Part 14
Beyond the Howling Swamp, an interesting glacial hill rises, dividing the swamp from the broader valley of Ball Brook beyond. The lower southern brow of this hill had been eroded by the currents formerly flowing over the ridge when a larger lake existed here. From the summit of this hill, one becomes conscious that not so long ago wide waters spread about. Two currents are evident,—one from the glaciated Dome, flowing westward, and one from the ice-capped heights of Mount Anthony, southeastward; the two currents mingling and rushing westward over the Glebe toward Pownal Centre and the natural dam at Gregor Rocks, toward the Hudson Valley and the sea. Slowly—as the dam in the valley broke away and let the ice-currents out—the mountain lakes were drained off, and left these bare, round hills and deep, swampy hollows, where as soon as the climates grew temperate, forests of evergreens sprang up and flowers bloomed. Northward, toward Bennington, as far as the eye can see, one discerns a chain of rounded wooded hills and intervening swamps.
On my way homeward, I stopped at the Swamp of Oracles, and decided to climb up the sides of the ravine for a look at the Large Round-Leaved Orchis, found here in June. I passed through Clintonia Hollow, beyond the woodchuck’s home, where I had observed the Small Round-Leaved Orchis in the little animal’s dooryard. There I struck out westward up the hillside. I frightened up the same mother whippoorwill that I had disturbed earlier in the season. The little birds of the second brood were now large, and commencing to feather. They were fluffy, and of a dead-leaf yellowish-brown color. Their large, round, brown eyes were like small shoe buttons. They began to run about at sight of me. The mother, meanwhile, feigned a broken wing and moaned piteously, with actual tears in her sad eyes. I lifted the downy balls in my hands. They snuggled without fear in my sleeve, and closed their sleepy eyes. Finally I put them on the leaves together, and promised the mother I would not again disturb her.
We have two species of the Goatsucker Family (_Caprimulgidæ_), including the Whippoorwill (_Antrostomus vociferus_), and the Southern Whippoorwill, or Chuck-will’s-widow (_Antrostomus Carolinensis_). The closely allied Night-Hawk, or Bull-Bat (_Chordeiles Virginianus_), is often mistaken for the Northern Whippoorwill. Its habits and flight are far different, however, although the homes of both are similarly adopted. The Night-Hawk deposits her two buff-green eggs on rocks, bare ground, or on flat roofs, either in country or village. All of these birds winter in the Southern lands, and all save the Chuck-will’s-widow arrive here about the third week in May, returning with their broods the latter part of September.
The Twilight-Hawk preys upon other birds and moths. I have observed him at twilight, on a cloudy day in autumn, circling and diving down among the weeds about a potato field, where sparrows were feeding in great numbers. The sparrows flew in fear toward the house, one driving so forcefully against the window-pane that he dropped to the ground with a broken neck. This Night-Hawk gives forth a peculiar moan or call,—“Peent,”—accompanied by a booming, buzzing sound in flight, as the wind passes through the quills of its feathers. It whizzes swiftly through the air, swooping down upon its prey about the fields or garden.
The leaves of the Pink Moccasins—sometimes called Whippoorwill’s-Shoes—were numerous about the place, the flowers serving, near the ever-changing nests, to attract the insects and moths upon which the birds feed.
I found another oven-bird’s thatched nest in Witch Hollow region, late in June, very near the colony of Ram’s-Head Cypripediums. On my return to secure a photograph of it, I found that some animal—perhaps a dog or skunk—had torn the nest to pieces and devoured the birdlings.
The Small Round-Leaved Orchis, which formerly I observed in Chalk Pond region, has developed into the varietal form of this species—producing oblong leaves—known as _Habenaria oblongifolia_. This often occurs when the flower is in company with the true Round-Leaved Orchis. This season I have instanced the fact in another colony of these orchids, in Rattlesnake Swamp.
