Our Friend John Burroughs Part 15

his "Gospel of Nature" (which one of his friends calls "The Gospel according to Saint John"), his "Noon of Science," his "Long Road"?

And most of this rich harvest he has gathered in his journeys back to Pepacton, inspired by the scenes amid which he first felt the desire to write.

Seeing him daily in these scenes, one feels that it may, indeed, be said of him as Matthew Arnold said of Sophocles, that he sees life steadily, and sees it whole. What a masterly handling is his of the facts of the universe, giving his reader the truths of the scientist touched with an idealism such as is only known to the poet's soul! A friend, writing me of "The Summit of the Years," spoke of "its splendid ascent by a rapid crescendo from the personal to the cosmic," and of how gratifying it is to see our author putting forth such fine work in his advancing years.

Another friend called it "a beautiful record of a beautiful life."

I recall the September morning on which he began that essay. He had written the first sentence--"The longer I live, the more I am impressed with the beauty and the wonder of the world"--when he was interrupted for a time. He spoke of what he had written, and said he hardly knew what he was going to make of it. Later in the day he brought me a large part of the essay to copy, and I remember how moved I was at its beauty, how grateful that I had been present at its inception and birth.

One afternoon he called us from our separate work, the artist from her canvas and me from my typewriter, to look at a wonderful rainbow spanning the wide valley below us. The next day he brought me a short ma.n.u.script saying, "If that seems worth while to you, you may copy it--I don't know whether there is anything in it or not." It was "The Rainbow," which appeared some months later in a popular magazine--a little gem, and a good ill.u.s.tration of his ability to throw the witchery of the ideal around the facts of nature. The lad with us had been learning Wordsworth's "Rainbow," a favorite of Mr. Burroughs, and it was no unusual thing of a morning to hear the rustic philosopher while frying the bacon for breakfast, singing contentedly in a sort of tune of his own making:--

"And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety."

One afternoon a neighbor came and took him in her automobile a ride of fifty miles or more, the objective point of which was Ashland, the place where he had attended a seminary in 1854 and 1855. On his return he said it seemed like wizard's work that he could be whisked there and back in one afternoon, to that place which had been the goal of his youthful dreams! They had also called on a schoolmate whom he had not seen for forty years. He told us how a possession of that boy's had been a thing he had coveted for many months--a slate pencil with a shining copper gun-cap! "How I longed for that pencil! I tried to trade for b.u.t.tons (all I had to offer in exchange), but it was too precious for my small barter, and I coveted it in vain." The wistful Celt began early to sigh for the unattainable.

We picked wild strawberries in June from the "clover lot" where the boy John Burroughs and his mother used to pick them. "I can see her now," he said reminiscently, "her bent figure moving slowly in the summer fields toward home with her basket filled. She would also go berrying on Old Clump, in early haying, long after the berries were gone in the lowlands."

During this summer of which I speak, the fields were a gorgeous ma.s.s of color--b.u.t.tercups and daisies, and the orange hawkweed--a display that rivaled the carpet of gold and purple we had seen in the San Joaquin Valley, in company with John Muir three summers before. Mr. Muir was done before starting for South America. He had promised to come to the Catskills, but had to keep putting it off to get copy ready, and the Laird of Woodchuck Lodge was exasperated that the mountaineer would stay in that hot Babylon,--he, the lover of the wild,--when we in the Delectable Mountains were calling him hither. As we looked upon the riot of color one day, Mr. Burroughs said, "John Muir, confound him! I wish he was here to see this at its height!"

Returning to the little gray farmhouse in the gathering dusk one late September day, Mr. Burroughs paused and turned, looking back at the old home, and up at the cattle silhouetted against the horizon. He gazed upon the landscape long and long. How fondly his eye dwells upon these scenes! So I have seen him look when about to part from a friend--as if he were trying to fix the features and expression in his mind forever.

"The older one grows, the more the later years erode away, as do the secondary rocks, and one gets down to bed-rock,--youth,--and there he wants to rest. These scenes make youth and all the early life real to me, the rest is more like a dream. How incredible it is!--all that is gone; but here it lives again."

(Ill.u.s.tration of On the Porch at Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott)

And yet, though he is face to face with the past at his old home, his days there are not so sad as some of his reminiscent talk would seem to indicate. In truth, he is serenely content, so much so that he sometimes almost chides himself for living so much in the present. "Oh, the power of a living reality to veil or blot out the Past!" he sighed. "And yet, is it not best so? Does not the gra.s.s grow above graves? Why should these lovely scenes always be a cemetery to me? There seems to have been a spell put upon them that has laid the ghosts, and I am glad." And to see him bird-nesting with his grandchildren, hunting in the woods for crooked sticks for his rustic furniture, waking the echo in the "new barn" (a barn that was new in 1844), routing out a woodchuck from a stone wall, blackberrying on the steep hillsides, or going a half-mile across the fields just to smell the fragrance of the buckwheat bloom, is to know that, wistful Celt that he is, and dominated by the spell of the Past, he is yet very much alive to the Present, out of which he is probably getting as full a measure of content as any man living to-day.

