Part 2

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, which we passed through first, is a preserve. It is God’s holy mountain on which no man may shoot. By the laws you are not allowed even to frighten a bird. You may not carry firearms into the region. We were therefore not very agreeably surprised to hear in the thickets the whiz-ping of a gun which some Indians were using. Lindsay nearly got a shot in the head as he got up from luncheon. The fact is, Glacier adjoins the Blackfeet Indian reservation, and the Indians are all hunters by instinct and preference. It is difficult to restrain them. They are a gay, independent, and wild lot. We saw a number of these men with an array of plumes round their heads, steel padlocks in their ears for ear-rings, cow-bells on their sleeves, and chequer-work embroidery on their gay vests and cloaks. They had with them their squaws, fat and handsome women, all swollen out and weather-beaten like fishwives, with high cheek-bones and red-ochre faces. They danced together and skirled in wild Asiatic strains while four intent ruffians in ordinary attire beat upon one small drum with sticks. I seemed to recognise in them some sort of acquaintance to my old friends, the nomads of Central Asia, the Kirghiz--the same sort of faces and the same way of being musical. I have had a similar musical entertainment during weeks and months tramping in Turkestan and Seven Rivers Land. Both Kirghiz and Indians are dying out and both are red. I was struck by the feminine expression of the faces of the Indians and the absence of hair on their lips and chins--as if their males were not male.

However, we soon left the Blackfeet behind, and came out of their forests, and in late afternoon stood high above the lovely length of water which we identified as Medicine Lake.

_The Indians are dancing as we enter their paradise, Our hearts are dancing too. We love the Indians because they never bent their backs To slavery, To civilisation, To office-desks. What matter if they are dying out, They have at least lived once._

IV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT

WE spent our first night in a burned forest beside a sunken pink and grey rock. There was a green carpet of unblossoming flowers as green and romantic as ideal spring, and beside it in contrast the stark blackness of the charred trees all up and down the hill. Hidden from view but twenty yards away was a foaming rivulet with pools.

We bathed and we cooked and we talked and we slept. A great mountain like God Almighty in the midst of His creation was visible to us through the trees. We made our beds soft by pulling the dead red foliage from scorched trees and heaping it under our blankets beside the pink rocks. Lindsay made hot a large stone in the embers of our fire to keep him warm. So we lay down and waited for the night. I looked through black masts and great entanglements to the hills. Lindsay faced a scorched section of the forest all hanging in brown tresses. We listened to the stream below, its music becoming every moment more insistent. We knew that it would lull us all night long.

The mountain cloud then began to come down and roll over the tree-tops, giving them ghostly semblance. That passed, and the stars and the moon appeared and stillness ruled. An hour before dawn we were awakened by the sudden patter of a shower of rain and it was followed by the birth of a wind which came roaring along a ravine and started all the air moving everywhere and all the dead forest creaked and whined. It was our signal to arise.

* * * * *

LINDSAY rose like a young lion roaring, rrrah!... and making the mountains echo with his roar. “Let us go up higher,” says he. I read him this. “Put it, ‘Lindsay arose groaning and grunting like a pig under a gate--and let people choose,’” said the poet.

He was in great spirits. “I have never been so free. I start afresh. All is behind me. We’ll tramp to the coast. We’ll tramp to Alaska. We’ll do all the national parks, the same way,” were his impulsive speeches.

As we climbed aloft, following the North-west by our wrist-compasses, and careless of time and space, he sang a disreputable song belonging no doubt to that disreputable past of his when he hiked and begged and recited his poems to farmers--

Why don’t you go to work Like other men do? How can we work when there’s no work to do? Hallelujah, on the bum! Hallelujah, bum again! Hallelujah! Give us a hand-out To revive us again!

“You do look a real honest-to-God tramp this morning,” said I in the language of the country, “with your corduroys burst out at the knees, old red handkerchief round your neck, and devil-may-care look in your eyes.”

We reached the top of a mountain where there was a perfect “cyclorama,” as he called it, and he balanced on his toes, and half closed his eyes in his half upturned face, and turned round and about like a teetotum. Last time I had seen him do this was on the carpet of a London drawing-room in Queen Anne’s Gate to the strains of “_Let Samson be a-coming in to your mind_.”

This mountain was our first _ne plus ultra_, for having got to the top of it there was only one thing to do, and that was to go down again. Lindsay tested the echoes from it with “_Rah for Bryan!_” apparently his favourite war-cry, and then as if in response a slim Indian youth on horseback appeared and seemed much amused by us. He was very red and swarthy, with bright teeth, and rode his horse as if he and it made one. He told us he knew all the mountains and had been to the top of every one except Rising Wolf, which had never been climbed by any one. “It is called ‘Wolf gets up’ in our language,” he explained, and pointed to its snarling and menacing mass upstarting through clouds. “A storm comes from the mountain,” said he in warning, and passed on. He passed and we remained, and we saw no other human being the whole day.

“Just think of the children these flowers would amuse,” said Lindsay. “Millions of flowers--and the only human being we see is an Indian. I’d like to write a song on it.”

