Perhaps there is no element in the varied life of an explorer so full of contemplative pleasure as the frequent and rapid passages he makes between city life and home: by that I mean his true home, where the flames of his bivouac fire light up trunks of sheltering pine and make an island of light in the silent darkness of the primeval forest. The crushing Juggernaut-car of modern life and the smothering struggle of civilization are so far off that the wail of suffering comes not, nor the din and dust of it all; and out of your very memory for a time—alas! only for a time—fade those two indelible examples of the shallowness of society, those terrible pictures of sorrow and wrong, and that perennial artifice which wellnigh always chokes with its weedy growth the rare, fine flowers of art.
All is forgotten: those murky clouds which in town life dispute the serenity of one’s spiritual air drift beyond view, and over you broods only the quiet sky of night, her white stars moving beyond fragrant pine-tops or lost in the dim tangle of their feathery foliage. Such is the mountaineer’s evening spent contemplatively before his fire; the profound sense of Nature’s tranquillity filling his mind with its repose till the flames give way to embers, and guardian pines spread dusky arms over his sleep. Not less a contrast greets him when from simple field life the doors of a city suddenly open, and the huddled complexity of everything jostles him. Either way, and as often as one makes this transit between civilization and the wilds, one prizes most the pure, simple, strengthening joy of nature.
Thus, when, from the heat and pressure of town in September, 1873, I suddenly plunged into the heart of the Sierra forest, a cool mountain sky of holy blue and my well-beloved trees, calm and vigorous as ever, communicated thrills of pleasure well worth my brief separation from them. Day after day through the green forest I rode on, leaving the mustang to choose his own gait, scarcely talking to my two campaign companions, who with the plodding pack-animals followed noiselessly behind. It was only when we ascended the east wall of the Kern Cañon on the Hockett Trail, and reached the nebulous plateau where pine and granite and cloud form the three elements of a severe picture, that I felt myself filled to the brim with my long draught of nature, and turned to my followers for society.
I was accompanied by Seaman and Knowles, two settlers of Tule River, who had been good enough to take a thorough interest in my proposed trip. One less used than I to the strong originality and remarkable histories of frontiersmen might have marvelled at the rich chat of these two men; for myself, however, I long ago learned to expect under the rough garb and simple manners of Western plainsmen and mountaineers a wealth of experience, with its resultant harvest of philosophy. Untrammelled by the schools, these men strike out boldly and arrange the universe to suit themselves. Not alone is this noticeable in matter of general interest; in the most special subjects it will not do to assume an ignorance at all in keeping with the primitive cut of their trousers or their idiom, which show strong affinities with the flint period. As an instance, volcanic action has of late years occupied much of my thoughts, and so dry a subject, one would think, could not have fixed the interest of many non-professional travellers. Judge of my feelings, therefore, on the night we reached the Kern Plateau and camped with a solitary shepherd, to hear without giving direction to it myself, the conversation turn on volcanoes, and realized, as the group renewed our fire and hours passed by, that my two companions had been in Iceland, Hawaii, Java, and Ecuador, and that, as for the sheep herder, he had rolled stones down nearly every prominent approachable crater on the planet. I was reminded of a certain vaquero who astounded Professor Brewer by launching out boldly in the Latin names of Mexican plants.
The Kern Plateau, so green and lovely on my former visit, in 1864, was now a gray sea of rolling granite ridges, darkened at intervals by forest, but no longer velveted with meadows and upland grasses. The indefatigable shepherds have camped everywhere, leaving hardly a spear of grass behind them.
To the sad annoyance of our hungry horses, we found this true until we entered the rough, rocky cañon which leads down from the false Mount Whitney, in whose depths, among glacier erratics and dark pines, we selected a spot where a vocal brook and patches of carex meadow seemed to welcome us. During a three days’ painful illness which overtook me here I felt that I should never lose an opportunity to warn my fellow-men against watermelon, which, after all, is only an ingenious contrivance of nature to converge the waves of motion from the midsummer sun, and, by the well-recognized principles of force conservation, transmute them into so much potential colic.
Across from wall to wall of our deep glacier cañon the morning sky stretched pure and blue, but without a trace of that infinite depth, so dark and vacant, so alluringly profound, when the sun nears its culmination. We arose early, and all three were marching up the gentle acclivity of the valley bottom, when, from among the peaks darkly profiled against the east, bold lances of light shot down through gloom and shadow, touching with sudden brightness here a clump of feathery fir, there a heap of glacier blocks, pencilling yellow lines across meadow-patch or alpine tarn, and working out along the whole rocky amphitheatre above us those splendid contrasts of gold and blue which are the delight of mountaineers and the despair of painters.
Knowles, with the keen eye of an accomplished hunter, became conscious, as we marched along, just how lately a mountain sheep had crossed our way, and occasionally the whispered sound of light footfalls along the crags overhead riveted his attention upon some gray mote on the granite, and with the huntsman’s habitual quiet he would only ejaculate: “Two-year-old buck,” or “Too thin for venison,” or some similar phrase, indicating the marvellous acuteness of his senses.
Among the many serious losses man has suffered in passing from a life of nature to one artificial is to be numbered the fatal blunting of all his senses.
Step after step the cañon ascended, with great, vacant corridors opening among the rocky buttresses on either side, till at last there were no more firs, the alpine meadows became mere patches, and a chilly wind drew down from among the snow-drifts.