The Mountains
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Stewart Edward White >> The Mountains
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As for bread, try it unleavened once in a while by
way of change. It is really very good,--just salt,
water, flour, and a very little sugar. For those who
like their bread "all crust," it is especially toothsome.
The usual camp bread that I have found the most
successful has been in the proportion of two cups of
flour to a teaspoonful of salt, one of sugar, and three
of baking-powder. Sugar or cinnamon sprinkled on
top is sometimes pleasant. Test by thrusting a splinter
into the loaf. If dough adheres to the wood, the
bread is not done. Biscuits are made by using twice
as much baking-powder and about two tablespoonfuls
of lard for shortening. They bake much more quickly
than the bread. Johnny-cake you mix of corn-meal
three cups, flour one cup, sugar four spoonfuls, salt
one spoonful, baking-powder four spoonfuls, and lard
twice as much as for biscuits. It also is good, very
good.
The flapjack is first cousin to bread, very palatable,
and extremely indigestible when made of flour, as is
ordinarily done. However, the self-raising buckwheat
flour makes an excellent flapjack, which is likewise
good for your insides. The batter is rather thin, is
poured into the piping hot greased pan, "flipped"
when brown on one side, and eaten with larrupy-dope
or brown gravy.
When you come to consider potatoes and beans
and onions and such matters, remember one thing:
that in the higher altitudes water boils at a low
temperature, and that therefore you must not expect your
boiled food to cook very rapidly. In fact, you'd
better leave beans at home. We did. Potatoes you can
sometimes tease along by quartering them.
Rolled oats are better than oatmeal. Put them in
plenty of water and boil down to the desired consistency.
In lack of cream you will probably want it rather soft.
Put your coffee into cold water, bring to a boil, let
boil for about two minutes, and immediately set off.
Settle by letting a half cup of cold water flow slowly
into the pot from the height of a foot or so. If your
utensils are clean, you will surely have good coffee
by this simple method. Of course you will never
boil your tea.
The sun was nearly down when we raised our long
yell. The cow-puncher promptly responded. We ate.
Then we smoked. Then we basely left all our dishes
until the morrow, and followed our cow-puncher to
his log cabin, where we were to spend the evening.
By now it was dark, and a bitter cold swooped
down from the mountains. We built a fire in a huge
stone fireplace and sat around in the flickering light
telling ghost-stories to one another. The place was
rudely furnished, with only a hard earthen floor, and
chairs hewn by the axe. Rifles, spurs, bits, revolvers,
branding-irons in turn caught the light and vanished
in the shadow. The skin of a bear looked at us from
hollow eye-sockets in which there were no eyes. We
talked of the Long Trail. Outside the wind, rising,
howled through the shakes of the roof.
ON THE WIND AT NIGHT
XV
ON THE WIND AT NIGHT
The winds were indeed abroad that night. They
rattled our cabin, they shrieked in our eaves,
they puffed down our chimney, scattering the ashes
and leaving in the room a balloon of smoke as though
a shell had burst. When we opened the door and
stepped out, after our good-nights had been said, it
caught at our hats and garments as though it had
been lying in wait for us.
To our eyes, fire-dazzled, the night seemed very
dark. There would be a moon later, but at present
even the stars seemed only so many pinpoints of
dull metal, lustreless, without illumination. We felt
our way to camp, conscious of the softness of grasses,
the uncertainty of stones.
At camp the remains of the fire crouched beneath
the rating of the storm. Its embers glowed sullen
and red, alternately glaring with a half-formed resolution
to rebel, and dying to a sulky resignation. Once
a feeble flame sprang up for an instant, but was
immediately pounced on and beaten flat as though by
a vigilant antagonist.
We, stumbling, gathered again our tumbled blankets.
Across the brow of the knoll lay a huge pine
trunk. In its shelter we respread our bedding, and
there, standing, dressed for the night. The power of
the wind tugged at our loose garments, hoping for
spoil. A towel, shaken by accident from the interior
of a sweater, departed white-winged, like a bird, into
the outer blackness. We found it next day caught
in the bushes several hundred yards distant. Our
voices as we shouted were snatched from our lips
and hurled lavishly into space. The very breath of
our bodies seemed driven back, so that as we faced
the elements, we breathed in gasps, with difficulty.
Then we dropped down into our blankets.
