The Land Of Little Rain - Mary Hunter Austin
The irrigating ditch is an impartial distributer. It gathers all the
alien weeds that come west in garden and grass seeds and affords them
harbor in its banks. There one finds the European mallow _(Malva
rotundifolia_) spreading out to the streets with the summer overflow,
and every spring a dandelion or two, brought in with the blue grass
seed, uncurls in the swardy soil. Farther than either of these have come
the lilies that the Chinese coolies cultivate in adjacent mud holes for
their foodful bulbs. The _seegoo_ establishes itself very readily in
swampy borders, and the white blossom spikes among the arrow-pointed
leaves are quite as acceptable to the eye as any native species.
In the neighborhood of towns founded by the Spanish Californians,
whether this plant is native to the locality or not, one can always find
aromatic clumps of _yerba buena_, the "good herb" (_Micromeria
Douglassii_). The virtue of it as a febrifuge was taught to the mission
fathers by the neophytes, and wise old dames of my acquaintance have
worked astonishing cures with it and the succulent _yerba mansa_. This
last is native to wet meadows and distinguished enough to have a family
all to itself.
Where the irrigating ditches are shallow and a little neglected, they
choke quickly with watercress that multiplies about the lowest Sierra
springs. It is characteristic of the frequenters of water borders near
man haunts, that they are chiefly of the sorts that are useful to man,
as if they made their services an excuse for the intrusion. The
joint-grass of soggy pastures produces edible, nut-flavored tubers,
called by the Indians _taboose_. The common reed of the ultramontane
marshes (here _Phragmites vulgaris_), a very stately, whispering reed,
light and strong for shafts or arrows, affords sweet sap and pith which
makes a passable sugar.
It seems the secrets of plant powers and influences yield themselves
most readily to primitive peoples, at least one never hears of the
knowledge coming from any other source. The Indian never concerns
himself, as the botanist and the poet, with the plant's appearances and
relations, but with what it can do for him. It can do much, but how do
you suppose he finds it out; what instincts or accidents guide him? How
does a cat know when to eat catnip? Why do western bred cattle avoid
loco weed, and strangers eat it and go mad? One might suppose that in a
time of famine the Paiutes digged wild parsnip in meadow corners and
died from eating it, and so learned to produce death swiftly and at
will. But how did they learn, repenting in the last agony, that animal
fat is the best antidote for its virulence; and who taught them that the
essence of joint pine (_Ephedra nevadensis_), which looks to have no
juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in stomachic disorders. But they
so understand and so use. One believes it to be a sort of instinct
atrophied by disuse in a complexer civilization. I remember very well
when I came first upon a wet meadow of _yerba mansa_, not knowing its
name or use. It _looked_ potent; the cool, shiny leaves, the succulent,
pink stems and fruity bloom. A little touch, a hint, a word, and I
should have known what use to put them to. So I felt, unwilling to leave
it until we had come to an understanding. So a musician might have felt
in the presence of an instrument known to be within his province, but
beyond his power. It was with the relieved sense of having shaped a long
surmise that I watched the Senora Romero make a poultice of it for my
burned hand.
On, down from the lower lakes to the village weirs, the brown and golden
disks of _helenum_ have beauty as a sufficient excuse for being. The
plants anchor out on tiny capes, or mid-stream islets, with the nearly
sessile radicle leaves submerged. The flowers keep up a constant
trepidation in time with the hasty water beating at their stems, a
quivering, instinct with life, that seems always at the point of
breaking into flight; just as the babble of the watercourses always
approaches articulation but never quite achieves it. Although of wide
range the helenum never makes itself common through profusion, and may
be looked for in the same places from year to year. Another lake dweller
that comes down to the ploughed lands is the red columbine (_C.
truncata_). It requires no encouragement other than shade, but grows too
rank in the summer heats and loses its wildwood grace. A common enough
orchid in these parts is the false lady's slipper (_Epipactis
gigantea_), one that springs up by any water where there is sufficient
growth of other sorts to give it countenance. It seems to thrive best in
an atmosphere of suffocation.
The middle Sierras fall off abruptly eastward toward the high valleys.
