The Land Of Little Rain - Mary Hunter Austin
It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die out.
Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing wood, the soul
is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines. They have no voice but the
wind, and no sound of them rises up to the high places. But the waters,
the evidences of their power, that go down the steep and stony ways, the
outlets of ice-bordered pools, the young rivers swaying with the force
of their running, they sing and shout and trumpet at the falls, and the
noise of it far outreaches the forest spires. You see from these conning
towers how they call and find each other in the slender gorges; how they
fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them
countenance and show the way; and how the pine woods are made glad by
them.
Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a sense of
pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if there are any, are home
dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking asp. They
grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems have a permanent
curve toward the down slope, as you may also see in hillside pines,
where they have borne the weight of sagging drifts.
Well up from the valley, at the confluence of canons, are delectable
summer meadows. Fireweed flames about them against the gray boulders;
streams are open, go smoothly about the glacier slips and make deep
bluish pools for trout. Pines raise statelier shafts and give themselves
room to grow,--gentians, shinleaf, and little grass of Parnassus in
their golden checkered shadows; the meadow is white with violets and all
outdoors keeps the clock. For example, when the ripples at the ford of
the creek raise a clear half tone,--sign that the snow water has come
down from the heated high ridges,--it is time to light the evening fire.
When it drops off a note--but you will not know it except the Douglas
squirrel tells you with his high, fluty chirrup from the pines' aerial
gloom--sign that some star watcher has caught the first far glint of the
nearing sun. Whitney cries it from his vantage tower; it flashes from
Oppapago to the front of Williamson; LeConte speeds it to the westering
peaks. The high rills wake and run, the birds begin. But down three
thousand feet in the canon, where you stir the fire under the cooking
pot, it will not be day for an hour. It goes on, the play of light
across the high places, rosy, purpling, tender, glint and glow, thunder
and windy flood, like the grave, exulting talk of elders above a merry
game.
Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the streets
of the mountains. As for me, once set above the country of the silver
firs, I must go on until I find white columbine. Around the
amphitheatres of the lake regions and above them to the limit of
perennial drifts they gather flock-wise in splintered rock wastes. The
crowds of them, the airy spread of sepals, the pale purity of the petal
spurs, the quivering swing of bloom, obsesses the sense. One must learn
to spare a little of the pang of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all
one's purse in one shop. There is always another year, and another.
Lingering on in the alpine regions until the first full snow, which is
often before the cessation of bloom, one goes down in good company.
First snows are soft and clogging and make laborious paths. Then it is
the roving inhabitants range down to the edge of the wood, below the
limit of early storms. Early winter and early spring one may have sight
or track of deer and bear and bighorn, cougar and bobcat, about the
thickets of buckthorn on open slopes between the black pines. But when
the ice crust is firm above the twenty foot drifts, they range far and
forage where they will. Often in midwinter will come, now and then, a
long fall of soft snow piling three or four feet above the ice crust,
and work a real hardship for the dwellers of these streets. When such a
storm portends the weather-wise black-tail will go down across the
valley and up to the pastures of Waban where no more snow falls than
suffices to nourish the sparsely growing pines. But the bighorn, the
wild sheep, able to bear the bitterest storms with no signs of stress,
cannot cope with the loose shifty snow. Never such a storm goes over the
mountains that the Indians do not catch them floundering belly deep
among the lower rifts. I have a pair of horns, inconceivably heavy, that
were borne as late as a year ago by a very monarch of the flock whom
death overtook at the mouth of Oak Creek after a week of wet snow. He
met it as a king should, with no vain effort or trembling, and it was
wholly kind to take him so with four of his following rather than that
the night prowlers should find him.
There is always more life abroad in the winter hills than one looks to
find, and much more in evidence than in summer weather. Light feet of
hare that make no print on the forest litter leave a wondrously plain
track in the snow. We used to look and look at the beginning of winter
for the birds to come down from the pine lands; looked in the orchard
and stubble; looked north and south on the mesa for their migratory
passing, and wondered that they never came. Busy little grosbeaks picked
about the kitchen doors, and woodpeckers tapped the eves of the farm
buildings, but we saw hardly any other of the frequenters of the summer
canons. After a while when we grew bold to tempt the snow borders we
found them in the street of the mountains. In the thick pine woods where
the overlapping boughs hung with snow-wreaths make wind-proof shelter
tents, in a very community of dwelling, winter the bird-folk who get
their living from the persisting cones and the larvae harboring bark.