At once the prostrate tree-trunk gave us its
protection. We lay in a little back-wash of the racing
winds, still as a night in June. Over us roared the
battle. We felt like sharpshooters in the trenches;
as though, were we to raise our heads, at that instant
we should enter a zone of danger. So we lay quietly
on our backs and stared at the heavens.
The first impression thence given was of stars
sailing serene and unaffected, remote from the
turbulence of what until this instant had seemed to fill
the universe. They were as always, just as we should
see them when the evening was warm and the tree-toads
chirped clearly audible at half a mile. The importance
of the tempest shrank. Then below them next we
noticed the mountains; they too were serene and calm.
Immediately it was as though the storm were an
hallucination; something not objective; something
real, but within the soul of him who looked upon it.
It claimed sudden kinship with those blackest days
when nevertheless the sun, the mere external unimportant
sun, shines with superlative brilliancy. Emotions
of a power to shake the foundations of life
seemed vaguely to stir in answer to these their hollow
symbols. For after all, we were contented at heart
and tranquil in mind, and this was but the outer
gorgeous show of an intense emotional experience
we did not at the moment prove. Our nerves
responded to it automatically. We became excited,
keyed to a high tension, and so lay rigid on our
backs, as though fighting out the battles of our souls.
It was all so unreal and yet so plain to our senses
that perforce automatically our experience had to
conclude it psychical. We were in air absolutely
still. Yet above us the trees writhed and twisted and
turned and bent and struck back, evidently in the
power of a mighty force. Across the calm heavens
the murk of flying atmosphere--I have always maintained
that if you looked closely enough you could
SEE the wind--the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris
fleeing high in the air;--these faintly hinted at intense
movement rushing down through space. A roar of
sound filled the hollow of the sky. Occasionally it
intermitted, falling abruptly in volume like the
mysterious rare hushings of a rapid stream. Then the
familiar noises of a summer night became audible
for the briefest instant,--a horse sneezed, an owl
hooted, the wild call of birds came down the wind.
And with a howl the legions of good and evil took
up their warring. It was too real, and yet it was not
reconcilable with the calm of our resting-places.
For hours we lay thus in all the intensity of an
inner storm and stress, which it seemed could not
fail to develop us, to mould us, to age us, to leave
on us its scars, to bequeath us its peace or remorse or
despair, as would some great mysterious dark experience
direct from the sources of life. And then
abruptly we were exhausted, as we should have been
by too great emotion. We fell asleep. The morning
dawned still and clear, and garnished and set in
order as though such things had never been. Only
our white towel fluttered like a flag of truce in the
direction the mighty elements had departed.
THE VALLEY
XVI
THE VALLEY
Once upon a time I happened to be staying in
a hotel room which had originally been part
of a suite, but which was then cut off from the others
by only a thin door through which sounds carried
clearly. It was about eleven o'clock in the evening.
The occupants of that next room came home. I
heard the door open and close. Then the bed
shrieked aloud as somebody fell heavily upon it.
There breathed across the silence a deep restful sigh.
"Mary," said a man's voice, "I'm mighty sorry I
didn't join that Association for Artificial Vacations.
They guarantee to get you just as tired and just as
mad in two days as you could by yourself in two weeks."
We thought of that one morning as we descended
the Glacier Point Trail in Yosemite.
The contrast we need not have made so sharp.
We might have taken the regular wagon-road by
way of Chinquapin, but we preferred to stick to the
trail, and so encountered our first sign of civilization
within an hundred yards of the brink. It, the
sign, was tourists. They were male and female, as
the Lord had made them, but they had improved on
that idea since. The women were freckled, hatted
with alpines, in which edelweiss--artificial, I think
--flowered in abundance; they sported severely
plain flannel shirts, bloomers of an aggressive and
unnecessary cut, and enormous square boots weighing
pounds. The men had on hats just off the sunbonnet
effect, pleated Norfolk jackets, bloomers ditto ditto to
the women, stockings whose tops rolled over innumerable
times to help out the size of that which they
should have contained, and also enormous square
boots. The female children they put in skin-tight
blue overalls. The male children they dressed in
bloomers. Why this should be I cannot tell you. All
carried toy hatchets with a spike on one end built to
resemble the pictures of alpenstocks.