The flowers found on the summit of the Dome, three thousand feet above sea level, are slightly modified in size and coloring. They are fully two or three weeks later in blooming than the same species flourishing in the Hoosac Lowlands.
On July 20th, with two other mountain climbers, I started from the brow of Mount Œta, and at nine o’clock descended to Rattlesnake Swamp and the secret haunts of Showy Reginæ. We crossed the stream over the log bridge, and followed up the old Joe Larabee path; passing around the southern ledge of the Domelet to the Dummy Road watering-trough. The path was densely overgrown with bushes, and impeded with heaps of tree-tops. However, we finally came out to the Exford Clearing and the White Oaks Road beyond. At the watering-trough, a road turns to the right hand through Rocky Hollow, leading to the Coal-Bed, or Chip-Bed, as it is known. We sauntered along the shady path of the Hollow until we came to the clearing, where loggers in winter haul and pile their spruce and hemlock logs for later milling. From this station, four roads branch in various directions. We took the northeast path, and were soon climbing steadily toward the clouds. On a previous occasion, during March, I had ridden on a logger’s sleigh to the summit. The snow, then about four feet deep, covered fallen trees, over which, during summer, it is almost impossible to walk. In winter, the hardened, encrusted snow spreads a clear, smooth surface for walking, far above impassable barriers and tangled brush. In its summer garb, the road was strangely confusing to me. It was rocky, and intersected by sun-dried brook beds, which the melting snows had guttered in spring.
Rocky Hollow Road is available for horse and carriage as far as Logger’s Depot, and northward to the Dummy Road. The trees along this vale are chestnuts, beech, yellow, white, and black birch, white oak, black oak, maples, and various flowering bushes, such as azalea, mountain laurel, and shad trees. As one ascends, the trees become dwarfed and gnarled, and many abnormal forms occur among the yellow birch. As we neared the summit, the yellow birch trunks assumed great size, while their tops were scraggy and dwarfed by the winds and storms. Higher up, we found little but spruce, hemlock, and balsam-fir; the trees and bushes became low-lying,—hugging the rocks for protection from the winds.
Frequently we paused by the path for breath, finding sweet Canada Violets (_Viola Canadensis_) ripening their seed-capsules. They were ready to burst and throw their seeds about for some feet. We collected several plants to transplant. The brakes and sphagnum indicated a swamp not far distant. We began to feel thirsty, and searched about without finding trace of a spring, although one is said to be near here, with a rusty tin cup hung to a tree. To the left of the path, we saw the ruins of a wood-chopper’s log cabin, which assured us that brook or spring must be near, else the spot never would have been chosen for man’s habitation. Above the hut, we came to a clearing. A level stretch led to the junction of two roads: one led directly ahead, terminating on the Ladd Lot, while the path to the right turned abruptly up the steeps to the summit of the Dome. The last few rods were the steepest portion of the whole journey, the rest of the climb having wound around about in gradual ascent.
At last we walked along the edges of a precipice above Bear Swamp. In the scorching heat of noon we made one last turn eastward, entering the clearing on the very brow of the desolate Dome, three thousand feet above the sea. Here were dense groups of beautiful spruces and balsam-firs. The forest floor was carpeted with luxuriant leaves of clintonia and dwarf dogwood,—sometimes wrongly called bear-berries. The latter, an Alpine species, was still in bloom, the flower sometimes having two whorls of rosy-tinted petals. The mountain snowberry, creeping wintergreen, trailing arbutus, and goldthread were clinging to the sphagnous hummocks over the summit, while Alpine species of huckleberries crept through the clearing and draped the white-faced rocks.
The great stillness of Nature’s solitude was broken only by the buzzing of insects, the notes of the chickadees, and the winds soughing through the boughs of spruce and firs. The brow of the Majestic Dome receives the force of the eight winds of heaven direct from the frozen North or from the fragrant Southlands. In March, 1894, a terrific tornado swept over this region from the northeast, mowing a path several rods wide over the Dome, and laying the spruce and firs in a twisted pile;—that portion of the summit is almost impassable to-day. During these great northeasters in the spring, the birds and beasts of the Dome seek the lower plains and hollows.