Peaks of the fourteen thousand class, belted with sombre swathes of
pine, rise almost directly from the bench lands with no foothill
approaches. At the lower edge of the bench or mesa the land falls away,
often by a fault, to the river hollows, and along the drop one looks for
springs or intermittent swampy swales. Here the plant world resembles a
little the lake gardens, modified by altitude and the use the town folk
put it to for pasture. Here are cress, blue violets, potentilla, and, in
the damp of the willow fence-rows, white false asphodels. I am sure we
make too free use of this word _false_ in naming plants--false mallow,
false lupine, and the like. The asphodel is at least no falsifier, but a
true lily by all the heaven-set marks, though small of flower and run
mostly to leaves, and should have a name that gives it credit for
growing up in such celestial semblance. Native to the mesa meadows is a
pale iris, gardens of it acres wide, that in the spring season of full
bloom make an airy fluttering as of azure wings. Single flowers are too
thin and sketchy of outline to affect the imagination, but the full
fields have the misty blue of mirage waters rolled across desert sand,
and quicken the senses to the anticipation of things ethereal. A very
poet's flower, I thought; not fit for gathering up, and proving a
nuisance in the pastures, therefore needing to be the more loved. And
one day I caught Winnenap' drawing out from mid leaf a fine strong fibre
for making snares. The borders of the iris fields are pure gold, nearly
sessile buttercups and a creeping-stemmed composite of a redder hue. I
am convinced that English-speaking children will always have buttercups.
If they do not light upon the original companion of little frogs they
will take the next best and cherish it accordingly. I find five
unrelated species loved by that name, and as many more and as
inappropriately called cowslips.
By every mesa spring one may expect to find a single shrub of the
buckthorn, called of old time _Cascara sagrada_--the sacred bark. Up in
the canons, within the limit of the rains, it seeks rather a stony
slope, but in the dry valleys is not found away from water borders.
In all the valleys and along the desert edges of the west are
considerable areas of soil sickly with alkali-collecting pools, black
and evil-smelling like old blood. Very little grows hereabout but
thick-leaved pickle weed. Curiously enough, in this stiff mud, along
roadways where there is frequently a little leakage from canals, grows
the only western representative of the true heliotropes (_Heliotropium
curassavicum_). It has flowers of faded white, foliage of faded green,
resembling the "live-for-ever" of old gardens and graveyards, but even
less attractive. After so much schooling in the virtues of water-seeking
plants, one is not surprised to learn that its mucilaginous sap has
healing powers.
Last and inevitable resort of overflow waters is the tulares, great
wastes of reeds (_Juncus_) in sickly, slow streams. The reeds, called
tules, are ghostly pale in winter, in summer deep poisonous-looking
green, the waters thick and brown; the reed beds breaking into dingy
pools, clumps of rotting willows, narrow winding water lanes and sinking
paths. The tules grow inconceivably thick in places, standing man-high
above the water; cattle, no, not any fish nor fowl can penetrate them.
Old stalks succumb slowly; the bed soil is quagmire, settling with the
weight as it fills and fills. Too slowly for counting they raise little
islands from the bog and reclaim the land. The waters pushed out cut
deeper channels, gnaw off the edges of the solid earth.
The tulares are full of mystery and malaria. That is why we have meant
to explore them and have never done so. It must be a happy mystery. So
you would think to hear the redwinged blackbirds proclaim it clear March
mornings. Flocks of them, and every flock a myriad, shelter in the dry,
whispering stems. They make little arched runways deep into the heart of
the tule beds. Miles across the valley one hears the clamor of their
high, keen flutings in the mating weather.
Wild fowl, quacking hordes of them, nest in the tulares. Any day's
venture will raise from open shallows the great blue heron on his hollow
wings. Chill evenings the mallard drakes cry continually from the glassy
pools, the bittern's hollow boom rolls along the water paths. Strange
and far-flown fowl drop down against the saffron, autumn sky. All day
wings beat above it hazy with speed; long flights of cranes glimmer in
the twilight. By night one wakes to hear the clanging geese go over. One
wishes for, but gets no nearer speech from those the reedy fens have
swallowed up. What they do there, how fare, what find, is the secret of
the tulares.
NURSLINGS OF THE SKY
Choose a hill country for storms. There all the business of the weather
is carried on above your horizon and loses its terror in familiarity.