They looked business-like, trod with an assured
air of veterans and a seeming of experience more
extended than it was possible to pack into any one
human life. We stared at them, our eyes bulging
out. They painfully and evidently concealed a
curiosity as to our pack-train. We wished them good-day,
in order to see to what language heaven had fitted
their extraordinary ideas as regards raiment. They
inquired the way to something or other--I think
Sentinel Dome. We had just arrived, so we did not
know, but in order to show a friendly spirit we
blandly pointed out A way. It may have led to Sentinel
Dome for all I know. They departed uttering
thanks in human speech.
Now this particular bunch of tourists was evidently
staying at the Glacier Point, and so was fresh. But
in the course of that morning we descended straight
down a drop of, is it four thousand feet? The trail
was steep and long and without water. During the
descent we passed first and last probably twoscore
of tourists, all on foot. A good half of them were
delicate women,--young, middle-aged, a few gray-
haired and evidently upwards of sixty. There were
also old men, and fat men, and men otherwise out of
condition. Probably nine out of ten, counting in the
entire outfit, were utterly unaccustomed, when at
home where grow street-cars and hansoms, to even
the mildest sort of exercise. They had come into the
Valley, whose floor is over four thousand feet up,
without the slightest physical preparation for the
altitude. They had submitted to the fatigue of a long
and dusty stage journey. And then they had merrily
whooped it up at a gait which would have appalled
seasoned old stagers like ourselves. Those blessed
lunatics seemed positively unhappy unless they
climbed up to some new point of view every day.
I have never seen such a universally tired out,
frazzled, vitally exhausted, white-faced, nervous
community in my life as I did during our four days'
stay in the Valley. Then probably they go away,
and take a month to get over it, and have queer
residual impressions of the trip. I should like to know
what those impressions really are.
Not but that Nature has done everything in her
power to oblige them. The things I am about to say
are heresy, but I hold them true.
Yosemite is not as interesting nor as satisfying
to me as some of the other big box canons, like
those of the Tehipite, the Kings in its branches, or
the Kaweah. I will admit that its waterfalls are
better. Otherwise it possesses no features which are
not to be seen in its sister valleys. And there is
this difference. In Yosemite everything is jumbled
together, apparently for the benefit of the tourist
with a linen duster and but three days' time at his
disposal. He can turn from the cliff-headland to the
dome, from the dome to the half dome, to the glacier
formation, the granite slide and all the rest of it,
with hardly the necessity of stirring his feet. Nature
has put samples of all her works here within reach
of his cataloguing vision. Everything is crowded in
together, like a row of houses in forty-foot lots. The
mere things themselves are here in profusion and
wonder, but the appropriate spacing, the approach,
the surrounding of subordinate detail which should
lead in artistic gradation to the supreme feature--
these things, which are a real and essential part of
esthetic effect, are lacking utterly for want of room.
The place is not natural scenery; it is a junk-shop, a
storehouse, a sample-room wherein the elements of
natural scenery are to be viewed. It is not an arrangement
of effects in accordance with the usual laws of
landscape, but an abnormality, a freak of Nature.
All these things are to be found elsewhere. There
are cliffs which to the naked eye are as grand as El
Capitan; domes, half domes, peaks as noble as any
to be seen in the Valley; sheer drops as breath-taking
as that from Glacier Point. But in other places
each of these is led up to appropriately, and stands
the central and satisfying feature to which all other
things look. Then you journey on from your cliff, or
whatever it happens to be, until, at just the right
distance, so that it gains from the presence of its
neighbor without losing from its proximity, a dome or a
pinnacle takes to itself the right of prominence. I
concede the waterfalls; but in other respects I prefer
the sister valleys.
That is not to say that one should not visit
Yosemite; nor that one will be disappointed. It is grand
beyond any possible human belief; and no one, even
a nerve-frazzled tourist, can gaze on it without the
strongest emotion. Only it is not so intimately satisfying
as it should be. It is a show. You do not take
it into your heart. "Whew!" you cry. "Isn't that
a wonder!" then after a moment, "Looks just like
the photographs. Up to sample. Now let's go."
