Stephen Graham

“ That makes us all nomads, all gypsies, all pilgrims. That draws the steps of the willing, and even the unwilling find themselves borne along by a human tide and a sliding sand of time—away to the west and the night and the other country. No one can stay, even if he will. In time all must go, all must follow the sun and cross the Divide and go down the slopes of the unimaginable other side and be with the stars in the long, hungry night, the myriads of stars that never do anything else but look down on human souls and ask of us and stare at us and dream of us. ”

“ He was weak at all joints and walked like a dwarf who lives in a hollow tree, a fairy-like antediluvian old fellow. His red wind-blown face was lined and lined. His eyes twinkled as he walked. He stooped to pick up wood, he looked cautiously about him, and I had the feeling that he would rapidly scurry away if a human being came into view.
I returned to camp for a bagful of provisions, and bright-faced Myrtle La Barge gave me a whole apple-pie to take to the poet in memory of Johnny Appleseed, and she gave me large overweight of cheese and apricots and ham and all the rest I asked for. ”

“ To sleep under the stars, to live with the river that sings as it flows, to sit by the embers of morning or evening fire and just dream away time and earnestness, to gather sticks to keep the old pot a-boiling, to laze into the company of strangers and slip out of their company in time, to make friends with bird and beast, and watch insects and grubs—to relax and to be ”

“ Then we washed in the snow and ceased to be old weather-beaten tramps and recaptured our yesterdays and our youth, and Vachel began to sing again and our knapsacks felt lighter, as indeed they were, for we had eaten up all the rations, even the iron rations.
Then we walked to the valley of the Sun Mountain adown the rocks of a continuous cascade. The descent to the snow-bound lake and the red peak had seemed impossible, and we essayed the impossible again. It was not merely a polite walk downstairs. Every step that we took was a problem. ”

“ We lunched on ham and peas and caramel cake, and lay in a natural cradle among the roots of giant firs, and slept for an hour of a perfect afternoon. After the ice-cold dip and scalding coffee and a good feed and a self-indulgent snooze, we knew ourselves to be well and certainly happy. What a thing is physical well-being—to be hard, to be fit, to be cool, to be [197] clear-headed, to know there’s a live spring in every muscle, and then to be care-free and able to sleep in the afternoon!
Vachel’s ankle went very well, the danger was that he might do too much on it. ”

“ We were then two nights and a day crossing the great land ocean of Minnesota, North Dakota, and eastern Montana—what was once an unending stage-coach trail to the West.
“This is what I like,” said Lindsay—“the prairie to the horizon, no fences, no stone walls, as in New England. It is all broad and unlimited; that is why since the days of Andrew Jackson all the great politicians have come from the West—the unfenced West. I’d like to put all the Boston and New York people out here on the plains and let the plain men run the East.” ”

“ People from all parts of the world come to Springfield to see the Lincoln home, to visit Salem and the grave of Anne Rutledge, to salute Lincoln’s grave. They do so, not because they are told to do so, or because there are organised tours, but because the heart moves them to it.
[203] But there are also many people in America ready to turn their backs on the simple Abe Lincoln of Springfield. He is too rough for them, too untidy, too raw. They would fain think of him as a man of aplomb, a man of a well-established family, one of the governing class. ”

“ Its battlements receded and we soon had a fly’s view of the [159] mountain, the view which the fly has when it is walking on the barren surface of the rock.
We clawed our way along the steep entangled shore of Lake Grinnell to a waste of willow saplings, and a litter of postal packets of great rocks delivered by the mail chute of the Grinnell Cataract. Here a great mass of water meets momentarily with calamity and falls over a precipice like houses falling. At two miles’ distance it is like a picture of a waterfall seen in a shop window, pretty and attractive. ”

“ Life is a fire, and we keep on burning and throwing up sparks. We are very pretty, if we could only see ourselves, with our thoughts and fancies jumping out of us and flying from us. The fire will burn out towards dawn, and then the sparks will cease. They’ll only be a happy memory then. But the poet believes the sparks go on. ”

“ You and I don’t think a Negro could rise to Presidency. But an Indian is different. There is a great romance connected with the Indians; there are the traditions of the battles with them; there is the personal grandeur of the braves. Every American boy has longed to be an Indian chief. And then there is the strain of Pocahontas, the Indian princess, married into the pride of Virginia. I believe an Indian President is just what we want to [216] root us in America and give us a genuine American inspiration. It would bring poetry into politics. It would bring all the glamour of the West. ”

“ We saw in retrospect many of the mountains we had climbed. “Going-to-the-Sun” and “Heaven’s Peak” were remote but grandiose on the horizon. We were on a much-exposed ridge of Flat Top Mountain, and we camped in a wintry spot beside a natural table of rock. On the rock we spread our supper; on the ground our blankets. The wind blew the flaps of our blankets, it blew away the flaming embers of the bonfire which we made, and it ignited the grass, and when we had put the fire out on one side it broke out on the other, and yet there was not enough of a fire to warm us. ”

“ So we burned one on a high flaming fire with young pine-shoots for incense, and the other we threw into a rushing mountain torrent, and bade it continue its world journey to the world’s end.
We lay stretched on our blankets by the pine fire that night and talked of the world. We arrived at some ideas. “You are not drawing the map merely as part of a geography lesson,” said I. “You are drawing the poetry of it.”
[118] A poetical map of the world has never yet been drawn. “It should have ships on its oceans and lighthouses on its rocks and mermaids under it, and stars over it,” said Vachel. ”

