The Magical Chance

‘LIFE offered him the magical human chance and he took it. There was something in him for which the decorous and conventional life of Boston allowed no place in its scheme. Two years Before the Mast belongs to the Literature of Escape.’

Is there any such literature nowadays? any escape? The magical chance was offered Dana far back in 1834, when escape was possible, and when, besides, he was a boy. This is the year 1917, and I would know if there are still such chances in Life’s hand?

It was a young world a hundred years ago, and full of adventure. One could escape then because there was some place to escape into, but to round the Horn from Boston now is to land at San Francisco, a much more conventional city. East and West have kissed each other and exchanged cards. There are chances, of course, both there and here — decorous, censored chances to bathe in the surf and motor and sail through the Panama Canal; but where does Life offer us a magical chance?

About the time that Dana was escaping from Boston, Thoreau tried to escape from Concord. Instead of a brig around the Horn, he took a rowboat up the Merrimac River, and after a whole week of rowing, complains of finding no frontiers that way any longer. ‘This generation,’he cries, ‘has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.’ (He had reached Concord, N.H.) ‘We cannot have the pleasure of erecting the last house; that was long ago set up in the suburbs oF Astoria City, and our boundaries have literally been run to the South Sea, according to the old patents.’

Born in 1817, a hundred years ago, and still fatally late. What of my own coming into the world? and yours, my son?

but you and I have missed an early glory that hath passed forever from the earth. Out of my window I can see a low-lying meadow, a grove of pines, and a winding gleaming stream, but only common June sunlight over them, the celestial light that of yore was their apparel having faded back in Wordsworth’s day, as the frontier disappeared in Thoreau’s. Instead of frontiers we come to barbed-wire fences; and if we row out of Concord, Massachusetts, we row into Concord, New Hampshire — between such tame ‘villantic’ places have our lines fallen!

It was about ten years after Thoreau’s too tame row up the Merrimac, however, that gold was discovered in California. Here was a magical chance as late as '49. But there are no more Outcasts in Poker Flat. Yet was it not about fifty years after this that they struck gold again on the Yukon, and another magical chance? True, but all of that is past and gone. Nothing of real chance and adventure has happened since — at least, not since Peary reached the North Pole, except, indeed, the finding of the South Pole, one of the greatest adventures of the world. There are only two poles, however, and flags now fly from both, and from every terrestrial spot between — over Mount McKinley, over the River of Doubt, so that we are stopped from singing, —

There is nothing now to cross. The frontiers are neither this way nor that. We have been born fatally late.

The earth’s crust is cooling and thickening steadily, and so is the crust of circumstance and convention that has hardened about us. City and suburb spread over the early frontiers, and adventure finds no place in the valleys that are exalted, on the mountains that are brought low, in the crooked places that are straightened, and the rough places being made smooth with macadam. A magical human chance used to mean doing something, going somewhere, escaping. It has come to be something of an adventure to stay at home.

Why is there less magic in a highpowered automobile on the Lincoln Highway than there was in Dana’s little brig, the Pilgrim, close-hauled on the wind? Why should this new motoring story, Two Million Miles Behind the Steering Wheel, strike one as dull compared with Two Years Before the Mast? I have never read an interesting automobile story. They all emphasize the miles, mere miles, — miles per hour, miles per gallon, miles per tire, — a stupid and unconvincing theme. I doubt if there ever can be so good a motor story as Dana’s sea story; perhaps never another sea story so good either. For Mr. John Masefield, poet and sailor, says that romance has now been driven from the sea; that the Ship of Dreams is gone; that you may haunt the wharves in these piping times of steam, —

which makes me thank heaven for my farm, where the same old romantic hoe remains about what it ever was.

Mr. Masefield is our contemporary, and his observations are dated 1912. Prior to that year real clipper-ships rode the deep, and real romance. There is no romance in a tramp steamer, in a whalebaek oiler, or in a submarine. It was prior to 1839 that there were real frontiers and romance in the land, and a last house (a government lighthouse) still to be set up in the suburbs of Astoria City. Going a little further back, we find that prior to 1491 (B.C.), about the year 4000 according to the margin of the King James Version, there were giants in the earth, and the stories in the Book of Genesis show that there were romances as well as giants in those days. But, like Thoreau and Masefield, the author had been born fatally late. A goat-herd to his father-in-law, on the back side of the desert (a sterile locality for romance), he was slow of speech, without prospects or imagination, and quite out of humor with a call to go to Egypt. He would stay on the back side of the desert and dream of the good old days of the giants, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth; when the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair. There was something doing in those days.

