The River Canons Of The Sierras Of The Snows Are Better Worth
While Than Most Broadways, Though The Choice Of Them Is Like The
Choice Of Streets, Not Very Well Determined By Their Names.
There
is always an amount of local history to be read in the names of
mountain highways where one touches the successive waves of
occupation or discovery, as in the old villages where the
neighborhoods are not built but grow.
Here you have the Spanish
Californian in Cero Gordo and pinon; Symmes and Shepherd,
pioneers both; Tunawai, probably Shoshone; Oak Creek, Kearsarge,
--easy to fix the date of that christening,--Tinpah, Paiute that;
Mist Canon and Paddy Jack's. The streets of the west Sierras
sloping toward the San Joaquin are long and winding, but from the
east, my country, a day's ride carries one to the lake regions.
The next day reaches the passes of the high divide, but whether one
gets passage depends a little on how many have gone that road
before, and much on one's own powers. The passes are steep and
windy ridges, though not the highest. By two and three thousand
feet the snow-caps overtop them. It is even possible to wind
through the Sierras without having passed above timber-line,
but one misses a great exhilaration.
The shape of a new mountain is roughly pyramidal, running out
into long shark-finned ridges that interfere and merge into other
thunder-splintered sierras. You get the saw-tooth effect from a
distance, but the near-by granite bulk glitters with the terrible
keen polish of old glacial ages. I say terrible; so it seems.
When those glossy domes swim into the alpenglow, wet after rain,
you conceive how long and imperturbable are the purposes of God.
Never believe what you are told, that midsummer is the best
time to go up the streets of the mountain--well--perhaps for the
merely idle or sportsmanly or scientific; but for seeing and
understanding, the best time is when you have the longest leave to
stay. And here is a hint if you would attempt the stateliest
approaches; travel light, and as much as possible live off the
land. Mulligatawny soup and tinned lobster will not bring you the
favor of the woodlanders.
Every canon commends itself for some particular pleasantness;
this for pines, another for trout, one for pure bleak beauty of
granite buttresses, one for its far-flung irised falls; and as I
say, though some are easier going, leads each to the cloud
shouldering citadel. First, near the canon mouth you get the
low-heading full-branched, one-leaf pines. That is the sort of
tree to know at sight, for the globose, resin-dripping cones
have palatable, nourishing kernels, the main harvest of the
Paiutes. That perhaps accounts for their growing accommodatingly
below the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on the valleyward
slopes. The real procession of the pines begins in the rifts with
the long-leafed Pinus jeffreyi, sighing its soul away upon
the wind. And it ought not to sigh in such good company. Here
begins the manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the
sharp waste of boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to
the sleek, ruddy, chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet,
burnished laurel, and the million unregarded trumpets of the coral-
red pentstemon. Wild life is likely to be busiest about the lower
pine borders. One looks in hollow trees and hiving rocks for wild
honey. The drone of bees, the chatter of jays, the hurry and stir
of squirrels, is incessant; the air is odorous and hot. The roar
of the stream fills up the morning and evening intervals, and at
night the deer feed in the buckthorn thickets. It is worth
watching the year round in the purlieus of the long-leafed pines.
One month or another you set sight or trail of most roving mountain
dwellers as they follow the limit of forbidding snows, and more
bloom than you can properly appreciate.
Whatever goes up or comes down the streets of the mountains,
water has the right of way; it takes the lowest ground and the
shortest passage. Where the rifts are narrow, and some of
the Sierra canons are not a stone's throw from wall to wall, the
best trail for foot or horse winds considerably above the
watercourses; but in a country of cone-bearers there is usually a
good strip of swardy sod along the canon floor. Pine woods, the
short-leafed Balfour and Murryana of the high Sierras, are sombre,
rooted in the litter of a thousand years, hushed, and corrective to
the spirit. The trail passes insensibly into them from the black
pines and a thin belt of firs. You look back as you rise, and
strain for glimpses of the tawny valley, blue glints of the Bitter
Lake, and tender cloud films on the farther ranges. For such
pictures the pine branches make a noble frame. Presently they
close in wholly; they draw mysteriously near, covering your tracks,
giving up the trail indifferently, or with a secret grudge. You
get a kind of impatience with their locked ranks, until you come
out lastly on some high, windy dome and see what they are about.
They troop thickly up the open ways, river banks, and brook
borders; up open swales of dribbling springs; swarm over old
moraines; circle the peaty swamps and part and meet about clean
still lakes; scale the stony gullies; tormented, bowed, persisting
to the door of the storm chambers, tall priests to pray for rain.
The spring winds lift clouds of pollen dust, finer than
frankincense, and trail it out over high altars, staining the snow.
No doubt they understand this work better than we; in fact
they know no other. "Come," say the churches of the valleys,
after a season of dry years, "let us pray for rain." They would do
better to plant more trees.
It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die
out.
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