We wandered southward in the path of the tornado, a quarter mile or so, to a sphagnous swamp and the ledge of White Rock on the side of the Dome. The view from these rocks is variable, yet not picturesque nor pastoral as the one from Mount Œta. It is wild, fearful,—beyond all signs or sounds of civilization. Far to the southwest the blue Catskills blend with the sky; southward the grim, awkward, ragged shoulders of Greylock’s Brotherhood tower; from the eastern brow, Haystack and Stamford Mountains roll away, one after the other, like great land waves. The deep valley of Broad Brook sleeps below. The slopes of Stamford Mountains are dotted with evergreen trees for miles, as far as one can see.
Gathering a few fragrant balsam-fir boughs, we now rapidly began to descend the mountain, for while the luncheon we carried had satisfied our hunger, we were sadly in need of drinking water. We soon found ourselves at the Coal-Bed, gathering the Wildwood Tiger Lilies (_Lilium Philadelphicum_), which we had observed as we passed in the morning. We ate the late wild strawberries along the roadside, and took a long rest in the shade, pursuing our way later down the Rocky Hollow Road northward to Blackberry Clearing, on the Dummy Farm. Here we religiously searched the ravines for Deaf-Man’s Spring. Major, our dog, was the first to discover it. We found him taking a bath in the deepest pool. However, a higher basin was overflowing with fresh, clean water, from which we drank excessively. The reviving effect upon our spirits was immediate. Deaf-Man’s Fountain is in the ravine of Dry Brook, walled up like a little well. It is the only water in this immediate vale,—a natural and everlasting spring-head. Guide-boards should be erected at the four corners of country roads, directing travellers to the water-supply, the need of which is often so powerfully felt by pilgrims.
We rounded the Domelet, descended to Jepson Farm in Rattlesnake Valley, and proceeded to Lloyd Spring and the colony of Showy Reginæ. At this point in our travels, we had completed a great circle.
XVII
The Cascade and Bellows-Pipe, Notch Valley, Berkshire County
Come here where Greylock rolls Itself toward heaven; in these deep silences World-worn and fretted souls Bathe and be clean! Cares drift like mists away.
Author Unknown.
Monday, July 22d, dawned fair, although there were some signs of a storm in the lowering gray cloud-folds at the horizon. However, we had decided to explore the Notch Valley and the Bellows-Pipe, between Greylock and the Ragged Mountains.
We journeyed from Mount Œta to North Adams, leaving State Street about ten o’clock, and ascended the path to Witt’s Ledge. Soon we rounded the Ragged Mountains, entering the woods near Crystal Spring, where we descended the Cascade ravine. Its rocky chasm is beautifully draped with the Common Polypody Ferns, and delicate tufts of Maiden-Hair Spleenwort, which clings in the fissured ledges. The bed-rock appears to be a flinty slate, similar to that of the Tunnel Mountain. It is not so favorable to the growth of the rarer ferns—such as the Rue-in-the-Wall—as the lime-rock formation of Gregor Rocks in Pownal. Large boulders lie in the heart of the brook bed, and the hillsides are clothed with primeval hemlocks. Just above the brow of the Cascade, I found a few Walking Ferns. The ravine is accessible to this point, but here I was forced back and climbed the southern bank to the path leading around to the waterfalls. High boots supplied with hob-nails are indispensable to safety in such climbing in the channels of streams.