* * * * *

BUT the poetic mood passed. Thunderclouds rose in spectral peaks behind the mountains. Mount Helen grew dark and dreadful, and four phantasmal Mount Helens appeared behind her, the first of white mist, the second of lead, the third of streaming cloud, the fourth of shadow. Rising Wolf entered heaven; a howling, gathering, tumultuous wind roared over all the pines of the valleys and lightning like the glint of an eye traversed the ravine. Clouds swept forward to embrace us and indeed overtook us and soaked us while we sat together on a downward slide and sheltered under a blanket.

The storm passed, but we got drenched to our necks as we walked through dense undergrowth downward to a strikingly prominent clump of gigantic pines which from aloft we had chosen as harbourage for the night. These lifted their fine forms from immemorial heaps of old pine mould, soft and brown and porous. There was a stream near them and we lit a great fire by the water’s edge and hung out a line to dry blankets, coats, pants, socks, and all we possessed.

The heat flew up in armfuls of smoke, in showers of sparks, up to our sagging shirts and heavy blankets. Sparks in hundreds lighted on them, and went out or burned small holes. We walked about like savages the while, wresting dead wood to build ever higher the fire. I pulled down a branch with a tree-wasp’s nest upon it, and brought a cloud of wasps after our bodies, and I paid the penalty in a sting. Thus, however, we dried everything, and we were able at last to make a dry bed in a wet place. But rain came on again at night, and in the intense darkness under the giant pines we lay and heard it, and slept, and then waked to hear it again.

_If it rains in the town and if you get caught in the rain And soaked to the bone--ah what a calamity! You must have a hot bath, and take some hot toddy; You must swallow an aspirin and sleep under blankets, Whilst your clothes on two chairs by the fire will be drying; You must put on dry clothes in the morning. It’s different in the mountains, You can sleep wet and wake wet, And dry when the weather gets drier, That’s more fun: try it._

V. GOING UP TO THE SNOW

IT cleared up before dawn, but it rained for three hours after dawn. Vachel got up in the night and relit the fire and made himself a hot rock. Coming back into our dark and gloomy thicket, he mistook my form for a bear, and his heart jumped. We lived in expectation of meeting bears. “There’ll just be one heading in the _Illinois Register_,” says Vachel--“ATE BY BEARS.” We placed our bacon twenty yards away from where we slept, and hoped tacitly that they would take the bacon and spare us.

Our knapsacks weighed double next morning because of the wet in our things. We got wetter still as we ploughed out through flower fields of a drowned paradise. But an hour before noon the sun broke free and started a miraculous drying of Nature and of ourselves. We seemed to cook in the steam of our own clothes. On the hillside, at last, we decided to rest and we spread out everything to dry, dispensing with most of our clothes, and we lay in the sun in the hot damp of the flowers and let Old Sol stream into us.

Early in the afternoon most of our clothes were dry and, following the compass, we climbed up and up to a great height through primeval forest. The trees were so close that often we could not squeeze between them with our packs. We hustled and bustled and impolitely pushed through branches and umbrage and crossed tiny glades filled with ineffably lovely basket grass, holding aloft their cream crowns of blossom. It seemed to us a great struggle, and Lindsay and I held different opinions as to what we should find when we got to the end of the wood, and both of us were wrong. He thought it would be “the divide.” I thought it might be another _ne plus ultra_ and a sheer descent.

But instead it was a sort of end of the world. Our primeval forest came sharply to an end on a deep, green, wind-bitten line where the branches of the trees were gnarled and twisted and beaten downward. Beyond that was a boulder-strewn upper-mountain region and a wall of rock. We asked no questions as to the morrow, but camped beside a huge stone. It was twelve feet high, but one could creep under it and be safe from the rain. And a few feet away was our first snow-bank. We built a big fire and made tea of melted snow, and Lindsay made ice-cream of sugar and condensed milk and snow which we voted very good, and we made eight or nine hot rocks for our bed.

* * * * *

BECAUSE of the mountain-wall above us sunset took place at about four in the afternoon here. But a beautiful evening endured long in the east below us. We were so exalted that we looked a hundred miles over the plains and saw, as it were, the whole world picked out in shadow and sunshine below. Sunset slowly advanced over it all, and with reflected rays from an unseen west the day passed serenely away.

Lindsay, being the colder man, slept under the great boulder, and I smoothed out a recess at the side. I lay beside scores of daintily hooded yellow columbines and looked out to the occasional licked-sweet redness of an Indian paint brush. A chipmunk rudely squeaked at us, and as a last visitor a humming bird boomed over our heads like a night-awakened beetle.

We slept serenely. At two I awoke to see a fleeting half moon, all silver, tripping homeward over the high wall of the mountain with attendant stars behind. But away in the east there was a faint rose light over a bank of darkness. The darkness slowly took sharp contour, and the light that comes before the light of day picked out ten or twelve lakes and tarns which we had not noticed until then. The darkness below the rose quivered with lightning; the zenith clearness grew clearer and clearer, and then, with uplifting hands of glory and light, came seraphical sunrise.

