Footing it in Franconia

by Bradford Torrey

“This is living!” I found myself repeating aloud, as I went up the longish hill to the plateau above Gale River, on the Bethlehem road. “This is living!” No more books, no more manuscripts,—my own or other people’s,—no more errands to the city. How good the air was! How glorious the mountains, unclouded, but hazy! How fragrant the ripening herbage in the shelter of the woods!—an odor caught for an instant, and then gone again; something that came of itself, not to be detected, much less traced to its source, by any effort or waiting. The forests were still green,—I had to look closely to find here and there the first touch of red or yellow; but the flowering season was mostly over, a few ragged asters and goldenrods being the chief brighteners of the wayside. About the sunnier patches of them, about the asters especially, insects were hovering, still drinking honey before it should be too late: yellow butterflies, bumble-bees (of some northern kind, apparently, marked with orange, and not so large as our common Massachusetts fellow), with swarms of smaller creatures of many sorts. If I stopped to attend to it, each aster bunch was a world by itself. And more than once I did stop. There was no haste; I had chosen my route partly with a view to just such idling; and the birds were, and were likely to be, nothing but old favorites. And they proved to be not many, after all. The best of them were the winter wrens, which I thought I had never seen more numerous; every one fretting, tut, tut, in their characteristic manner, without a note of song.

On my way back, the sun being higher, there were many butterflies in the road, flat on the sand, with wings outspread. If ever there is comfort in the world, the butterfly feels it at such times. Here and there half a dozen or more of yellow ones would be huddled about a damp spot. There were mourning-cloaks, also, and many small angle-wings, some species of Grapta, I knew not which, of a peculiarly bright red. Once or twice, wishing a name for them, I essayed to catch a specimen under my hat; but it seemed a small business, at which I was only half ashamed to find myself grown inexpert.

The forenoon was not without its tragedy, nevertheless. As I came out into the open, on my return from the river woods toward the Bethlehem road, a carriage stopped across the field; a man jumped out, gun in hand, ran up to an unoccupied house standing there by itself, with a tract of low meadow behind it, peeped cautiously round the corner, lifted his gun, leveled it upon something with the quickness of a practiced marksman, and fired. Then down the grassy slope he went on the run out of sight, and in a minute reappeared, holding a crow by its claw. He took the trophy into the carriage with him,—two ladies and a second man occupying the other seats,—and as I emerged from the pine wood, fifteen minutes afterward, I found it lying in the middle of the road. Its shining feathers would fly no more; but its death had brightened the day of some of the lords and ladies of creation. What happier fate could a crow ask for?

One of my first desires, this time (there is always something in particular on my mind when I go to Franconia), was to revisit Lonesome Lake, a romantic sheet of water lying deep in the wilderness on the back side of Mount Cannon, at an elevation of perhaps twenty-eight hundred feet, or something less than a thousand feet above the level of Profile Notch. One of its two owners, fortunately, is of our Franconia company; and when I spoke of my intention of visiting it again, he bade me drive up with his man, who would be going that way within a day or two. Late as the season was getting, he still went up to the lake once or twice a week, it appeared, keeping watch over the cabin, boat-house, and so forth. The plan suited my convenience perfectly. We drove to the foot of the bridle path, off the Notch road; the man put a saddle on the horse and rode up, and I followed on foot.

The climb is longer or shorter, as the climber may elect. A pedestrian would do it in thirty minutes, or a little less, I suppose; a nature-loving stroller may profitably be two hours about it. There must be at least a hundred trees along the path, which a sensitive man might be glad to stop and commune with: ancient birches, beeches, and spruces, any one of which, if it could talk, or rather if we had ears to hear it, would tell us things not to be read in any book. Hundreds of years many of the spruces must have stood there. Some of them, in all likelihood, were of a good height long before any white man set foot on this continent. Many of them were already old before they ever saw a paleface. What dwarfs and weaklings these restless creatures are, that once in a while come puffing up the hillside, halting every few minutes to get their breath and stare foolishly about! What murderer’s curse is on them, that they have no home, no abiding-place, where they can stay and get their growth?

