Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street

by Julian Street

Now that the dread of skidding was removed I began to enjoy myself, taking keen delight in the marvelous blue plains spread out everywhere to the eastward, and inhaling great drafts of effervescent air.

When we had struggled upward for perhaps two hours we left the road and assailed a little peak, from the top of which our host believed the main range of the Rockies would be visible. The slope was rather steep, but the ground beneath the snow was fairly smooth, giving us moderately good footing. By making transverse paths we zigzagged without much difficulty to the top, which was sharp, like the backbone of some gigantic animal.

I must admit that I had not been so anxious to see the main range as my Denver friends had been to have me see it. It did not seem to me that any mountain spectacle could be much finer than that presented by the glittering wall as seen from Denver. I had expected to be disappointed at the sight of the main range, and I am glad that I expected that, because it made all the greater the thrill which I felt when, on topping the hill, I saw what was beyond.

I was by this time very definitely aware that I had my fill of winter motoring in the mountains. The mere reluctance I felt as we began to climb had now developed into a passionate desire to desist

I do not believe that any experience in life can give the ordinary man—the man who is not a real explorer of new places—the sense of actual discovery and of great achievement, which he may attain by laboring up a slope and looking over it at a vast range of mountains glittering, peak upon peak, into the distance. The sensation is overwhelming. It fills one with a strange kind of exaltation, like that which is produced by great music played by a splendid orchestra. The golden air, vibrating and shimmering, is like the tremolo of violins; the shadows in the abysses are like the deep throbbing notes of violoncellos and double basses; while the great peaks, rising in their might and majesty, suggest the surge and rumble of pipe organs echoing to the vault of heaven.

I had often heard that, to some people, certain kinds of music suggest certain colors. Here, in the silence of the mountains, I understood that thing for the first time, for the vast forms of those jewel-encrusted hills seemed to give off a superb symphonic song—a song with an air which, when I let my mind drift with it, seemed to become definite, but which, when I tried to follow it, melted into vague, elusive harmonies.

There is no place in the world where Man can get along for more than two or three minutes at a time without thinking of himself. Everything with which he comes in contact suggests him to himself. Nothing is too small, nothing too stupendous, to make man think of man. If he sees an ant he thinks: "That, in its humble way, is a little replica of me, doing my work." But when he looks upon a mountain range he thinks more salutary thoughts, for if his thoughts about himself are ever humble, they will be humble then. Indeed, it would be like man to say that that was the purpose with which mountains were made—to humble him. For it is man's pleasure to think that everything in the universe was created with some definite relation to himself.

However that may be, it is man's habit, when he looks upon the mountains, to endeavor to make up for the long vainglorious years with a brief but complete orgy of self-abnegation. And that, of course, is a good thing for him, although it seems a pity that he cannot spread it thinner and thereby make it last him longer. But man does not like to take his humility that way. He prefers to take it like any other sickening medicine, gulping it down in one big draft, and getting it over with. That is the reason man can never bear to stay for any length of time upon a mountain top. Up there he finds out what he really is, and for man to find that out is, naturally, painful.

As he looks at the mountains the ego, which is 99 per cent. of him, begins to shrivel up. He may not feel it at first. Probably he doesn't. Very likely he begins by writing his own name in the eternal snows, or scratching his initials on a rock. But presently he gazes off into space and remarks with the Poet Towne: "Ain't Nature wonderful!" And, of course, after that he begins to think of himself again, saying with a great sense of discovery: "What a little thing I am!" Then, as his ego shrinks farther, the orgy of humility begins.