All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves6 where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken7 of most things but beauty and madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the mid8 Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable thirst.
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 determined9 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 Creek10, 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 winding11, 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 ridges12, 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 interfere13 and merge14 into other thunder-splintered sierras. You get the saw-tooth effect from a distance, but the near-by granite15 bulk glitters with the terrible keen polish of old glacial ages. I say terrible; so it seems. When those glossy16 domes18 swim into the alpenglow, wet after rain, you conceive how long and imperturbable19 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 lobster22 will not bring you the favor of the woodlanders.
Every canon commends itself for some particular pleasantness; this for pines, another for trout23, one for pure bleak24 beauty of granite buttresses25, 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 cones26 have palatable27, nourishing kernels28, the main harvest of the Paiutes. That perhaps accounts for their growing accommodatingly below the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on the valley-ward 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 tortuous29 stiff stems to the sharp waste of boulders30, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to the sleek31, ruddy, chestnut32 stems; begins also the meadowsweet, burnished33 laurel, and the million unregarded trumpets34 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 chatter36 of jays, the hurry and stir of squirrels, is incessant37; the air is odorous and hot. The roar of the stream fills up the morning and evening intervals38, and at night the deer feed in the buckthorn thickets39. 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 dwellers40 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 considerably41 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 tawny21 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 grudge42. You get a kind of impatience43 with their locked ranks, until you come out lastly on some high, windy dome17 and see what they are about. They troop thickly up the open ways, river banks, and brook44 borders; up open swales of dribbling45 springs; swarm46 over old moraines; circle the peaty swamps and part and meet about clean still lakes; scale the stony gullies; tormented47, bowed, persisting to the door of the storm chambers48, tall priests to pray for rain. The spring winds lift clouds of pollen49 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 lyric50 improvisation51 die out. Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing52 wood, the soul is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines. They have no voice but the wind, and no sound of them rises up to the high places. But the waters, the evidences of their power, that go down the steep and stony ways, the outlets53 of ice-bordered pools, the young rivers swaying with the force of their running, they sing and shout and trumpet35 at the falls, and the noise of it far outreaches the forest spires54. You see from these conning55 towers how they call and find each other in the slender gorges56; how they fumble57 in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them countenance58 and show the way; and how the pine woods are made glad by them.
Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a sense of pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if they are any, are home dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking asp. They grow in clumps59 by spring borders, and all their stems have a permanent curve toward the down slope, as you may also see in hillside pines, where they have borne the weight of sagging60 drifts.
Well up from the valley, at the confluence61 of canons, are delectable62 summer meadows. Fireweed flames about them against the gray boulders; streams are open, go smoothly63 about the glacier slips and make deep bluish pools for trout. Pines raise statelier shafts64 and give themselves room to grow,—gentians, shinleaf, and little grass of Parnassus in their golden checkered65 shadows; the meadow is white with violets and all outdoors keeps the clock. For example, when the ripples66 at the ford67 of the creek raise a clear half tone,—sign that the snow water has come down from the heated high ridges,—it is time to light the evening fire. When it drops off a note—but you will not know it except the Douglas squirrel tells you with his high, fluty chirrup from the pines' aerial gloom—sign that some star watcher has caught the first far glint of the nearing sun. Whitney cries it from his vantage tower; it flashes from Oppapago to the front of Williamson; LeConte speeds it to the westering peaks. The high rills wake and run, the birds begin. But down three thousand feet in the canon, where you stir the fire under the cooking pot, it will not be day for an hour. It goes on, the play of light across the high places, rosy68, purpling, tender, glint and glow, thunder and windy flood, like the grave, exulting69 talk of elders above a merry game.
Who shall say what another will find most to his liking70 in the streets of the mountains. As for me, once set above the country of the silver firs, I must go on until I find white columbine. Around the amphitheatres of the lake regions and above them to the limit of perennial71 drifts they gather flock-wise in splintered rock wastes. The crowds of them, the airy spread of sepals, the pale purity of the petal72 spurs, the quivering swing of bloom, obsesses73 the sense. One must learn to spare a little of the pang74 of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all one's purse in one shop. There is always another year, and another.
Lingering on in the alpine75 regions until the first full snow, which is often before the cessation of bloom, one goes down in good company. First snows are soft and clogging76 and make laborious77 paths. Then it is the roving inhabitants range down to the edge of the wood, below the limit of early storms. Early winter and early spring one may have sight or track of deer and bear and bighorn, cougar79 and bobcat, about the thickets of buckthorn on open slopes between the black pines. But when the ice crust is firm above the twenty foot drifts, they range far and forage80 where they will. Often in midwinter will come, now and then, a long fall of soft snow piling three or four feet above the ice crust, and work a real hardship for the dwellers of these streets. When such a storm portends81 the weather-wise blacktail will go down across the valley and up to the pastures of Waban where no more snow falls than suffices to nourish the sparsely82 growing pines. But the bighorn, the wild sheep, able to bear the bitterest storms with no signs of stress, cannot cope with the loose shifty snow. Never such a storm goes over the mountains that the Indians do not catch them floundering belly83 deep among the lower rifts. I have a pair of horns, inconceivably heavy, that were borne as late as a year ago by a very monarch84 of the flock whom death overtook at the mouth of Oak Creek after a week of wet snow. He met it as a king should, with no vain effort or trembling, and it was wholly kind to take him so with four of his following rather than that the night prowlers should find him.
