Under the Maples Part 6

The only flower we saw there which was new to me was the Indian pink.

Roosevelt seemed to know the flowers as well as he did the birds. Pink moccasin-flowers and the bird's-foot violet were common in that locality.

On our return trip, Roosevelt's secretary being on the train, Roosevelt threw himself into the dictation of many letters, the wrens and the warblers already sidetracked for the business of the Administration.

I pa.s.sed another night at the White House, and in the morning early we went out on the White House grounds to look for birds, our quest seeming to attract the puzzled attention of the pa.s.sers-by.

"They often stare at me as though they thought me crazy," he said, "when they see me gazing up into the trees."

"Well, now they will think I am your keeper," I said.

"Yes, and I your nurse," laughed Mrs. Roosevelt.

When I left, Roosevelt gave me a list of the birds that we had seen while at Pine Knot and hoped that I would sometime write up the trip; in fact, for years after, whenever we would meet, almost the first thing he would say was, "Have you written up our Pine Knot trip yet, Oom John?"

And his disappointment at my failure to do so was always unmistakable.[2]

[2] The following letter may be of interest in this connection.

C. B.

DEAR OOM JOHN:

Did you ever get the pamphlet on Concealing Coloration? If not, I will send you another. I do hope that you will include in your coming volume of sketches a little account of the time you visited us at Pine Knot, our little Virginia camp, while I was President. I am very proud of you, Oom John, and I want the fact that you were my guest when I was President, and that you and I looked at birds together, recorded there--and don't forget that I showed you the blue grosbeak and the Bewick's wren, and almost all the other birds I said I would!

Ever yours,

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

VIII

A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY

One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with some friends for a two weeks' automobile trip into the land of Dixie--joy-riders with a luxurious outfit calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort.

We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. I confess that mountains and men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I can stand both, and I started out with the hope that the great Appalachian range held something new and interesting for me. Yet I knew it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was younger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more strongly. Yet I was fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.

Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so diversified, so forest-clad--the huge unbroken Alleghany ranges with their deep valleys cutting across it from north to south; the world of fine farms and rural homesteads in the eastern half, and the great mining and manufacturing interests in the western, the source of n.o.ble rivers; and the storehouse of many of Nature's most useful gifts to man.

The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows the line of least resistance, but it has some formidable obstacles to surmount, and it goes at them very deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one a sense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember persons with lighter cars standing beside them at the foot of those long, winding ascents, nursing and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing them for the heavy task before them. An almost perfect road, worthy of its great namesake, but an Alleghany range which you cannot get around or through gives the automobilist pause.

As we were hurled along over the great highway the things I remember with the most satisfaction were the groups or processions of army trucks we met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was written large on that Lincoln Highway in that army of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb, khaki-colored fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking, a host of them, rolling eastward toward the seat of war, some loaded with soldiers, some with camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormous resources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon himself in this far-off land. On other highways the weapons and materials of war were converging toward the great seaports in the same way. The silent, grim, processions--how impressive they were!

Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake of brimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of the hill-tops. I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than I ever did in any other city in this country. One is fairly suffocated at times driving along the public highway on a bright, breezy August day. It might well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such blackening and blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and of destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of h.e.l.l-fire seemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them--much that suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of the lake bottoms.

We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron from entering our souls. Our vast industries have their root in the geologic history of the globe as in no other past age. We delve for our power, and it is all barbarous and unhandsome. When the coal and oil are all gone and we come to the surface and above the surface for the white coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and the sunshine, how much more attractive life will be! Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can hitch them to the mountain streams, and make the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the silver age will displace the iron age.

The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast coal-mine. The farmer has only to dig into the side of the hill back of his house and take out his winter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth and gentle and gra.s.sy the hills looked. It is a cemetery of the old carboniferous G.o.ds, and it seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and watched over with kindly care. Good crops of hay and grain were growing above their black remains, and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way. The shuffling and the deformation of the earth's surface which attended the laying down of the coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of that wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has smoothed it all out.

Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or more miles southeast of Pittsburgh, an ideal place--a large, open oak grove on a gentle eminence well carpeted with gra.s.s, with wood and water in abundance. But the night was chilly. Folding camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily warmth, and until you get the hang of them and equip yourself with plenty of blankets, Sleep enters your tent very reluctantly. She tarried with me but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I got up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair beside it indulged in the "long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youth was soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all.

The talk that first night around the camp-fire gave us an inside view of many things about which we were much concerned. The ship question was the acute question of the hour and we had with us for a few days Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping Board, who could give us first-hand information, which he did to our great comfort.

Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where for that night we slept indoors.

On the following day one of the big cars had an accident--the fan broke, and the iron punctured the radiator. It looked as if we should be delayed until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh. We made our way slowly to Connellsville, where there was a good garage, but the best workmen there shook their heads; they said a new radiator was the only remedy. All four arms of the fan were broken off and there was no way to mend them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle. "Give me a chance," he said, and, pulling off his coat and rolling up his sleeves, he fell to work. In two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid of drills and copper wire the master mechanic had st.i.tched the severed arms to their stubs, soldered up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled car was again in running order.

On August the 31st we made our camp on the banks of a large, clear creek in West Virginia called Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the reluctant consent of the widow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch of roasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably had experiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor even when I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edison was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, gra.s.sy margin of the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring, eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated our mess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individual tents elbowing one another in the narrow s.p.a.ces between the boulders.

But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what the camper-out wants.

Pure elements--air, water, earth--these settle the question; Camp Horseshoe Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I got my first view of the nonpareil, or painted bunting--a bird rarely seen north of the Potomac.

An interesting object near our camp was an old, unused grist-mill, with a huge, decaying overshot oaken water-wheel. We all perched on the wheel and had our pictures taken.

