THE DOWNWARD WAY
VI. DIFFERENT WAYS OF GOING DOWNWARD
For several days now we did not meet a human being or see evidence of the existence of one; nor, though continually imagining that we had found a bit of a trail, did we find either a footstep or a hoof-mark. “I’ve never been before in a place where you did not see tin cans,” said Lindsay. “Why, some of the popular canyons of the West are literally filled with cans. It is not only tourist parties that leave them, but the cowboys live on canned goods and fill the valley with their cans.” Another relief is the absence of advertisements, of all the signs of modern civilisation. You are given without reserve to America as she was.
“I don’t believe in class war,” says Lindsay, as we turn the corner of the mountain-wall. “I believe in the war of the mountain and the desert with the town. Only the deserts and mountains of America can break the business-hardened skulls of the East.”
He wants me to seek with him the source of the American spirit in the mountains of the West. However, reality confronts us and not a dream. We see beyond the wall of the mountain, terrace after terrace and cascade upon cascade, gleaming upward on a sort of endless stairway. To the first waterfall we count eight bays of loose stone and shale. We step from rock to rock, and as my legs are longer this hinders Lindsay more than it does me. He is all for diagonalising downward, or even going straight down, and finding an imaginary easier course skirting the edge of the forest. We, however, try to keep our level, but whether we wish it or no we slide downward at each uncertain step.
At last we come to a bay of tiny, trickling silt, so steep and smooth that a glass marble might roll from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Decent progress along this is impossible, so we decide to toboggan to the bottom, and seat ourselves on broad, flat stones, and guiding ourselves with our hands go off at a rare pace for that imaginary better way at the skirting of the mid-mountain forest. The device reminds Lindsay of an Indian Government agent who had the task of supplying the Indians with all they needed on their reservation.
There came, consigned to him, some very large skillets or frying-pans, which the Indians repeatedly refused to take away, having no use for them. At last one day the chief came in and gladly took away the lot. The agent, curious to know what they were going to do with them, went out to see. He found half the tribe on the hillside and a very gay game in progress—Indians sitting in the frying-pans and tobogganing on the loose shale.
We slid to the bottom like the Indians, but we found no better way down there. The skirting of the mid-mountain forest ran unevenly, now up three hundred feet, now down again, and it was too arduous a way for us. “Let us go down through the forest and seek a trail,” said my companion. Once more we entered the primeval crowd of vegetation, and like police hurrying to some scene of accident, pushed our way through. In half an hour we made good progress downward and came to a sheer cliff over the rivulet of the valley. The cliff was feathered with pines, and we let ourselves down with our hands from the tops of trees, from branches, from stem to stem and trunk to trunk, to the verdant pit of the stream. We clambered downward like two curious Mowglis, but with large humps on our backs, and the humps were our packs. And how these packs of ours pulled us about! We seldom touched earth with our feet and therefore constantly slewed around and dangled with our packs entangled in thick growth.
There was little to console the poet when the water was reached, unless it was the mess of tea we made on a fire on a dank, red rock standing out of the stream. But he was all for fording the water and for trying to find a better way on the other side. This we did, and we climbed up again and then we climbed down. And we found no better way. For no one had been there before us to make it for us.
But we found beautiful quarters at last among the snows and the waterfalls below the pass, and we slept under innumerable stars, lulled by the choruses of many waters. We made breakfast at dawn and talked till it was warm. Vachel told me of his past—how he had struggled always against the downward way. People had said to him, “You must make money. You must enter a profession.” When as an art student he had gained some power with the pencil, they had said, “You must enter commercial art”; when as poet he had been recognised, they had said, “You must let us organise and commercialise your gift, turn it into money for you.” “They wanted to Barnumise me,” said my companion, “and take me all over America as a reciting freak. When I refused, they said, ‘You’ll end in the poor-house,’ and I replied, ‘I don’t care: show me the poor-house—let me go to it.’” He had taken to the road to regain his self-respect. He had gone without any money, and in the hospitality and kindness of the farmers he had won a personal faith in the common man and a reliance which was not merely on success. When he harvested in Kansas for two dollars fifty a day, that daily wage was like millions to him. And now with me, when all the world was telling him he must do thus and so, he was finding in the wilderness of the Rockies a new means of escape.