I Take to the Woods
IT was, possibly, only yesterday by geologic time when the Sequoia forest began its definite existence — three hundred million years, at a guess. Two hundred million years ago it was well established and had fixed habits much as at present. Passing tightly over one hundred and ninety million years, ten million years ago the genus Homo perhaps began to take refuge in its branches.
In the days when Moses was a mountain climber, on a portion of the earth’s crust very nearly the antipodes of the Sinai Peninsula, — a region that was not to receive the name of California for some forty centuries, — a forest of sequoias stretched their green and glossy fingers into the shimmering Western sky. Already for an unimagined period, through summer and winter, cold and heat, seed time and harvest, day and night, it had pressed inch by inch into the firmament; ring by ring it had imperceptibly added to its girth.
Nineveh and Babylon, Rome and Carthage, Tyre and Jerusalem, rose and fell. Cyrus and Genghis Khan, Alexander, Julius Cæsar, and Napoleon conquered the world. Confucius and Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, swayed the realm of the spirit. Solomon and Socrates, Galileo and Darwin, produced the bitter and potent fruit of the thinking mind. Homer and Vergil and Dante and Shakespeare gave to the world of the imagination a local habitation. Pericles and Aspasia, Paolo and Francesca, Launcelot and Guinevere, counted the world well lost for the brief ecstasy of love.
The Sequoia forest, untroubled by the rise and fall of nations, unconscious of the sulphurous depths of passion and woe of the human spirit, unchanged by the cataclysmic changes in the world of human thought, mercifully untouched even by terrestrial cataclysms that overwhelmed many a mountain and plain, scattered its golden pollen in the spring, its ripened cones in the fall; sang its inimitable, dreamy song when the winds passed through it; entertained unimaginable generations of warbling birds, chattering squirrels, and rasping insects. Almost within sound of its ‘hushing,’ great civilizations came to maturity and sank into the soil — so deep that the youngest, even now, is inarticulate. Late, very late, in time, naked red men came stealing among its mighty trunks and wondered at their immensity. They had no tools even to scratch the surface of the forest.
Somewhere near the foundation of our subconscious structure lies the concept of the forest primeval. A species cannot live as an organic part of the forest, as ours undoubtedly did for an uncounted number of æons, without retaining, beneath the thickly encrusting and rapidly acquired veneer of sophistication, vestiges of that primordial existence.
Those rare individuals who annually, not with luxurious yacht or motor boat or complete automotive equipment, but with knapsack or pack pony or canoe, alone or with a kindred spirit, gleefully ' take to the woods ’ are paying tribute to this vestigial consciousness.
I
In the old days, before the railroad carried the fat and luxurious tourist to the top of Mount Mitchell, the highest point of the Appalachian system, we used to take off from Black Mountain station, the top of the grade on the Southern Railroad. We employed mules or knapsacks, according to temperament and taste, and plunged into the forest for a four or five days’ arduous tramp. From Black Mountain to the top of Greybeard — a lovely mountain — was a frequently traveled portion of the route. Like Christian in the earlier and less arduous stages of his pilgrimage, we might have abundant and gracious companionship thus far. The trail, through open forest of chestnut and oak, maple and gum, tulip and beech, zigzagged easily at first to the right and left of a little stream that dashes downward on a much steeper grade. Presently, however, it left the stream abruptly and scrambled without due warning on to the backbone of the Blue Ridge itself, to which it clung more or less tenaciously for a good half of the journey.
From the summit of Greybeard, the first peak that lay in our way, was visible the first extensive panorama — a sea of mountain peaks. This often proved to be the most comprehensive view we obtained, for, although Greybeard was the lowest of the peaks to be scaled, it was freer from fog and cloud than any other. Pinnacle, the second peak, was a triangular prism, and on its summit one might accomplish the feat of being in three counties at once, by sitting in one and placing each of one’s feet in another, the three ridges of the peak being the county lines. The trail up Pinnacle, deep as an irrigating ditch, and equally supplied with water, clings in one’s mind as a mountain torrent. The trip to Mitchell was seldom accomplished in the summer time without encountering deluges — sometimes a continuous deluge — of rain.
Toe River Gap is the connecting link between the Blue Ridge and the Blacks, and, being nearly a halfway mark, was a favorite camping place. It gathers about itself memories of devastating rain that invaded clothing and provisions and made a camp fire well-nigh impossible. How beautiful the one that we once achieved — in the heart of a mighty stump, whose own substance, solid and dry beneath the surface, furnished the glowing base.
