Several times I have walked down Staten Island and across New Jersey to Princeton "after dark," the destination being a particularly attractive feature of this walk. But I enjoy also the journeys that are made in strange places where one knows neither the way nor the destination, except from a map or the advice of signboard or kilometer posts (which one reads by the flame of a match, or, where that is wanting, sometimes by following the letters and figures on a post with one's fingers), or the information, usually inaccurate, of some other wayfarer. Most of these journeys have been made of a necessity that has prevented my making them by day, but I have in every case been grateful afterward for the necessity. In this country they have been usually among the mountains--the Green Mountains or the White Mountains or the Catskills. But of all my night faring, a night on the moors of Scotland is the most impressive and memorable, though without incident. No mountain landscape is to me more awesome than the moorlands by night, or more alluring than the moorlands by day when the heather is in bloom. Perhaps this is only the ancestors speaking again.
But something besides ancestry must account for the others. Indeed, in spite of it, I was drawn one night to Assisi, where St. Francis had lived. Late in the evening I started on to Foligno in order to take a train in to Rome for Easter morning. I followed a white road that wound around the hills, through silent clusters of cottages tightly shut up with only a slit of light visible now and then, meeting not a human being along the way save three somber figures accompanying an ox cart, a man at the head of the oxen and a man and a woman at the tail of the cart--a theme for Millet. (I asked in broken Italian how far it was to Foligno, and the answer was, "Una hora"--distance in time and not in miles.) Off in the night I could see the lights of Perugia, and some time after midnight I began to see the lights of Foligno--of Perugia and Foligno, where Raphael had wandered and painted. The adventure of it all was that when I reached Foligno I found it was a walled town, that the gate was shut, and that I had neither passport nor intelligible speech. There is an interesting walking sequel to this journey. I carried that night a wooden water-bottle, such as the Italian soldiers used to carry, filling it from the fountain at the gate of Assisi before starting. Just a month later, under the same full moon, I was walking between midnight and morning in New Hampshire. I had the same water-bottle and stopped at a spring to fill it. When I turned the bottle upside down, a few drops of water from the fountain of Assisi fell into the New England spring, which for me, at any rate, has been forever sweetened by this association.
All my long night walks seem to me now as but preparation for one which I was obliged to make at the outbreak of the war in Europe. I had crossed the Channel from England to France, on the day that war was declared by England, to get a boy of ten years out of the war zone. I got as far by rail as a town between Arras and Amiens, where I expected to take a train on a branch road toward Dieppe; but late in the afternoon I was informed that the scheduled train had been canceled and that there might not be another for twenty-four hours, if then. Automobiles were not to be had even if I had been able to pay for one. So I set out at dusk on foot toward Dieppe, which was forty miles or more distant. The experiences of that night would in themselves make one willing to practice walking for years in order to be able to walk through such a night in whose dawn all Europe waked to war. There was the quiet, serious gathering of the soldiers at the place of rendezvous; there were the all-night preparations of the peasants along the way to meet the new conditions; there was the pelting storm from which I sought shelter in the niches for statues in the walls of an abandoned château; there was the clatter of the hurrying feet of soldiers or gendarmes who properly arrested the wanderer, searched him, took him to a guard-house, and detained him until certain that he was an American citizen and a friend of France, when he was let go on his way with a bon voyage; there was the never-to-be-forgotten dawn upon the harvest fields in which only old men, women, and children were at work; there was the gathering of the peasants with commandeered horses and carts in the beautiful park on the water-front at Dieppe; and there was much besides; but they were experiences for the most part which only one on foot could have had.
And the moral of my whole story is that walking is not only a joy in itself, but that it gives an intimacy with the sacred things and the primal things of earth that are not revealed to those who rush by on wheels.
I have wished to organize just one more club--the "Holy Earth" club, with the purposes that Liberty Bailey has set forth in his book of the same title (The Holy Earth), but I should admit to membership in it (except for special reasons) only those who love to walk upon the earth.
Traveling afoot! This is the best posture in which to worship the God of the Out-of-Doors!
[OLD BOATS][25]
Walter Prichard Eaton
Anything which man has hewn from stone or shaped from wood, put to the uses of his pleasure or his toil, and then at length abandoned to crumble slowly back into its elements of soil or metal, is fraught for the beholder with a wistful appeal, whether it be the pyramids of Egyptian kings, or an abandoned farmhouse on the road to Moosilauke, or only a rusty hay-rake in a field now overgrown with golden-rod and Queen Anne's lace, and fast surrendering to the returning tide of the forest. A pyramid may thrill us by its tremendousness; we may dream how once the legions of Mark Antony encamped below it, how the eagles of Napoleon went tossing past. But in the end we shall reflect on the toiling slaves who built it, block upon heavy block, to be a monarch's tomb, and on the monarch who now lies beneath (if his mummy has not been transferred to the British Museum). The old gray house by the roadside, abandoned, desolate, with a bittersweet vine entwined around the chimney and a raspberry bush pushing up through the rotted doorsill, takes us back to the days when the pioneer's axe rang in this clearing, hewing the timbers for beam and rafter, and the smoke of the first fire went up that ample flue. How many a time have I paused in my tramping to poke around such a ruin, reconstructing the vanished life of a day when the cities had not sucked our hill towns dry and this scrubby wilderness was a productive farm!
The motor cars go through the Berkshires in steady procession by the valley highways, past great estates betokening our changed civilization. But the back roads of Berkshire are known to few, and you may tramp all the morning over the Beartown Mountain plateau, by a road where the green grass grows between the ruts, without meeting a motor, or indeed, a vehicle of any sort. A century ago Beartown was a thriving community, producing many thousand dollars' worth of grain, maple sugar, wool, and mutton. To-day there are less than half a dozen families left, and they survive by cutting cord wood from the sheep pastures! We must haul our wool from the Argentine, and our mutton from Montana, while our own land goes back to unproductive wilderness. As the road draws near the long hill down into Monterey, there stands a ruined house beside it, one of many ruins you will have passed, the plaster in heaps on the floor, the windows gone, the door half fallen from its long, hand-wrought hinges. It is a house built around a huge central chimney, which seems still as solid as on the day it was completed. The rotted mantels were simply wrought, but with perfect lines, and the panelling above them was extremely good. So was the delicate fanlight over the door, in which a bit of glass still clings, iridescent now like oil on water. Under the eaves the carpenter had indulged in a Greek border, and over the woodshed opening behind he had spanned a keystone arch. Peering into this shed, under the collapsing roof, you see what is left of an axe embedded in a pile of reddish vegetable mould, which was once the chopping block. Peering through the windows of the house, you see a few bits of simple furniture still inhabiting the ruined rooms. Just outside, in the door-yard, the day lilies, run wild in the grass, speak to you of a housewife's hand across the vanished years. The barn has gone completely, overthrown and wiped out by the advancing forest edge. Enough of the clearing still remains, however, to show where the cornfields and the pastures lay. They are wild with berry stalks and flowers now, still and vacant under the Summer sun.