I WENT TO A HOUSEAND I KNOCKED AT THE DOORBUT THE OLD LADY SAIDI HAVE SEEN YOU BEFOREIV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT
I WENT TO A HOUSEAND I KNOCKED AT THE DOORBUT THE OLD LADY SAIDI HAVE SEEN YOU BEFORE
Wespent our first night in a burned forest beside a sunken pink and grey rock. There was a green carpet of unblossoming flowers as green and romantic as ideal spring, and beside it in contrast the stark blackness of the charred trees all up and down the hill. Hidden from view but twenty yards away was a foaming rivulet with pools.
We bathed and we cooked and we talked and we slept. A great mountain like God Almighty in the midst of His creation wasvisible to us through the trees. We made our beds soft by pulling the dead red foliage from scorched trees and heaping it under our blankets beside the pink rocks. Lindsay made hot a large stone in the embers of our fire to keep him warm. So we lay down and waited for the night. I looked through black masts and great entanglements to the hills. Lindsay faced a scorched section of the forest all hanging in brown tresses. We listened to the stream below, its music becoming every moment more insistent. We knew that it would lull us all night long.
The mountain cloud then began to come down and roll over the tree-tops, giving them ghostly semblance. That passed, and the stars and the moon appeared and stillness ruled. An hour before dawn we were awakened by the sudden patter of a shower of rain and it was followed by the birth of a wind which came roaring along a ravine and started all the air moving everywhere and all the dead forest creaked and whined. It was our signal to arise.
Lindsayrose like a young lion roaring, rrrah!... and making the mountains echo with hisroar. “Let us go up higher,” says he. I read him this. “Put it, ‘Lindsay arose groaning and grunting like a pig under a gate—and let people choose,’” said the poet.
He was in great spirits. “I have never been so free. I start afresh. All is behind me. We’ll tramp to the coast. We’ll tramp to Alaska. We’ll do all the national parks, the same way,” were his impulsive speeches.
As we climbed aloft, following the North-west by our wrist-compasses, and careless of time and space, he sang a disreputable song belonging no doubt to that disreputable past of his when he hiked and begged and recited his poems to farmers—
Why don’t you go to workLike other men do?How can we work when there’s no work to do?Hallelujah, on the bum!Hallelujah, bum again!Hallelujah! Give us a hand-outTo revive us again!
Why don’t you go to workLike other men do?How can we work when there’s no work to do?Hallelujah, on the bum!Hallelujah, bum again!Hallelujah! Give us a hand-outTo revive us again!
Why don’t you go to work
Like other men do?
How can we work when there’s no work to do?
Hallelujah, on the bum!
Hallelujah, bum again!
Hallelujah! Give us a hand-out
To revive us again!
“You do look a real honest-to-God tramp this morning,” said I in the language of the country, “with your corduroys burst out at the knees, old red handkerchief round your neck, and devil-may-care look in your eyes.”
We reached the top of a mountain where there was a perfect “cyclorama,” as he called it, and he balanced on his toes, and half closed his eyes in his half upturned face, and turned round and about like a teetotum. Last time I had seen him do this was on the carpet of a London drawing-room in Queen Anne’s Gate to the strains of “Let Samson be a-coming in to your mind.”
This mountain was our firstne plus ultra, for having got to the top of it there was only one thing to do, and that was to go down again. Lindsay tested the echoes from it with “Rah for Bryan!” apparently his favourite war-cry, and then as if in response a slim Indian youth on horseback appeared and seemed much amused by us. He was very red and swarthy, with bright teeth, and rode his horse as if he and it made one. He told us he knew all the mountains and had been to the top of every one except Rising Wolf, which had never been climbed by any one. “It is called ‘Wolf gets up’ in our language,” he explained, and pointed to its snarling and menacing mass upstarting through clouds. “A storm comes from the mountain,” said he in warning, and passed on.He passed and we remained, and we saw no other human being the whole day.
“Just think of the children these flowers would amuse,” said Lindsay. “Millions of flowers—and the only human being we see is an Indian. I’d like to write a song on it.”
Butthe poetic mood passed. Thunderclouds rose in spectral peaks behind the mountains. Mount Helen grew dark and dreadful, and four phantasmal Mount Helens appeared behind her, the first of white mist, the second of lead, the third of streaming cloud, the fourth of shadow. Rising Wolf entered heaven; a howling, gathering, tumultuous wind roared over all the pines of the valleys and lightning like the glint of an eye traversed the ravine. Clouds swept forward to embrace us and indeed overtook us and soaked us while we sat together on a downward slide and sheltered under a blanket.
The storm passed, but we got drenched to our necks as we walked through dense undergrowth downward to a strikingly prominent clump of gigantic pines which from aloft we had chosen as harbourage for the night. These lifted their fine forms from immemorial heaps ofold pine mould, soft and brown and porous. There was a stream near them and we lit a great fire by the water’s edge and hung out a line to dry blankets, coats, pants, socks, and all we possessed.
The heat flew up in armfuls of smoke, in showers of sparks, up to our sagging shirts and heavy blankets. Sparks in hundreds lighted on them, and went out or burned small holes. We walked about like savages the while, wresting dead wood to build ever higher the fire. I pulled down a branch with a tree-wasp’s nest upon it, and brought a cloud of wasps after our bodies, and I paid the penalty in a sting. Thus, however, we dried everything, and we were able at last to make a dry bed in a wet place. But rain came on again at night, and in the intense darkness under the giant pines we lay and heard it, and slept, and then waked to hear it again.
If it rains in the town and if you get caught in the rainAnd soaked to the bone—ah what a calamity!You must have a hot bath, and take some hot toddy;You must swallow an aspirin and sleep under blankets,Whilst your clothes on two chairs by the fire will be drying;You must put on dry clothes in the morning.It’s different in the mountains,You can sleep wet and wake wet,And dry when the weather gets drier,That’s more fun: try it.
If it rains in the town and if you get caught in the rainAnd soaked to the bone—ah what a calamity!You must have a hot bath, and take some hot toddy;You must swallow an aspirin and sleep under blankets,Whilst your clothes on two chairs by the fire will be drying;You must put on dry clothes in the morning.It’s different in the mountains,You can sleep wet and wake wet,And dry when the weather gets drier,That’s more fun: try it.
If it rains in the town and if you get caught in the rain
And soaked to the bone—ah what a calamity!
You must have a hot bath, and take some hot toddy;
You must swallow an aspirin and sleep under blankets,
Whilst your clothes on two chairs by the fire will be drying;
You must put on dry clothes in the morning.
It’s different in the mountains,
You can sleep wet and wake wet,
And dry when the weather gets drier,
That’s more fun: try it.