When you come to think about it, the disastrous storms are on the
levels, sea or sand or plains. There you get only a hint of what is
about to happen, the fume of the gods rising from their meeting place
under the rim of the world; and when it breaks upon you there is no stay
nor shelter. The terrible mewings and mouthings of a Kansas wind have
the added terror of viewlessness. You are lapped in them like uprooted
grass; suspect them of a personal grudge. But the storms of hill
countries have other business. They scoop watercourses, manure the
pines, twist them to a finer fibre, fit the firs to be masts and spars,
and, if you keep reasonably out of the track of their affairs, do you no
harm.
They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and warnings,
and they leave you in no doubt about their performances. One who builds
his house on a water scar or the rubble of a steep slope must take
chances. So they did in Overtown who built in the wash of Argus water,
and at Kearsarge at the foot of a steep, treeless swale. After twenty
years Argus water rose in the wash against the frail houses, and the
piled snows of Kearsarge slid down at a thunder peal over the cabins and
the camp, but you could conceive that it was the fault of neither the
water nor the snow.
The first effect of cloud study is a sense of presence and intention in
storm processes.
Weather does not happen. It is the visible manifestation of the Spirit
moving itself in the void. It gathers itself together under the heavens;
rains, snows, yearns mightily in wind, smiles; and the Weather Bureau,
situated advantageously for that very business, taps the record on his
instruments and going out on the streets denies his God, not having
gathered the sense of what he has seen. Hardly anybody takes account of
the fact that John Muir, who knows more of mountain storms than any
other, is a devout man.
Of the high Sierras choose the neighborhood of the splintered peaks
about the Kern and King's river divide for storm study, or the short,
wide-mouthed canons opening eastward on high valleys. Days when the
hollows are steeped in a warm, winey flood the clouds come walking on
the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath, rounded and pearly
white above. They gather flock-wise, moving on the level currents that
roll about the peaks, lock hands and settle with the cooler air, drawing
a veil about those places where they do their work. If their meeting or
parting takes place at sunrise or sunset, as it often does, one gets the
splendor of the apocalypse. There will be cloud pillars miles high,
snow-capped, glorified, and preserving an orderly perspective before the
unbarred door of the sun, or perhaps mere ghosts of clouds that dance to
some pied piper of an unfelt wind. But be it day or night, once they
have settled to their work, one sees from the valley only the blank wall
of their tents stretched along the ranges. To get the real effect of a
mountain storm you must be inside.
One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say: What if it
should rain? It always does rain somewhere among the peaks: the unusual
thing is that one should escape it. You might suppose that if you took
any account of plant contrivances to save their pollen powder against
showers. Note how many there are deep-throated and bell-flowered like
the pentstemons, how many have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how
many grow in copse shelters and grow there only. There is keen delight
in the quick showers of summer canons, with the added comfort, born of
experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high
altitudes. The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the canon wall,
slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy pass, obscures your
sun. Next you hear the rain drum on the broad-leaved hellebore, and beat
down the mimulus beside the brook. You shelter on the lee of some strong
pine with shut-winged butterflies and merry, fiddling creatures of the
wood. Runnels of rain water from the glacier-slips swirl through the
pine needles into rivulets; the streams froth and rise in their banks.
The sky is white with cloud; the sky is gray with rain; the sky is
clear. The summer showers leave no wake.
Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August weather.
Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs about the lake
gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away harmlessly.
Sometimes one has the good fortune from a heather--grown headland to
watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air. Out over meadow or lake region
begins a little darkling of the sky,--no cloud, no wind, just a
smokiness such as spirits materialize from in witch stories.
It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret canons. Rain
begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind comes up and
drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pitted by the
glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such rains relieve like tears.
The same season brings the rains that have work to do, ploughing storms
that alter the face of things. These come with thunder and the play of
live fire along the rocks. They come with great winds that try the pines
for their work upon the seas and strike out the unfit. They shake down
avalanches of splinters from sky-line pinnacles and raise up sudden
floods like battle fronts in the canons against towns, trees, and
boulders. They would be kind if they could, but have more important
matters. Such storms, called cloud-bursts by the country folk, are not
rain, rather the spillings of Thor's cup, jarred by the Thunderer. After
such a one the water that comes up in the village hydrants miles away is
white with forced bubbles from the wind-tormented streams.