Potato Knob, the point of attack in the Blacks, has a tendency to produce seriousness of contemplation in both man and beast, and to arouse the suspicion that there is serious work as well as play in this enterprise. As we toil upward toward the summit of the Blacks, the woods grow denser. Hitherto they have been wild but cheerful woods — tossing seas of deciduous growth in summer luxuriance. Now they darken into the evergreen forest, dense and silent and black. Through it the trail runs, black as the forest, and worn deep as the channel of a brook. The Blacks have been wrapped in fog since yesterday. Now that we have gained their summit, all is hidden from view save the line of plodding pilgrims winding ever upward into the denser gloom, by the black and winding trail, through the black forest.
Hallback and Clingman’s and Mount Gibbs at length lie behind us, not without pain and sorrow, and testing of will and limb. Mitchell, our final goal, remains. We are in the balsam now, still black and sombre woods, but sweet, delicious balsam. The dark boughs weave a close roof overhead. The stems stand straight and bare. Beneath them lies the wreck of immemorial forest, — slender forms tossed every way, covered light and close with olive mosses, — uncounted species interwoven, light and fernlike, close and fine as velvet, vivid and brown, all harmonized into the tender olive coverlet. We had delighted in acres of fern on the lower slopes. Here, only an occasional tuft honors the moss, but, heavenly touch, white wood sorrel, like the stars of spring, pure and distinct and frail, smiles from every curve and hollow toward the sombre sky.
Weary and numb, oppressed by the gloom and the fog, touched by the tender beauty, the traveler yields himself to brooding fancy. What is this creeping spell? Surely we have walked this way before! Not in the flesh, but in the company of some master mind. With whom came we? With Dante? Is it a page from the Inferno that we are seeking to read? These prostrate forms are not the wreck of forest, but wraiths of those who, brought to the gates of Heaven, had no eyes with which to contemplate its glories, blinded by the beauties of the natural world. Condemned, they lie here in perpetual somnolence, with eyes forever closed upon the aspects of both earth and Heaven. Surely that great chest heaved, that mossy arm moved into more perfect rest. What is the spell — this pain and wonder born of beauty? Is it that we ourselves shall walk this way again? Shall we also, wanting in appreciation of the golden streets, be turned to wander here forever in groves of balsam and of tamarack, with eyes forever downcast on the sweet, fair things of earth — on white wood sorrel in the olive moss?
Happy the sinner who meets such retribution!
But here brays the traveler’s mule, trumpets his victory, and sets foot upon the summit.
As we revolve about the camp fire during the wakeful night, our old guide tells us the story of the naming of Mitchell’s Peak. Dr. Elisha Mitchell of the University of North Carolina was the first to declare it (then unnamed) the highest point of the Appalachian system. This statement being disputed, he returned to the mountain in June 1857, and, having left his less ambitious companions at the base of the peak, made the ascent, verified his measurements, and left his record of them on the summit. Thereafter he disappeared. During the next month all Asheville and the surrounding country joined the search for the lost scientist. He was found by Big Tom Wilson — still in the days of our pilgrimages a recluse living in his cabin not far from the summit — sitting up in a deep pool under a cliff, long dead. Marks above the cliff indicated, said Tom, that he had been running. ‘He mought,’ he said, ‘have been chased by a b’ar.’ The body was buried on the summit of the mountain, and a metal monument was brought over the trail in sections and inscribed with the honorable record of his achievement.
II
The Black Hills region of South Dakota and Wyoming has recently and tardily acquired a richly deserved appreciation. Its wild and rugged beauty having won the approval of a President, its popularity is assured. In the days when the writer knew it, it was but newly won from the condition of a happy hunting ground for the savage, and, though Gold Run and Deadwood Creek were shaking down their golden sands for the exploitation of the prospector, the unbroken pine forest still covered great areas all undisturbed. Typical of the Rocky Mountain forest, its straight red trunks rose like cathedral columns to the dark and gently murmuring roof.