Ground inhabiting species seek the dim snow chambers of the chaparral.
Consider how it must be in a hill-slope overgrown with stout-twigged,
partly evergreen shrubs, more than man high, and as thick as a hedge.
Not all the canon's sifting of snow can fill the intricate spaces of the
hill tangles. Here and there an overhanging rock, or a stiff arch of
buckthorn, makes an opening to communicating rooms and runways deep
under the snow.
The light filtering through the snow walls is blue and ghostly, but
serves to show seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries, and the
wind-built walls are warm against the wind. It seems that live plants,
especially if they are evergreen and growing, give off heat; the snow
wall melts earliest from within and hollows to thinness before there is
a hint of spring in the air. But you think of these things afterward. Up
in the street it has the effect of being done consciously; the
buckthorns lean to each other and the drift to them, the little birds
run in and out of their appointed ways with the greatest cheerfulness.
They give almost no tokens of distress, and even if the winter tries
them too much you are not to pity them. You of the house habit can
hardly understand the sense of the hills. No doubt the labor of being
comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated
pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they
adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease. The business
that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous,
world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children crying
small wares and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct its
affairs. Summer is their holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the
street, "I have need of a great work and no more playing."
But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure kindness. They
are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the nobler plan which
they accept with a dignity the rest of us have not yet learned.
WATER BORDERS
I like that name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine, and find
it pertinent to my subject,--Oppapago, The Weeper. It sits eastward and
solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and above a range of
little, old, blunt hills, and has a bowed, grave aspect as of some woman
you might have known, looking out across the grassy barrows of her dead.
From twin gray lakes under its noble brow stream down incessant white
and tumbling waters. "Mahala all time cry," said Winnenap', drawing
furrows in his rugged, wrinkled cheeks.
The origin of mountain streams is like the origin of tears, patent to
the understanding but mysterious to the sense.
They are always at it, but one so seldom catches them in the act. Here
in the valley there is no cessation of waters even in the season when
the niggard frost gives them scant leave to run. They make the most of
their midday hour, and tinkle all night thinly under the ice. An ear
laid to the snow catches a muffled hint of their eternal busyness
fifteen or twenty feet under the canon drifts, and long before any
appreciable spring thaw, the sagging edges of the snow bridges mark out
the place of their running. One who ventures to look for it finds the
immediate source of the spring freshets--all the hill fronts furrowed
with the reek of melting drifts, all the gravelly flats in a swirl of
waters. But later, in June or July, when the camping season begins,
there runs the stream away full and singing, with no visible
reinforcement other than an icy trickle from some high, belated clot of
snow. Oftenest the stream drops bodily from the bleak bowl of some
alpine lake; sometimes breaks out of a hillside as a spring where the
ear can trace it under the rubble of loose stones to the neighborhood of
some blind pool. But that leaves the lakes to be accounted for.
The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid, unwinking, also
unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and stony brows is guessed
at. It is always a favorite local tradition that one or another of the
blind lakes is bottomless. Often they lie in such deep cairns of broken
boulders that one never gets quite to them, or gets away unhurt. One
such drops below the plunging slope that the Kearsarge trail winds over,
perilously, nearing the pass. It lies still and wickedly green in its
sharp-lipped cup, and the guides of that region love to tell of the
packs and pack animals it has swallowed up.
But the lakes of Oppapago are perhaps not so deep, less green than gray,
and better befriended. The ousel haunts them, while still hang about
their coasts the thin undercut drifts that never quite leave the high
altitudes. In and out of the bluish ice caves he flits and sings, and
his singing heard from above is sweet and uncanny like the Nixie's
chord. One finds butterflies, too, about these high, sharp regions which
might be called desolate, but will not by me who love them. This is
above timber-line but not too high for comforting by succulent small
herbs and golden tufted grass. A granite mountain does not crumble with
alacrity, but once resolved to soil makes the best of it. Every handful
of loose gravel not wholly water leached affords a plant footing, and
even in such unpromising surroundings there is a choice of locations.