“ Flora, Illinois, where one changes for Springfield, has a Main Street, and, like many a little town of the Middle West of America, looks rather self-consciously askance at visitors, like the village that voted the earth was flat in Kipling’s tale. For the novel of the hour is called Main Street and is sold to hundreds of thousands of people and read by every American who reads anything, and is bitterly or jocularly discussed at every tea-table. ”

“ There are people with crumpled faces and there are people made of dimples and curves—but happiness holds all.
We did not see very much of the tourist life. There is not much of it up here. There ought probably to be more. While Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Yellowstone are visited by hundreds of thousands of Americans, Glacier is left unused. We do not want its canyons also to be filled up to the top with cans, but no one would grudge a few more people in a wilderness where you can travel weeks without meeting a soul—a few more sharers in the loveliness of the Northern Rockies. ”

“ I got up through the hole in the wall and hauled up Lindsay’s pack after me, and he followed.
But when we got on top it was flat, but it was not the top. We lay full length there and ate raisins and looked upward over another field of shale and loose boulders, and a cold wind as from the Pole swept across. We watched the first stars appear and talked of finding a sheltered ledge somewhere and sleeping on it or at least waiting on it till morning. But secretly we still had a strong hold on hope. Mountain tops are only to be conquered, and we would not give in. ”

“ I read the newspapers and then tick off the names of the stations on the printed time-table of the B. and O. folder and patiently await the city and its bard. A four-hour journey in a slow train in England would seem intolerable, but America has a different sense of time and space, and a long time is not thought so long. At last, in the late dusk, behold Springfield, Illinois, and the unmistakable marble of the [10] poet’s face under a small black felt—“waitin’ for me, prayin’ for me,” and certainly not really believing in the act of faith which can bring the mountain to Mahomet. ”

“ We ourselves are going westward now, rather than north-west, and the sun beckons us. For the mountain we are now setting out to reach has been called by the Indians “Going-to-the-Sun.” It stands over and beyond St. Mary’s Lake and climbs heavenward in gigantic steps of stone. It steps from the forest to the rocks, from the rocks to the snow, from the snow to the sky. ”

“ The sun arising grew upon us and chased wraith-like mists across the waters, and our fire, hotter than the sun, blazed on the mauve stones and baked us and dried us when we came out to it, and gave us our coffee and gave us all we needed till old Sol was radiant o’er the scene. ”

“ By slow stages we reach a new possible pass, and every time we stop and turn round and sit down to rest we face the lake. On three sides the descent to the water is precipitous, and an overhanging snow-crust goes round. In the late light the surface of the lake is a still, viscous green and the mountain above it a calm blood-red. The snow patches on the mountain are of fantastic shape and give an idea of futurist designs. ”

“ These grow in the dusk. The winds chase over us, and when [49] they pass there are moments of windlessness, and we watch hurrying grey rags of clouds running over the brow of the ridge above us and losing themselves in thin air.
It is a romantic climb. We support each other up the steep, sitting down every twenty paces in breathlessness. Vachel sits with his head on my shoulder and I with my head on his. In a minute or so we recover and sit up straight, in the half darkness, and pick up flat stones and try to make them skid over the snow patches. ”

“ States can aspire to do,” cried Vachel as we sat on a log together and looked at the shadow and shine of the myriad-fold population of trees. “We’ve no governing class. We’ve only got a class that thinks it is the governing class, but it is the most barren in the community. Lincoln’s life shows the real truth. Any one who feels he has it in him can rise to the Presidency of the United States.”
I promised to make the pilgrimage to the Lincoln shrines when our tramp should be over and we returned to Springfield. ”

“ We had by this time lifted ourselves high out of the gloomy valleys and had attained to a rarer atmosphere and a clearer world, where the forest lay below like a book that has been read and above it rose the eternal hills lifting their mighty granite shoulders to the sky. ”

“ Vachel Lindsay will no doubt dramatise the subject in one fine Western epic some day, and I make my appeal, as I have done before, in prose, as for the wildernesses of Europe, so also for the wildernesses of America. [76] But whether we write or sing of what we feel or see, one thing is sure when we are done—we shall have lived apart and tramped and meditated upon the mountains and far in the wilderness and it will mean something in our lives. ”

“ We pull up to the black door of a great rock, and the splashing of a cascade splashes through his vibrant tones.
At last, however, the mountains silenced us. They outstayed us, and will outstay us. They ate up our provisions, and swallowed our breath, and beguiled us deceptively to climb higher. “Upward and onward!” was invisibly written on every crag. And we always expected to get to the top in an hour. We finished the coffee, we finished the milk, we finished the bread, we finished the sugar. We got down to a rasher of bacon a day and tea without sugar and milk. ”

“ The circumambient moor is many coloured, and a dove-coloured sky is flecked with softest cloud. There are snow fences at many points of the road to protect from drifts in winter. A neverceasing wind which brings no rain is driving over the corn-fields. As you approach the village you begin to see Russian peasant men [242] and women working on the fields hoisting the wheat-sheaves to the harvesting carts, hoisting the sheaves to the top of the stacks. A stalwart peasant-wife in cottons stands on top of the stack, pitchfork in her hand, and she catches the sheaves as they come up to her. ”

“ But no, we have been made drunk with words; it often occurs, and with Lindsay’s stone coffee. The stone in the mosquito-net coffee bag has spoken through us. It is a piece of the Rocky Mountains, and they know all there is to know about the mysterious mound-builders and mountain-tribes. How gauntly and savagely these old mountains have looked on at no-humanity and for how many thousands of years! “What went ye out for to see?” said Vachel presently when we had hitched on our packs. “Not a reed shaken by the wind! What went we out into Glacier Wilderness for to see? Why, man, a prophet. ”