Footing it in Franconia

by Bradford Torrey

With progress of this industriously indolent sort it is nearly noon by the time I turn into the footpath that leads down to Echo Lake. Here the air is full of toad voices; a chorus of long-drawn trills in the shrillest of musical tones. If the creatures (the sandy shore and its immediate shallows are thick with them) are attempting to set up an echo, they meet with no success. At all events I hear no response, though the fault may easily be in my hearing, insusceptible as it is to vibrations above a certain pitch of fineness. What ethereal music it would be, an echo of toad trills from the grand sounding-board of Eagle Cliff! In the density of my ignorance I am surprised to find such numbers of these humble, half-domesticated, garden-loving batrachians congregated here in the wilderness. If the day were less midsummery, and were not already mortgaged to other plans, I would go down to Profile Lake to see whether the same thing is going on there. I should have looked upon these lovely sheets of mountain water as spawning-places for trout. But toads!—that seems another matter. If I am surprised at their presence, however, they seem equally so at mine. And who knows? They were here first. Perhaps I am the intruder. I wish them no harm in any case. If black flies form any considerable part of their diet, they could not multiply too rapidly, though every note of every trill were good for a polliwog, and every polliwog should grow into the portliest of toads.

THE AFTERNOON

I spoke a little warmly, perhaps, at the end of the forenoon chapter. Echo Lake, at the foot of it, is one of the places where I love best to linger, and to-day it was more attractive even than usual; the air of the clearest, the sun bright, the mountain woods all in young leaf, the water shining. But the black flies, which had left me undisturbed on the railroad, though I sat still by the half-hour, once I reached the lake would allow me no rest.

It was twelve days since my first visit. The snow was gone, and the trailing arbutus had dropped its last blossoms; but both kinds of shadbush, standing in the hollow where a snowbank had lain ten days ago, were still in fresh bloom. Pink lady’s-slippers were common (more buds than blossoms as yet), and the pink rhodora also; with goldthread, star-flower, dwarf cornel, housonia, and the painted trillium. Chokeberry bushes were topped with handsome clusters of round, purplish buds.

The brightest and prettiest thing here, however, was not a flower, but a bird; a Blackburnian warbler fluttering along before me in the low bushes—an extraordinary act of grace on the part of this haunter of treetops—as if on purpose to show himself. He was worth showing. His throat was like a jewel. A bay-breast, always deserving of notice, was singing among the evergreens near by. So I believed, but the flies were so hot after me that I made no attempt to assure myself. I was fairly chased away from the waterside. One place after another I fled to, seeking one where the breeze should rid me of my tormentors, till at last, in desperation, I took to the piazza of the little shop—now unoccupied—at which the summer tourist buys birch-bark souvenirs, with ginger-beer, perhaps, and other potables. There I finished my luncheon, still having a skirmish with the enemy’s scouts now and then, but thankful to be out of the thick of the battle. The rippling lake shone before me, a few swifts were shooting to and fro above it, but for the time my enjoyment of all such things was gone. That half hour of black-fly persecution had dissipated the happy mood in which the forenoon had been passed, and there was no recovering it by force of will. A military man would have said, perhaps, that I had lost my morale. Something had happened to me, call it what you will. But if one string was broken, my bow had another. Quiet meditation being impossible, I was all the readier to go in search of Selkirk’s violet, the possible finding of which was one of the motives that had brought me into the mountains thus early. To look for flowers is not a question of mood, but of patience. To look at them, so as to feel their beauty and meaning, is another business, not to be conducted successfully while poisonous insects are fretting one’s temper to madness.

If I went about this botanical errand doubtingly, let the reader hold me excused. He has heard of a needle in a haystack. The case of my violets was similar. The one man who had seen them was now dead. Years before, he had pointed out to me casually (or like a dunce I had heard him casually) the place where he was accustomed to leave the road in going after them—which was always long before my arrival. This place I believed that I remembered within perhaps half a mile. My only resource, therefore, was to plunge into the forest, practically endless on its further side, and as well as I could, in an hour or so, look the land over for that distance. Success would be a piece of almost incredible luck, no doubt; but what then? I was here, the hour was to spare, and the woods were worth a visit, violets or no violets. So I plunged in, and, following the general course of the road, swept the ground right and left with my eye, turning this way and that as boulders and tangles impeded my steps, or as the sight of something like violet leaves attracted me.

Well, for good or ill, it is a short story. There were plenty of violets, but all of the common white sort, and when I emerged into the road again my hands were empty. “Small,” “rare,” says the Manual. My failure was not ignominious,—or I would keep it to myself,—and I count upon trying again another season. And one thing I had found: my peace of mind. Subjectively, as we say, my hunt had prospered. Now I could climb Bald Mountain with good hope of an hour or two of serene enjoyment at the summit.

The climb is short, though the upper half of it is steep enough to merit the name, and the “mountain” (it will pardon me the quotation marks) is no more than a point of rocks, an outlying spur of Lafayette. Its attractiveness is due not to its altitude, but to the exceptional felicity of its situation; commanding the lake and the Notch, and the broad Franconia Valley, together with a splendid panorama of broken country and mountain forest; and over all, close at hand, the solemn, bare peak of Lafayette.

I took my time for the ascent (blessed be all-day jaunts, say I), minding the mossy boulders, the fern-beds, and the trees (many of them old friends of mine—it is more than twenty years since I began going up and down here), and especially the violets. It was surprising, not to say amusing, now that I had violets in my eye, how ubiquitous the little blanda had suddenly become. Almost it might be said that there was nothing else in the whole forest. So true it is that seeing or not seeing is mostly a matter of prepossession. As for the birds, this was their hour of after-dinner silence. I recall only a golden-crowned kinglet zeeing among the low evergreens about the cone. He was the first one of my whole vacation trip, and slipped at once into the eighty-seventh place in my catalogue, the place I had tried so hard to induce the brown creeper to take possession of two hours before. Creeper or kinglet, it was all one to me, though the kinglet is the handsomer of the two, and much the less prosaic in his dietary methods. In fact, now that the subject suggests itself, the two birds present a really striking contrast: one so preternaturally quick and so continually in motion, the other so comparatively lethargic. Every one to his trade. Let the creeper stick to his bark. Quick or slow, he should still have been Number 88, and thrice welcome, if he would have given me half an excuse for counting him. As things were, he kept out of my reckoning to the end.

“This is the best thing I have had yet.” So I said to myself as I turned to look about me at the summit. It was only half past two, the day was gloriously fair, the breeze not too strong, yet ample for creature comforts,—coolness and freedom,—and the place all my own. If I had missed Selkirk’s violet, I had found his solitude. The joists of the little open summer-house were scrawled thickly with names and initials, but the scribblers and carvers had gone with last year’s birds. I might sing or shout, and there would be none to hear me. But I did neither. I was glad to be still and look.