The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

He seemed to have no desire for companionship, but there was nothing morose or misanthropic in his love of seclusion, and I soon saw that, though he had no care for intellectual growth and no longing for books, he thought a good deal in his own way, and that, mingled with his limited thinking and tranquil emotion before nature, there was a large element of spiritual activity, and this had kept him mentally alive. He had heard of spiritism, and his own experience led him to acceptance of its reality. In his solitary life, in the unbroken silence which reigned around him, he heard mysterious voices, and only the year before he had heard one say that he was wanted at home. He paid no attention to it, thinking it only an illusion, but, after an interval, it was repeated so distinctly that he packed his knapsack, took his dog, and went out with the intention of going home. On the way he met a messenger sent after him, who told him that his brother had met with an accident which disabled him from all work, and begged him to come to his assistance. The voice had come to him at the time of the accident. As a rule, however, the voices seemed vagarious, and he attached no importance to them, except as phenomena which interested him slightly. There was nothing flighty about him, no indication of monomania—he reasoned well, but from the point of view of a man who has had only an elementary education, knowing nothing of philosophy; he had no religious crotchets, and apparently thought little or not at all on religious matters—was, in fine, a natural and healthy man, a despiser of alcohol, satisfied with the moment he lived in, and giving no consideration to that which would come after. He had a great contempt for his fellow woodsmen and avoided contact with them.

The backwoods life, as a rule, I found led to hard drinking, and even the old settler with whom I had taken quarters, though an excellent and affectionate head of his family, and in his ordinary life temperate and hard-working, used at long intervals to break bounds, and, taking his savings down to the settlement, drink till he could neither pay for more nor "get it on trust," and then come home penitent and humiliated. About two weeks after I entered the family, the old man took me aside and informed me, mysteriously, that he was going to the settlement for a few days, and begged me to take one of the boats and come down for him on a fixed day, and he would row the boat back. I rowed down accordingly, sixteen miles, and found Johnson at the landing in a state of fading intoxication, money and credit exhausted as usual, and begging some one to give him a half pint of rum "to ease up on." He was "all on fire inside of him," and begged so piteously that I got him a half pint and we started out, he at the oars and I steering. A copious draught of rum, neat, brought his saturated brain to overflow, and before we had gone a mile he was so drunk that I had to guide the oars from behind to insure their taking the water. Then he broke out into singing, beating time on the gunwale of the boat with such violence that it menaced capsizing every minute, and to all my remonstrances he replied by jeering and more uproarious jollity.

It was no joke, for not to talk of him, too drunk even to hold on to the boat, I was a poor swimmer, and in the deep and cold lake water should never have reached the shore swimming, and I found myself obliged to menace violence. I raised the steering paddle over his head and assured him with a savageness that reached even his drunken brain, that I should knock him on the head and pitch him overboard if he did not keep perfectly quiet. There was imminent danger, for the slight boat of that region requires to be treated with the care of a bark canoe, and the menace cowed him so that he quieted down, and watched me like a whipped dog. I tried to get the bottle away from him, but his drunken cunning anticipated me and he put it far behind him, now and then taking a mouthful of rum to keep down the burning. Thus, he pulling and I guiding the oars, we ran through the lower lake, seven miles, to a "carry," where the boat had to be lifted out and carried over into the river above, around a waterfall. Here I fortunately caught the bottle and sent it down the lake, and we labored on through another lake, three miles, and up a crooked river to another carry into the third lake, on which we lived. He was too drunk still to be trusted any further, and, leaving the boat at the landing with him beside it, I carried the load over and waited for him to get sober. After an interval, long enough I thought for him to grow sober enough to carry the boat, I went back and to my amazement he met me, apparently in his right mind, intensely indignant with some one who, having found him in the state of intoxication in which I left him, had given him a drink of what he called "high wines," i.e. common alcohol, the singular effect of which was to bring him immediately to his senses, and we reached home without further incident.

That night, somewhere near midnight, poor Mrs. Johnson awoke me, begging piteously that I would help her and her daughter to search for her husband, who had disappeared from the house. Then she told me that he had the habit of falling into desperate melancholy after his drunken fits, and had even attempted suicide, and they had on one occasion cut the rope by which he had hanged himself, barely in time, and she always expected to find him dead somewhere. We ransacked the house, the loft, the barn, the stable, in all their corners, every shed and nook about the premises and were returning hopeless, to wait for daylight to look for him in the lake, when, as I passed the wood-yard (where the fire-wood was stored and chopped), I heard a groan, and, guided by it, found him lying amongst the chips in the torpor of drunken sleep. The poor wife, with my assistance, dragged him home and put him to bed, and when I saw him the next morning I heard over and over again his vows and resolutions, his sermons against drink, his repentance and pledges never to touch liquor again. When I showed incredulity, he offered to bet with me his best yoke of oxen against one hundred dollars that he never would drink another drop as long as he lived. I thought the bet a safe one for me, at all events, and took it and made him write it down, and it probably kept him from another spree as long as I remained there, but when I saw him again the next summer he was as drunk as ever. I asked him about my oxen, and he leered and jeered and joked with drunken cunning, but said nothing more.