From Moses to Masefield the times have been fatally late. Mine must be, too, with the clipper-ships, frontiers, giants, and daughters of men that are fair all gone. Yet I seem to see them fair, but ought not, I suppose, my times being so late. Are there no more giants then, no more magical chances? Am I never to escape — from Hingham?

Lumber is still brought in boats to one of Hingham’s old wharves, but the rest of her wharves are deserted, and her citizens, who used to do business in great waters, stop now in Hingham Harbor to catch smelts. Change and some decay one can see all about Hingham, but little chance of escape; for, coming or going, where is the frontier from Mullein Hill? Down at the foot of the hill runs a long, long road. I have traveled it as far as Philadelphia, going south, and could have gone farther, for there was no frontier out of Philadelphia: the next stop was Chester. I have traveled it as far as Skowhegan, going east, without finding, except where the steam-roller was at work, that there was any end, any chance to get off; you can keep on going after you leave Skowhegan. It runs on; it runs back as well, and off to the side, everywhere, every way, clear down the Cape to Provincetown, for this road was the ancient trail between Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts Bay Colony, which now reaches to Aroostook and beyond; and over to the Imperial Valley and beyond; and circling the Everglades, climbs up Pike’s Peak and down, and on and on — never finding the frontier.

This is an age of roads, and the day of good roads. Whoever is not building a road is building or buying a machine to travel over a road, or is already traveling. The mechanics for going have been refined far beyond those for staying; but going, even ‘good going,’ is not escaping, our National Good Roads Congresses notwithstanding. We already have more good roads to travel than good places to travel to, or good reasons for traveling. Good roads are needed to cart potatoes over. Who buys a super-six automobile to haul potatoes in? Macadam is for commerce. Romance must needs get stuck in a rut.

New ones, not good ones, are the roads of adventure and the magical chance of escape. Pathfinding, however, came to an end with the last, frontier, and now we know by finger-board and odometer, to the tenth of the mile, just where we are: how far from Rome, or Butte, or the next Socony station. If there is any pathfinding left for us it is to find a road that has no Socony station; and if there is left us a single magical chance of escape it will be the chance, I think, of running out of ‘gas.’

The frontier is gone, and the scalping Indian, the buffalo herd, the overland stage. ‘Hank’ Monks is gone. This most famous of stage drivers on the Great Divide sleeps in Carson City, his Concord coach of split hickory sleeping with him, for Concord town has ceased to make such coaches. From Hell Gate to Golden Gate overland there are only miles now, and so few of them that any three-hundred-andsixty-dollar automobile makes a holiday of the trip. A young acquaintance of mine, driving her own car, has just made the coast-to-coast run, and had only three punctures to break the cushioned tenor of the way. It was pretty monotonous, she said, though there was much to see — one of Mr. Luther Burbank’s ‘spineless cacti creations’ for instance; and another thing that interested and somewhat puzzled her: a petition, circulated by the native Arizonians, asking Congress to preserve for them and posterity a portion of their original desert.

Moses saw the giants pass away, Thoreau, the frontier; Masefield the clipper-ship; but it remained for us to see the irrigation ditch wipe out the Great American Desert — and with it the gila monster and the need of a shovel on the trip across the sands.

Is it that we have eaten of the Casaba and gone melon-mad? To make the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose, and bring forth Casaba melons and alligator pears and spineless cacti, is to breed the prick from life, is to rob it of its adventure, and to exchange a fierce wild beauty in the mesa for a conventional beauty from the greenhouse. Ploughing the desert, turning the giant cacti into ensilage, as if to live were a silo — for fear of this the Arizonians are asking that a portion of the native desert and of life’s romance be saved to them. And well they may; for who would take the oiled road across the desert if he could have the sand? Is it all of life to get through to San Diego on time? I had rather leave my bones to bleach beneath a mesquite bush than travel on and on by schedule, always making life’s connections, and so missing always life’s magical chances.

I am not going to miss many such chances. My very watches — I have three of them — know the adventure in being ahead or behind time; and the three clocks that I wind usually on Sunday run like lovers, too, or laggards, interesting individuals, eccentric, sentient things, that keep their own time, as we all should.