At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a twelve-year-old girl appeared in the road above us with a pail of apples for sale. We invited her into our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We took all of her apples. I can see her yet with her shining eyes as she crumpled the new one-dollar bill which one of the party placed in her hand. She did not look at it; the feel of it told the story to her. We quizzed her about many things and got straight, clear-cut answers--a very firm, level-headed little maid. Her home was on the hill above us. We told her the names of some of the members of the party, and after she had returned home we saw an aged man come out to the gate and look down upon us. An added interest was felt whenever we came in contact with any of the local population. Birds and flowers and trees and springs and mills were something, but human flowers and rills of human life were better. I do not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen years old, to whom we gave a lift of a few miles on her way. She had been on a train five times, and once had been forty miles from home. Her mother was dead and her father lived in Pennsylvania, and she was living with her grandfather. When asked how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever and ever so many miles."

The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds of miles, in fact, all the way from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, or Joe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed--stately, hardy growths, and very pleasing to look upon, the ironweed with its crimson purple, and the eupatorium with its ma.s.sive head of soft, pinkish purple.

August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West Virginia, a large, clear mountain trout-brook. It crossed our path many times that day. Every mountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on the other side of it. It was flowing by a very devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We were working south and east.

We made our camp that night on the grounds of the Cheat Mountain Club, on the banks of the river--an ideal spot. The people at the big clubhouse gave us a hospitable welcome and added much to our comfort. I found the forests and streams of this part of West Virginia much like those of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and the climate even colder. That night the mercury dropped to thirty. On June the 24th they had a frost that killed all their garden truck. The paper outlines of big trout which covered the walls in the main room of the clubhouse told the story of the rare sport the club-members have there. Evidently Cheat River deserves a better name.

The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all present a marked contrast to those of New York and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbed down and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played such a part in shaping our northern landscapes. The valleys are markedly V-shaped, while ours are markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep that they are rarely cultivated; the farm land for the most part lies on the tops of the broad, rounded hills, though we pa.s.sed through some broad, open river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful farms in which hay and oats were still being harvested. Everywhere were large fields of buckwheat, white with bloom, and, I presume, humming with bees.

Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders strewn over the landscape, I saw evidences of large local glaciers that had hatched in these mountains during the great Ice Age.

We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the 23d--a famous spring, and a beautiful spot. We pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and some of the party availed themselves of the public bathhouse that spanned the overflow of the great spring. The next night our camp was at Wolf Creek, not far from the Narrows--a beautiful spot, marred only by its proximity to the dusty highway. It was on the narrow, gra.s.sy margin of a broad, limpid creek in which the fish were jumping. Some grazing horses disturbed my sleep early in the morning, but on the whole I have only pleasant memories of our camp at Wolf Creek.

We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia, crossing many times the border between the two States, now in one, then in the other, all the time among the mountains, with a succession of glorious views from mountain-tops and along broad, fertile valleys. Now we were at Warm Springs, then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at Sweet Water Springs. Soft water and hard water, cold water and warm water, mineral water and trout-streams, companion one another in these mountains. This part of the continent got much folded and ruptured and mixed up in the building, and the elements are unevenly distributed.

I think to most of us West Virginia had always been a rather hazy proposition, and we were glad to get a clear impression of it. We certainly became pretty intimate with the backbone of the continent--or with its many backbones, as its skeleton seems to be a very multiplex affair. The backbones of continents usually get broken in many places, but they serve their purpose just as well. In fact, our old Earth is more like an articulate than a vertebrate. Its huge sh.e.l.l is in many sections.

One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name of the owner of the farm.

One of the boys there, Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful in bringing wood and doing other errands.

A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I felt more than did the others, was the scanty or delayed war news; the local papers, picked up here and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in the larger towns we could get some of the great dailies, the news was a day or two old.

When one has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four exciting years, one is lost when cut off from them.

Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a kind of a lark, especially to the younger members of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain, near Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats on a side-hill below the road. Our procession stopped, and the irrepressible Ford and Firestone were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with doubtful success. A photograph shows the farmer and Mr. Ford looking on with broad smiles, watching Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradle tangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face also, but decidedly an equivocal smile--the trick was not so easy as it looked. Evidently Mr. Ford had not forgotten his cradling days on the home farm in Michigan.

Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how many conveniences you have, and things of the mind keep pretty well in the background.

Occasionally around the camp-fire we drew Edison out on chemical problems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if he were reading them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps has few, if any, equals in this country. It was easy to draw out Mr. Ford on mechanical problems. There is always pleasure and profit in hearing a master discuss his own art.

A plunge into the South for a Northern man is in many ways a plunge into the Past. As soon as you get into Virginia there is a change. Things and people in the South are more local and provincial than in the North. For the most part, in certain sections, at least, the county builds the roads (macadam), and not the State. Hence you pa.s.s from a fine stone road in one county on to a rough dirt road in the next. Toll-gates appear. In one case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for the cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills are seen along the way, driven by overshot wheels, and they are usually at work. A man or a boy on horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind him, going to or returning from the mill, is a frequent sight; or a woman on horseback, on a sidesaddle, with a baby in her arms, attracts your attention. Thus my grandmother went to mill in pioneer days in the Catskills.

The absence of bridges over the small streams was to us a novel feature.

One of the party called these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble. Another Southern feature, indicating how far behind our Northern and more scientific farming the South still is, are the groups of small haystacks in the meadows with poles sticking out of their tops, letting the rain and the destructive bacteria into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features of the South much to be commended are the large families. In a farmhouse near which we made camp one night there were thirteen children, the eldest of whom was at the front in France. The schools were in session in late August, and the schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.