The Hours of the Day
“Can you hear what the morning says to you, and believe that? Can you bring home the summits of Wachusett, Greylock, and the New Hampshire hills?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Country Life.”
It is well, and altogether pleasantest, on the hike, to be under way early in the morning; and sometimes—particularly if the day’s march be short—to finish all, without prolonged stop. Ordinarily, it is preferable to walk till eleven or twelve o’clock, then to rest, wash clothing, have lunch, read, sleep, and, setting out again in the middle of the afternoon, to complete the day’s stage by five or six o’clock. Afterward come bath, clean clothes, the evening meal, rest, and an early bed.
But one’s schedule should not be inflexible; one should have acquaintance with the dawn, he should know the voices of the night. One forgets how many stars there are, till he finds himself abroad at night in clear mountain air. An all-night walk is a wonderful experience, particularly under a full moon; and, in intensely hot weather, a plan to walk by night may be a very grateful arrangement.
Dr. John H. Finley, of the University of the State of New York, writes in the Outlook[3] reminiscently of walking by night:
“But the walks which I most enjoy, in retrospect at any rate, are those taken at night. Then one makes one’s own landscape with only the help of the moon or stars or the distant lights of a city, or with one’s unaided imagination if the sky is filled with cloud.
“The next better thing to the democracy of a road by day is the monarchy of a road by night, when one has one’s own terrestrial way under guidance of a Providence that is nearer. It was in the ‘cool of the day’ that the Almighty is pictured as walking in the garden, but I have most often met him on the road by night.
“Several times I have walked down Staten Island and across New Jersey to Princeton ‘after dark,’ the destination being a particularly attractive feature of this walk. But I enjoy also the journeys that are made in strange places where one knows neither the way nor the destination, except from a map or the advice of signboard or kilometer posts (which one reads by the flame of a match, or, where that is wanting, sometimes by following the letters and figures on a post with one’s fingers), or the information, usually inaccurate, of some other wayfarer. Most of these journeys have been made of a necessity that has prevented my making them by day, but I have in every case been grateful afterward for the necessity. In this country they have been usually among the mountains—the Green Mountains or the White Mountains or the Catskills. But of all my night faring, a night on the moors of Scotland is the most impressive and memorable, though without incident. No mountain landscape is to me more awesome than the moorlands by night, or more alluring than the moorlands by day when the heather is in bloom. Perhaps this is only the ancestors speaking again.
“But something besides ancestry must account for the others. Indeed, in spite of it, I was drawn one night to Assisi, where St. Francis had lived. Late in the evening I started on to Foligno in order to take a train in to Rome for Easter morning. I followed a white road that wound around the hills, through silent clusters of cottages tightly shut up with only a slit of light visible now and then, meeting not a human being along the way save three somber figures accompanying an ox cart, a man at the head of the oxen and a man and a woman at the tail of the cart—a theme for Millet. (I asked in broken Italian how far it was to Foligno, and the answer was, ‘Una hora’—distance in time and not in miles.) Off in the night I could see the lights of Perugia, and some time after midnight I began to see the lights of Foligno—of Perugia and Foligno, where Raphael had wandered and painted. The adventure of it all was that when I reached Foligno I found that it was a walled town, that the gate was shut, and that I had neither passport nor intelligible speech. There is an interesting walking sequel to this journey. I carried that night a wooden water-bottle, such as the Italian soldiers used to carry, filling it from the fountain at the gate of Assisi before starting. Just a month later, under the same full moon, I was walking between midnight and morning in New Hampshire. I had the same water-bottle and stopped at a spring to fill it. When I turned the bottle upside down, a few drops of water from the fountain of Assisi fell into the New England spring, which for me, at any rate, has been forever sweetened by this association.