There is never going to be any communism of mountain herbage, their
affinities are too sure. Full in the runnels of snow water on gravelly,
open spaces in the shadow of a drift, one looks to find buttercups,
frozen knee-deep by night, and owning no desire but to ripen their fruit
above the icy bath. Soppy little plants of the portulaca and small, fine
ferns shiver under the drip of falls and in dribbling crevices. The
bleaker the situation, so it is near a stream border, the better the
cassiope loves it. Yet I have not found it on the polished glacier
slips, but where the country rock cleaves and splinters in the high
windy headlands that the wild sheep frequents, hordes and hordes of the
white bells swing over matted, mossy foliage. On Oppapago, which is also
called Sheep Mountain, one finds not far from the beds of cassiope the
ice-worn, stony hollows where the bighorns cradle their young. These are
above the wolf's quest and the eagle's wont, and though the heather beds
are softer, they are neither so dry nor so warm, and here only the stars
go by. No other animal of any pretensions makes a habitat of the alpine
regions. Now and then one gets a hint of some small, brown creature, rat
or mouse kind, that slips secretly among the rocks; no others adapt
themselves to desertness of aridity or altitude so readily as these
ground inhabiting, graminivorous species. If there is an open stream the
trout go up the lake as far as the water breeds food for them, but the
ousel goes farthest, for pure love of it.
Since no lake can be at the highest point, it is possible to find plant
life higher than the water borders; grasses perhaps the highest, gilias,
royal blue trusses of polymonium, rosy plats of Sierra primroses. What
one has to get used to in flowers at high altitudes is the bleaching of
the sun. Hardly do they hold their virgin color for a day, and this
early fading before their function is performed gives them a pitiful
appearance not according with their hardihood. The color scheme runs
along the high ridges from blue to rosy purple, carmine and coral red;
along the water borders it is chiefly white and yellow where the mimulus
makes a vivid note, running into red when the two schemes meet and mix
about the borders of the meadows, at the upper limit of the columbine.
Here is the fashion in which a mountain stream gets down from the
perennial pastures of the snow to its proper level and identity as an
irrigating ditch. It slips stilly by the glacier scoured rim of an ice
bordered pool, drops over sheer, broken ledges to another pool, gathers
itself, plunges headlong on a rocky ripple slope, finds a lake again,
reinforced, roars downward to a pot-hole, foams and bridles, glides a
tranquil reach in some still meadow, tumbles into a sharp groove between
hill flanks, curdles under the stream tangles, and so arrives at the
open country and steadier going. Meadows, little strips of alpine
freshness, begin before the timber-line is reached. Here one treads on a
carpet of dwarf willows, downy catkins of creditable size and the
greatest economy of foliage and stems. No other plant of high altitudes
knows its business so well.
It hugs the ground, grows roots from stem joints where no roots should
be, grows a slender leaf or two and twice as many erect full catkins
that rarely, even in that short growing season, fail of fruit. Dipping
over banks in the inlets of the creeks, the fortunate find the rosy
apples of the miniature manzanita, barely, but always quite
sufficiently, borne above the spongy sod. It does not do to be anything
but humble in the alpine regions, but not fearful. I have pawed about
for hours in the chill sward of meadows where one might properly expect
to get one's death, and got no harm from it, except it might be Oliver
Twist's complaint. One comes soon after this to shrubby willows, and
where willows are trout may be confidently looked for in most Sierra
streams. There is no accounting for their distribution; though provident
anglers have assisted nature of late, one still comes upon roaring brown
waters where trout might very well be, but are not.
The highest limit of conifers--in the middle Sierras, the white bark
pine--is not along the water border. They come to it about the level of
the heather, but they have no such affinity for dampness as the tamarack
pines. Scarcely any bird-note breaks the stillness of the timber-line,
but chipmunks inhabit here, as may be guessed by the gnawed ruddy cones
of the pines, and lowering hours the woodchucks come down to the water.