And he was the only scholar in the school who inspired a poem. Failing to connect would make a bad philosophy; yet I know by all experience that there is no escape, in the larger sense, for him who is on time.

The desert is doomed, no doubt, but we shall always have détours; and if ‘on the surface of things men have been there before us,’ we must go beneath. There are giants still in these days; the daughters of men are still fair; there are frontiers for those who will find them; and clipper-ships or no, I believe in the everlasting adventure of rounding the Horn. I believe in magical chances of escape, born though I was after my parents, which might have been fatally late had I not happily come before my children, each of whom is an adventure and an escape. Wherever I turn I see a chance to sidestep the decorous, the conventional. the scheduled, to dodge into the bushes and escape. Every day is an adventure if you will take it; as there is humor in most things if you can see it. Humor is a matter of point of view. Lincoln saw humor everywhere, — in a man spading his garden, in a clothes-line full of clothes, — in everything and anything. ‘A point of view’ — that is all. No one ever washed and hung comedy on one’s own clothes-line. One’s own wash out is tragedy. Now romance is not, like humor, an angle of vision, so much as the color of things; not their shape but their complexion; not a matter of position but of participation. You have your adventure, as Thoreau had in building his house on Walden Pond; but when some one else set up the last house beyond Astoria City it became, for Thoreau, a prison-house to Romance.

What Thoreau should have done was to take a wife out to that last house in Astoria City; for when there are no more houses to be set up, there will be plenty of wives to be had, and the romance of housebuilding is tame compared with the adventure of housekeeping. This last house was set up more than seventy-five years ago on the Oregon coast, but in Boston last year were filed 10,033 marriage intentions, notwithstanding the 9942 of the year before. What is adventure — to make the crane or hang it? Suburban house-lots are scarce in Massachusetts, even in the country parts, like Pride’s Crossing and Manchesterby-the-Sea; yet here are 20,066 adventurers seizing upon Life’s magical human chance in the Old Bay State for 1916 — an actual increase of 182 over the record of the previous banner year.

There are magical human chances to go round, there is adventure and escape for everybody who will seize it. Youth is as young, the world as round, the earth as wild as ever it was, in spite of all our inbreedings; and, in spite of all those who have grown old, it is still appareled in celestial light, — sunlight, starlight, moonlight, — or else wrapped in ancient and adventurous dark. Life with the earth goes round, not forward, except to complete a circuit established when the stars were fixed, an orbit that all the forces of Heaven and human intelligence have been unable to warp. The only variation or shadow of new turning Earth herself can look forward to is from collision with some mad comet, which, if she lasts long enough, may happen possibly within 15,000,000 years, — a square head-on smash it may be, or only a side-swipe with a severe shaking up, — and then 15,000,000 years more of steady turning. Things outside are rather hard and fast despite appearances, and we who are parts of this even scheme, we find that our uprisings and downsittings have never varied much from rule, nor are liable to.

We are what we always were, and so are things what they always were, though they look different. We have changed the spots of a few leopards, the skins of a few Ethiopians, and shifted the frontier from the dark wild heart of the forest to the wild dark heart of the city; but we have not changed the darkness, or the wildness, or the Ethiopian, or the leopard.

If you do not find your fill of adventure with Davy Balfour in Appin, come down with him to Dean — to Edinburgh, and you shall see the face of such danger ‘in the midst of what they call the safety of a town ’ as may shake you too ‘beyond experience.'

If you don’t find the frontier in the daylight, wait for the dark. Every night is a fresh frontier. There are no landmarks of the day but are blotted out by the dark as the lines are sponged in the wake of a steamer’s keel. On the shortest night of this year wild rabbits were in my garden, fox-hounds were baying beyond the quarries, and through the thin early mist of the dawn we were all at the window watching a wild doe behind the barn. She nipped the clover nervously, twitched her tail, pricked her ears (for the day was approaching), and took the high wire fence at a bound. She was as wild and free as the wind.

The sun still knoweth his going down; and the wild heart of things still watches and waits. The circus lion obeys the whip, chokes back the roar in his throat and the savage rage in his heart, for fear — and waits. What else is civilization but putting the caged lion through his tricks?

‘Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.

‘The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.

‘The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens.

‘Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.’

Until the evening? and then what ? The magic, the chance of escape in the end of the day, the end of the cage with its open door into the dark.