He looked about him at the close of his first stay at Woodchuck Lodge after the completion of the repairs which had made the house so homelike and comfortable, and said contentedly: "A beautiful dream come true! And to think I've stayed down there on the Hudson all these years with never the home feeling, when here were my native hills waiting to cradle me as they did in my youth, and I so slow to return to them! I've been homesick for over forty years: I was an alien there; I couldn't take root there. It was a lucky day when I decided to spend the rest of my summers here"

CAMPING WITH BURROUGHS AND MUIR

In February, 1909, I was one of a small party which set out with Mr.

Burroughs for the Pacific Coast and the Hawaiian Islands. The lure held out to him by the friend who arranged his trip was that John Muir would start from his home at Martinez, California, and await him at the Petrified Forests in Arizona; conduct him through, that weirdly picturesque region, and in and around the Grand Canon of the Colorado; camp and tramp with him in the Mojave Desert; tarry awhile in Southern California; then visit Yosemite before embarking on the Pacific preparatory to lotus-eating in Hawaii. The lure held out to the more obscure members of the party was all that has been enumerated, plus that of having these two great, simple men for traveling companions. To see the wonders of the Southwest is in itself great good fortune, but to see them in company with these two students of nature, and to study the students while the students were studying the wonders, was an incalculable privilege.

It frightens me now when I think on what a slight chance hung our opportunity for this unique Journey; for Mr. Burroughs, though at first deciding to go, had later given it up, declaring himself to be too much of a tenderfoot to go so far from home alone at his age.

"Why should I go gadding about to see the strange and the extraordinary?" he wrote me, when trying to argue himself into abandoning the trip. "The whole gospel of my books (if they have any gospel) is 'Stay at home; see the wonderful and the beautiful in the simple things all about you; make the most of the common and the near at hand.' When I have gone abroad, I have carried this spirit with me, and have tested what I have seen by the nature revealed to me at my own doorstep. Well, I am glad I have triumphed at last; I feel much better and like writing again, now that this incubus is off my shoulders." But the incubus soon rested on him again, for the next mail carried a letter begging him to reconsider and let two of his women friends accompany him. So it all came about in a few days, and we were off.

We wondered how Mr. Muir would relish two women being in the party, but a.s.sured Mr. Burroughs we should not hamper them, and should be ready to do whatever they were.

"Have no fears on that score," he said; "Muir will be friendly if you are good listeners; and he is well worth listening to. He is very entertaining, but he sometimes talks when I want to be let alone; at least he did up in Alaska."

"But you won't be crusty to him, will you?"

"Oh, no, I shan't dare to be--he is too likely to get the best of one; he is a born tease."

The long journey across the Western States (by the Santa Fe route) was full of interest at every point. Even the monotony of the Middle West was not wearisome, while the scenery and scenes in New Mexico and Arizona were fascinating in the extreme.

Mr. Burroughs had been to the Far West by a northern route, but this was all fresh territory to him, and he brought to it his usual keen appet.i.te for new phases of nature, made still keener by a recently awakened interest in geological subjects. It enhanced the pleasure and profit of the trip a hundredfold to get his first impressions of the moving panorama, as I did when he dictated notes to me from his diary, or descriptive letters to his wife and son. The impression one gets out there of earth sculpture in process is one of the chief attractions of the region, and Mr. Burroughs never tired of studying the physiognomy of the land, and the overwhelming evidences of time and change, and of contrasting these with our still older, maturer landscapes in the East.

In pa.s.sing through Kansas he commented on the monotonous level expanse of country as being unbearable from any point of view except as good farm land. Used to hills and mountains, inviting brooks and winding roads, he turned away from this unpicturesque land, saying if it was a good place to make money, it was also a place to lose one's own soul--he was already homesick for the beauty and diversity of our more winsome country.

Two days' journey from Chicago and we reached the desert town of Adamana. As the train stopped near the little inn, a voice called out in the darkness, "h.e.l.lo, Johnnie, is that you?"

"Yes, John Muir"; and there under the big dipper, on the great Arizona desert, the two friends met after a lapse of ten years.

"Muir, aren't you surprised to find me with two women in my wake?" asked Mr. Burroughs, introducing us.