On a little spit of land running into Windy Lake we found one summer the
evidence of a tragedy; a pair of sheep's horns not fully grown caught in
the crotch of a pine where the living sheep must have lodged them. The
trunk of the tree had quite closed over them, and the skull bones
crumbled away from the weathered horn cases. We hoped it was not too far
out of the running of night prowlers to have put a speedy end to the
long agony, but we could not be sure. I never liked the spit of Windy
Lake again. It seems that all snow nourished plants count nothing so
excellent in their kind as to be forehanded with their bloom, working
secretly to that end under the high piled winters. The heathers begin by
the lake borders, while little sodden drifts still shelter under their
branches. I have seen the tiniest of them (_Kalmia glauca_) blooming,
and with well-formed fruit, a foot away from a snowbank from which it
could hardly have emerged within a week. Somehow the soul of the heather
has entered into the blood of the English-speaking.
"And oh! is that heather?" they say; and the most indifferent ends by
picking a sprig of it in a hushed, wondering way. One must suppose that
the root of their respective races issued from the glacial borders at
about the same epoch, and remember their origin.
Among the pines where the slope of the land allows it, the streams run
into smooth, brown, trout-abounding rills across open flats that are in
reality filled lake basins. These are the displaying grounds of the
gentians--blue--blue--eye-blue, perhaps, virtuous and likable flowers.
One is not surprised to learn that they have tonic properties. But if
your meadow should be outside the forest reserve, and the sheep have
been there, you will find little but the shorter, paler _G. Newberryii_,
and in the matted sods of the little tongues of greenness that lick up
among the pines along the watercourses, white, scentless, nearly
stemless, alpine violets.
At about the nine thousand foot level and in the summer there will be
hosts of rosy-winged dodecatheon, called shooting-stars, outlining the
crystal runnels in the sod. Single flowers have often a two-inch spread
of petal, and the full, twelve blossomed heads above the slender
pedicels have the airy effect of wings.
It is about this level one looks to find the largest lakes with thick
ranks of pines bearing down on them, often swamped in the summer floods
and paying the inevitable penalty for such encroachment. Here in wet
coves of the hills harbors that crowd of bloom that makes the wonder of
the Sierra canons.
They drift under the alternate flicker and gloom of the windy rooms of
pines, in gray rock shelters, and by the ooze of blind springs, and
their juxtapositions are the best imaginable. Lilies come up out of fern
beds, columbine swings over meadowsweet, white rein-orchids quake in the
leaning grass. Open swales, where in wet years may be running water, are
plantations of false hellebore (_Veratrum Californicum_), tall, branched
candelabra of greenish bloom above the sessile, sheathing, boat-shaped
leaves, semi-translucent in the sun. A stately plant of the lily family,
but why "false?" It is frankly offensive in its character, and its young
juices deadly as any hellebore that ever grew.
Like most mountain herbs it has an uncanny haste to bloom. One hears by
night, when all the wood is still, the crepitatious rustle of the
unfolding leaves and the pushing flower-stalk within, that has open
blossoms before it has fairly uncramped from the sheath. It commends
itself by a certain exclusiveness of growth, taking enough room and
never elbowing; for if the flora of the lake region has a fault it is
that there is too much of it. We have more than three hundred species
from Kearsarge Canon alone, and if that does not include them all it is
because they were already collected otherwhere.
One expects to find lakes down to about nine thousand feet, leading into
each other by comparatively open ripple slopes and white cascades. Below
the lakes are filled basins that are still spongy swamps, or substantial
meadows, as they get down and down.
Here begin the stream tangles. On the east slopes of the middle Sierras
the pines, all but an occasional yellow variety, desert the stream
borders about the level of the lowest lakes, and the birches and
tree-willows begin. The firs hold on almost to the mesa levels,--there
are no foothills on this eastern slope,--and whoever has firs misses
nothing else. It goes without saying that a tree that can afford to take
fifty years to its first fruiting will repay acquaintance. It keeps,
too, all that half century, a virginal grace of outline, but having once
flowered, begins quietly to put away the things of its youth. Year by
year the lower rounds of boughs are shed, leaving no scar; year by year
the star-branched minarets approach the sky. A fir-tree loves a water
border, loves a long wind in a draughty canon, loves to spend itself
secretly on the inner finishings of its burnished, shapely cones. Broken
open in mid-season the petal-shaped scales show a crimson satin surface,
perfect as a rose.
