tramping
tramping
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SEEKING SHELTER
SOMETIMES, at high altitudes in the Alps, the Rockies, and elsewhere, one comes upon bleak empty shelters built for protection against wind and snow. Ordinary tramping is not mountaineering, but, nevertheless, it leads one upon occasion to wild and desolate exalted regions. There seems to be no particular danger except that of failing to obtain provisions after supplies have run out. But there is a danger, often unforeseen; the coming on of a great storm.
A raging blizzard of snow is sometimesblinding and perishing. All is veiled in driving whiteness. The wind is piercing. After a few steps the track, if there is one, is lost; landmarks have disappeared from view, and it is safer to stop than to go on. Not a few people have met their deaths in an unexpected snowstorm in the upper Alps. They may be in fairly safe mountain country, but it is easy to misjudge distance in such circumstances, and go over a cliffside by a random step in the snow. Unless you can find some sort of shelter you are changed to a snow man in a few minutes, and get disgustingly numbed. Even if you lie down flat in the snow the storm pierces to your bones.
Fortunately, one can generally see a storm coming, and find a rock or a cave or some sort of kraal or shepherd’s house. The cave is a good place in which to await the storm and then watch it pass.
Thunderstorms may be almost as perilous as blizzards, and certainly more frightening. You are up where the clouds meet; the electric currents surge through you. Something dark comes driving up the wedge between theranges, roaring below through the ravine. It is the oncoming wind and rain. Thunders prodigious and bellowing, break out upon the right and left. You suddenly find yourself in an island of pale subdued light, with clouds rolling up to you from below. It is an experience worth having if you possess the nerve to take it calmly.
The lightnings are sometimes amazingly intimate, wrapping you, wreathing you, bathing you with fire, almost searing your eyeballs. Criss-cross, flash, blare, effusion, confusion. The explosions are dumbfounding and the many echoes confound in one great infernal battle music. There is an oncoming enemy who always threatens, and never seems quite to arrive. Or you are in the midst of the mêlée with torrents battling across and across you. You get soaked, the knapsack gets soaked, the boots get soaked, the rock under you becomes a water channel; the cliffs on all sides discharge water against you, to say nothing of what is raging out of the sky.
Once more, it is better to watch it from acave. There is the enormous advantage of keeping relatively dry. In a great storm a certain amount of rain is bound to blow into any cave, but there is the advantage of feeling safer, whether one is or not. The lightnings do not play quite so much about your eyes. You are also out of the way of those rain-loosened boulders which have a way of detaching themselves in a storm, and coming violently from above, falling sometimes at your feet or dashing past your knees to fall another two thousand feet into the abyss below you. In the cave a falling rock is merely a feature of interest, while you watch the grand spectacle of a thunderstorm in the mountains. If the storm last too long, one can generally glean a coffeepot full of water, light a fire at the mouth of the cave, and make some coffee or tea.
In like manner one can take shelter from mountain gales which sometimes spring up with hurricane force and make perilous the passage of some knife-edge track. It is not wise to brave the elements when one false step risks your life. Such gales commonly diedown before sunset, and the succeeding calm can be waited for with patience.
These are heroic occasions, but there are others less heroic which bid us seek shelter. One may be down below in the quiet country, and yet as devastating a thunderstorm intervene, or heavy drenching rain, or a bone-searching northeaster. But down below it is easier to find refuge. There are keepers’ huts in forests, holes dug by animals, hollow trees, there are deserted houses, barns, outhouses, bridges. There are human homes, inns, hotels—even railway stations and covered vans. Obtaining shelter, except on wide and desolate moors, is not so difficult. On moorland there is nothing for it but to put on one’s waterproof cape, over knapsack and all, and brave it out. You will find of what enormous value the waterproof cape can be, not only being your ground sheet at night, but saving you your provisions and kit, from a deluge of rain.