From this point we retraced our steps to the Pent Road, leading up through Snuff Hollow to the City’s reservoir, at the junction of the South Adams Road. Here we trudged up the hill and entered the Notch highway at Walden’s farmhouse. Greylock Park Road turns off here through the pastures, around Mount Williams. We, however, continued straight ahead toward the source of The Notch Brook,—Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s routes, long before roads to Greylock were available. It was steady climbing, until at last we reached the pasture-land where the streams from Greylock’s Brotherhood divide; there is a stream beyond the ridge, flowing southward to South Adams, while those on the north side flow down Notch Valley to the Hoosac River. Hawthorne often sought the seclusion of this valley, and in his _American Notes_, under date of September 9, 1838, describes these rugged slopes. He not only followed up the North Notch, but descended the South Notch in the rocky course of the stream homeward through South Adams. He speaks of inquiring at a cottage his way to South Village, which was “across lots,” into the road near the Quaker Meeting-house, surrounded by grave-stones. He also drank of the region’s spring water,—the “most delicious” he ever tasted,—“pure, fresh, almost sparkling, exhilarating,—such water as Adam and Eve drank.”[51]
The people of this region looked upon his journeys through their valley with curiosity in those early days. The houses were more numerous then than now in the extreme southern portion of the valley. This region has been purchased by the North Adams Water Company, which has removed all dwellings above the reservoir. The last house in The Notch to-day is on the Walden Farm, at Greylock Park Gate.
Hawthorne found, in the Highlands-of-the-Hoosac, the originals of many characters described in his works. “Eustace Bright,” of _Wonder-Book_, was a student of Williams; and the _Tanglewood Tales_ have made the whole world familiar with “rough, broken, rugged, headlong Berkshire.” Here, in the seclusion of The Bellows-Pipe, “where it slopes upward to the skies,” Hawthorne loved best to come. There he could look southward over the vast fields of Berkshire’s valleys to the distant crags of Bryant’s “Monument Mountain,” immortalized as the “headless sphinx” of his own _Wonder-Book_. And from the northern Notch, he looked away to the blue Domes of the White Mountains, a distance of sixty miles or more.
The Limekilns along the Ashuilticook—the south branch of the Hoosac—still are smoking, as when Hawthorne and Mr. Leach visited them in 1838. The tale of _Ethan Brand_ was suggested by the legend of an insane creature who threw himself in at the open gate of the burning kiln. Their open iron doors in the mountainside at night seem like yawning mouths of Tartarus. Hawthorne met here also his “Bertram,” who figures in the story; while “the boy Joe,” son of “Bertram, the lime-burner,” was a bar-room lad observed at the “Whig Tavern” in North Adams. Daniel Haines, then living in a desolate hut in “Willow Dell,” was formerly nicknamed in the village as “Black Hawk,” and is described in _Ethan Brand_ as “Lawyer Giles,” the “elderly ragmuffin,” who—with the rest of the lazy regiment from the town tavern—came in response to the summons of “boy Joe” to see poor Brand returned from his long “search after the Unpardonable Sin.” The title of this story was the name of one of the prose master’s Salem acquaintances.
Among other characters which Hawthorne drew from this region, were the “seven doctors of the place.” In the “Whig Tavern boarder” Hawthorne saw and delineated himself. He describes the Saddleback Mountain and Greylock in all their different phases,—when enshrouded with dark masses of storm clouds and when: “Old Greylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon his head. Scattered likewise over the breasts of the surrounding mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some of them far down into the valley, others high up toward the summits, and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another of the clouds that rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky, that it was a day dream to look at it. To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn, while Echo caught up the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and elaborate harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to little share. The great hills played a concert among themselves, each contributing a strain of airy sweetness.”[52]
As we neared the head of The Bellows-Pipe, and passed the Wilbur and Eddy farms, where Thoreau was entertained, I tried to trace the paths which he had followed in his ascent to Greylock some years after Hawthorne sojourned here. He stopped that July afternoon in North Adams Village, purchased a tin cup, a little rice and sugar, and, placing them in his knapsack, started up The Bellows toward the mountains, followed closely by a thunderstorm. “The thunder had rumbled at my heels all the way,” he said, “but the shower passed off in another direction, though if it had not, I half believed that I should get above it.” He “reached the last house but one, where the path to the summit diverged to the right, while the summit itself rose directly in front.” But it seems he “determined to follow up the valley to its head,” and there find his “own route up the steep as the shorter and more adventurous way.” He believed this “occupied much less time than it would have taken to follow the path—for what’s the hurry? If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, ... but the places that have known him, _they_ are lost,—how much anxiety and danger would vanish. I am not alone if I stand by myself.”[53]
We followed up the eastern sides of Notch Valley to the head of The Bellows where the Saw Mill had stood in Thoreau’s day. We regaled ourselves upon the red raspberries along the pasture, and found the Deadly Nightshade in bloom amid the bushes. These fields furnish pasturage for yearlings and calves. The sides of Greylock are clothed with a heavy forest—“all beshaggled,”—and adorned with “headlong precipices” and innumerable rivulets. Finally we crossed to the west side of the valley, in the shadow of the great hill, and entered a ravine which we christened Æolian Glen.