I have seen the evening come over the city, a night deep with darkness and wild with a great storm blowing salty from the sea. I have watched the streets grow empty till the shadow feet of Midnight echoed as they passed, and all the doors were shut. Then I have crept down along the dark wet ways that were bleak and steep-cut as cliffs, where I have heard the beating of great wings above the roofs, the call of wild shrill voices along the craggy covings, and the wash and splash of driving rains aslant the walls; I have tasted brine, spume, and spindrift on the level winds, flying through a city’s streets from far at sea, — ‘one-way’ streets by day, and so crowded that traffic could barely move in the one direction; but here — in the hushed tumult of the storm and night—I could hear the stones crying out of their walls, and the beams out of the timbers answering them; the very cobbles of the pavement having souls that could not be squared by the chisel, and tongues that would speak when the din of the pounding hoofs was past.

The wild frontier, like the hunted fox, has doubled on its trail. Romance has slipped out of the woods into the deeper places of the city; Adventure has turned commuter; and here are the three to companion life, as they ever have — the Athos, Porthos, and Aramis to a bebundled D’Artagnan. And already it is more than ‘Twenty Years Since.’

Twenty years, or a hundred years,—

Some one complained to Browning that Italy is the only land of romance now left tous. The poet answered promptly, ‘I should like to include dear old Camberwell.’ And I should like to include dear old Haleyville and dear old Hingham. And you would like to include dear old Wig Lane, if you were born there, and Jersey City, if that happens to be your living place. Life for the patriarch Abraham, from the time he left Ur of the Chaldees to the Citywith-Foundations, which he died seeking, was one long adventure. He was a hundred years old when Isaac was born, and a hundred and forty when he married Keturah! I left Haleyville at the age of eight and have only lately come to Hingham, but all the way from Haleyville to Hingham, as all the way from Hingham to Heaven, — let me hope, — there has been and shall be, held out in both of Life’s hands, the magical chance of escape.

The beasts of the forest creep from their dens at night and seek their meat from God; and so do the souls of men seek theirs of God — in love, and war, and Wall Street; in books, in art, and in the hoeing of their garden corn.

Those preachers imagine a vain thing who think we ever cease to sowwild oats (at least there is many a late crop, as Thackeray says). The truth is there are no oats but wild ones. The seed-catalogues for 1917 are advertising a ‘Regenerated Swedish Select Oat,’ but to read a seed-catalogue you would think that every seed and tuber, from artichoke to zinnia, had been to a revival since last summer and ‘hit the trail.’ Great revivalists are the seedsmen. Their work, however, is not permanent. For they know, and we know, that every regenerated Swedish select oat in their bins is a backslider at heart, as wild as the wild ass of the wilderness that scorneth the crying of the driver. The range of the mountains is his pastime — and yours and mine and every ‘improved’ regenerated seed’s of the gardener’s catalogue.

This spring I brought in from the garden a frozen lump of earth, a bit of some regenerated improved soil that I had been subduing for years: that. I had sweetened with lime, had fed with nitrogen and potash, and planted with nothing but improved, regenerated, select seeds from catalogues. I put this lump of soil in a pot by a south window and tenderly planted more regenerated select seeds within its breast — tomato seeds, the Jewel, Earliana, and Bonny Best. Then I looked that it should bring forth tomato plants, and it brought forth within the pot, at the end of two weeks, pig-weed, chickweed, smart-weed, white-weed, ragweed, knot-weed, tumble-weed, crabgrass, old witch-grass, foxtail grass, sheep sorrel, and purslane, besides some other unfamiliar things whose infant cotyledons seemed innocent enough, but whose roots I knew were evil.

Life offered that lump of mother earth its magical chance and the lump took it. The innate badness of it, this cared-for, chemically pure, subdued piece of garden soil! Its frozen heart was a very furnace of smouldering fires; its breast, that suckled the nursing salsify in the summer, a bed of such wild spores as would sow a world to weeds! If this is the fatty clod of the garden, what must be the spirit in the flaming care of creation? And in your care? and mine?

sings Watts with Augustine, with gusto too, and with great truth; though doctrinally on this head I hold with Socinus. But our question is not of original sin, it is rather of the original Adam, an ancienter question, with Adam in puris naturalibus, and with the ancestral domum superadditum which he passed down to us; and on this head I am a Darwinian, holding that our inheritance is from below, showing simian, and even remoter, lower leanings, that we were and are, of the earth, and full of weeds.

