Part 15

On August 16th, this season, a great landslide occurred on the southern brow of Greylock, caused by a cloudburst. It began within a few feet of the summit, widening as the loosened soil slipped off the bed-rock of the mountain. It swept down with velocity, becoming several rods wide as it reached the valley. It covered Gould Farm with earth, rocks, and logs gathered in its descent to South Adams, and the machinery in the mills in the village, three miles away, was crippled by the sand and water pouring in about the engines; the streets became canals, and boats were necessary to move about in. However, no lives were lost. The formation rock, from the base of Greylock, is laid bare in the path of this landslide. Six to ten terraced ridges, like stone stairs, are revealed in the ascent for some distance, indicating many ages in geological history. Here is evidence of those slowly receding seas and lakes as they drained from the summits down, stair by stair to the winding Ashuilticook River of to-day.

XVIII

The Natural Bridge of Mayunsook Valley, Northern Berkshire

There’s no music like a little river’s. It plays the same tune (and that’s the favorite) over and over again, and yet does not weary of it like men fiddlers.—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, _Prince Otto_.

A narrow vale winds away northeastward from the city of North Adams to Stamford, Vermont. A short walk from the terminus of the car line in The Beaver leads to the junction of Hudson Brook with the Mayunsook River. The Mayunsook is often called the Little Deerfield. It is the North Branch of the Hoosac, rising near Stamford Ponds, and draining the southern and western slopes above Stamford Hollow. The Greater Deerfield River rises also near these lakes, and drains the same mountains from their northern and eastern slopes, flowing around through Readsboro to Zoar, where travellers meet it as they pass out of the eastern portal of the Hoosac Tunnel into the Deerfield Valley. Thus, from their mysterious sources our turbulent rivers and mountain streams bring restful, cooling news from out the higher lands, where scarce the foot of man has been.

On August 7th I explored about Natural Bridge on Hudson Brook. I wore hob-nailed boots, and made a long day’s excursion. Hawthorne knew and loved this wonderful natural feature of northern Berkshire, and here gathered many fancies, which he has woven into his tales. The chasm of Hudson Brook is described as the “Cave” in his _Notes_. His description of the ravine is the finest ever written.

Hudson Brook, tradition tells us, took its name from the hunter Hudson, who, one twilight, dragging homeward a deer he had killed, lost it in this chasm. He narrowly escaped following it himself.

The region is entered either by walking up the bed of the stream itself, or following around the road above Marble Quarry, just east of the chasm. The former is the more direct, but the latter a longer and safer way. In this instance, I followed the travelled highway. I proceeded up the stream where the erosions begin, and readily descended the ravine, following its course downward until I came to a beautiful marble basin or pot-hole formation, which very few see, since it is hidden under the wooden foot-bridge above the natural bridge of rock. Logs and immense rocks barred my way, and I was forced through dark fissures in my ascent to the sunlight.

The pot-hole was evidently the same pool of which Hawthorne wrote: “As the deepest pool occurs in the most uneven part of the chasm, where the hollows in the sides of the crag are deepest, so that each hollow is almost a cave by itself, I determined to wade through it ... there was an accumulation of soft stuff on the bottom, so that the water did not look more than knee-deep; but, finding that my feet sunk in it, I took off my trousers and waded through.”[57] He visited this stream often: “The cave makes a fresh impression upon me every time I visit it,—so deep, so irregular, so gloomy, so stern,—part of its walls the pure white of marble,—others covered with a gray decomposition and with spots of moss, and with brake growing where there is a handful of earth.”[58]

Hawthorne believed firmly that “a complete arch of marble, forming a natural bridge over the top of the cave,” must have covered the whole chasm of the stream at an unknown period. The pot-hole, I am most certain, has been forded by few lads, and it is hardly probable that any other poet or prose master ever disrobed and bathed in its waters as Hawthorne did in 1838. The basin is from six to eight feet deep, with a beautifully rounded, highly polished brim. I christened this bowl “Hawthorne’s Bath-Tub,” and, unable to wade it, climbed out of the “Cave” to the light above. I, however, descended again to see the northern portal of the arch below the Bath-Tub. I was interested in the names painted high and low upon the marble rocks. Some visitors had evidently tried to place their initials as high as possible, while others more modest sought to write theirs as low, and in more obscure places. I regretted that I had not brought a pot of red paint and a brush to daub my own title there, with the ambitious crowd.