Through these limitless colonnades one might ride all day without guide and without trail. There was no tangle of undergrowth to obstruct the progress or the view, as in the forest of a moister clime. If one were at a good height, the colonnades yielded vistas of shimmering plains and isolated mountain cones in rose and purple. The chattering red pine squirrel shot up and down the tree trunks, spitting fire and brimstone at the intruder, and showering him with chippings from the loose red bark that stands out deeply corrugated, and patterned like an alligator’s hide. Chipmunks scurried over the outcropping rocks, sitting up saucily to eat bluebells that grew in the crannies, and hiding in clumps of dry rock ferns. Coming out upon the edge of a little ‘park,’ — as the West calls a natural open space in the woods, — one might startle a herd of deer quietly feeding, knee-deep in the thick red grass. Bears, mountain lions, lynxes, and wildcats roamed freely. Many birds far different from those of the moist and deciduous forest broke the silence with strange cries: the Canada jay, the Rocky Mountain jay, — the latter in musical and colorful flocks in the fall and spring, — the crossbill, the poorwill, the exquisitely warbling water ouzel. Among birds already familiar, the chickadee, the junco, the nuthatch, and, following our establishment in the forest, the robin, the bluebird, and the oriole were our familiars. In the spring, the drumming of the ruffed grouse sounded on all sides, and a little later one was likely at any time to startle a brood of multitudinous brown chicks, which would scatter like leaves before a gust of wind. In the white and frozen nights of the late winter, a host of owls of various species sang their part songs unceasingly.
The native flora was brilliant and outstanding. As early as February in some years, on sunny slopes, huge furry balls pushed up out of the frozen ground and expanded into lovely blue stars with golden centres — the flowers of the Anemone patens. Spires of waxy yucca bells stood three feet or more in height in the midst of their spiny barricade. Huge foxgloves of an exquisite lavender challenged the eye. The hardy flora of a dry country is gorgeous in its short season of bloom, and showers the landscape with color. During our first springtime, dense clouds of sulphur-colored dust rode upon the breeze and settled upon our springs and all exposed surfaces. We thought it came from some distant volcano in eruption, but it proved to be only the lavish pollen from the pines, ensuring those ponderous cones that should later bruise our heads and shoulders and thunder upon our roofs, at the harvesting time of the pine squirrel. The birds and squirrels took us at our own valuation and became our friends. The birds frequented the porch in flocks in snowy times, and in the fall we were permitted to watch the digging of huge excavations, preferably in flower beds and garden, to accommodate unbelievable stores of cones and acorns.
The writer’s initiation as a pedagogue took place on the summit of this mountain group. A little company of squatters had established themselves on the well-watered meadows fed by springs that were the headwaters of the vigorous mountain streams so characteristic of the region. Around about these meadows stood towers and pinnacles and castles of snow-white limestone, the remnants of the cap rock of the country. It was the little log schoolhouse of this sky land that witnessed the first ecstasies and despairs of one who ‘waited on teaching.’
Down from these castellated peaks dashed the little streams, cutting, through snowy limestone, dark red sandstone, and gray granite, some of the most beautiful and rugged canyons in America. The precipitous, almost vertical walls are like the layer cake of the giants of the infant world. In the wall-sheltered mouths of these canyons, mystic ‘tepee circles’ sinking slowly into the all-recording earth testify of many a happy hunt of the aboriginal American.
III
Neahkahnie Mountain of the Coast Ranges is a splendid promontory, with a massive stone foot thrust far out into the Pacific. Around the brow of this mountain was hewed out the pack trail of the early adventurers to this section of the coast. Highways at a lower level and by an easier route have superseded the trail, which remains, with rotting bridges and many obstructed stretches, still the short cut of the adventurous pedestrian.
A Thanksgiving vacation found me ambitious to accomplish a four days’ hike, by way of the Neahkahnie trail and the coast, to the historic sites of the Lewis and Clark winter camp, and the fort of the Astor Company near the Columbia’s mouth. A buoyant young collie, alone of those approached, signified enthusiasm for the trip.
From the face of the headlong cliff that braves the sea has been taken, at some time late or soon, as if by a giant cheese knife, a wedge from top to bottom. Across this gap — the pony trail having at this point slid into the sea — has been thrown a light suspension footbridge of woven wire. Like a spider’s web it swings at the height of several hundred feet, two twelve-inch boards for the feet and two cables for the hands intervening, with no convincing assurance, between the traveler and eternity. Rocking and creaking in the gale that was rising (while, far below, the breakers dashed against the foot of the cliff), a little out of order, too, in that one board was displaced and set on edge, it made a precarious appeal to the pilgrim accompanied by a huge and vivacious companion of violent and uncertain impulses.
