A word about Berlin. Its situation is far more picturesque than that of Gorham. There is the same environment of mountains, and, in addition to the falls, a magnificent view of Madison, Adams, Jefferson, and of the Carter range. The precipices of Mount Forist, which overhang railway and village, are noticeable among a thousand. Here Dead River falls into the Androscoggin, and here the Grand Trunk Railway, taking leave of this river, turns to the north-west, crosses over to the Upper Ammonoosuc, twists and twines along: with it among the northern mountains, and at last emerges upon the level meadows of the Connecticut.
Berlin has another aspect. Lumber is its business; lumber its staple of conversation; people go to bed to dream of lumber. In a word, lumber is everywhere. The lumberman admires a tree in his way quite as much as you or I. No eye like his to estimate its height, its girth, its thickness. But as ships to Shylock, so trees to him are naught but boards—so many feet. So that there is something almost ferocious in the lumberman’s or mill-owner’s admiration for the forest; something almost startling in the idea that this out-of-the-way corner is devouring the forests at the rate of twenty car-loads a day. In plain language, this village cuts up a good-sized grove every day, and rejoices over it with a new house or a new barn.
At the risk of being classed with the sentimental and the unpractical, every one who is alive to the consequences of converting our forests into deserts, or worse than deserts, should raise a voice of warning against this wholesale destruction. The consequences may be remote, but they are certain. For the most part, the travelled routes have long since been stripped of their valuable timber trees. Now the mills are fast eating their way into the hitherto inaccessible regions, leaving a track of desolation behind wherever they go, like that of a destroying army. What cannot be carried away is burnt. Fires are seen blazing by the side of every saw-mill, in which all the waste material is carefully consumed. A trifle? Enough is consumed every year in this way to furnish the great city of New York with its fuel. I speak with moderation. Not a village but has its saw-mills; while at Whitefield, Bethlehem, Livermore, Low, and Burbank’s Grant, and many other localities, the havoc is frightful. Forest fires, originating chiefly in the logging-camps, annually desolate leagues of forest land. How long is this to continue?
The mountain labors incessantly to re-create, but what can it do against such fearful odds? and what shall we do when it can no longer furnish pine to build our homes, or wood to warm them? Delve deeper and deeper under the Alleghanies? In about two hundred and fifty years the noble forests, which set the early discoverers wild with enthusiasm, have been steadily driven farther and farther back into the interior, until “the forest primeval” exists not nearer than a hundred miles inland. Then the great northern wilderness began at the sea-coast. It is now in the vicinity of Lake Umbagog. Still the warfare goes on. I do not call occasional bunches of wood forests. All this means less and less moisture; consequently, more and more drought. The tree draws the cloud from heaven, and bestows it on the earth. The summer of 1880 was one of almost unexampled dryness. Large rivers dwindled to pitiful rivulets, brooks were dried up, and the beautiful cascades in many instances wholly disappeared. The State is powerless to interfere. Not so individuals, or combinations of individuals for the preservation of such tracts of woodland as the noble Cathedral woods of North Conway. In the West a man who plants a tree is a public benefactor; is he who saves the life of one in the East less so? America, says Berthold Auerbach, is no longer “the Promised Land for the Old World;” if she does not protect her woods, she will become “waste and dry,” like the Promised Land of the ancients—Palestine itself. Look on this picture of Michelet:
“On the shores of the Caspian, for three or four hundred leagues, one sees nothing, one encounters nothing, but midway an isolated and solitary tree. It is the love and worship of every passing wayfarer. Each one offers it something; and the very Tartar, in default of every other gift, will snatch a hair from his beard or his horse’s mane.”
The season when the great movement of lumber from the northern wilderness to the sea begins is one of great activity. The logs are floated down the Androscoggin from Lake Umbagog with the spring freshets, when those destined to go farther are “driven,” as the lumbermen’s phrase is, over the falls and through the rapids here, to be picked up below. It may well be believed that the passage of the falls by a “drive” is a sight worth witnessing. Sometimes the logs get so tightly jammed in the narrow gorge of the river that it seems impossible to extricate them; but the dam they form causes the river to rise behind it, when the accumulated and pent-up waters force their way through the obstruction, tossing huge logs in the air as if they were straws. A squad of lumbermen—tough, muscular, handy fellows they are—accompanies each drive, just as vaqueros do a Texan herd; and the herd of logs, like the herd of cattle, is branded with the owner’s mark. After making the drive of the falls, the men move down below them, where they find active and, so far as appearance goes, dangerous work in disentangling the snarls of logs caught among the rocks of the rapids. Against a current no ordinary boat could stem for a moment; they dart hither and thither in their light bateaux, as the herdsman does on his active little mustang. If a log grounds in the midst of the rapids, the bateaux dashes toward it. One river-driver jumps upon it, and holds the boat fast, while another grapples it with a powerful lever called a cant-dog. In a moment the log rolls off the rocks with a loud splash, and is hurried away by the rapid tide.
During the drive the lumberman is almost always wet to the skin, day in and day out. When a raft of logs is first started in the spring the men suffer from the exposure; but after a little time the work seems to toughen and harden them, so that they do not in the least mind the amphibious life they are forced to lead. Rain or shine, they get to their work at five in the morning, leaving it only when it is too dark to see longer. Each squad—for the whole force is divided into what may be called skirmishers, advanced-guards, main body, and rear-guard, each having its appointed work to perform—then repairs to its camp, which is generally a tent pitched near the river, where the cook is waiting for their arrival with a hot supper of fried doughnuts and baked beans—the lumberman’s diet of preference. They pass the evening playing euchre, telling stories, or relating the experiences of the day, and are as simple, hearty, happy-go-lucky fellows as can be found in the wide world.
To say that the Berlin Falls begin two miles below the village is no more than the truth, since at this distance the river was sheeted in foam from shore to shore. For these two miles its bed is so thickly sown with rocks that it is like a river stretched on the rack. The whole river, every drop of it, is hemmed in by enormous masses of granite, forming a long, narrow, and rocky gorge, down which it bursts in one mad plunge, tossing and roaring like the Maelstrom. What fury! What force! The solid earth shakes, and the very air trembles. It is a saturnalia. A whirlwind of passion, swift, uncontrollable, and terrible.
The best situation I could find was upon a jutting ledge below the little foot-bridge thrown from rock to rock. Several turns in the long course of the cataract prevent its whole extent being seen all at once; but it starts up hither and thither among the rocks, boiling with rage at being so continually hindered in its free course, until, at last, madness seizes it, and, flying straight at the throat of the gorge, it goes down in one long white wave, overwhelming everything in its way. It reaches the foot of the rocks in fleeces, darts wildly hither and thither, shakes off the grasp of concealed rocks, and, racing on, stretches itself on its wide and shallow bed, uttering a tremulous wail.
From the village at the falls, and from Berlin Mills, are elevations from which the great White Mountains are grandly conspicuous. The view is similar to that much extolled one from Milan, the town next to Berlin. Here the three great mountains, closed in mass, display a triple crown of peaks, Washington being thrown back to the left, and behind Madison, with Adams on his right. Best of all is the blended effect of early morning, or of the afterglow, when a few light clouds sail along the crimson sky, and their shadows play hide-and-seek on the mountain sides.