The stream, as it approaches the arch of the Bridge, is deep and of a dark green color. The chasm, from the top of the ledge, is about sixty feet deep, and the ravine three hundred feet in length. Geologists say that the ravine was formerly spanned by two ledges of rock, one of which is now in ruins. The piles of rocks in the chasm south of the southern portal of the arch are dazzling white, seen in the noonday sunshine. The fall of water, in its descent through the ravine, is about forty feet to the three hundred feet, so that the eddies play and whirl rapidly through the irregular bed. A wooden tile, or raceway, was hung high over the chasm, across a leaning crag of the original ledge,—conveying water power thereby to mills below. This old structure leaked, and as I descended the banks below, I saw some of the most gorgeous miniature rainbows spanning the depths, as the sunshine fell upon the mist near the arch.

A lad once made a wager with his comrades that he could cross over the ravine upon this wooden tile. The old weather-worn log was slippery with mould and mosses. In making his daring and perilous trip, the youth lost his footing, and fell headlong into the heart of the chasm. Following the fall, a terrific thunderstorm passed through the Hoosac, and night closed over the chasm. The next morning the boy’s lifeless body was recovered. The wooden structure is now replaced with an iron tiling.

I passed on down the path on the west bank, until I reached an immense marble boulder, which was draped with dainty ferns and mosses. Little rivulets flowed from its sides, and climbing around to its southern brow, I was delighted to find many luxuriant plants of Walking Ferns—this making the fifth excursion in succession in which I had found this rare plant.

I entered the ravine below the boulder, and picked my way up the chasm to the southern portal of the arch, where I became wet through from the mist above, as I ventured to look through the cave. Returning, I found a path up the east bank leading to Marble Quarry and the mill below, where grave-stones, door-stones, and various ornaments are manufactured. The most useful piece of work ever turned out here was, in my mind, the Williams College sun-dial tablet, which Hawthorne observed in 1838 as being as large as the top of a hogshead.[59] I have later discovered that this dial was placed near that old Astronomical Observatory on Consumption Hill, near the present College Library,—the first building of its kind erected in the United States, for the study of the worlds above, by Professor Albert Hopkins, in 1838. The bronze sun-dial was supported upon the marble table which Hawthorne saw at the quarry. Around it was carved in the soft marble the now dim inscription:

“HOW IS IT THAT YE DO NOT DISCERN THIS TIME.”

This dial is now among the relics in the College Museum.

The overhanging crag, near the southern side of the arch, will in another half-century or more tumble also into the ravine. One large pine tree and many bushes, growing on this leaning tower, are plying their roots deeply in the marble fissures, and are slowly splitting the rock asunder. I have designated this pile Captain Skipper’s Monument, in memory of him who recorded the last evidences of the Beaver Dam across this stream. Tradition says that the beavers labored centuries before the white man arrived in the Mayunsook Valley, building better than they realized, since they erected a dam which stopped the rippling flow of Hudson Brook. Originally, this stream flowed nearer the surface of the Natural Bridge. It is believed by some that the dam clogged the driftwood from the domes, and thus set the waters back. The force of the eddies, combined with the chemical action of the waters whirling among the logs and rocks, eroded dimples in the soft marble, until they wore the present archway through.

[Illustration: =The Marble Arch of the Natural Bridge, North Adams, Massachusetts.=

“Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens, and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome, or Greece, Etruria, or Carthage, or Egypt, or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?”—THOREAU.]

I followed down the bed of the stream, stepping from rock to rock easily, until I reached the path far below the Marble Quarry, and entered The Beaver, a little village where every one works like the small animals for which it is named. I was now near the junction of Hudson Brook and the Mayunsook; and not wishing to return to the City until sunset, I scrambled up the slippery sides of the hemlock hills above the little river. With the echo of the cavern’s tumultuous roar still in my ears, I now heard, in pleasant contrast, the distant gentle murmur of that flowing stream. When I departed from the vales of these talking streams, I carried with me back to the busy world the remembrance of the voicing fantasies of their songs of wilderness and solitude.

