible; and these are gentle
sounds that prove wide quietude in Nature, and tell man that the burr
and buzz in his day-laboring brain have ceased, and he had better be
breathing deep in harmony. So we disposed ourselves upon the fragrant
couch of spruce-boughs, and sank slowly and deeper into sleep, as divers
sink into the thick waters down below, into the dreamy waters far below
the plunge of sunshine.
By-and-by, as the time came for rising to the surface again, and the
mind began to be half conscious of facts without it, as the diver may
half perceive light through thinning strata of sea, there penetrated
through my last layers of slumber a pungent odor of wetted embers. It
was raining quietly. Drip was the pervading sound, as if the rain-drops
were counting aloud the leaves of the forest. Evidently a resolute and
permanent wetting impended. On rainy days one does not climb Katahdin.
Instead of rising by starlight, breakfasting by gray, and starting by
rosy dawn, it would be policy to persuade night to linger long into the
hours of a dull day. When daylight finally came, dim and sulky, there
was no rivalry among us which should light the fire. We did not leap,
but trickled slowly forth into the inhospitable morning, all forlorn.
Wet days in camp try "grit." "Clear grit" brightens more crystalline,
the more it is rained upon; sham grit dissolves into mud and water.
Yankees, who take in pulverized granite with every breath of their
native dust, are not likely to melt in a drizzle. We three certainly
did not. We reacted stoutly against the forlorn weather, unpacking our
internal stores of sunshine, as a camel in a desert draws water from his
inner tank when outer water fails. We made the best of it. A breakfast
of trout and trimmings looks nearly as well and tastes nearly as well in
a fog as in a glare: that we proved by experience at Camp Katahdin.
We could not climb the mountain dark and dim; we would not be idle: what
was to be done? Much. Much for sport and for use. We shouldered the
axe and sallied into the dripping forest. Only a faint smoke from the
smouldering logs curled up among the branches of the yellow birch over
camp. We wanted a big smoke, and chopped at the woods for fuel. Speaking
for myself, I should say that our wood-work was ill done. Iglesias
smiled at my axe-handling, and Cancut at his, as chopping we sent chips
far and wide.
The busy, keen, short strokes of the axe resounded through the forest.
When these had done their work, and the bungler paused amid his wasteful
_debris_ to watch his toil's result, first was heard a rustle of leaves,
as if a passing whirlwind had alighted there; next came the crack of
bursting sinews; then the groan of a great riving spasm, and the tree,
decapitated at its foot, crashed to earth, with a vain attempt to clutch
for support at the stiff, unpitying arms of its woodland brotherhood.
Down was the tree,--fallen, but so it should not lie. This tree we
proposed to promote from brute matter, mere lumber, downcast and
dejected, into finer essence: fuel was to be made into fire.
First, however, the fuel must be put into portable shape. We top-sawyers
went at our prostrate and vanquished non-resistant, and without mercy
mangled and dismembered him, until he was merely a bare trunk, a torso
incapable of restoration.
While we were thus busy, useful, and happy, the dripping rain, like a
clepsydra, told off the morning moments. The dinner-hour drew nigh. We
had determined on a feast, and trout were to be its daintiest dainty.
But before we cooked our trout, we must, according to sage Kitchener's
advice, catch our trout. They were, we felt confident, awaiting us in
the refrigerate larder at hand. We waited until the confusing pepper of
a shower had passed away and left the water calm. Then softly and deftly
we propelled our bark across to the Ayboljockameegus. We tossed to the
fish humbugs of wool, silk, and feathers, gauds such as captivate the
greedy or the guileless. Again the "gobemouches" trout, the fellows
on the look-out for novelty, dashed up and swallowed disappointing
juiceless morsels, and with them swallowed hooks.
We caught an apostolic boat-load of beauties fresh and blooming
as Aurora, silver as the morning star, gemmy with eye-spots as a
tiger-lily.
O feast most festal! Iglesias, of course, was the great artist who
devised and mainly executed it. As well as he could, he covered his pot
and pan from the rain, admitting only enough to season each dish with
gravy direct from the skies. As day had ripened, the banquet grew ripe.
Then as day declined, we reclined on our triclinium of hemlock and
spruce boughs, and made high festival, toasting each other in the
uninebriating flow of our beverages. Jollity reigned. Cancut fattened,
and visibly broadened. Toward the veriest end of the banquet, we seemed
to feel that there had been a slight sameness in its courses. The Bill
of Fare, however, proved the freest variety. And at the close we sat and
sipped our chocolate with uttermost content. No _garcon_, cringing, but
firm, would here intrude with the unhandsome bill. Nothing to pay is the
rarest of pleasures. This dinner we had caught ourselves, we had cooked
ourselves, and had eaten for the benefit of ourselves and no other.
There was nothing to repent of afterwards in the way of extravagance,
and certainly nothing of indigestion. Indigestion in the forest
primeval, in the shadow of Katahdin, is impossible.
While we dined, we talked of our to-morrow's climb of Katahdin. We were
hopeful. We disbelieved in obstacles. To-morrow would be fine. We would
spring early from our elastic bed and stride topwards. Iglesias nerved
himself and me with a history of his ascent some years before, up the
eastern side of the mountain. He had left the house of Mr. Hunt, the
outsider at that time of Eastern Maine, with a squad of lumbermen, and
with them tramped up the furrow of a land-avalanche to the top, spending
wet and ineffective days in the dripping woods, and vowing then to
return and study the mountain from our present camping-spot. I recalled
also the first recorded ascent of the Natardin or Catardin Mountain by
Mr. Turner in 1804, printed in the Massachusetts Historical Society's
Collections, and identified the stream up whose valley he climbed with
the Ayboljockameegus. Cancut offered valuable contributions to our
knowledge from his recent ascent with our Boston predecessors. To-morrow
we would verify our recollections and our fancies.
And so good-night, and to our spruce bed.
CHAPTER XIII.
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 _debris_ 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.
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