There is always more life abroad in the winter hills than one looks to find, and much more in evidence than in summer weather. Light feet of hare that make no print on the forest litter leave a wondrously85 plain track in the snow. We used to look and look at the beginning of winter for the birds to come down from the pine lands; looked in the orchard86 and stubble; looked north and south on the mesa for their migratory87 passing, and wondered that they never came. Busy little grosbeaks picked about the kitchen doors, and woodpeckers tapped the eaves of the farm buildings, but we saw hardly any other of the frequenters of the summer canons. After a while when we grew bold to tempt20 the snow borders we found them in the street of the mountains. In the thick pine woods where the overlapping88 boughs89 hung with snow-wreaths make wind-proof shelter tents, in a very community of dwelling90, winter the bird-folk who get their living from the persisting cones and the larvae91 harboring bark. Ground inhabiting species seek the dim snow chambers of the chaparral. Consider how it must be in a hill-slope overgrown with stout-twigged, partly evergreen92 shrubs93, more than man high, and as thick as a hedge. Not all the canon's sifting94 of snow can fill the intricate spaces of the hill tangles95. Here and there an overhanging rock, or a stiff arch of buckthorn, makes an opening to communicating rooms and runways deep under the snow.
The light filtering through the snow walls is blue and ghostly, but serves to show seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries, and the wind-built walls are warm against the wind. It seems that live plants, especially if they are evergreen and growing, give off heat; the snow wall melts earliest from within and hollows to thinnness before there is a hint of spring in the air. But you think of these things afterward96. Up in the street it has the effect of being done consciously; the buckthorns lean to each other and the drift to them, the little birds run in and out of their appointed ways with the greatest cheerfulness. They give almost no tokens of distress97, and even if the winter tries them too much you are not to pity them. You of the house habit can hardly understand the sense of the hills. No doubt the labor78 of being comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease. The business that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous, world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children crying small wares98 and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct99 its affairs. Summer is their holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the street, "I have need of a great work and no more playing."
But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure kindness. They are not pushed out except by the exigencies100 of the nobler plan which they accept with a dignity the rest of us have not yet learned.
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1
citadel
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| n.城堡；堡垒；避难所 | |
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rifts
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| n.裂缝( rift的名词复数 )；裂隙；分裂；不和 | |
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glacier
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| n.冰川，冰河 | |
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glades
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| n.林中空地( glade的名词复数 ) | |
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stony
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| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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grooves
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| n.沟( groove的名词复数 )；槽；老一套；（某种）音乐节奏v.沟( groove的第三人称单数 )；槽；老一套；（某种）音乐节奏 | |
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Forsaken
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| adj. 被遗忘的, 被抛弃的 动词forsake的过去分词 | |
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mid
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| adj.中央的，中间的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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creek
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| n.小溪，小河，小湾 | |
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winding
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| n.绕，缠，绕组，线圈 | |
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ridges
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| n.脊( ridge的名词复数 )；山脊；脊状突起；大气层的)高压脊 | |
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interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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merge
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| v.(使)结合，(使)合并，(使)合为一体 | |
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granite
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| adj.花岗岩，花岗石 | |
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glossy
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| adj.平滑的；有光泽的 | |
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dome
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| n.圆屋顶，拱顶 | |
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domes
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| n.圆屋顶( dome的名词复数 )；像圆屋顶一样的东西；圆顶体育场 | |
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imperturbable
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| adj.镇静的 | |
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tempt
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| vt.引诱，勾引，吸引，引起…的兴趣 | |
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tawny
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| adj.茶色的，黄褐色的；n.黄褐色 | |
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lobster
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| n.龙虾，龙虾肉 | |
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trout
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| n.鳟鱼；鲑鱼(属) | |
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bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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buttresses
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| n.扶壁，扶垛( buttress的名词复数 )v.用扶壁支撑，加固( buttress的第三人称单数 ) | |
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cones
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| n.（人眼）圆锥细胞；圆锥体( cone的名词复数 )；球果；圆锥形东西；（盛冰淇淋的）锥形蛋卷筒 | |
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palatable
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| adj.可口的，美味的；惬意的 | |
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kernels
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| 谷粒( kernel的名词复数 )； 仁； 核； 要点 | |
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tortuous
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| adj.弯弯曲曲的，蜿蜒的 | |
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boulders
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| n.卵石( boulder的名词复数 )；巨砾；（受水或天气侵蚀而成的）巨石；漂砾 | |
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sleek
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| adj.光滑的，井然有序的；v.使光滑，梳拢 | |
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chestnut
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| n.栗树，栗子 | |
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burnished
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| adj.抛光的，光亮的v.擦亮（金属等），磨光( burnish的过去式和过去分词 )；被擦亮，磨光 | |
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trumpets
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| 喇叭( trumpet的名词复数 )； 小号； 喇叭形物； （尤指）绽开的水仙花 | |
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trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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chatter
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| vi.／n.喋喋不休；短促尖叫；(牙齿)打战 | |
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incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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thickets
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| n.灌木丛( thicket的名词复数 )；丛状物 | |
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dwellers
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| n.居民，居住者( dweller的名词复数 ) | |