XIX

Orange Mountains, and Salt Meadows, New Jersey

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard fought field.—THOREAU, _Excursions_.

August 12th I started for the Orange Mountains, in search of Cardinal Flowers, and various other blossoms, which I hoped to find about Eagle Rock. Arriving at those ragged cliffs, overhanging the brow of the mountains above West Orange, I climbed up the winding stone stairs and entered the park. The woods were strewn with small yellow flowers and ferns.

The view from the Rock is vast, as the eye sweeps off over the Great Salt Meadows beyond Newark, to Brooklyn Heights. On a clear day, the tall buildings of New York and the piers of Brooklyn Bridge are discernible. The Goddess of Liberty in the Bay also stands out clearly, and the slow-moving sails and funnels of outgoing steamers are visible. Most people seek Eagle Rock for this view alone.

Farther back in the woods, in May and June, the Pinxter-Flower, False Solomon’s Seal, yellow and blue violets, bluets, and anemone everywhere decorate the rocky soil. Numerous tall weeds towered coarsely along the mountainsides, to-day flaunting their disagreeable perfume ever before me.

I followed southwesterly, along the summit for a mile or more, to Crystal Lake, passing the park called “Wildmont,” to the right of which stands Cobblestone Cottage. The building appears very ancient.

All the vast solitudes of the parks of Orange Mountains are locked within gates, and the entrance labelled, “_No Trespassing, Under Penalty of the Law_.” Law is a specific designation for a certain kind of a broad-headed, bow-legged quadruped—a thoroughbred species not mentioned in the scientific annals of the Hoosac Highlands. After passing the lake, I followed up the swamp toward the distant walls of Wildmont, very desirous of trespassing and seeing the Wild Law in his cage. Soon I found a place where the stones were tumbled out, and where, by lifting a barbed wire, I could crawl through. So happily and leisurely I began to trespass about the woods. I found luxuriant colonies of the Maiden-Hair Fern, tall spirit-like spikes of feathery flowers, and club-like spikes of fringed-purple weeds not seen in the Hoosac Valley. They were so common that I did not gather any, so I never determined their title. In the deeper pools grew a few plants of the Skunk Cabbage. The low bushes and plants were overgrown and coarse in the extreme, amid the dense shades of chestnut and elm trees. The forest, apparently, was still in its primeval state.

As I approached the cottage of Wildmont, I ran upon an old cellar hole, where a building had once stood. The ruins were now prettily covered with myrtle and ivy. From this site, between the parting boughs, I caught glints of a sea of blues in the valley of the Oranges, which was overflowing with glistening house-tops and church-spires. Here I turned about and found a great colony of Indian Pipes.

As I turned from the shades of Wildmont, I walked toward Crystal Lake, along a dry brook bed. Here, indeed, I found a Cardinal show; over a hundred spikes of that brilliant flower danced before my eyes and lighted up the glooms. I had never before seen such flowers as these. The Cardinal-Flower (_Lobelia cardinalis_) is not frequent in Hoosac Valley—at least I have never collected it there. John Burroughs writes of it: “It is not so much something colored as it is color itself.”[60] I gathered many spikes of this flaring colored flower, and passed out to the shore of the lake; children, with their sailboats, ran teasingly after me, until I escaped to a quiet retreat where ice-cream was served. The waiter and the children alike were strangely unfamiliar with this flower, growing so close to their homes.

I passed out over the rocky slopes northward, where I ate huckleberries to my heart’s content. The ghost-like Feathery Plumes, and common Purple Clubs of this region towered everywhere among the woods; and low beautiful plants of the Yellow Gerardia were in full bloom. As I rounded the slope, below the Rock, I collected a fine specimen of the gorgeously colored Orange Butterfly-Weed, or Pleurisy-Root (_Asclepias tuberosa_), of the Milkweed Family. In the swamp farther south on the Orange Mountains, I have formerly collected the Swamp Milkweed flowers, which are similar to Butterfly-Weed, save that they are of a delicate rose-purple color. Our common species northward is the Purple-Flowered Silkweed. It grows along our roadside walls and river banks, and its tender leaves are used as greens, proving very delicious food.

