Redwood Canyon

I WAS weary from toiling all day long over the sharp ridges which border the south fork of the King’s River, and uncertain of my way, when I came by chance into the sequoia forest of Redwood Canyon. The air was only dimly luminous beneath the vast red columns of the trees, but through the gloom I could see bright bars of sunset sky, and hurrying onward among the great trunks I came to a tiny meadow between their knees, bright with grass and white violets. At the farther end, two sequoias met in the sky to make an arch through which the eye ranged in purple sunset air to nameless peaks and snow-clad cliffs of the high Sierras. I dropped my pack and scrambled up a fallen sequoia which stretched like a wall across the meadow.

Sitting there, listening to the distant wind among the high plumes of the sequoias and the quail fluting mournfully in the manzanita, I felt an almost personal regret that Audubon and Thoreau, those lovers of American woods, had never seen this great forest. And Wordsworth, what would he have made of it? When his spirit was still fiery, he might have put Redwood Canyon into words! By moonlight, the shimmering stream bathing the feet of that ancient company of giants, the meadow gleaming softly, — by moonlight, Keats would have caught the magic, for in this California forest there is the beauty of proportion, the easy grace, the classic touch which he could turn into romantic verse. Coleridge’s imagination was too fantastic for such a scene. Tennyson would have made of it an English park. Milton might have given these lofty shades to his fallen angels for their high discourse on

Certainly the vast trunks that glowed now intensely red in the evening sunlight, were companions more fitting for a Satan as tall as a mast and thunder-scarred, than for a mere manling, whose tiny form was lost in their shadow, who shivered and lit his pipe, glad of the little circle cast by the friendly blaze of the match.

How should the poet give life to this American forest? Dryads, nymphs, Bacchus and Artemis, are too tiny, too slight for its great spaces; elves and gnomes too grotesque. I do not know what mythology we may use for the Sierras; and yet, like all stirring scenery, it calls for some kind of anthropomorphism to interpret the human imprisoned in its beauty. There must be some spiritualizing of the natural forces at work there; some play of the imagination over the powerful trees and the stubborn mountains, before they can enter into our life like the English country, or the Alps, or the headlands and fountains of Greece. But, great God, — to quote from Wordsworth’s sonnet, —I’d rather see a dozen poetlings fill these magnificent vistas with inappropriate figures from outworn faiths, than find — as now in the tourist groves — the names of local celebrities tacked to the knees of each noble redwood.

Our poets of American nature have lacked vigor for the task. Our sweet singers of nature were left behind, like piping seabirds on the sands, when the last great tide of the romantic movement swung outward. It would be well for many of them if they could be purged and strengthened in Redwood Canyon. For here one cannot be content to pipe; one cannot blink the immensity of the world or the scope and sweep of nature’s plan. The work of wind and water and heat is clear; the great trees grow by law where moisture lets them; their seeds die on in the slopes which the swing of the earth or the sun has made sterile for their kind. In the placid home country of the lowlands, or in the hacked and brush-grown forests of the East, the imagination is easily dulled or frozen by realizing that the cliff is only worn calcium carbonate, and the tree a compound hydrocarbon. Here one comprehends without disillusionment the immutable laws of matter. Here the symbolic beauty of the great trees carries the thought into further speculation; drives it from the petty sentimentality of the mere nature enthusiast into serene breadth. A French decadent would write verse as noble as beautiful in the Sierras — if indeed he could write at all. A magazine poet of the undergrowth would rise above sentiment and egoism. A scientist would reach beyond facts into beauty, as is proven by the work of such pioneers in these splendid mountains as John Muir and the geologist Clarence King.

It is not easy for us to feel the quivering mystery, the immanent spirit of the world in nature, as Wordsworth felt it. The whole of nineteenth-century science lies between his day and ours; and though we have rejected the easy solutions of materialism, we are more likely to analyze than to worship. We know far more of the force which built his mountains, dug his lakes, and made his cowslip. We know too much for easy wonder. We know too little to pass easily beyond the consciousness of mechanism in the waterfall, of chemistry in the plant, and slavish reaction in the animal, to a contemplation of the mysterious power behind or an application of the symbolic beauty of the result. Forests where Wordsworth found the mood

where he felt

such forests must first appear to us as mere coteries of cell-forms each following inevitable laws of growth, inevitably conditioned by heredity and environment. And by the time we have traced out the natural causes which make one cliff vertical and another sloping, or which determine the location of pine and cedar, cactus and wild rose, the mind is weary and the mood of wonder and spiritual refreshment may escape.

