The Climb from Crawford's Through an Enchanting Forest
Off Mount Jackson runs a tiny brook. I do not know its name, but because it is the very beginning of the Saco River and because it empties into Saco Lake, I fancy it is Saco Brook. Whatever its name it is fortunate above most White Mountain brooks in that the lumbermen have kept away from it for half a century or so and the great growth of an ancient forest shadows it. At the bottom of this it dances down ledges and under prostrate trunks of trees that have stood their time and been pushed over by the wind, and as it goes it splashes joyously to itself in a liquid flow of language that has as many variations of syllables and intonations as has human speech. On either side its winding staircase in the forest old, old hemlocks rise in columnar dignity and great yellow birches spread the climbing walls of its passageway with a leafy tapestry of gold and green, their once crisp, sun-imprisoning curls of yellow bark all gray with age and as shaggy as those on a centenarian's head. Through such shady glens of cool delight the little brook calls the path up Jackson from its beginnings at the cellar-hole of the old Crawford homestead and the path responds gladly, climbing within sound of this melodious monologue a pleasant part of the way.
Even after it turns, reluctantly one thinks, to breast the slope southward and leave the friendly brook behind, the way leads still through this fine old forest whose moist gloaming fosters the growth of all mosses and through them in turn makes the forest tenure secure. Nor does it pass into the full sun until its two and three-quarters miles to the summit of Jackson are all but completed and it climbs steeply out of dwarf firs and spruces to surmount the bare dome. How excellent the moist moss which deeply clothes stumps, stones and all things else, is for the growing of firs and hemlocks may be easily seen. Here no seedling need fail to grow for lack of moisture, even if it fall on the very top of a high rock. Here is a fir, for instance, beside the path up by Bugle Cliff. Its first rootlets ran from the very top of a boulder down each side of it through this soft, moist covering of moss till they reached the ground beneath. There as the years have passed they sunk deep and the fir has become a fine tree, though the base of its trunk is five feet from the ground and its two big roots straddle the rock on which they first found frail tenure in the thin covering of moss. Once let the sun in on this to dry out the moisture and the seedling would have evaporated with it. Thus the trees protect the moss and the moss protects the trees. Remove either one and the other must go.
This golden gloom and persistent moisture fosters other evergreen growth than firs and mosses. Here thrives and grows beautiful the spinulose wood fern, which seems peculiarly the fern of the high mountain slopes. But more conspicuous along this path to the summit of Jackson are the polypodys. The polypody stands drought or cold equally well. In either it shrivels and seems to wither, but let the warmth or moisture needed come back and the seemingly blighted fronds fill out and are vigorously alive once more. I often find polypodys in summer on exposed rocks seemingly crisp and dead with the drought. But when the September rains have soaked them I come by again and find them growing as huskily as before. Yet for all their persistence throughout weather torment these ferns are most beautiful and luxuriant in spots where moisture persists, and they have uninterrupted growth throughout their summer season. Such a spot is the deep wood along this trail, and there, on such rocks as they favor, the polypodys set close fronds of a green that seems singularly bright and rich in shade. It may be that the diffused gold of the sunlight in such places brings out greens at their best, but surely nowhere else have I found these little ferns at once so luxuriant in growth and so beautiful in color.
For all that, not all rocks in this delectable woodland bear the picturesque decoration of the polypody fronds. Up by Bugle Cliff are two great cubical boulders. On the level top of one of these is a splendid garden of the little ferns. They cover it with an even matted growth that looks like a marvellously woven and decorated mat covering a mighty footstool that might have been left behind by some recently departing race of giants. Yet within a stone's throw of it is another rock, quite like it in size and shape, on which one or two straggling ferns are trying to get a foothold, but with very indifferent success. So through this as other woodlands it seems to be with the polypody, which is without doubt a fern of feminine nature in spite of its sturdiness. With one rock Miss Polypody will dwell in woodland seclusion most happily all her days; with another of similar shape and size she will have no dallying. The cause is no doubt to be sought in the character of the rock rather than in its figure or consistency. The polypody has a predilection for lime, and it is probable that the rocks which they decorate so faithfully have their characters sweetened by this ingredient.
But in these forest shades if every stone may not bear wilful Miss Polypody upon its breast none goes without decoration of beauty. Without the mosses and lichens the ferns would find little chance for life in any forest, and here they cover all things with a beauty that is as profuse as it is delicate. No rock nor stump nor growing trunk of forest tree but has these, so wonderfully blended in their grays and greens, their olives and browns, that the eye accepts them as a whole and, in such perfect harmony is their adornment, half the time fails to note that they are there at all. Yet one has but to pick out a definite spot and examine it for a moment to be impressed with the prodigality of beauty of the whole. Here, for instance, not far from the point where the trail up Mount Webster diverges from that up Jackson, is a pathside rock of rough, micaceous granite such as mosses love. Its surface slopes like a lean-to roof toward the north and is but a foot or two square. It is no more beautifully, no more diversely decorated than ten thousand other rocks which one may see along the trail. Yet here is a harmony of blending and contrasting colors and forms such as the cleverest human artist with all the fabrics and all the dyes of Christendom might labor in vain to produce.
Tiny fern-like fronds of the dainty cedar moss weave across it a tapestry of golden green, a feathery fabric such as only fairy workmen, laboring patiently for long years, can produce. Yet it is a fabric common to the whole wood, carpeting and upholstering its inequalities for miles. Into this is sparingly wrought an over-pattern of deeper green tufts of the hairy-cap moss, sending up slender stems headed with fruitage and holding the pointed caps which are the fairy headgear. To note these is to realize suddenly that the fairies are still at work under the shadow of the warp and woof of the fabric, though they are too nimble to be seen, however suddenly one may lift it. It is easy to lift the hairy caps, but I refrain. To take even one away is to spoil the perfect symmetry of this pattern which is so complete that every detail, even the most minute, is needed for the harmony of the whole. On one side an hepatic lichen spreads a rosette-like decoration of purple-brown edged with silvery gray, a color that has its answering glints all through the structure of the cedar moss and which joins the brown hepatic in all its roughness to this dainty background.
In another spot is the gray mist of a clump of reindeer lichen, a fine, soft, green-gray mist, blowing across from the other lichen's edge and clouding with its filmy fluff a tiny portion of the picture. It is thus that summer clouds float over the green tops of the forest trees on some days and shadow them with a gray mist for a moment. The reindeer lichen is growing on the stone, but it has all the effect of being blown across it, and I know well that if I look away for a moment it will be gone when I look back. Diagonally across the rock runs a bar dextra of Clintonia leaves, loosely laid in shining green, and in certain groups are the trifoliate scallops of the wood-sorrel. The whole is like a shield of one of the great knights of Arthur's court, heraldic emblazonry thick upon it, hung here in the greenwood while its bearer rests upon his arms or drinks perhaps from the waters of the Silver Cascade brook which I hear swishing coolly down the glen not far away.
But all this decoration, so wonderfully harmonious, so minutely complete in itself, is, on this particular rock, but a background for a clump of pure white Indian pipe blooms, growing in its centre. Ghostlily beautiful, their white glowing by contrast in the green gloom of the place, these blossoms seem the plant embodiment of the cool echo of falling waters that slips along the aisles of flickering, golden light between the brown, straight columns of the firs and hemlocks. The nodding, pallid flowers are as soothing to the sight as is this soft whisper of descending streams to the ear. The forest writes the word "hush" in letters of the Indian pipe blooms.