I sat some time on the hillside under Eagle Rock, recalling the various flowers collected along the Northfield Road the year past. Llewellyn and Hutton Parks, along these summits, are always fragrant with blossoms in May and June. I once spent a holiday in Pleasant Valley beyond St. Cloud, in May and June, collecting among other flowers the beautiful Tulip-Tree blossoms (_Liriodendron Tulipifera_), which some lads graciously gathered for me.

The swamps and woods about this vale produce about the same species of flowers and trees as the hills of Mosholu and Lowerre above New York City—marsh marigolds, violets, anemones, dogwoods, and glowing apple orchards that one does not soon forget. One rare flower, however, graces the Orlando Williams Swamp in Pleasant Valley that I find nowhere else. It is the Painted-Cup (_Castilleja coccinea_) of the Figwort Family. It is very similar to the Scarlet Painted-Cup that Bryant wrote about as growing on the prairies.[61]

[Illustration: =The Star-blossoms of the Grass of Parnassus= (_Parnassia Caroliniana_), =and the Ladies’ Tresses.=]

Frequently country folk call this flower Indian’s Paint-Brush; it somewhat resembles a clover tuft daubed with vermilion. The species found in New Jersey and Staten Island are the same. Thoreau found the scarlet tufts of the Painted-Cup “very common in the meadows” on Staten Island in 1843.[62] The Alpine Painted-Cups of the White and Green Mountains are somewhat different from the species found southward and westward. A friend collected flowers of these strange plants near Woodmont in the vicinity of New Haven, and about Marbledale, Connecticut. These are typical little Figworts.

The lobelias, gerardias, milkweeds, butter-and-eggs, Leopard’s-Bane (_Arnica acaulis_), and field daisies are common in the pastures and woods of St. Cloud and Pleasant Valley. In the distant swamps the Sweet Bay Magnolia (_Magnolia Virginiana_) and the Tulip Tree are the only two common northern species of the Magnolia Family. A single tulip tree is found in the Hoosac Valley, at North Pownal. Tulip trees are abundant in New Haven, Connecticut, and in Bronx Park, and also on Orange Mountains. They thrive especially westward and southward, where they become beautiful flowering trees—often one hundred and forty feet high.

As I came down the Northfield Road from St. Cloud, in June, 1896, I found the pastures full of blooming briar-roses, and the meadows waving with white daisies and golden arnica. The latter flower is replaced in the meadows of the Hoosac Highlands by great patches of the Devil’s Paint-Brush or Orange Hawkweed (_Hieracium aurantiacum_), an emigrant weed from Europe, which is very pretty and fragrant. The Purple Gerardia (_Gerardia purpurea_), the Blue Lobelias (_Lobelia syphilitica_), and _Lobelia spicata_ grow abundantly in Pownal-on-the-Hoosac in June.

As I passed homeward through the Salt Meadows, beyond Newark, on the new Plank Road to Desbrosses Ferry, I began to observe the large pink-purple blossoms of the Swamp Rose-Mallow (_Hibiscus Moscheutos_) and the Marsh-Mallow (_Althæa officinalis_), whose roots contain a mucilaginous substance, and which are closely allied to our cultivated hollyhocks. I soon neared an open ditch by the road, filled with blossoming Arrow-Head (_Sagittaria latifolia_) and Pickerel-Weed (_Pontederia cordata_). The former produces beautiful waxen white flowers, and the latter, blue spikes of ragged blossoms. Not far from this mud-hole on the dry, sandy roadside, I gathered the rank-scented Jimson-Weed or Thorn-Apple (_Datura Stramonium_), a poisonous emigrant weed from Asia, whose Arabic name was _Tatorah_. It is common everywhere about these regions in waste ground, as well as along Kingsbridge Road and Old East Chester near the City. I have also observed it near the poor-house in New Haven, but never in the Hoosac Valley region.

The Salt Meadows of New Jersey, during August and September, are rolling swales of tall sedges and cat-tail grasses. Later in the season, when the golden-rod and purple asters are frozen and brown, and thrown in heaps upon the ground by the autumn winds, one may see great flocks of geese, and the comical purple grackle—the crow blackbird—flying southward over these desolate lands. A deep, weird solitude surrounds these unfathomable swamps. The foot of man and his bog-hoe as yet have never penetrated their regions, although within hearing of Old Trinity’s chimes.