This mood of disillusionment, — so I thought as I sat on the ledge and looked down through the temple aisles where the great sequoia trunks glowed in the forest twilight, — this modern disillusionment should be brought to the Sierra forest. Redwood Canyon is medicine for minds sick of tracing cause and effect. We moderns who have seen nature go into the laboratory and come out in elements, who know the history of the world for a million years, and can explain the shape of that godlike peak by the action of water and fire, or repeat the formation of the river-bed below in a box of sand, — we find the sense of the sublime elusive; for us the burthen of the mystery is in the text-books we have to study. The world has become a picture puzzle. When we have put together the few pieces that science has given us, we are often too pleased with our success to be impressed by the result. We seem to need an excess of natural beauty, if any real exaltation is to follow. We need trees far larger, far more graceful than the hemlocks which thrilled us as boys. We need vast cliffs and dazzling peaks. We need such triumphs of nature as this Redwood Canyon, which has been maturing for five centuries, and has reached its ripest beauty just as we are craving a stronger stimulus lest our sense of the wonder of the world be submerged in a puny knowledge of the cogs and cranks of the great machine.

As I sat on the great log, my mind freed itself from the dullness of routine labor, rose above analysis, and triumphed in the beauty of Redwood Canyon. A young sequoia soared gracefully before me, and flung its great arms proudly into the high air; the forest floor glowed with flowers; the thrushes sang more loudly in the wild lilacs; and a flight of little birds swung through the last sunshine above the dreamy meadow, curved upwards, and shot out into the space above the great valley of the King’s.

Redwood Canyon, so they tell me, is utterly destroyed. This spring the lumbering railroad was pushed around the headlands of the greater canyon of the King’s River and reached its foot. Saw and axe have fallen upon its trees; the redwoods have crashed down, smashing the forest and themselves; the vast logs, hauled by a screeching donkey engine, have ripped and torn the undergrowth to ruin; the meadow is a desolate pile of bleaching, broken lumber; the stream has spread out in slimy mud; the canyon walls are scarred and channeled deserts; the flowers are dead, the birds gone. Where the arch looked outward over the deep King’s valley, the slovenly shacks of the lumber crew surround a pile of tin cans and dry-goods boxes. Redwood Canyon is an ugly scar on the face of the Sierras.

A thousand years will not remake this little canyon. Was it wise to destroy it? I followed last year the logs from an earlier onslaught upon a less beautiful valley, down into the lowlands. At $30 a thousand feet they were building houses, shingling roofs, doing a hundred useful things for the multitudes crowding in on the Pacific Coast. Each thousand-year sequoia toppled from its twenty-foot stump helped to make prosperity for swarming towns whose population doubles each decade. Hundreds of thousands of feet of fine timber came from that lumbering,—all marketable, all needed, all used in making the world more comfortable. Our forestry service, whose duty it is to conserve our resources of timber, would have approved of the turning of those ripe trees into commodities for man’s use, although they might well have deplored the wasteful methods of the lumber-men. Was the devastation of Redwood Canyon, then, expedient, necessary, inevitable?