"Yes; surprised that there are only two, Johnnie." Then to us, "Up in Alaska there were a dozen or two following him around, tucking him up in steamer rugs, putting pillows to his head, running to him with a flower, or a description of a bird--Oh, two is a very moderate number, Johnnie, but we'll manage to worry through with them, somehow." And picking up part of our luggage, the tall, grizzly Scot led the way to the inn.

The next day we drove nine miles over the rolling desert to visit one of the petrified forests, of which there are five in that vicinity. Blended with the unwonted scenes--the gray sands dotted with sagebrush and greasewood, the leaping jack rabbits, the frightened bands of half-wild horses, the distant b.u.t.tes and mesas, and the brilliant blue of the Arizona sky--is the memory of that talk of Mr. Muir's during the long drive, a talk which for range and raciness I have never heard equaled.

He often uses the broad dialect of the Scot, translating as he goes along. His forte is in monologue. He is a most engaging talker,--discursive, grave and gay,--mingling thrilling adventures, side-splitting anecdotes, choice quotations, apt characterizations, scientific data, enthusiastic descriptions, sarcastic comments, scornful denunciations, inimitable mimicry.

Mr. Burroughs, on the contrary, is not a ready talker; he gives of his best in his books. He establishes intimate relations with his reader, Mr. Muir with his listener. He is more fond of an interchange of ideas than is Mr. Muir; is not the least inclined to banter or to get the better of one; is so averse to witnessing discomfiture that even when forced into an argument, he is loath to push it to the bitter end. Yet when he does engage in argument, he drives things home with very telling force, especially when writing on debatable points.

As we drove along the desert, Mr. Muir pointed to a lofty plateau toward which we were tending,--"Robbers' Roost,"--where sheep-stealers hie themselves, commanding the view for hundreds of miles in every direction. I wish I could make vivid the panorama we saw from this vantage-ground--the desert in the foreground, and far away against the sky the curiously carved pink and purple and lilac mountains, while immediately below us lay the dry river-bed over which a gaunt raven flew and croaked ominously, and a little beyond rose the various b.u.t.tes, mauve and terra-cotta colored, from whose sides and at whose bases projected the petrified trees. There lay the giant trees, straight and tapering--no branching as in our trees of to-day. The trunks are often flattened, as though they had been under great pressure, often the very bark seemed to be on them (though it was petrified bark), and on some we saw marks of insect tracery like those made by the borers of to-day.

Some of the trunks were more than one hundred and fifty feet long, and five to seven feet in diameter, prostrate but intact, looking as though uprooted where they lay. Others were broken at regular intervals, as though sawed into stove lengths. In places the ground looks like a chip-yard, the chips dry and white as though bleached by the sun. The eye is deceived; chips these surely are, you think, but the ear corrects this impression, for as your feet strike the fragments, the clinking sound proves that they are stone. In some of the other forests, visited later, the chips and larger fragments, and the interior of the trunks, are gorgeously colored, so that we walked on a natural mosaic of jasper, chalcedony, onyx, and agate. In many fragments the cell-structure of the wood is still visible, but in others nature has carried the process further, and crystallization has transformed the wood of these old, old trees into the brilliant fragments we can have for the carrying--"beautiful wood replaced by beautiful stone," as Mr. Muir was fond of saying.

With what wonder and incredulity we roamed about witnessing the strange spectacle!--the prostrate monarchs with hearts of jasper and chalcedony, now silent and rigid in this desolate region where they basked in the sunlight and swayed in the winds millions of years ago. Only a small part of the old forest is as yet exposed; these trees, buried for ages beneath the early seas, becoming petrified as they lay, are, after ages more, gradually being unearthed as the softer parts of the soil covering them wears away.

The scenic aspects of the place, the powerful appeal it made to the imagination, the evidences of infinite time, the wonderful metamorphosis from vegetable life to these petrified remains which copy so faithfully the form and structure of the living trees, were powerfully enhanced by the sight of these two men wandering amid these ruins of Carboniferous time, sometimes in earnest conversation, oftener in silence; again in serious question from the one and perhaps bantering answer from the other; for although Mr. Burroughs was intensely interested in this spectacle, and full of cogitations and questions as to the cause and explanation of it all, Mr. Muir was not disposed to treat questions seriously.

"Oh, get a primer of geology, Johnnie," he would say when the earnest Eastern student would ask for a solution of some of the puzzles arising in his mind--a perversity that was especially annoying, since the Scot had carefully explored these regions, and was doubtless well equipped to adduce reasonable explanations had he been so minded. That very forest to which we went on that first day, and where we ate our luncheon from the trunk of a great petrified Sigillaria, had been discovered by Mr.

