 | CHAPTER XVI. Forest life |  |
16. CHAPTER XVI.
So only she is rich in meadows, meres, and springs;
And holds herself as great in her superfluous waste
As others by their towns and fruitful tillage graced.
Drayton.
I trust I may be pardoned for having ventured
to give words to a small part of the reflections which
filled my mind after parting with the city travellers.
The subject is with us an all-engrossing one, and
so intimately is it connected with all that is most
important to us, that it is difficult to enter upon it
at all without enlarging to the extent of a volume
at least—so I must be excused for a few lines.
Our way lay northward, through a broken and
uneven tract, and the road wound round the base
of high woody hills in many an intricate curve.
This road is only one of Nature's laying. When it
is what is technically called “laid,” by the united
wisdom of the district,—at present the owl and the
fox are the only savans in the neighborhood,—it
will go most determinedly straight up and straight
down the hills, and in a “bee line,” as we say,
through the broadest marshes, if marshes lie in the
way. We scorn to be turned aside when we are
laying roads. Not that we run them in a direct
line between the places we wish to connect.
lines most religiously, and consequently,—the
sections being squares,—we shall in time have the
pleasure of travelling zigzag at right angles, from
one corner of the state to another. We do not
submit to have notches and slices cut off our farms,
for the accommodation of the public. If fifty cents'
worth of land would save digging down a hill or
bridging a wide marsh at the expense of hundreds
of dollars, no farmer would be found who would
vote for so tyrannical a proceeding. Truly says
Mons. De Tocqueville that ours is a most expensive
mode of transacting public business.—But as I
was saying, our road was not “laid,” so it was a
very even and pleasant one, although it led through
a rough country.
We had not yet lost the fresh breeze of the early
morning, but the sun had become so powerful as
to make the flickering shade of these scattered
woods very delightful to us all. The children
were never tired of watching the vagaries of the
little chipmonk as he glanced from branch to
branch with almost the swiftness of light, but they
screamed with pleasure when the noise of our
wheels started three young fawns that were quietly
nestled at the foot of a great oak, and now pursued
their graceful flight over hill and hollow, lost to the
sight at one moment, then reappearing on another-eminence,
and standing still to watch us, belling
all the while. It was a pretty sight, and I was as
our fairy company had indeed left us, as the children
said, “for good and all.” On the whole, that
morning ride was one of the pleasant trifles which
one remembers for a long time.
Our scenery has been called tame. What is
tame scenery? Is every landscape tame which
cannot boast of mountains or cataracts? Save these
I know of no feature of rural beauty in which our
green peninsula is found wanting. If the richest
meadow-land shut in by gently swelling hills and
fringed with every variety of foliage—if streams
innumerable, not wild and dashing it is true, but
rapid enough to insure purity—if lakes in unparalleled
variety of size and figure, studded with
islands and tenanted by multitudes of wild fowl—
if these be elements of beauty, we may justly boast
of our fair domain, and invoke the eye of the painter
and the pen of the poet. No spot on earth possesses
a more transparent atmosphere. If it be true
of any region that
Enriches so the bosom of the earth
That trees and flowers appear but like so much
Enamel upon gold—
heavenly bodies seem to smile upon us without an
intervening medium. The lustre of the stars and
the white glittering moonlight seem more pure and
perfect here than elsewhere.
“That's a little sun, papa!” said wee Willie,
pointing with rapt admiration at the evening star;
and it is not long since I uttered an exclamation at
seeing what I supposed to be a crimson flame bursting
over the roof of a house at a little distance, but
which proved to be Mars just risen above the horizon,
and showing an aspect which in warlike times
could be considered nothing less than portentous.
This peculiar transparency in the atmosphere is
strikingly evident in the appearance of the Aurora
Borealis, which often looks to be so near us that
one can almost fancy that the tall pines pierce its
silvery depths and enjoy perpetual daylight.
Perhaps it is this that gives a charm to scenery
which it has been the fashion to call tame. The
waters are more like molten diamonds, and the herbage
like living emeralds, because the lustrous sky
brings out their hues in undimmed intensity, adding
depth to shadow, and keeping back nothing of
brilliancy. Philosophers might tell of refraction,—
painters of chiar oscuro—I have but one word—
Beauty! and this expresses all that I know about
that which fills me with delight.