I passed a very happy summer, enjoying my work and wandering in the forest or exploring the streams which flowed into the lake, for subjects. The pure air and the tranquillity of the life, as well as its simplicity, and a certain amount of boating exercise which I went through every day in going to my subject, brought me to the highest point of physical health I had ever known.

The great danger to the uninitiated in the forest life is that of getting lost in this wild maze of trees, with no kind of landmark to serve as a clue. Not a few rash beginners have become bewildered, lost all conception of their whereabouts, and perished of starvation within a short walk of a place of refuge. The houses there were invariably built by the waterways, and the lines of communication were by water, so that there was no necessity for roads. One finds the "runways" or paths made by the deer traversing the woods in every direction,—a perfect labyrinth of byways, ending nowhere and often bringing the incautious wanderer, who supposes them to be paths, back to his starting-place, with the result that he is at once bewildered beyond recovery.

Years before, during one of my college vacations, I had made a fishing excursion to the northern edge of the great woods, in company with a classmate to the manner born, and had learned the need in my excursions of precautions against the bewilderment which follows the loss of one's sense of direction. He told me of one of the inexperienced assistants of a surveying party of which he was a member, engaged in running a township line in the trackless forest, who ventured to leave the line a few minutes, and, before he could recover it, though only a short distance from his party, had become quite insane, and could only be compelled to return with his companions by force. An artist friend who had sketched on the southern border of the Wilderness told me of a similar experience of an English shoemaker who came to settle in a village on the southern edge of the woods, and who, after a short residence, went out to fish in a stream not far from home. He did not return, and, though protracted search was made for him, no trace of him, nor even of his clothing, was ever discovered, except that a resident in a neighboring village said that, a day or two after the stranger had disappeared, a man answering to the description came to his door, his clothes in tatters, and, in a wild and incoherent manner, asked the way to the village from which he had gone, but, before any reply could be made, started off running and disappeared in the woods again. He had contracted the woods madness and so perished.

Of this danger I was well informed, and, beside, I was more or less a child of the woodlands, and had no apprehension of it, having, moreover, an implicit faith in what I considered a kind of spiritual guidance in all I did,—a delusion which at least served to keep me in absolute self-control under all circumstances. It was probably this which kept me during my wanderings from falling into the panic which constituted the real danger, depriving the victim temporarily of the use of his reasoning powers. I had, however, an interesting experience which gave me a clearer comprehension of the phenomenon, which is a very curious one.

One of the woodsmen had told me of a waterfall on a trout stream of considerable size which emptied into a lake near by us, and, in the hope of finding a subject in it, I took the boat one afternoon and began to follow the course of the stream up from the mouth. After a half mile of clear and navigable water it became so clogged with fallen trees that more lifting than paddling was required, and, as its course was extremely tortuous, I occasionally got out and examined the vicinity of the stream bed and the course above, if, perchance, there might be better navigation beyond. On one of the digressions I suddenly came on the stream running back on its previous course and parallel to it. Instantly, in the twinkling of an eye, the entire landscape seemed to have changed its bearings,—the sun, which was clear in the sky, it being about three o'clock, shone to me out of the north, and it was impossible to convince myself that my senses deceived me, or accept the fact that the sun must be in the southwest, the general direction from which the stream was flowing, and that, to get home again, I must turn my back to it, if I had lost my boat, as seemed certain. Then began to come over me, like an evil spell, the bewilderment and the panic which accompanied it. Fortunately, I recognized this panic from the experiences I knew of, and was aware that if I gave way to it I was a lost man, beyond any finding by the woodsmen, even if they attempted to track me.

Fresh wolf tracks were plenty all along the bank of the stream; panthers and bears abounded in that section, and the wilderness beyond me was never explored, and hardly penetrable, so dense was the undergrowth of dwarf firs and swamp cedars. I had one terrible moment of clear consciousness that if I went astray at that juncture no human being would ever know where I was, and the absolute necessity of recovering my sense of the points of compass was clear to me. By a strong effort of the will, I repressed the growing panic, sat down on a log and covered my face with my hands, and waited, I had no idea how long, but until I felt quite calm; and when I looked out on the landscape again I found the sun in his proper place and the landscape as I had known it. I walked back to my boat without difficulty and went home, and I never lost my head again while I frequented the wilderness. I grew in time to know the points of the compass, even when the sky was covered, and often came home from my excursions after sunset without confusion, but I know that I then owed my escape from the most terrible of deaths entirely to my presence of mind, and this I probably owed then, and always, to that supreme confidence in the protection of a superior power which never deserted me.