Muir and his daughter a few years before as they were riding over the sandy plateau. He told us how excited he was that night--he could not sleep, but lay awake trying to restore the living forest in imagination, for, from the petrified remains, he could tell to what order these giants belonged.

When others congregate to eat, the Scot seems specially impelled to talk. With a fine disregard for food, he sat and crumbled dry bread, occasionally putting a bit in his mouth, talking while the eating was going on. He is likewise independent of sleep. "Sleep!" he would exclaim, when the rest of us, after a long day of sight-seeing, would have to yield to our sense of fatigue, "why, you can sleep when you get back home, or, at least, in the grave."

Mr. Burroughs, on the contrary, is specially dependent upon sleep and food in order to do his work or to enjoy anything. On our arrival at the Grand Canon in the morning, after a night of travel and fasting, all the rest of us felt the need of refreshing ourselves and taking breakfast before we would even take a peep at the great rose-purple abyss out there a few steps from the hotel, but the teasing Scot jeered at us for thinking of eating when there was that sublime spectacle to be seen.

When we did go out to the rim, Mr. Muir preceded us, and, as we approached, waved toward the great abyss and said: "There! Empty your heads of all vanity, and look!" And we did look, overwhelmed by what must be the most truly sublime spectacle this earth has to offer--a veritable terrestrial Book of Revelation, as Mr. Burroughs said.

We followed a little path along the rim, led by Mr. Muir, to where we could escape from the other sight-seers, and there we sat on the rocks, though the snow lay in patches on the ground that bright February day.

Mr. Burroughs made a fire of Juniper brush, and as the fragrant incense rose on the air, with that wondrous spectacle before our eyes, we listened to Mr. Muir reciting some lines from Milton--almost the only poet one would think of quoting in the presence of such solemn, awful beauty.

Mr. Muir tried to dissuade us the next day from going down into the canon: "Don't straddle a mule and poke your noses down to the ground, and plunge down that dangerous icy trail, imagining, because you get a few shivers down your backs, you are seeing the glories of the canon, or getting any conception of the n.o.ble river that made it. You must climb, climb, to see the glories, always." But when Mr. Burroughs would ask him where we could climb to, to see the canon, since under his guidance we had been brought to the very edge on the top, he did not deign to explain, but continued to deride the project of the descent into the depths--a way the dear man has of meeting an argument that is a bit annoying at times.

We did go down into the canon on mule-back,--down, down, over four thousand feet,--and the jeering Scot went with us, sitting his mule uncompromisingly, and indulging in many a jest at the expense of the terrified women who felt, when too late to retreat, that it would have been better to heed his advice. Still, after the descent, and then the ascent, were safely accomplished, we were glad we had not let him dissuade us. None of us can ever forget that day, with its rich and varied experiences, the mingled fear and awe and exultation, the overpowering emotions felt at each new revelation of the stupendous spectacle, often relieved by the lively sallies of Mr. Muir. We ate our luncheon on the old Cambrian plateau, the mighty Colorado, still a thousand feet below us, looking entirely inadequate to have accomplished the tremendous results we were witnessing.

One day at the canon, feeling acutely aware of our incalculable privilege, I said, "To think of having the Grand Canon, and John Burroughs and John Muir thrown in!"

"I wish Muir _was_ thrown in, sometimes," retorted Mr. Burroughs, with a twinkle in his eye, "when he gets between me and the canon."

In contrast to Mr. Muir, the Wanderer, is Mr. Burroughs, the Home-lover, one who is under the spell of the near and the familiar. The scenes of his boyhood in the Catskills, the woods he wandered in about Washington during the years he dwelt there, his later tramping-ground along the Hudson--these are the scenes he has made his readers love because he has loved them so much himself; and however we may enjoy his journeyings in "Mellow England," in "Green Alaska," in Jamaica, or his philosophical or speculative essays, we find his stay-at-home things the best. And he likes the familiar scenes and things the best, much as he enjoyed the wonders that the great West offered. The robins in Yosemite Valley and the skylarks in the Hawaiian Islands, because these were a part of his earlier a.s.sociations, did more to endear these places to him than did the wonders themselves. On Hawaii, where we saw the world's greatest active volcano throwing up its fountains of molten lava sixty or more feet high, the ma.s.ses falling with a roar like that of the "husky-voiced sea," Mr. Burroughs found it difficult to understand why some of us were so fascinated that we wanted to stay all night, willing to endure the discomforts of a resting-place on lava rocks, occasional stifling gusts of sulphur fumes, dripping rain, and heat that scorched our veiled faces, so long as we could gaze on that boiling, tumbling, heaving, ever-changing lake of fire. Such wild, terrible, unfamiliar beauty could not long hold him under its spell.

(Ill.u.s.tration of John Muir and John Burroughs, Pasadena, California.