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 tunnels 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. Years 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.