The birch--the brown-bark western birch characteristic of lower stream
tangles--is a spoil sport. It grows thickly to choke the stream that
feeds it; grudges it the sky and space for angler's rod and fly. The
willows do better; painted-cup, cypripedium, and the hollow stalks of
span-broad white umbels, find a footing among their stems. But in
general the steep plunges, the white swirls, green and tawny pools, the
gliding hush of waters between the meadows and the mesas afford little
fishing and few flowers.
One looks for these to begin again when once free of the rifted canon
walls; the high note of babble and laughter falls off to the steadier
mellow tone of a stream that knows its purpose and reflects the sky.
OTHER WATER BORDERS
It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the west to
become an irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams are willing. They
go as far as they can, or dare, toward the tillable lands in their own
boulder fenced gullies--but how much farther in the man-made waterways.
It is difficult to come into intimate relations with appropriated
waters; like very busy people they have no time to reveal themselves.
One needs to have known an irrigating ditch when it was a brook, and to
have lived by it, to mark the morning and evening tone of its crooning,
rising and falling to the excess of snow water; to have watched far
across the valley, south to the Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke,
the shining wall of the village water gate; to see still blue herons
stalking the little glinting weirs across the field.
Perhaps to get into the mood of the waterways one needs to have seen old
Amos Judson asquat on the headgate with his gun, guarding his
water-right toward the end of a dry summer. Amos owned the half of Tule
Creek and the other half pertained to the neighboring Greenfields ranch.
Years of a "short water crop," that is, when too little snow fell on the
high pine ridges, or, falling, melted too early, Amos held that it took
all the water that came down to make his half, and maintained it with a
Winchester and a deadly aim. Jesus Montana, first proprietor of
Greenfields,--you can see at once that Judson had the racial
advantage,--contesting the right with him, walked into five of Judson's
bullets and his eternal possessions on the same occasion. That was the
Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition. Twelve years later
one of the Clarks, holding Greenfields, not so very green by now, shot
one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that also might become classic, but
the jury found for manslaughter. It had the effect of discouraging the
Greenfields claim, but Amos used to sit on the headgate just the same,
as quaint and lone a figure as the sandhill crane watching for water
toads below the Tule drop. Every subsequent owner of Greenfields bought
it with Amos in full view. The last of these was Diedrick. Along in
August of that year came a week of low water. Judson's ditch failed and
he went out with his rifle to learn why. There on the headgate sat
Diedrick's frau with a long-handled shovel across her lap and all the
water turned into Diedrick's ditch; there she sat knitting through the
long sun, and the children brought out her dinner. It was all up with
Amos; he was too much of a gentleman to fight a lady--that was the way
he expressed it. She was a very large lady, and a long-handled shovel is
no mean weapon. The next year Judson and Diedrick put in a modern water
gauge and took the summer ebb in equal inches. Some of the water-right
difficulties are more squalid than this, some more tragic; but unless
you have known them you cannot very well know what the water thinks as
it slips past the gardens and in the long slow sweeps of the canal. You
get that sense of brooding from the confined and sober floods, not all
at once but by degrees, as one might become aware of a middle-aged and
serious neighbor who has had that in his life to make him so. It is the
repose of the completely accepted instinct.
With the water runs a certain following of thirsty herbs and shrubs. The
willows go as far as the stream goes, and a bit farther on the slightest
provocation. They will strike root in the leak of a flume, or the
dribble of an overfull bank, coaxing the water beyond its appointed
bounds. Given a new waterway in a barren land, and in three years the
willows have fringed all its miles of banks; three years more and they
will touch tops across it. It is perhaps due to the early usurpation of
the willows that so little else finds growing-room along the large
canals. The birch beginning far back in the canon tangles is more
conservative; it is shy of man haunts and needs to have the permanence
of its drink assured. It stops far short of the summer limit of waters,
and I have never known it to take up a position on the banks beyond the
ploughed lands. There is something almost like premeditation in the
avoidance of cultivated tracts by certain plants of water borders. The
clematis, mingling its foliage secretly with its host, comes down with
the stream tangles to the village fences, skips over to corners of
little used pasture lands and the plantations that spring up about waste
water pools; but never ventures a footing in the trail of spade or
plough; will not be persuaded to grow in any garden plot. On the other
hand, the horehound, the common European species imported with the
colonies, hankers after hedgerows and snug little borders. It is more
widely distributed than many native species, and may be always found
along the ditches in the village corners, where it is not appreciated.