As we descended the trail, we and the tourists
aroused in each other a mutual interest. One husband
was trying to encourage his young and handsome wife
to go on. She was beautifully dressed for the part
in a marvelous, becoming costume of whipcord--
short skirt, high laced elkskin boots and the rest of it;
but in all her magnificence she had sat down on the
ground, her back to the cliff, her legs across the trail,
and was so tired out that she could hardly muster
interest enough to pull them in out of the way of
our horses' hoofs. The man inquired anxiously of
us how far it was to the top. Now it was a long
distance to the top, but a longer to the bottom, so we
lied a lie that I am sure was immediately forgiven
us, and told them it was only a short climb. I should
have offered them the use of Bullet, but Bullet had
come far enough, and this was only one of a dozen
such cases. In marked contrast was a jolly white-
haired clergyman of the bishop type who climbed
vigorously and hailed us with a shout.
The horses were decidedly unaccustomed to any
such sights, and we sometimes had our hands full
getting them by on the narrow way. The trail was
safe enough, but it did have an edge, and that edge
jumped pretty straight off. It was interesting to
observe how the tourists acted. Some of them were
perfect fools, and we had more trouble with them
than we did with the horses. They could not seem
to get the notion into their heads that all we wanted
them to do was to get on the inside and stand still.
About half of them were terrified to death, so that
at the crucial moment, just as a horse was passing
them, they had little fluttering panics that called the
beast's attention. Most of the remainder tried to be
bold and help. They reached out the hand of
assistance toward the halter rope; the astonished animal
promptly snorted, tried to turn around, cannoned
against the next in line. Then there was a mix-up.
Two tall clean-cut well-bred looking girls of our slim
patrician type offered us material assistance. They
seemed to understand horses, and got out of the way
in the proper manner, did just the right thing, and
made sensible suggestions. I offer them my homage.
They spoke to us as though they had penetrated
the disguise of long travel, and could see we were
not necessarily members of Burt Alvord's gang.
This phase too of our descent became increasingly
interesting to us, a species of gauge by which we
measured the perceptions of those we encountered.
Most did not speak to us at all. Others responded
to our greetings with a reserve in which was more
than a tinge of distrust. Still others patronized us.
A very few overlooked our faded flannel shirts, our
soiled trousers, our floppy old hats with their
rattlesnake bands, the wear and tear of our equipment, to
respond to us heartily. Them in return we generally
perceived to belong to our totem.
We found the floor of the Valley well sprinkled
with campers. They had pitched all kinds of tents;
built all kinds of fancy permanent conveniences;
erected all kinds of banners and signs advertising
their identity, and were generally having a nice, easy,
healthful, jolly kind of a time up there in the
mountains. Their outfits they had either brought in with
their own wagons, or had had freighted. The store
near the bend of the Merced supplied all their needs.
It was truly a pleasant sight to see so many people
enjoying themselves, for they were mostly those in
moderate circumstances to whom a trip on tourist
lines would be impossible. We saw bakers' and
grocers' and butchers' wagons that had been pressed
into service. A man, his wife, and little baby had
come in an ordinary buggy, the one horse of which,
led by the man, carried the woman and baby to the
various points of interest.
We reported to the official in charge, were allotted
a camping and grazing place, and proceeded to make
ourselves at home.
During the next two days we rode comfortably
here and there and looked at things. The things
could not be spoiled, but their effect was very
materially marred by the swarms of tourists. Sometimes
they were silly, and cracked inane and obvious jokes
in ridicule of the grandest objects they had come so
far to see; sometimes they were detestable and left
their insignificant calling-cards or their unimportant
names where nobody could ever have any object in
reading them; sometimes they were pathetic and
helpless and had to have assistance; sometimes
they were amusing; hardly ever did they seem
entirely human. I wonder what there is about the
traveling public that seems so to set it apart, to make
of it at least a sub-species of mankind?
Among other things, we were vastly interested in
the guides. They were typical of this sort of thing.
Each morning one of these men took a pleasantly
awe-stricken band of tourists out, led them around in
the brush awhile, and brought them back in time for
lunch. They wore broad hats and leather bands
and exotic raiment and fierce expressions, and looked
dark and mysterious and extra-competent over the
most trivial of difficulties.
Nothing could be more instructive than to see two
or three of these imitation bad men starting out in
the morning to "guide" a flock, say to Nevada Falls.
The tourists, being about to mount, have outdone
themselves in weird and awesome clothes--especially
the women. Nine out of ten wear their stirrups
too short, so their knees are hunched up. One guide
rides at the head--great deal of silver spur, clanking
chain, and the rest of it. Another rides in the rear.
The third rides up and down the line, very gruff,
very preoccupied, very careworn over the dangers
of the way. The cavalcade moves. It proceeds for
about a mile. There arise sudden cries, great but
subdued excitement. The leader stops, raising a
commanding hand. Guide number three gallops up.
