V. GOING UP TO THE SNOW
It cleared up before dawn, but it rained for three hours after dawn. Vachel got up in the night and relit the fire and made himself a hot rock. Coming back into our dark and gloomy thicket, he mistook my form for a bear, and his heart jumped. We lived in expectation of meeting bears. “There’ll just be one heading in the Illinois Register,” says Vachel—“Ate by Bears.” We placed our bacon twenty yards away from where we slept, and hoped tacitly that they would take the bacon and spare us.
Our knapsacks weighed double next morning because of the wet in our things. We got wetter still as we ploughed out through flower fields of a drowned paradise. But an hour before noon the sun broke free and started a miraculous drying of Nature and of ourselves. We seemed to cook in the steam of our own clothes. On the hillside, at last, we decided to rest and we spread out everything to dry, dispensing with most of our clothes, and we lay in the sun in the hot damp of the flowers and let Old Sol stream into us.
Early in the afternoon most of our clothes were dry and, following the compass, we climbed up and up to a great height through primeval forest. The trees were so close that often we could not squeeze between them with our packs. We hustled and bustled and impolitely pushed through branches and umbrage and crossed tiny glades filled with ineffably lovely basket grass, holding aloft their cream crowns of blossom. It seemed to us a great struggle, and Lindsay and I held different opinions as to what we should find when we got to the end of the wood, and both of us were wrong. He thought it would be “the divide.” I thought it might be another ne plus ultra and a sheer descent.
But instead it was a sort of end of the world. Our primeval forest came sharply to an end on a deep, green, wind-bitten line where the branches of the trees were gnarled and twisted and beaten downward. Beyond that was a boulder-strewn upper-mountain region and a wall of rock. We asked no questions as to the morrow, but camped beside a huge stone. It was twelve feet high, but one could creep under it and be safe from the rain. And a few feet away was our first snow-bank. We built a big fire and made tea of melted snow, and Lindsay made ice-cream of sugar and condensed milk and snow which we voted very good, and we made eight or nine hot rocks for our bed.
Because of the mountain-wall above us sunset took place at about four in the afternoon here. But a beautiful evening endured long in the east below us. We were so exalted that we looked a hundred miles over the plains and saw, as it were, the whole world picked out in shadow and sunshine below. Sunset slowly advanced over it all, and with reflected rays from an unseen west the day passed serenely away.
Lindsay, being the colder man, slept under the great boulder, and I smoothed out a recess at the side. I lay beside scores of daintily hooded yellow columbines and looked out to the occasional licked-sweet redness of an Indian paint brush. A chipmunk rudely squeaked at us, and as a last visitor a humming bird boomed over our heads like a night-awakened beetle.
We slept serenely. At two I awoke to see a fleeting half moon, all silver, tripping homeward over the high wall of the mountain with attendant stars behind. But away in the east there was a faint rose light over a bank of darkness. The darkness slowly took sharp contour, and the light that comes before the light of day picked out ten or twelve lakes and tarns which we had not noticed until then. The darkness below the rose quivered with lightning; the zenith clearness grew clearer and clearer, and then, with uplifting hands of glory and light, came seraphical sunrise.
Our bonfire, which had burned red all night, now burned a pallid yellow in the new light, and we brought out our blankets into the open and lay down and slept again in the increasing light and warmth of the new day. Then breakfast at seven and God’s in his heaven. And we washed in the snow, and scores of curlews screamed from rock to rock above us on the road that we should take.
“How new it all is!” said the poet. “It is as if no one ever slept here before and wakened to see what we see or to do the things we do.”
Wrapped in our thoughts we put our packs on our shoulders and meditatively turned our steps to the downward-dropping corner of the mountain-wall which obscured the adventures of the new day.
We cut off the top of the snow with a sharp piece of slate,
And took the purer under-snow to make our coffee,
To make ice-cream:
Fastidious creatures!
And then we stood in the snow-hole
And washed with warm water,
And rubbed ourselves all over with handfuls of sloppy snow—
Disgusting old tramps!
The discreet birds watched us,
The chipmunks squeaked at us,
You didn’t see us.
THE DOWNWARD WAY