In the Hoosac Valley autumn is a season of glory. Late August produces the gorgeous colored tiger lilies. The swampy meadows in September are brightened with the delicate greenish-white stars of the Grass-of Parnassus (_Parnassia Caroliniana_), first found on that ancient Mount Parnassus in Greece, and described and named by Dioscorides in Christ’s day. Innumerable asters and golden-rod brighten the roadside hedges. In the open clearings of bushy pastures grows the Woolly Moonshine—the “everlasting” of which Thoreau wrote. It is sometimes called Cud-Weed, or Balsam-Weed (_Gnaphalium decurrens_). The Pearly-Everlasting or None-so-Pretty (_Anaphalis margaritacea_) is peculiarly fragrant and beautiful, banked in among the late golden-rods, and the crimson and chrome-colored autumn leaves of sumach and blackberry briars against the dark green pines. I have found these flowers unfolding amid the snows as late as December. Late spikes of Orchids, the Ladies’ Tresses of genus _Gyrostachys_, the Bitter-Buttons or Tansy-Weed (_Tanacetum vulgare_), numerous thistles (_Carduus_), the velvety leaves of St. Peter’s Mullen (_Verbascum Thapsus_), Wormwood (_Artemisia Absinthium_) grow along the roadsides over Mount Œta, while Thimble-Berry blossoms and the Bluebells-of-New-England fill in the waste places of fences and dug-away ledges.

When the cooler days of October come, we may look for that blue flower of heaven, the Fringed Gentian (_Gentiana crinita_), along the roadsides near the swamps of Etchowog, modestly and patiently waiting for the autumnal skies of blue:

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye Look through its fringes to the sky, Blue—blue—as if that sky let fall A flower from its cerulean well.[63]

So come and fade alike the rarest flowers and the commonest weeds among the Highlands of the Hoosac, the valley of peaceful waters.

It is in the deepest and most secluded swamps that the shy orchid blooms, far beyond the realm of lawn or garden. Few indeed realize what a world of beauty and order lies sleeping unsought and unseen in the mossy recesses of our mountains,—a wonderland of discovery to any one who persistently, though reverently, seeks to lure from Nature the secrets of her deep retreats.

[Illustration: =The Hoosac River, Pownal, Vermont.=

“_Flow on, fair Hoosac, with your gentle song,_ _Flow peacefully through all the centuries long;_ _To that unbounded sea, Eternity!_ _That God decrees alike for Man and Thee._”

G. G. N.]

APPENDIX

NEW ENGLAND ORCHIDS

Nature, in fact that parent of all things, has produced no animated being for the purpose solely of eating; she has willed that it should be born to satisfy the wants of others, and in its very vitals has implanted medicaments conducive to health.... Cato has recommended that flowers for making chaplets should be cultivated in the gardens: varieties remarkable for delicacy, which it is quite impossible to express, inasmuch as no individual can find such faculties for describing them as Nature does, for bestowing on them their numerous tints. Nature, who here in especial shows herself in a sportive mood, takes a delight in the prolific display of her varied productions. The other plants she has produced for our uses and our nutriment, and to them accordingly she has granted years, and even ages, of duration; but as for the flowers and their perfumes, she has given them birth for but a day—a mighty lesson to man, we see, to teach him that that which in its career is most beauteous and most attractive to the eye is the very first to fade and die.

Even the limner’s art possesses no resources for reproducing colors of the flowers in all their varied tints and combinations, whether we view them in groups alternately blending their hues or whether arranged in festoons, each variety by itself.—PLINY, _Natural History_ (23-79 A.D.).

Orchidaceæ

_Orchid Family_

[In compiling the appendix of New England Orchids, the author has followed the order of classification and nomenclature adopted by Messrs. Britton and Brown in the _Illustrated Flora_ of Northeastern North America, 1896, without doubt the highest and most systematic arrangement according to the progress of evolution and the advancement of the science of botany in North America.]

ORCHIDACEÆ, Lindley, _Natural System_, 2d ed., p. 336. 1836.