I try to put out of my memory the solemn glories of the Canyon forest, and to forget the clear blue air of the Sierra washing through the sequoia arch and rippling over the deep meadow grass, so that I may consider fairly the ruin of this mountain garden. It was a great cutting, in which hundreds of Greeks and Slavs earned their three dollars daily through a long summer. It was a plenteous river of rich red boards sent flowing down the mountain flumes; dividends for a few, roofs and walls for many. The total results will look well in the pamphlets advertising Fresno County next year; and they mean that a good round sum has been drawn from nature, the earth’s savings-bank, and put to active work. For each forest cut down, for each river dammed, for each wild valley ploughed, the population can increase or live more easily. An economist might reckon a sequoia grove in terms of children, one baby more allowed for each tree turned into timber and then into cash; or a redwood valley as equal to a new village in the lowlands. He would scarcely exaggerate. You can see the little towns clustering north and south along the great forest belt of the Sierras, sucking on its fatness; and they get but the first runnings, — the bulk of the nourishment goes on below, and east and west as far as Australia. We cannot eat our forest and have it too. We cannot make the world more comfortable without hacking and hewing; and the swarming multitudes pouring over the railroad passes (and soon through the Canal) must be sheltered, must have materials with which to work. Only the sentimentalist fails to approve the sacrifice of dead beauty for the vital needs of humanity. But was the beauty of Redwood Canyon dead, incapable of active good; is redwood timber at $30 a thousand one of humanity’s vital needs?

I think that the ruin of this little canyon was a tragedy, — slight in itself perhaps, but great in its significance. I am radical (or conservative) enough to deny that there is anything great, or godlike, or even intrinsically useful in the increase of population. The ‘doubling each decade’ of the census-rolls of the coast cities seems to me just as important or as unimportant as the decline in the French birth-rate. It all depends upon the results. To make two blades of grass grow where one grew before, is surely no achievement unless the grass is good grass. Undoubtedly they are striving to raise the quality as well as the quantity of the population in the West; striving harder, it appears, than in the East, or in much of Europe. But did the death of Redwood Canyon help them? You can knock out the stained-glass windows of a cathedral, and thereby get more light; or dig out the gravel bottom from a garden pool, so that it will hold more water. But is the result worth the sacrifice?

The case of Redwood Canyon is typical. Its loss is the loss of one more resource of inspiration and idealism, swept away by the rising tide of vulgar needs. I laud, I praise democracy. I see, as every man must, that the many must be vulgar in the good old sense of the word, must delight in the common things before the uncommon. And yet, what will become of democracy if all our Redwood Canyons are destroyed in making it? How shall its average be raised if we vulgarize all art, all literature, all religion, all thought, and even all nature, until the round world contains nothing popular but mediocrity? Whence will come the salt to savor it? Will an overpopulated world be worth the gain, and the loss?

The dreamers who see visions by day and night of doubled incomes, boosted towns, and jumping census-rolls, are a menace to America. They dream that a big city is better than a small one; that ten people with a million dollars each are happier and more useful than one; and they cut, burn, dig, level,— and occasionally cheat and lie,—in the pursuit of a fallacious ideal. But the practical man considers that it is easier to breed and support ten men than to make one good member of society. He realizes that a love of nature, or a sense of humor, or a taste for reading, or merely a knowledge of the difference between what is worth while in this life and what is not,—all have a determinable value. An old house in a Connecticut town preserving the standards of a more tasteful generation, is an asset. When it is wrecked to make room for a moving-picture theatre, he figures up the losses. When the fields beside the railroad lines begin to be choked with banal sign-boards, he figures up the losses. When America seeks quantity instead of quality, he cannot fail to figure up the losses.

The practical man wants, not more brute life swarming on the globe, but a life better worth living. He would have seen that the meadow garden beneath its thousand-year sequoias had a cash value in terms of rest and inspiration for the finer minds who think and feel for the democracy. He would have seen the power it had to touch the hearts and lift the thoughts of the campers swarming up in summer from the hot plains; simple folks,—farmers, mechanics, clerks, — the vanguard of democracy, seeking relief from routine, seeking without knowing it an escape from mediocrity. All this he would have weighed against the net returns of capitalist, retailer, and ultimate consumer of redwood timber,—and his conclusions would have come rapidly.

It was an economic error to cut down the trees of Redwood Canyon, since it is always an error to destroy great ultimate values for smaller immediate gains. A more imaginative race than ours would have fancied strange shapes of ancient grandeur hovering over the broken trunks of that forest; and shimmering spirits darting like frightened birds from the flowers of the torn meadow. But the practical American should be sufficiently moved by still another instance of beauty turned to ugliness without due returns to the race; another pattern shattered which cannot be replaced; another reservoir of inspiration emptied uselessly in a night. Lavish, wealthy America is still too poor for such extravagance.