Footing it in Franconia

by Bradford Torrey

One of the principal glories of Franconia is the same in spring as in autumn,—the colors of the forest. There is no describing them: greens and reds of all tender and lovely shades; not to speak of the exquisite haze-blue, or blue-purple, which mantles the still budded woods on the higher slopes. For the reds I was quite unprepared. They have never been written about, so far as I know, doubtless because they have never been seen. The scribbling tourist is never here till long after they are gone. In fact, I stayed late enough, on my present visit, to see the end of them. I knew, of course, that young maple leaves, like old ones, are of a ruddy complexion;[4] but somehow I had never considered that the massing of the trees on hillsides would work the same gorgeous, spectacular effect in spring as in autumn,—broad patches of splendor hung aloft, a natural tapestry, for the eye to feast upon. Not that May is as gaudy as September. There are no brilliant yellows, and the reds are many shades less fiery than autumn furnishes; but what is lacking in intensity is more than made up in delicacy, as the bloom of youth is fairer than any hectic flush. The glory passed, as I have said. Before the 1st of June it had deepened, and then disappeared; but the sight of it was of itself enough to reward my journey.

The clouds returned after the rain, and my first forenoon was spent under an umbrella on the Bethlehem plateau, not so much walking as standing about; now in the woods, now in the sandy road, now in the dooryard of an empty house. It was Sunday; the rain, quiet and intermittent, rather favored music; and all in all, things were pretty much to my mind,—plenty to see and hear, yet all of a sweetly familiar sort, such as one hardly thinks of putting into a notebook. Why record, as if it could be forgotten or needed to be remembered, the lisping of happy chickadees or the whistle of white-throated sparrows? Or why speak of shadblow and goldthread, or even of the lovely painted trilliums, with their three daintily crinkled petals, streaked with rose-purple? The trilliums, indeed, well deserved to be spoken of: so bright and bold they were; every blossom looking the sun squarely in the face,—in great contrast with the pale and bashful wake-robin, which I find (by searching for it) in my own woods. One after another I gathered them (pulled them, to speak with poetic literalness), each fresher and handsomer than the one before it, till the white stems made a handful.

“Oh,” said a man on the piazza, as I returned to the hotel, “I see you have nosebleed.” I was putting my hand to my pocket, wondering why I should have been taken so childishly, when it came over me what he meant. He was looking at the trilliums, and explained, in answer to a question, that he had always heard them called “nosebleed.” Somewhere, then,—I omitted to inquire where,—this is their “vulgar” name. In Franconia the people call them “Benjamins,” which has a pleasant Biblical sound,—better than “nosebleed,” at all events,—though to my thinking “trillium” is preferable to either of them, both for sound and for sense. People cry out against “Latin names.” But why is Latin worse than Hebrew? And who could ask anything prettier or easier than trillium, geranium, anemone, and hepatica?

The next morning I set out for Echo Lake. At that height, in that hollow among the mountains, the season must still be young. There, if anywhere, I should find the early violet and the trailing mayflower. And whatever I found, or did not find, at the end of the way, I should have made another ascent of the dear old Notch road, every rod of it the pleasanter for happy memories. I had never traveled it in May, with the glossy-leaved clintonia yet in the bud, and the broad, grassy golf links above the Profile House farm all frosty with houstonia bloom. And many times as I had been over it, I had never known till now that rhodora stood along its very edge. To-day, with the pink blossoms brightening the crooked, leafless, knee-high stems, not even my eyes could miss it. Our one small pear-leaved willow, near the foot of Hardscrabble, was in flower, its maroon leaves partly grown. Well I remembered the June morning when I lighted upon it, and the interest shown by the senior botanist of our little company when I reported the discovery, at the dinner table. He went up that very afternoon to see it for himself; and year after year, while he lived, he watched over it, more than once cautioning the road-menders against its destruction. How many times he and I have stopped beside it, on our way up and down! The “Torrey willow” he always called it, stroking my vanity; and I liked the word.

Now a chipmunk speaks to me, as I pass; it is not his fault, nor mine either, perhaps, that I do not understand him; and now, hearing a twig snap, I glance up in time to see a woodchuck scuttling out of sight under the high, overhanging bank. So he is a dweller in these upper mountain woods![5] I should have thought him too nice an epicure to feel himself at home in such diggings. But who knows? Perhaps he finds something hereabout—wood-sorrel or what not—that is more savory even than young clover leaves and early garden sauce. From somewhere on my right comes the sweet—honey-sweet—warble of a rose-breasted grosbeak; and almost over my head, at the topmost point of a tall spruce, sits a Blackburnian warbler, doing his little utmost to express himself. His pitch is as high as his perch, and his tone, pure z, is like the finest of wire. Another water-bar surmounted, and a bay-breast sings, and lets me see him,—a bird I always love to look at, and a song that I always have to learn anew, partly because I hear it so seldom, partly because of its want of individuality: a single hurried phrase, pure z like the Blackburnian’s, and of the same wire-drawn tenuity. These warblers are poor hands at warbling, but they are musical to the eye. By this rule,—if throats were made to be looked at, and judged by the feathers on them,—the Blackburnian might challenge comparison with any singer under the sun.