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considerably
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| adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上 | |
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grudge
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| n.不满，怨恨，妒嫉；vt.勉强给，不情愿做 | |
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impatience
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| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
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brook
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| n.小河，溪；v.忍受，容让 | |
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dribbling
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| n.（燃料或油从系统内）漏泄v.流口水( dribble的现在分词 )；（使液体）滴下或作细流；运球，带球 | |
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swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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tormented
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| 饱受折磨的 | |
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chambers
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| n.房间( chamber的名词复数 )；（议会的）议院；卧室；会议厅 | |
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pollen
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| n.[植]花粉 | |
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lyric
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| n.抒情诗，歌词；adj.抒情的 | |
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improvisation
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| n.即席演奏(或演唱)；即兴创作 | |
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encompassing
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| v.围绕( encompass的现在分词 )；包围；包含；包括 | |
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outlets
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| n.出口( outlet的名词复数 )；经销店；插座；廉价经销店 | |
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spires
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| n.（教堂的） 塔尖，尖顶( spire的名词复数 ) | |
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conning
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| v.诈骗，哄骗( con的现在分词 )；指挥操舵( conn的现在分词 ) | |
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gorges
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| n.山峡，峡谷( gorge的名词复数 )；咽喉v.（用食物把自己）塞饱，填饱( gorge的第三人称单数 )；作呕 | |
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fumble
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| vi.笨拙地用手摸、弄、接等，摸索 | |
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countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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clumps
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| n.（树、灌木、植物等的）丛、簇( clump的名词复数 )；（土、泥等）团；块；笨重的脚步声v.（树、灌木、植物等的）丛、簇( clump的第三人称单数 )；（土、泥等）团；块；笨重的脚步声 | |
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sagging
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| 下垂[沉，陷]，松垂，垂度 | |
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confluence
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| n.汇合，聚集 | |
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delectable
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| adj.使人愉快的；美味的 | |
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smoothly
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| adv.平滑地，顺利地，流利地，流畅地 | |
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shafts
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| n.轴( shaft的名词复数 )；（箭、高尔夫球棒等的）杆；通风井；一阵（疼痛、害怕等） | |
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checkered
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| adj.有方格图案的 | |
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ripples
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| 逐渐扩散的感觉( ripple的名词复数 ) | |
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Ford
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| n.浅滩，水浅可涉处；v.涉水，涉过 | |
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rosy
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| adj.美好的，乐观的，玫瑰色的 | |
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exulting
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| vi. 欢欣鼓舞，狂喜 | |
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liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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perennial
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| adj.终年的；长久的 | |
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petal
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| n.花瓣 | |
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obsesses
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| v.时刻困扰( obsess的第三人称单数 )；缠住；使痴迷；使迷恋 | |
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74
pang
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| n.剧痛，悲痛，苦闷 | |
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alpine
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| adj.高山的；n.高山植物 | |
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clogging
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| 堵塞，闭合 | |
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laborious
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| adj.吃力的，努力的，不流畅 | |
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labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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79
cougar
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| n.美洲狮；美洲豹 | |
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80
forage
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| n.(牛马的)饲料，粮草；v.搜寻，翻寻 | |
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81
portends
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| v.预示( portend的第三人称单数 )；预兆；给…以警告；预告 | |
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82
sparsely
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| adv.稀疏地；稀少地；不足地；贫乏地 | |
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belly
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| n.肚子，腹部；(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分，膛 | |
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monarch
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| n.帝王，君主，最高统治者 | |
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85
wondrously
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| adv.惊奇地，非常，极其 | |
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86
orchard
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| n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场 | |
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migratory
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| n.候鸟，迁移 | |
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overlapping
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| adj./n.交迭（的） | |
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89
boughs
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| 大树枝( bough的名词复数 ) | |
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90
dwelling
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| n.住宅，住所，寓所 | |
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larvae
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| n.幼虫 | |
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evergreen
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| n.常青树；adj.四季常青的 | |
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shrubs
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| 灌木( shrub的名词复数 ) | |
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94
sifting
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| n.筛，过滤v.筛( sift的现在分词 )；筛滤；细查；详审 | |
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95
tangles
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| （使）缠结， （使）乱作一团( tangle的第三人称单数 ) | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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wares
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| n. 货物, 商品 | |
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obstruct
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| v.阻隔，阻塞(道路、通道等)；n.阻碍物，障碍物 | |
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exigencies
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| n.急切需要 | |
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