The heart of man is not less constant than a lump of earth. What it was, it is, and will be — wild, and ever seeking to escape the routine, the decorous and conventional of our subdued and ordered life. How constant the heart of nature is to itself one may see at Walden Pond. I was out at the pond recently and recalled that Thoreau wrote, ‘But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.’

But the many years have now passed, and had Thoreau been with me he would have found a cairn of stones for his cabin, and for bean-vines and the stumps of the woodchoppers, tall stranger trees, under which we had rambled down to catch a sight of the beloved face of Walden, calm and pure as when he last looked upon it.

‘ Why, here is Walden! ’ to quote what he once actually exclaimed; ‘the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lusty as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface as was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its maker, aye’ — And snatching his words away, I cry, ‘Aye, and it may be to me! ’

Change is constant, but it is the change of the ever-returning wheel. Thoreau’s little cabin is gone, and the great trees have come back as he said they would. Any day a new house may be built by the pond, and that too in time will crumble away, with not so much as a cairn of stones to mark where it stood. It will pass, and tall stranger trees will spread their roots within its cellar and cover the grave with shade.

So will the frontier come back. Pushed past the suburbs of Astoria City into the Pacific, it is seen crawling out on the sandy shores of Cape Cod with the next great storm. The single line of human footsteps across the polar snows has not left too packed and plain a trail. New snows have covered it, as new trees have shadowed the shores of Walden.

Peary’s footprints, and Dr. Cook’s, too, would be very hard to follow.

Von Baer’s Law is as true backward as forward. We not only develop, but revert, and we remain all that we ever were. We are not different from the rest of nature.

It was more than twenty-five years ago that I started from Savannah over the old stage road to Augusta, finding my way by faint uncertain blazings on the tree-trunks through a hundred and thirty-odd miles of swamp. They were solemn miles. Trees thicker than my body grew in the ruts where wheels had run; more than once the great diamond rattle-snake coiled in my path, chilling the silence of the river bottoms with his shivering whirr. Once I heard the gobble of the wild turkey and the scream of the bob-cat; and at night, while sleeping in an old abandoned church on the river bluff, I was awakened by the snuffling of a bear which had thrust its muzzle underneath the church door in the foot-worn hollow of the sill.

It was a lonesome place. A faint road led away from it off through the swamp; but aside from the gravestones near-by, there were no other human signs around. How long since human feet had crossed the threshold, I do not know.

The chintz altar-cloth that I tried to draw over me (the night was chill) crumbled at my touch. I had meant no desecration. I was very weary and had crept in through a window from the night and cold. A slow rain had settled down with the dusk, attended by darkness indescribably profound. And beneath the long-draped pines outside slept those whose feet had worn the threshold — slept undisturbed by the soughing of the wind, wrapped in the unutterable loneliness of the coiling river and the silent sombre swamp.

Yet here had passed a highway between two great cities just a few years earlier, before the railroad was built farther out through the state. Already the swamp and the river had taken the highway for their own, and from human foot given it again to adventure, to the gliding form, the swift wing, and the soft padded foot.

The giants of old, the frontiers and clipper-ships of old, are gone. Still, what is this news of fleets of wooden ships abuilding, with sails of canvas to speed them? They went out with the ebb tide, and here already they come back with the flood! Lay aside the rifle and you pick up the camera — to creep with it into the lion’s den; or to climb with it into the top of a towering oak, on some sheer mountain wall; and, pushing it before you along a horizontal limb, feet dangling in space, a stiff wind blowing, eagles screaming overhead, canyon wall below you, and far, far down the narrow canyon bottom, you hold on, body balancing camera, but nothing over against the swaying brain, and grind out a hundred feet of movie film. This is to shoot a good many lions.

The magical human chance? Life offers it us with both hands, and millions of men in the trenches are seizing it as a way of escape. There is plenty of old primordial war left yet. Its appearance is changed, that is all. Its pomp and circumstance have been reduced to shovel and overalls. Even the shouting and tumult is done as the sappers burrow into enemy trenches to fight with poison gas and club. But the story of it all reads more like Hell than ever, and must prove to be the substance of another Iliad,—

but what of blessings, I wonder, when another and a greater Homer shall seize the magical chance to sing it?

Life offers us all the chance of escape. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us; but beneath the surface we need go no deeper than our own hearts to find a frontier, and that adventurous something for which the decorous and conventional allows no place in its scheme.