Up over the crest of the mountain and down to the trail on the other side would be but a slight deviation. In half an hour we stood upon the sharp dividing line — on one side, the bare slopes leading down to the busy towns, on the other, the untouched forest with its dim green mysteries, through which, as it seemed, sounded the roar of the ocean and filtered the light of that greatest of all plains. Here we rested briefly and devoured a sandwich and a half, the other half being slipped providently into the pocket of my mackintosh. We should be at Cannon Beach for Thanksgiving dinner.
A moment of taking bearings, and I stepped down unhesitatingly into the fir and cedar wilderness, as I have stepped many a time into the pathless pine woods, since my childhood as a lumberman’s daughter.
At that moment, though I was slow to recognize the fact, there closed about me a timeless world, a world that knows not man, a world in which life and decay have followed each other in undisturbed sequence since these mountains were folded up by a capricious earth. In this mysterious world, lacking all orientation that sun or moon might have vouchsafed me, since the clouds of a Pacific winter enfolded all, I wandered for three days and nights. The first night I spent under a giant cedar with my dog cuddled close beside me. On the second evening I came down to a little strip of coast whereon stood a tiny cabin that had been used during the summer time by the keeper of a radio ship, on duty offshore. On the third evening, having come at last upon the lost trail, we were led ignominiously into the roaring Pacific, season and tide having made impassable the once-negotiable rounding of a headland by way of the beach. This night I spent beneath a giant log, taking now on back and now on knees the steady run-off from this water shed. On the fourth morning, ’a footprint in the sand’! To this clue Scotty clung, with superior sense and unswerving determination, till, after much more weary traveling in the forest, it brought us to a place of habitation. From a contemporary record I take some observations upon this unfamiliar world that enfolded us for three memorable days and nights: —
‘The light grew dimmer now. The trees shut out the sky at a greater height above me. I still thought only of the transcendent beauty of the place (silent except for murmuring branches and rushing stream), wrapped in an age-old, impenetrable blanket of green, flowerless life, a harmonious weave of fernlike moss and mosslike fern, of lichen and fungus with their startling brilliance of reproduction (for it is the high tide of their year) — orange and gold scallopings, henna embroideries, crimson polka dots; forests of meaty mushrooms and toadstools, to me, an uninitiate in the realm of cryptogams, indistinguishable. Here and there, a scalloped cup held an exquisite emerald, shooting a phosphorescent light. If I touched it, the light went out as if I had turned off the current from an electric bulb, and the cup closed, dank and forbidding.
‘Difficulties became greater. Thicker and thicker closed the forest about me, huger and huger grew the trunks, — cedars that would make eight-foot boards, still green and young, firs only slightly more slender, and, piled about their roots, their fathers, their grandfathers, and their great-grandfathers back to the beginning of the forest era, — the oldest completely absorbed into the general level of decay, the next-oldest just visible mounds beneath the fairy coverlet, others at all heights and stages of preservation, the natural wreckage of a thousand years, sinking softly down into the homogeneous decomposition wrought by ceaseless rain and myriad forms of decay.
‘I would pass through this forest. Huge logs that, lying prone, still towered above my head lay crisscross in an endless tangle — to be surmounted, to be passed around, to be crept under. Would I clamber over them? Sturdy-looking branches came out in my hand and let me down; mossy coverings slipped off, bark and all, and gave me a toboggan slide down a treacherous slope. Attaining to the back of a giant log, I sank in it up to my knees, wallowing helplessly in a cauldron of wood pulp already brewed. Would I pass around? Two hundred feet up the steep and difficult hillside the logs pointed, and every here and there came others into the tangle to turn me back. Would I creep under? The impenetrable, ferny covering of the ground hid pitfalls into which I tumbled headlong. Thorny tangles of shrubs sprang up to prevent me and filled my hands with tiny thorns and raked the skin from my wrists. The drenching vegetation loaded my clothes with water. I stopped again and again to wring out my serge dress, to lighten its clinging weight.
‘Neither fire nor flood, nor earthquake, nor human greed has ever disturbed this forest. Here is natural reforestation in undisturbed perfection. Here tiny baby firs and cedars reach up their little hands toward feathery covers of youthful trees, above which slender trunks feel their way up among the ancient growth from which the younger sprang.