As the road ascends, the aspect of things grows more and more springlike,—or less and less summer-like. Black-birch catkins are just beginning to fall, and a little higher, not far from the Bald Mountain path, I notice a sugar maple still hanging full of pale straw-colored tassels,—encouraging signs to a man who was becoming apprehensive lest he had arrived too late.

Then, as I pass the height of land and begin the gentle descent into the Notch, fronting the white peak of Lafayette and the black face of Eagle Cliff, I am aware of a strange sensation, as if I had stepped into another world: bare, leafless woods and sudden blank silence. All the way hitherto birds have been singing on either hand, my ear picking out the voices one by one, while flies and mosquitoes have buzzed continually about my head; here, all in a moment, not a bird, not an insect,—a stillness like that of winter. Minute after minute, rod after rod, and not a breath of sound,—not so much as the stirring of a leaf. I could not have believed such a transformation possible. It is uncanny. I walk as in a dream. The silence lasts for at least a quarter of a mile. Then a warbler breaks it for an instant, and leaves it, if possible, more absolute than before. I am going southward, and downhill; but I am going into the Notch, into the very shadow of the mountains, where Winter makes his last rally against the inevitable.

And yes, here are some of the early flowers I have come in search of: the dear little yellow violets, whose glossy, round leaves, no more than half-grown as yet, seem to love the very border of a snowbank. Here, too, is a most flourishing patch of spring-beauties, and another of adder’s-tongue,—dog-tooth violet, so called. Of the latter there must be hundreds of acres in Franconia. I have seen the freckled leaves everywhere, and now and then a few belated blossoms. Here I have it at its best, the whole bed thick with buds and freshly blown flowers. But the round-leaved violet is what I am chiefly taken with. The very type and pattern of modesty, I am ready to say. The spring-beauty masses itself; and though every blossom, if you look at it, is a miracle of delicacy,—lustrous pink satin, with veinings of a deeper shade,—it may fairly be said to make a show. But the violets, scattered, and barely out of the ground, must be sought after one by one. So meek, and yet so bold!—part of the beautiful vernal paradox, that the lowly and the frail are the first to venture.

As I come down to the lakeside,—making toward the lower end, whither I always go, because there the railroad is least obtrusively in sight and the mountains are faced to the best advantage,—two or three solitary sandpipers flit before me, tweeting and bobbing, and a winter wren (invisible, of course) sings from a thicket at my elbow. A jolly songster he is, with the clearest and finest of tones—a true fife—and an irresistible accent and rhythm. A bird by himself. This fellow hurries and hurries (am I wrong in half remembering a line by some poet about a bird that “hurries and precipitates”?),[6] till the tempo becomes too much for him; the notes can no longer be taken, and, like a boy running down too steep a hill, he finishes with a slide. I think of those pianoforte passages which the most lightninglike of performers—Paderewski himself—are reduced to playing ignominiously with the back of one finger. I know not their technical name, if they have one,—finger-nail runs, perhaps. I remember, also, Thoreau’s description of a song heard in Tuckerman’s Ravine and here in the Franconia Notch. He could never discover the author of it, but pretty certainly it was the winter wren. “Most peculiar and memorable,” he pronounces it, like a “fine corkscrew stream issuing with incessant tinkle from a cork.” “Tinkle” is exactly the word. Trust Thoreau to find that, though he could not find the singer. If the thrushes are left out of the account, there is no voice in the mountains that I am gladder to hear.

Near the outlet of the lake, in a shaded hollow, lies a deep snowbank, and not far away the ground is matted with trailing arbutus, still in plentiful bloom. One of the most attractive things here is the few-flowered shadbush (Amelanchier oligocarpa). The common A. Canadensis grows near by; and it is astonishing how unlike the two species look, although the difference (the visible difference, I mean) is mostly in the arrangement of the flowers,—clustered in one case, separately disposed in the other. To-day the “average observer” would look twice before suspecting any close relationship between them; a week or two hence he would look a dozen times before remarking any distinction. With them, as with the red cherry, it is the blossom that makes the bush.