I wonder if you can imagine what fun pioneering is. To be in a country where the fairest spot is yours for the wanting it, to cut and build your own home out of the land you stand upon, to plan and create clearings, parks, vistas, and make out of a wilderness an ordered place! Of course so much was done—nearly all—when I came. But in clearing up the woods and in improving my own stead I have had a taste of the great experience. Ah, it’s a fine and wholesome life!...
Another day. The storm rages out of doors. To-day I stuffed the largest of the cracks in our wall with woolen socks, sweaters, and all manner of clothes. It’s so warm and cozy here now! Olson has been in to see me for a long chat. I believe he can give one the material for a thrilling book of adventure. Take his story, or enough of the thousand wild incidents of it, give it its true setting—publishing a map of that part of the coast where his travels mostly lay—let it be frankly his story retold, above all true and savoring of this land—and I believe no record of pioneering or adventure could surpass it. He’s a keen philosopher and by his critical observations gives his discourse a fine dignity. On Olson’s return to Idaho in the ’80’s after his first trip to Alaska a friend of his, a saloon-keeper, came out into the street, seized him, and drew him into his place. “Sit down, Olson,” he said, “and tell us about Alaska from beginning to end.” And the traveler told his long wonder-story to the crowd.
THE SLEEPER
At last he finished.
“Olson,” said his friend, “that would make the greatest book in the world—if it was only lies.”
Gee, how the storm rages!
I’m relieved to-night; Rockwell, who seems to have a felon on his finger, is improving under the heroic treatment he submits to. I’ve had visions of operating on it myself—a deep incision to the bone being the method. It is no fun having such ailments to handle—unless you’re of the type Olson seems to be who, if his eye troubled him seriously, would stick in his finger and pull the eye out,—and then doubtless fill the socket with tobacco juice.
We have reached Wednesday, September the eighteenth.
That day the sun did shine. We rowed to Seward, Rockwell and I; stopped for the motor that on our last trip we had left by the way, but found the surf too high. At Seward the beach was strewn with damaged and demolished boats from a recent storm. Moreover, in the town the glacial stream was swollen to a torrent; the barriers had, some of them, been swept away; a bridge was gone, the railroad tracks were flooded, the hospital was surrounded and almost floated from its foundations. And we saw the next day, when it again poured rain, the black-robed sisters of charity, booted to the thighs, fleeing through the water to a safer place. It stormed incessantly for four days more. Although I had taken what seemed ample precaution for the safety of my dory, she was caught at the height of the storm by the exceptional tide of that season and carried against a stranded boat high up on the shore, and pinioned there by a heavy pile torn from the wharf. But our boat escaped undamaged.