SO FOR US HE MADE GREAT MEDICINEXXVIII. JOHNNY APPLESEED
SO FOR US HE MADE GREAT MEDICINE
I builta fire by the roadside opposite the palatial hotel and made our coffee. “It’s like lighting a fire and making yourself a personal cup of coffee on Broadway,” said Lindsay, “but it’s fine.” It’s a dramatic act and startles the imagination. The coffee-pot could be made the emblem of revolt—“Go West, young man, with a coffee-pot. You can live on nothing a year with a coffee-pot. Figure it out, how little money you need to live in the wilds!”
Vachel is all for giving the business man and clerk and industrial worker a three-months’ vacation. “They don’t work in these summer months anyway,” says he. “But they are afraid of being reproached if they take long holidays. Every man here, be he a millionaire or a poor man, works. He has an office, he has a factory. If he hasn’t these, he invents them. He believes it is effeminate to take more than two weeks’ holiday. For a month’s holiday he must have the recommendation of his physician. Otherwise he loses caste and may be called a ‘lounge lizard,’ which is one of the terms of abuse which sting most. On the other hand, modern work becomes every-day more sedentary, more mechanical. In accountancy figures become more exclusive, in the workshop automatic machinery becomes more and more perfect. It dulls and enthralls the mind.”
“Yet how easy it is to get out and do what we are doing!” I urged in agreement.
“Go, give them a message,” cried the poet.
“Intelligentsia of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. Young men and women, get free, get your coffee-pots, takeup the national parks and the free lands of the West!”
“I have an idea that most of the tramps and vagabonds of our country-sides have had lives full of poetry. The men who are dismissed as eccentrics were often mystics. America has not liked its Thoreaus and its Chapmans.... Johnny Appleseed, for instance, who was an American St. Francis, has been generally laughed at as a sort of a harmless lunatic.”
We talked of this on the upward trail next day. One point in favour of the hotel had been its good supply of canvas trousers. I bought myself a pair, and was thereby saved the reproach of looking a little like Johnny Appleseed in the matter of my attire. I laughed at Johnny for having worn a tin can on his head for a hat, and Vachel was at pains to defend him even there. But the poetry of his life was his going ahead of the pioneers of Ohio and Indiana, and planting apple-orchards and tending them and watching them grow for the America that should come after him. I often wonder whether the large red-gleaming Ohio apples of to-day do not come from him. I’ve stolen them and munched them at dawn,as I tramped to the West, and I can testify how good they were—good medicine.
“And so for us he made great medicine,” says the poet reverently, quoting his own new poem.
Vachel in his quest for beauty was regarded by many as a crank, an eccentric. He endured the humiliation of being village-idiot, or, as they call it in the Middle West, “town-boob.” Awfully silly people who thought themselves smart would stop in front of him with the air of a Johnny Walker whisky advertisement and ask him quizzically if he were “still going strong.” He was discovered later, and hailed and acclaimed by the poets of America and England, but even then the dulled folk of business and politics looked doubtfully upon him. He told me, for instance, how a celebrated impresario introduced him to the notables of the capital, but always with the formula—
“I want to introduce you to Mr. Vachel Lindsay of Springfield, Illinois.... He is a pp—oet.”
So there’s a streak of sadness somewhere in the poet’s mind, and it comes from brother-man.And that sadness has expressed itself in a love of Johnny Appleseed and all others whom the Spirit drives into the wilderness.
Wecamped then under an overhanging crag of Mt. Justinian and watched the moon, half eclipsed by a cliff, creep and crawl like a golden turtle over the mountains, over the mighty tops, over the ... over the world, whilst bright silver cloudlets in ball-robes danced lightly amongst the stars. And we climbed next day by twenty-four zigzags to the jagged summit, and rested in a grand snow-cavern as large as a church, made by the winds and the drifts in dread mid-winter, and we saw the clouds blow off the glaciers like washing-day steam out of a kitchen door. The poet lifted his mighty voice to the rocks, and they sent a kindred answer back to him. He called the snow-cavern Brand’s Church, and it was a strange and thrilling place in which to abide.
They call the ridge of the mountain the “Garden Wall,” but it is not very felicitously named. But it is wall-like. It is like an enormous exaggeration of the Roman wall built to keep out the Picts and Scots fromEngland, but it is a rampart against the Martians rather than against man.
We came at last to a joyous company in an old-fashioned inn, and made happy acquaintance with a band of hikers and sportsmen and mountaineers. Girls with riding-switches in their hands were dancing with one another, and a tall dark striking one whom I called the Spaniard chummed in with us and brought her friend and made Vachel promise to recite. We had a mountain-climbers’ supper, and when this was cleared away the bears came down the mountain toward us for the leavings, and watched us eagerly and ate the sweets we threw them, and when the bears were gone we built a huge bonfire and sat around and watched the sparks fly upward, and told stories and chaffed one another. And Vachel talked to us all of the virtue of the West and read to us his poem of the hour—the story of Johnny Appleseed, who in the days of President Washington made for us all—great medicine.
Thackeray advised us—How to live on nothing a year.“Take a nice little house in Mayfair;Order everything and pay nothing.”We can go one better than that.Take over the Rocky MountainsAs your personal estate;Everything arranged for you in advance,Complete freedom of mind,And no bills.When the little game in Mayfair is played outAnd you are clearly on the rocks,Be sweet about it,Leave your friends a card,Tell them you’ve been advised a change of scene.You’re on the Rockies.
Thackeray advised us—How to live on nothing a year.“Take a nice little house in Mayfair;Order everything and pay nothing.”We can go one better than that.Take over the Rocky MountainsAs your personal estate;Everything arranged for you in advance,Complete freedom of mind,And no bills.When the little game in Mayfair is played outAnd you are clearly on the rocks,Be sweet about it,Leave your friends a card,Tell them you’ve been advised a change of scene.You’re on the Rockies.
Thackeray advised us—
How to live on nothing a year.
“Take a nice little house in Mayfair;
Order everything and pay nothing.”
We can go one better than that.
Take over the Rocky Mountains
As your personal estate;
Everything arranged for you in advance,
Complete freedom of mind,
And no bills.
When the little game in Mayfair is played out
And you are clearly on the rocks,
Be sweet about it,
Leave your friends a card,
Tell them you’ve been advised a change of scene.
You’re on the Rockies.