Footing it in Franconia

by Bradford Torrey

Bound each to each by natural piety.”

A little way up the valley we come to an ancient mill and a bridge; a new bridge it is now, but I remember an old one, and a fright that I once had upon it. With a fellow itinerant—a learned man, whose life was valuable—I stopped here to rest of a summer noon, and my companion, with an eye to shady comfort, clambered over the edge of the bridge and out upon a joist which projected over the stream. There he sat down with his back against a pillar and his legs stretched before him on the joist. He has a theory, concerning which I have heard him discourse more than once,—something in his own attitude suggesting the theme,—that when a man, after walking, “puts his feet up,” he is acting not merely upon a natural impulse, but in accordance with a sound physiological principle; and in accordance with that principle he was acting now, as well as the circumstances of the case would permit. We chatted awhile; then he fell silent; and after a time I turned my head, and saw him clean gone in a doze. The seat was barely wide enough to hold him. What if he should move in his sleep, or start up suddenly on being awakened? I looked at the rocks below, and shivered. I dared not disturb him, and could only sit in a kind of stupid terror and wait for him to open his eyes. Happily his nap did not last long, and came to a quiet termination; so that the cause of science suffered no loss that day; but I can never go by the place without thinking of what might have happened.

Here, likewise, on an autumnal forenoon, two or three years ago, I had another memorable experience; nothing less (nothing more, the reader may say) than the song of a hermit thrush. It was in the season after bluebirds and hermits had been killed in such dreadful numbers (almost exterminated, we thought then) by cold and snow at the South. I had scarcely seen a hermit all the year, and was approaching the bridge, of a pleasant late September morning, when I heard a thrush’s voice. I stopped instantly. The note was repeated; and there the bird stood in a low roadside tree; the next minute he began singing in a kind of reminiscential half-voice,—the soul of a year’s music distilled in a few drops of sound,—such as birds of many kinds so frequently drop into in the fall. That, too, I am sure to remember as often as I pass this way.

In truth, all my Franconia rambles (I am tempted to write the name in three syllables, as I sometimes speak it, following the example of Fishin’ Jimmy and other local worthies),—all my “Francony” rambles, I say, are by this time full of these miserly delights. It is really a gain, perhaps, that I make the round of them but once a year. Some things are wisely kept choice.

“Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare.”

To get all the goodness out of a piece of country, return to it again and again, till every corner of it is alive with memories; but do not see it too often, nor make your stay in it too long. The hermit thrush’s voice is all the sweeter because he is a hermit.

This afternoon I do not cross the bridge, but keep to the valley road, which soon runs for some distance along the edge of a hackmatack swamp; full of graceful, pencil-tipped, feathery trees, with here and there a dead one, on purpose for woodpeckers and hawks. A hairy woodpecker is on one of them at this moment, now hammering the trunk with his powerful beak (hammer and chisel in one), now lifting up his voice in a way to be heard for half a mile. To judge from his ordinary tone and manner, Dryobates villosus has no need to cultivate decision of character. Every word is peremptory, and every action speaks of energy and a mind made up.

In this larch swamp, though I have never really explored it, I have seen, first and last, a good many things. Here grows much of the pear-leaved willow (Salix balsamifera). I notice a few bushes even now as I pass, the reddish twigs each with a tuft of yellowing, red-stemmed leaves at the tip. Here, one June, a Tennessee warbler sang to me; and there are only two other places in the world in which I have been thus favored. Here,—a little farther up the valley,—on a rainy September forenoon, I once sat for an hour in the midst of as pretty a flock of birds as a man could wish to see: south-going travelers of many sorts, whom the fortunes of the road had thrown together. Here they were, lying by for a day’s rest in this favorable spot; flitting to and fro, chirping, singing, feeding, playfully quarreling, as if life, even in rainy weather and in migration time, were all a pleasure trip. It was a sight to cure low spirits. I sat on the hay just within the open side of a barn which stands here in the woods, quite by itself, and watched them till I almost felt myself of their company. I have forgotten their names, though I listed them carefully enough, beyond a doubt; but it will be long before I forget my delight in the birds themselves. Ours may be an evil world, as the pessimists and the preachers find so much comfort in maintaining, but there is one thing to be said in its favor: its happy days are the longest remembered. The pain I suffered years ago I cannot any longer make real to myself, even if I would, but the joys of that time are still almost as good as new, when occasion calls them up. Some of them, indeed, seem to have sweetened with age. This is especially the case, I think, with simple and natural pleasures; which may be considered as a good reason why every man should be, if he can, a lover of nature,—a sympathizer, that is to say, with the life of the world about him. The less artificial our joys, the more likelihood of their staying by us.

Not to blink at the truth, nevertheless, I must add a circumstance which, till this moment, I had clean forgotten. I was still watching the birds, with perhaps a dozen species in sight close at hand, when suddenly I observed a something come over them, and on the instant a large hawk skimmed the tops of the trees. In one second every bird was gone,—vanished, as if at the touch of a necromancer’s wand. I did not see them fly; there was no rush of wings; but the place was empty; and though I waited for them, they did not reappear. Two or three, indeed, I may have seen afterward, but the flock was gone. My holiday, at all events, or that part of it, was done,—shadowed by a hawk’s wing. Undoubtedly a few minutes of safety put the birds all in comfortable spirits again, however; and anyhow, it bears out my theory of remembered happiness, that this less cheerful part of the story had so completely passed out of mind. Memory, like a sundial, had marked only the bright hour.

Beyond this lonely barn the soil of the valley becomes drier and sandier. Here are two or three houses, with broad hayfields about them, in which live many vesper sparrows. No doubt they have lived here longer than any of their present human neighbors. Even now they flit along the wayside in advance of the foot-passenger, running a space, after their manner, and anon taking wing to alight upon a fence rail. Their year is done, but they linger still a few days, out of love for the ancestral fields, or, it may be, in dread of the long journey, from which some of them will pretty certainly never come back.