' Not a ripple on this forest when the first curious bipeds came sliding into this continent from Asia. What did the dreaming forest care? Not even animals disturbed its peace. Too dark, too wet, too impenetrable for warmblooded things to harbor in.
‘Just two forms of animal life all the first day crossed my path — a snail, large as my finger, green as the moss, squashy as its habitat, and a tiny, flitting, tipping, chipping brown wren, which bobbed up here and there, ran up and down the trees, talked to me fearlessly and sociably, and was altogether at home in these dim depths. Too tiny, perhaps, to hold its own in more hospitable woods, and adapting itself where no enemies cared to follow.
‘On the third morning, the short beach having ended in impassable cliffs, I was forced once more up the mountain side. It was very hard climbing for a time, but I soon came out on a ridge between two deep ravines. Here for the first time, to the great interest of Scotty, we came upon lightly broken trails. Crushed rotten branches, indentations in the moss, moss scratched from logs where some creature had jumped over, well-worn little paths on the logs themselves, showing that the travelers, whatever they might be, had appreciated how wonderful a path maker is a falling tree when it falls in the right direction.
‘The constant rains had obliterated most of the tracks, but I soon found, in protected places, a few fresh deer tracks and what appeared, to my amazement, to be the tracks of a small cow. Could it be that we were near some habitation? However, when this track maker also leaped four-foot logs, or ran along them for fifty feet or so, I was sorely puzzled. Then, out of a near cover of young fir sprang a big doe elk, fat as a Hereford steer, and made off, with high head, up the mountain. Again and again the trails, which consistently kept to the backbone of the ridge, as I also wished to do, ran into these closely roofed fir covers, which were evidently the retiring places of the trail makers. Occasionally the trails led to fresh mountain springs, converging with others into well-worn highways down to the drinking places. Twice again we startled some large animal into headlong flight, but caught no glimpse of it. Scot ty was primitively and profoundly moved by the strange intimations, the sounds and smells of this unfamiliar world. Yesterday there had been no tracks. To-day we were on a great highway, yet human signs seemed as far to seek as ever. However, in the late afternoon Scotty barked joyously in response to the faint far sound of a whistle.
‘Of the rare and delicate beauty of the forest I was at no time insensible.
I am a deplorer of the commercial exploitation of our wild and woodsy places, yet, during these three days, nothing sent the blood leaping through my veins like the indisputable mark of an axe on a clump of saplings. Then, quite suddenly at last, as death, long expected, is said to come, we walked out upon an ancient slabbed trail, with moss-grown and rotting bridges, but bearing every evidence of being the will-o’-the-wisp of our search.
‘ A bit of mortal, ardent consciousness dropped into the heart of this seemingly immortal, dreaming harmony of an alien life, to this involuntary guest the sleepless night brings unfamiliar questionings. What is the meaning of the forest for us? What spirit, if any, breathes through its timeless, unhalting, inarticulate existence? Absolutely indifferent to its passionate guest, its cool carpet preserves its delicate pattern of infinite variety, enfolding all that has lived and died within its borders — proud elk and gentle deer, creeping snail and soaring bird. And after you, poor human, have resigned your thirst for the residue of your scant draft of life, it will enfold your lifeless body, imperceptibly, resistlessly, completely. You will become a mound where the spores of myriad mosses sprout and thrive, where exquisite wood sorrel raises its starry eyes to the dim roof, where the waxy corpse plant droops its untouchable bells. Indistinguishable from the gradually subsiding mounds of age-old tree trunks, you will be absorbed into the substance of the forest, and will rise again in trunk and branch, in leaf and flower, in seed and pollen. On the highest dome of the all-comprehending roof, you will be exposed to sun and star, to the azure sky and the bitter storm. You will writhe and groan in the tempest; you will hush and whisper in the summer breeze; you will be animal, vegetable, and mineral; male and female; parent and child. You will assume a thousand forms — moss and lichen, toadstool and fungus, fern and orchid. You will enter into the worm, and become the substance of birds, rising into the ether and ministering once more to consciousness.
‘But will you be conscious? Is the forest conscious? As it unrestingly fulfills its destiny, is it more free than the elements that beat upon it and minister to its growth? What is this force that pushes upward and outward in every cell of every leaf; that determines the harmony and unspeakable beauty of the cool, green, trembling, whispering, composite whole? Nor sage, nor prophet, nor scientist, nor poet, nor god, nor man has told.’