It sometimes happens that a storm beginning in the afternoon will last all night. One must judge by the look of the sky. On a shelterless moor or plateau it is no gain to shutone’s eyes to the dire possibilities of the situation. It is an occasion when the art of idleness can be put aside. If it is necessary to walk a steady twenty miles to some place of shelter for the night, it is as well to set the mind to it. After the first mile in the rain the tramp becomes pleasant; after five or ten miles one begins to sing. One generally finishes in the highest of spirits, even though soaked to the skin. Then shines the opportunity of the good inn or the farmhouse with kitchen fire. One hangs up all to dry and, sitting in a pair of mine host’s breeches, makes mirth with a vast platter of ham and eggs, to say nothing of a chicken stewed in its own soup, and a bottle of Burgundy, or a deep draught of cider, or a Yorkshire tea. After that, one burrows deep into the unfamiliar softness of a feather bed and listens to the rain still pouring on the just and the unjust outside.
It may happen, however, that this idyllic dénouement is not realized; you make no house in twenty miles. You are fain at last to get into a stone breaker’s hut, or a wet cave or a deserted cabin. You come to a house withonly three rafters left of its ruined roof, and you snuggle somehow into its one dry corner, possibly making a fire in a convenient place of bits of flooring, and old newspapers. By this you dry off a little, boil your pot, and make the best of a wet world. After all, one’s not likely to take cold or feel any ill effects. The open air gives strength and health to resist cold and damp. The body goes hot as you lie in the draught of the ruin; it finds its own heat and will dry your shirt for you as you lie there in the cold and the dark.
You find, however, that it is more cold in a ruined or empty house than in the open. The less ruined the house, the more cold. In some places you come upon many empty houses. The owners are far away; the houses are locked, the windows shut. There is nothing inside; every room gapes at you from its dreary window. It is always easy to get inside. Owners leave some door or window free. You get in on to the kitchen sink, into the dreary kitchen, open its further door and come to the silent parlor, climb the stairs, half fearing to meet a ghost, and come upon thoseweird bedchambers where no one sleeps. It takes some nerve to settle down there for the night. The wind whistles in the keyholes, creeps with a knife-edge under the door, searching your cold toes. You lie and quake, fearing you do not know what—the house imps, the sprites of dead children, the opening of the dread door in front of you and the coming in of some ghostly aged grandma, holding a candle in one hand.
Not a danger, but one feels one would scream, one would rend the roof of the house with a great yell of horror. I have slept in such places, but do not recall them with gladness. The best place is to open the front or the back door and lie down to sleep on the threshold, looking out upon the free spacious rain-drenched open-air world.
Or the tramp may seem to have better luck. He comes in the water-washed twilight into view of some lamp-lighted window and makes for it, as a ship for a harbor—any port in a storm. It is common to buoy oneself up with unusual hopes about that window and the home behind it. The tired man thinks of ahappy cosy home, joy in welcome, warmth in hospitality. But too often the light proves to be a will-o’-the-wisp. The house may be a home, but you are not wanted there. The man of the house will tell you of a place five miles on where you can stay; he will tell you of a hearsay inn, and you must trudge on till you see another light. On such occasions the weary wanderer may feel bitter. He feels hurt. He feels he had a right to be taken indoors. But he does not think of his wild looks, his forbidding aspect, his drenched and perhaps holey breeches. It is getting late. The man in the desolate house is simply afraid to take him in, fears he may be robbed in the night, or worse.
In these inhospitable days it is better to use a little stealth—put one’s foot in the door, so to speak, get a hot supper first, win a few kind looks from the lady, talk of bed later. It takes half an hour or so to introduce oneself for a bed. It is only the rare chance where all seems to have been prepared as for an expected guest, a spare corner even laid at the table where the family is supping, an occasion to rejoice over and remember for a long time.I well remember one such time when I had been a long while in the snow, and landed up at a desolate ranch. It was as if a long-lost son had arrived. I was at once in the bosom of the family with a pack of new sisters and young brothers, to say nothing of a cowboy father and a farm-wife mother. Very pleasant! Rare!