I have always believed that this Notch Valley was in Thoreau’s thoughts when he wrote “Rumors from an Æolian Harp.” The name “Bellows-Pipe” originated with the early settlers for the extreme portion of Notch Valley, on account of the subtle roaring of the southeast winds, breathing like a bellows through the narrow vale. The Indians recognized in the roar of winds the anger of the Great Spirit. The Hoosac Highlands near the “Forbidden Mountain” were their hunting grounds, to which they journeyed from their Indian village farther westward near Schaghticoke, not far from Troy-on-the-Hudson.
Thoreau says of this vale’s “glen-like seclusion overlooking the country at a great elevation between these two mountain walls,” that it reminded him of the homesteads of the Huguenots, on the interior hills of Staten Island.
As Thoreau passed the last house in The Bellows, on his ascent to Greylock, “Rice” called out and told him that it was still four or five miles to the summit by the path which he had left, though not more than two in a straight line from where he was, but that nobody ever went this way; there was no path and it would be found as “steep as the roof of a house.” But Thoreau took the short cut, notwithstanding Wilbur’s warning that he would not reach the summit of Greylock that night. Thoreau says, however: “I made my way steadily upward in a straight line, through a dense undergrowth of mountain laurel, until the trees began to have a scraggy and infernal look, as if contending with frost goblins, and at length I reached the summit, just as the sun was setting.” After taking “one fair view of the country before the sun went down,” Thoreau “set out directly to find water.” It proved to be labor, too. Following down the path for half a mile he came to a muddy place in the road “where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had carried travellers up.” He drank these dry, one after the other, by lying flat on the earth. He was not able to fill his dipper, and in a place above dug a well about two feet deep, using his hands and sharp stones as spade and hoe. It soon filled with pure cold water, from which he filled his tin cup; and he says: “The birds, too, came and drank at it.” He then proceeded to the rude wooden observatory originally erected by Williams College, for the construction of which Platt—“a friend of mine,” writes Hawthorne in the _Diary_—hauled the material by ox-team. Platt, the stage-driver, boasted of the fact that he was the _first_ man to drive a team to the summit of the then pathless Greylock, led by President Griffin of Williams on horseback, who directed the building of that first observatory. This tower is now replaced by a modern iron structure fifty feet high.
Thoreau collected some “dry sticks, and made a fire on some flat stones” placed on the floor of the observatory for the purpose, and cooked the rice which he had bought in the village, eating it with a wooden spoon whittled out for the occasion. He was up at daybreak the next morning, and he has left a glorious description of sunrise on Greylock, as seen from the tower in the mists.[54]
The nights are very chill on these summits, even in July. There are now several log-cabins erected on Greylock for travellers to occupy, with stables for horses and keepers in attendance. The Catskills can be seen to the southwestward from this height.
Thoreau set his compass for a lake in the valley to the southwest, and descended the mountain by his own route, on the opposite side to that of his ascent.