Our bonfire, which had burned red all night, now burned a pallid yellow in the new light, and we brought out our blankets into the open and lay down and slept again in the increasing light and warmth of the new day. Then breakfast at seven and God’s in his heaven. And we washed in the snow, and scores of curlews screamed from rock to rock above us on the road that we should take.

“How new it all is!” said the poet. “It is as if no one ever slept here before and wakened to see what we see or to do the things we do.”

Wrapped in our thoughts we put our packs on our shoulders and meditatively turned our steps to the downward-dropping corner of the mountain-wall which obscured the adventures of the new day.

We cut off the top of the snow with a sharp piece of slate, And took the purer under-snow to make our coffee, To make ice-cream: _Fastidious creatures!_ And then we stood in the snow-hole And washed with warm water, And rubbed ourselves all over with handfuls of sloppy snow-- _Disgusting old tramps!_ The discreet birds watched us, The chipmunks squeaked at us, You didn’t see us.

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.

“To-morrow,” said he, “we will climb right away to the top and find the pass into new country.”

_Who said it was easier to go down, Facilis decensus and the rest? I’ll say it is more painful Than to go up. You think it was great fun a-sliding down the shale On large flat rocks. But it leaves me cold, As the saying is, For the seat of my pants is much thinner._

VII. SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS

MY companion’s secret thought is that he is a Virginian. But how, since he was born in Illinois and his parents in Kentucky? “I am a follower of Poe and Jefferson,” he answers. Kentucky was largely colonised from Virginia, and the poet is ready to claim allegiance to the chivalric, leisurely and flamboyant genius of the South. “If only as a protest against the drab, square-toed, dull, unimaginative America which is gaining on us all,” he adds. He has a passion for ideal democracy, and his great hero of the hour as we stride over the rocks is John Randolph, of Roanoke, who could enter Congress with four hounds and a dog-whip and make speeches to which all must listen. “America,” Lindsay insists, “simply _needs_ the flamboyant to save her soul.” I suppose, because of that faith, he also, Vachel Lindsay, the poet, is a flamboyant genius.

The higher we rose in the mountains the more serious became our conversation. We were silent only when we lost our breath. Upon occasion, in this grand and lonely scene, the poet would lift his voice so high that it could have been heard on the mountain on the other side of the valley. His enthusiasm naturally lifted his resonant voice. His political hero is John Randolph or Andrew Jackson, his literary hero is Ruskin, his artist in marble is Saint-Gaudens, his pet hobby is Egyptian hieroglyphics, his passion is the road, and his ideal is St. Francis. Tell it to the mountains and the streams; tell it out! They hear and so do I.

* * * * *

WHERE we stand is where never man has stood before, or foot of man has trod, and the fresh and virginal flowers on every hand look up at us with mute surprise. We carry our argument higher and higher. We sit and boil our pot beside a bank of purple heather, exalted upon the bare scarp of a sun-drowned mountain, and crackling of roots in the fire blends with strident Middle-West American. We pull up to the black door of a great rock, and the splashing of a cascade splashes through his vibrant tones.

At last, however, the mountains silenced us. They outstayed us, and will outstay us. They ate up our provisions, and swallowed our breath, and beguiled us deceptively to climb higher. “Upward and onward!” was invisibly written on every crag. And we always expected to get to the top in an hour. We finished the coffee, we finished the milk, we finished the bread, we finished the sugar. We got down to a rasher of bacon a day and tea without sugar and milk. Then even the much-loathed bacon got finished, and the problem was to find a “camp” and get more supplies. So we set ourselves seriously to the task of finding a pass over the range.

The poet became much exhausted, and the high altitude evidently affected him more than it did me. We walked quarter-hours and rested quarter-hours, and every time we rested we fell fast asleep. I led up the steep inclines, and we stopped every twenty paces and listened to our breath, I to his breath, he to mine--_ao, ao, ao_--almost a sob, and waited for the _ahoo_ sound, which meant that the lungs had filled again. After some arduous hours in this wise, we came on our first destitute afternoon, to our first topmost ridge. A cold hurricane seemed to try to stop our final conquest of it, and it went through our bodies like swords. But when we exultantly bore through it we came to a sheer precipice going down to a narrow corridor which led always to the northward.

* * * * *

VACHEL punctuates most of his remarks with a wild native yell--“Whoopee Whuh!” but he was down to a whisper now, and could no longer move the mountains with a “Hurrah for Bryan.” Silently and rather mournfully we diagonalised downward to a far blue lake which was the ultimate end of the valley, and the source of the stream we had followed for days. Devastating winds blew across us, and we watched how they descended upon the surface of that lake and tore it off in sprays and circles of water and steam. We found what seemed to be a horse trail over the shingle, but it led to an extensive field of snow, and we recognised only the footsteps of a bear. The lake was not blue, but green when we got near to it, and was banked on three sides by snow.

Said Vachel: “Here, Stephen, is the place to catch a fish.”

I said: “No, Vachel, this is just a snow-melt; there never were any fish here.”

“Nevertheless try!” said the poet.

Now we had purchased fishing tackle, though we had no rods. And Vachel had a large red wooden grasshopper, and I had a large green one.

Vachel said: “You must throw your grasshopper in, and I’ll go light a fire so as to be ready to cook the fish.”