There is a consultation. The cinch-strap of the brindle
shave-tail is taken up two inches. A catastrophe
has been averted. The noble three look volumes of
relief. The cavalcade moves again.
Now the trail rises. It is a nice, safe, easy trail.
But to the tourists it is made terrible. The noble
three see to that. They pass more dangers by the
exercise of superhuman skill than you or I could
discover in a summer's close search. The joke of the
matter is that those forty-odd saddle-animals have
been over that trail so many times that one would
have difficulty in heading them off from it once they
got started.
Very much the same criticism would hold as to
the popular notion of the Yosemite stage-drivers.
They drive well, and seem efficient men. But their
wonderful reputation would have to be upheld on
rougher roads than those into the Valley. The tourist
is, of course, encouraged to believe that he is doing
the hair-breadth escape; but in reality, as mountain
travel goes, the Yosemite stage-road is very mild.
This that I have been saying is not by way of
depreciation. But it seems to me that the Valley is
wonderful enough to stand by itself in men's appreciation
without the unreality of sickly sentimentalism
in regard to imaginary dangers, or the histrionics of
playing wilderness where no wilderness exists.
As we went out, this time by the Chinquapin
wagon-road, we met one stage-load after another of
tourists coming in. They had not yet donned the
outlandish attire they believe proper to the occasion,
and so showed for what they were,--prosperous,
well-bred, well-dressed travelers. In contrast to their
smartness, the brilliancy of new-painted stages, the
dash of the horses maintained by the Yosemite Stage
Company, our own dusty travel-worn outfit of mountain
ponies, our own rough clothes patched and
faded, our sheath-knives and firearms seemed out of
place and curious, as though a knight in medieval
armor were to ride down Broadway.
I do not know how many stages there were. We
turned our pack-horses out for them all, dashing back
and forth along the line, coercing the diabolical
Dinkey. The road was too smooth. There were no
obstructions to surmount; no dangers to avert; no
difficulties to avoid. We could not get into trouble,
but proceeded as on a county turnpike. Too tame,
too civilized, too representative of the tourist
element, it ended by getting on our nerves. The
wilderness seemed to have left us forever. Never would
we get back to our own again. After a long time
Wes, leading, turned into our old trail branching off
to the high country. Hardly had we traveled a half
mile before we heard from the advance guard a crash
and a shout.
"What is it, Wes?" we yelled.
In a moment the reply came,--
"Lily's fallen down again,--thank God!"
We understood what he meant. By this we knew
that the tourist zone was crossed, that we had left
the show country, and were once more in the open.
XVII
THE MAIN CREST
The traveler in the High Sierras generally keeps
to the west of the main crest. Sometimes he
approaches fairly to the foot of the last slope;
sometimes he angles away and away even down to what
finally seems to him a lower country,--to the pine
mountains of only five or six thousand feet. But
always to the left or right of him, according to whether
he travels south or north, runs the rampart of the
system, sometimes glittering with snow, sometimes
formidable and rugged with splinters and spires of
granite. He crosses spurs and tributary ranges as high,
as rugged, as snow-clad as these. They do not quite
satisfy him. Over beyond he thinks he ought to see
something great,--some wide outlook, some space
bluer than his trail can offer him. One day or
another he clamps his decision, and so turns aside for
the simple and only purpose of standing on the top
of the world.
We were bitten by that idea while crossing the
Granite Basin. The latter is some ten thousand feet
in the air, a cup of rock five or six miles across,
surrounded by mountains much higher than itself. That
would have been sufficient for most moods, but,
resting on the edge of a pass ten thousand six hundred
feet high, we concluded that we surely would have
to look over into Nevada.
We got out the map. It became evident, after a
little study, that by descending six thousand feet into
a box canon, proceeding in it a few miles, and
promptly climbing out again, by climbing steadily
up the long narrow course of another box canon for
about a day and a half's journey, and then climbing
out of that to a high ridge country with little flat
valleys, we would come to a wide lake in a meadow
eleven thousand feet up. There we could camp.
The mountain opposite was thirteen thousand three
hundred and twenty feet, so the climb from the
lake became merely a matter of computation. This,
we figured, would take us just a week, which may
seem a considerable time to sacrifice to the gratification
of a whim. But such a glorious whim!
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