We can at least boast some features unique and peculiar
in our landscape—our “openings” and our
wide savannas are not to be found in Switzerland,
I am sure. These—as to the picturesque which
we are all wild about—bear something like the same
proportion to the Alps that the fair, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked
and tidy daughter of one of our good farmers,
black eyes and her soul of fire. There are many
chances in favor of the farmer's daughter being the
most comfortable person to live with, though she
will attract no tourists to her soirées.
It is well understood that a large portion of the
new new world was found but scantily clothed
with timber. Immense tracts are covered but thinly
with scattered trees, and these are almost exclusively
of the different kinds of oak. By contrast with
the heavily timbered land these tracts seem almost
bare, and they have received the appropriate name
of “oak-openings.” Innumerable are the hypotheses
by which the learned and the ingenious have
attempted to account for this peculiarity of the
country. Many have ascribed it to the annual
fires which the Indians are known to have sent
through the forest with the intention of clearing
away the almost impervious under-brush which
hindered their hunting. But the fact that the soil
of the openings is ordinarily quite different in its
characteristics from that of the timbered land seems
to oblige us to seek further for a reason for so
striking a difference in outward appearance. Much
of our soil is said to be diluvial,—the wash of the
great ocean lakes as they overflowed towards the
south. This soil, which varies in depth from one
foot to one hundred, (say the explorers,) is light
and friable, but it is based upon something emphatically
called “hard pan,” which is supposed to
proper depth. Whether oak-openings are found
only where the soil is one foot in thickness, or
equally where it extends to one hundred, we are
not informed, I believe; but in all cases the hard
pan gets the blame, from one class of theorists at
least, of the want of large timber in these park-like
tracts of our pleasant land.
The other “feature” to which I alluded—a very
wide and flat one—the prodigious amount of wet
prairie or “marsh”—the produce of millions of
springs which percolate in every direction this diluvial
mass—is said to promise magnificent resources
of wealth for—our great-grandchildren. At present
it yields, in the first place, agues of the first
quality, and, secondly, very tolerable wild grass for
the cattle of the emigrant; which latter advantage
is supposed very much to have aided in the rapid
settlement of the country. People make their
transit now as in the time of the patriarchs, with
their flocks and their herds, certain of finding
abundant though coarse food for the sustenance of
all kinds of stock until they shall have had time to
provide better.
As to future days, inexhaustible beds of peat and
marl—the former to use as fuel when we shall
have burned all the oaks, the latter to restore the
exhausted soil to its pristine fertility—are to compensate
to our descendants for the loss of energy
and enterprise which we ancestors shall undoubtedly
be equalized. We reap the advantages of the rich
virgin soil; our hereafter is to find boundless wealth
beneath its surface.
Not fewer than three thousand lakes—every
one a mirror set in verdant velvet and bordered with
the richest fringe—with a proportionate number
of streams—the very threadiest capable of being
dammed into a respectable duckpond—supply
moisture to our fields. What wonder then that
those fields “stand dressed in living green!”
One acre of water to less than forty of land!
Small need, one would think, for artificial irrigation!
Yet we have seen much suffering from
drought, even in this land of water. For eighteen
months, at one time, we of the interior had not a
heavy shower, nor even a soft rain long enough
continued to wet more than the surface of the
ground. This lack of the ordinary supply of falling
water is supposed to have effected materially the
decrease of depth in the great lakes. Their periodical
subsidence (a knotty subject, by the bye) went
on much more rapidly than usual during that time.
A smaller, though not unimportant, concomitant of
the parching process was the thirsty condition of
the poor cattle, who had to be driven, in some
cases, miles for each day's drink. They do not
like their champaign without water, so that they
really suffered. At such times, one is almost disposed
to wish, in defiance of the picturesque, that
in every other quarter-section. I suppose however
that no country—except Holland perhaps—is
more thoroughly soaked than ours; so that, notwithstanding
this one arid period, we need scarcely
fear that our history will be a dry one.
The quietly beautiful aspect of Michigan, tame
though it be, is not without its consolations. Have
not the learned agreed that people's characteristics
usually bear some mysterious rapport to those of
their native land? Few of our “natives” have as
yet had time to show much character, but as we
are bound to believe in the pretty notion that
may we not augur for the rising race? It is
true there may never be a William Tell among
them, but the mountain hero was the bright creation
of circumstances that will never arise in this
sunny land of lakes. We can do without such, for
we shall have no Gesslers.
| CHAPTER XVI. Forest life | |