It is a precious and solemn stillness that falls upon a man in these lofty woods. Across the narrow pass, as he looks through the branches, are the long, rugged upper slopes of Lafayette, torn with slides and gashed into deep ravines. Far over his head soar the trees, tall, branchless trunks pushing upward and upward, seeking the sun. In their leafy tops the wind murmurs, and here and there a bird is stirring. Now a chickadee lisps, or a nuthatch calls to his fellow. Out of the tangled, round-leaved hobble-bushes underneath an occasional robin may start with a quick note of surprise, or a flock of white-throats or snowbirds will fly up one by one to gaze at the intruder. In one place I hear the faint smooth-voiced signals of a group of Swainson thrushes and the chuck of a hermit. A few siskins (rarer than usual this year, it seems to me) pass overhead, sounding their curious, long-drawn whistle, as if they were blowing through a fine-toothed comb. Further up, I stand still at the tapping of a woodpecker just before me. Yes, there he is, on a dead spruce. A sapsucker, I call him at the first glance. But I raise my glass. No, it is not a sapsucker, but a bird of one of the three-toed species; a male, for I see his yellow crown-patch. His back is black. And now, of a sudden, a second one joins him. I am in great luck. This is a bird I have never seen before except once, and that many years ago on Mount Washington, in Tuckerman’s Ravine. The pair are gone too soon, and, patiently as I linger about the spot, I see no more of them. A pity they could not have broken silence. It is little we know of a bird or of a man till we hear him speak.

At the lake there are certain to be numbers of birds; not water birds, for the most part,—though I steal forward quietly at the last, hoping to surprise a duck or two, or a few sandpipers, as sometimes I have done,—but birds of the woods. The water makes a break in the wilderness,—a natural rendezvous, as we may say; it lets in the sun, also, and attracts insects; and birds of many kinds seem to enjoy its neighborhood. I do not wonder. To-day I notice first a large flock of white-throats, and a smaller flock of cedar-birds. The latter, when I first discover them, are in the conical tops of the tall spruces, whence they rise into the air, one after another, with a peculiar motion, as if a hand had tossed them aloft. They are catching insects, a business at which no bird can be more graceful, I think, though some may have been at it longer and more exclusively. Their behavior is suggestive of play rather than of a serious occupation. Near the white-throats are snowbirds, and in the firs by the lakeside chickadees are stirring, among which, to my great satisfaction, I presently hear a few Hudsonian voices. Sick-a-day-day, they call, and soon a little brown-headed fellow is directly at my elbow. I stretch out my hand, and chirp encouragingly. He comes within three or four feet of it, and looks and looks at me, but is not to be coaxed nearer. Sick-a-day-day-day, he calls again (“I don’t like strangers,” he means to tell me), and away he flits. He is almost always here, and right glad I am to see him on my annual visit. I have never been favored with a sight of him further south.

The lake is like a mirror, and I sit in the boat with the sun on my back (as comfortable as a butterfly), listening and looking. What else can I do? I have pulled out far enough to bring the top of Lafayette into view above the trees, and have put down the oars. The birds are mostly invisible. Chickadees can be heard talking among themselves, a flicker calls wicker, wicker, whatever that means, and once a kingfisher springs his rattle. Red squirrels seem to be ubiquitous, full of sauciness and chatter. How very often their clocks need winding! A few big dragon-flies are still shooting over the water. But the best thing of all is the place itself: the solitude, the brooding sky (the lake’s own, it seems to be), the solemn mountain-top, the encircling forest, the musical woodsy stillness. The rowan trees were never so bright with berries. Here and there one still holds full of green leaves, with the ripe red clusters shining everywhere among them.

After luncheon I must sit for a while in the forest itself. Every breath in the treetops, unfelt at my level, brings down a sprinkling of yellow birch leaves, each with a faint rustle, like a whispered good-by, as it strikes against the twigs in its fall. Every one preaches its sermon, and I know the text,—“We all do fade.” May the rest of us be as happy as the leaves, and fade only when the time is ripe. A nuthatch, busy with his day’s work, passes near me. Small as he is, I hear his wing-beats. A squirrel jumps upon the very log on which I am seated, but is off in a jiffy on catching sight of so unexpected a neighbor. So short a log is not big enough for two of us, he thinks. By and by I hear a bird stirring on a branch overhead, and look up to find him a red-eyed vireo. One of the belated, he must be, according to my almanac. He peers down at me with inquisitive, sidelong glances. A man!—in such a place!—and sitting still! I like to believe that he, as well as I, feels a pleasurable surprise at the unlooked-for encounter. We call him the preacher, but he is not sermonizing to-day, perhaps because the falling leaves have taken the words out of his mouth.

It is one of the best things about a place like this that it gives a man a most unusual feeling of remoteness and isolation. To be here is not the same as to be in some equally wild and silent spot nearer to human habitations. The sense of the climb we have made, of the wilderness we have traversed, still folds us about. The fever and the fret, so constant with us as to be mostly unrealized or taken for the normal state of man, are for the moment gone, and peace settles upon the heart. For myself, at least, there is an unspeakable sweetness in such an hour. I could stay here, forever, I think, till I became a tree. That feeling I have often had,—a state of ravishment, a kind of absorption into the life of things about me. It will not last, and I know it will not; but it is like heaven, for the time it is on me,—a foretaste, perhaps, of the true Nirvana.