All that storms do to the face of the earth you may read in the
geographies, but not what they do to our contemporaries. I remember one
night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by the houseless cry
of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family, had been buried under a
slide of broken boulders on the slope of Kearsarge. We had heard the
heavy denotation of the slide about the hour of the alpenglow, a pale
rosy interval in a darkling air, and judged he must have come from
hunting to the ruined cliff and paced the night out before it, crying a
very human woe. I remember, too, in that same season of storms, a lake
made milky white for days, and crowded out of its bed by clay washed
into it by a fury of rain, with the trout floating in it belly up,
stunned by the shock of the sudden flood. But there were trout enough
for what was left of the lake next year and the beginning of a meadow
about its upper rim. What taxed me most in the wreck of one of my
favorite canons by cloudburst was to see a bobcat mother mouthing her
drowned kittens in the ruined lair built in the wash, far above the
limit of accustomed waters, but not far enough for the unexpected. After
a time you get the point of view of gods about these things to save you
from being too pitiful.
The great snows that come at the beginning of winter, before there is
yet any snow except the perpetual high banks, are best worth while to
watch. These come often before the late bloomers are gone and while the
migratory birds are still in the piney woods. Down in the valley you see
little but the flocking of blackbirds in the streets, or the low flight
of mallards over the tulares, and the gathering of clouds behind
Williamson. First there is a waiting stillness in the wood; the
pine-trees creak although there is no wind, the sky glowers, the firs
rock by the water borders. The noise of the creek rises insistently and
falls off a full note like a child abashed by sudden silence in the
room. This changing of the stream-tone following tardily the changes of
the sun on melting snows is most meaningful of wood notes. After it runs
a little trumpeter wind to cry the wild creatures to their holes.
Sometimes the warning hangs in the air for days with increasing
stillness. Only Clark's crow and the strident jays make light of it;
only they can afford to. The cattle get down to the foothills and ground
inhabiting creatures make fast their doors. It grows chill, blind clouds
fumble in the canons; there will be a roll of thunder, perhaps, or a
flurry of rain, but mostly the snow is born in the air with quietness
and the sense of strong white pinions softly stirred. It increases, is
wet and clogging, and makes a white night of midday.
There is seldom any wind with first snows, more often rain, but later,
when there is already a smooth foot or two over all the slopes, the
drifts begin. The late snows are fine and dry, mere ice granules at the
wind's will. Keen mornings after a storm they are blown out in wreaths
and banners from the high ridges sifting into the canons.
Once in a year or so we have a "big snow." The cloud tents are widened
out to shut in the valley and an outlying range or two and are drawn
tight against the sun. Such a storm begins warm, with a dry white mist
that fills and fills between the ridges, and the air is thick with
formless groaning. Now for days you get no hint of the neighboring
ranges until the snows begin to lighten and some shouldering peak lifts
through a rent. Mornings after the heavy snows are steely blue,
two-edged with cold, divinely fresh and still, and these are times to go
up to the pine borders. There you may find floundering in the unstable
drifts "tainted wethers" of the wild sheep, faint from age and hunger;
easy prey. Even the deer make slow going in the thick fresh snow, and
once we found a wolverine going blind and feebly in the white glare.
No tree takes the snow stress with such ease as the silver fir. The
star-whorled, fan-spread branches droop under the soft wreaths--droop
and press flatly to the trunk; presently the point of overloading is
reached, there is a soft sough and muffled dropping, the boughs recover,
and the weighting goes on until the drifts have reached the midmost
whorls and covered up the branches. When the snows are particularly wet
and heavy they spread over the young firs in green-ribbed tents wherein
harbor winter loving birds.
All storms of desert hills, except wind storms, are impotent. East and
east of the Sierras they rise in nearly parallel ranges, desertward, and
no rain breaks over them, except from some far-strayed cloud or roving
wind from the California Gulf, and these only in winter. In summer the
sky travails with thunderings and the flare of sheet lightnings to win a
few blistering big drops, and once in a lifetime the chance of a
torrent. But you have not known what force resides in the mindless
things until you have known a desert wind. One expects it at the turn of
the two seasons, wet and dry, with electrified tense nerves. Along the
edge of the mesa where it drops off to the valley, dust devils begin to
rise white and steady, fanning out at the top like the genii out of the
Fisherman's bottle. One supposes the Indians might have learned the use
of smoke signals from these dust pillars as they learn most things
direct from the tutelage of the earth. The air begins to move fluently,
blowing hot and cold between the ranges. Far south rises a murk of sand
against the sky; it grows, the wind shakes itself, and has a smell of
earth. The cloud of small dust takes on the color of gold and shuts out
the neighborhood, the push of the wind is unsparing. Only man of all
folk is foolish enough to stir abroad in it. But being in a house is
really much worse; no relief from the dust, and a great fear of the
creaking timbers. There is no looking ahead in such a wind, and the bite
of the small sharp sand on exposed skin is keener than any insect sting.
One might sleep, for the lapping of the wind wears one to the point of
exhaustion very soon, but there is dread, in open sand stretches
sometimes justified, of being over blown by the drift. It is hot, dry,
fretful work, but by going along the ground with the wind behind, one
may come upon strange things in its tumultuous privacy. I like these
truces of wind and heat that the desert makes, otherwise I do not know
how I should come by so many acquaintances with furtive folk. I like to
see hawks sitting daunted in shallow holes, not daring to spread a
feather, and doves in a row by the prickle bushes, and shut-eyed cattle,
turned tail to the wind in a patient doze. I like the smother of sand
among the dunes, and finding small coiled snakes in open places, but I
never like to come in a wind upon the silly sheep. The wind robs them of
what wit they had, and they seem never to have learned the self-induced
hypnotic stupor with which most wild things endure weather stress. I
have never heard that the desert winds brought harm to any other than
the wandering shepherds and their flocks. Once below Pastaria Little
Pete showed me bones sticking out of the sand where a flock of two
hundred had been smothered in a bygone wind. In many places the
four-foot posts of a cattle fence had been buried by the wind-blown
dunes.
It is enough occupation, when no storm is brewing, to watch the cloud
currents and the chambers of the sky. From Kearsarge, say, you look over
Inyo and find pink soft cloud masses asleep on the level desert air;
south of you hurries a white troop late to some gathering of their kind
at the back of Oppapago; nosing the foot of Waban, a woolly mist creeps
south. In the clean, smooth paths of the middle sky and highest up in
air, drift, unshepherded, small flocks ranging contrarily. You will find
the proper names of these things in the reports of the Weather
Bureau--cirrus, cumulus, and the like--and charts that will teach by
study when to sow and take up crops. It is astonishing the trouble men
will be at to find out when to plant potatoes, and gloze over the
eternal meaning of the skies. You have to beat out for yourself many
mornings on the windly headlands the sense of the fact that you get the
same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of your garden
hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to it.
THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES
There are still some places in the west where the quails cry
"_cuidado_"; where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle; where
all the dishes have _chile_ in them, and they make more of the Sixteenth
of September than they do of the Fourth of July. I mean in particular El
Pueblo de Las Uvas. Where it lies, how to come at it, you will not get
from me; rather would I show you the heron's nest in the tulares. It has
a peak behind it, glinting above the tamarack pines, above a breaker of
ruddy hills that have a long slope valley-wards and the shoreward steep
of waves toward the Sierras.
Below the Town of the Grape Vines, which shortens to Las Uvas for common
use, the land dips away to the river pastures and the tulares. It
shrouds under a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome of
cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. Hereabouts are some
strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up the creek for the
village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of the arrastra. Wild vines
that begin among the willows lap over to the orchard rows, take the
trellis and roof-tree.
There is another town above Las Uvas that merits some attention, a town
of arches and airy crofts, full of linnets, blackbirds, fruit birds,
small sharp hawks, and mockingbirds that sing by night. They pour out
piercing, unendurably sweet cavatinas above the fragrance of bloom and
musky smell of fruit. Singing is in fact the business of the night at
Las Uvas as sleeping is for midday. When the moon comes over the
mountain wall new-washed from the sea, and the shadows lie like lace on
the stamped floors of the patios, from recess to recess of the vine
tangle runs the thrum of guitars and the voice of singing.