 |
| June 3, 1858 |
Whether you have slept soundly or not, it is not easy to lie abed under these circumstances, and we rose at 3.30, in order to see the sun rise from the top and get our breakfast there. Concealing our blankets under a shelving rock near the camp, we set out.
It was still hazy, and we did not see the shadow of the mountain until it was comparatively short. We did not get the most distant views, as of the Green and White Mountains, while we were there. We carried up fuel for the last quarter of a mile.
A Fringilla hyemalis seemed to be attracted by the smoke of our fire, and flew quite near to us. They are the prevailing bird of the summit, and perhaps are baited by the crumbs left by visitors. It was flitting about there, and it would sit and sing, on the top of a dwarf spruce, the strain I have often heard. I saw just beneath the summit, and commencing some fifteen or twenty rods from it, dwarfish Rhodora Canadensis, not yet anywhere quite out, much later than in the valley, very common; lambkill; and checkerberry; and, in slightly boggy places, quite dwarfish specimens of Eriophorum vaginatum, quite common in similar localities all over the rocky part, six inches high or more.
A little water andromeda with it, scarcely out, and Labrador tea, scarcely suggesting flowers. (This I observed only in two or three places on the northerly side.) A viburnum (probably nudum or a form of it) was quite common, just begun to leaf, and with nemopanthes, showing its transparent leafets not yet expanded, a little behind the other, was quite sizable, especially the latter. These two, with the spruce, the largest shrubs at this height.
In the little thickets made by these bushes, grew the two-leaved Solomon’s-seal, not nearly out, and Clintonia borealis, not budded, though out in the valley. Within the folded leaves of the last, was considerable water, as within the leaves of the seaside goldenrod on the sands of the Cape.
Cornus Canadensis, along the base of the rocks, not out. Diervilla. And, on the moist ground or in the small bogs, Lycopodium annotinum, resembling at first sight the L. lucidulum, but running, was very common in boggy places, sometimes forming quite conspicuous green patches.
The above plants of the mountain-top, except perhaps the mountain cranberry, extended downward over the whole top or rocky part of the mountain and were there mingled with a little Polypodium vulgare; a peculiar Amelanchier Canadensis, apparently variety oligocarpa, just begun to bloom, with few flowers, short roundish petals, and finely serrate leaves; red cherry, not out; Populus tremuliformis, not common and quite small; small willows, apparently discolor, etc., also rostrata, and maybe humilis; canoe birch and yellow birch, for the most part scrubby, largest in swampy places; meadow-sweet; Lycopodium clavatum; Amelanchier Canadensis var. oblongifolia, not quite out, a little of it; and also a little very dwarfish hemlock and white pine (two or three feet high); a little mayflower and Chiogenes hispidula.
We concluded to explore the whole rocky part of the mountain in this wise, to saunter slowly about it, about the height and distance from the summit of our camp, or say half a mile, more or less, first going north from the summit and returning by the western semicircle, and then exploring the east side, completing the circle, and return over the summit at night. To sum up, these were the Plants of the Summit, i. e. within a dozen rods of it: Potentilla tridentata (and lower); Vaccinium Vitis-Idoea, fine grass; sericocar pus-like radical leaves; Arenaria Granlandica; dwarf black spruce; a little dry moss; the two kinds of cladonia, white and green, and the small leather-colored lichen of rocks, mingled with the larger Umbilicaria postulate.
All these but the V. Vitis-Idoea generally dispersed over the rocky part. Within fifteen or twenty rods of it, or scarcely, if at all, lower than the last: Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum and perhaps the variety augustifolium (?); Pyrus arbutifolia; mountain-ash. Generally distributed. Commencing fifteen or twenty rods below it: Rhodora; lambkill; checkerberry; Eriophorum vaginatum; water andromeda; Labrador tea; Viburnum (nudum?); nemopanthes; two-leaved Solomon’s-seal; clintonia; Cornus Canadensis; Lycopodium annotinum; diervilla.
Generally lower than the above, on the rest of the bare rocky part, with all of the above: Ribes prostratum; Polypodium vulgaris; Amelanchier Canadensis var. oligocarpa (?); red cherry; Populus tremuliformis; Salix apparently discolor, perhaps also humilis, certainly rostrata; meadow-sweet; canoe birch; yellow birch; Lycopodium clavatum; Amelanchier oblongifolia; a little red elder; hemlock; white pine; mayflower; chiogenes.
Did not examine particularly the larger growth of the swamps, but think it was chiefly spruce, white and yellow birch, mountain-ash, etc.
The Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum and the Abies nigra are among the most prevailing conspicuous plants.
We first descended somewhat toward the north this forenoon, then turned west over a ridge by which some ascend from the north. There are several large ponds not far from the mountain on the north, and I thought there was less forest to be seen on this side than on the south. We crossed one or two now dry watercourses, where, however, judging from the collections of rubbish or drift, much water must have flown at some other season.
Jackson in his map in the Report on the Geology of Massachusetts calls this mountain “mica slate and porphyritic granite,” and that the rocks on the summit are “a hard variety of gneiss filled with small crystals of garnets.”
We observed that the rocks were remarkably smoothed, almost polished and rounded, and also scratched. The scratches run from about north-northwest to south-south east. The sides of the rocks often straight, upright walls, several rods long from north to south and five to ten feet high, with a very smooth, rounded edge. There were many of these long, straight, rounded walls of rock, especially on the northwest and west. Some smaller or lower ones were so rounded and smooth as to resemble at a little distance long-fallen trunks of trees. The rocks were, indeed, singularly worn on a great scale. Often a vertical cross-section would show some such profile as if they had been grooved with a tool of a corresponding edge.
There were occasionally conspicuous masses and also veins of white quartz, and very common were bright-purple or wine colored garnets imbedded in the rock, looking like berries in a pudding.
In many parts, as on the southeast plateau especially, the rocks were regularly stratified, and split into regular horizontal slabs about a foot in thickness, projecting one beyond another like steps.
The little bogs or mosses, sometimes only a rod in diameter, are a singular feature. Ordinarily the cladonia and other lichens are crackling under your feet, when suddenly you step into a miniature bog filling the space between two rocks and you are at a loss to tell where the moisture comes from. The amount of it seems to be that some spongy moss is enabled to grow there and retain some of the clouds which rest on it. Moisture and aridity are singularly near neighbors to each other up there.
The surface is made up of masses of rock more or less smoothed and rounded, or else jagged, and the little soil between is a coarse, gravelly kind, the ruins of the rocks and the decayed vegetation that has grown there. You step unexpectedly from Arabia Petraea, where the dry lichens crackle under your feet, into a miniature bog, say Dismal Swamp, where you suddenly sink a foot in wet moss, and the next step carries you into Arabia Petraea again.
In more extensive swamps I slumped through moss to water some times, though the bottom was of rock, while a fire would rapidly spread in the arid lichens around. Perhaps the mosses grow in the wettest season chiefly, and so are enabled to retain some moisture through the driest.
Plants of the bogs and of the rocks grow close to each other. You are surprised to see a great many plants of bogs growing close to the most barren and driest spots, where only cladonias cover the rocks. Often your first notice of a bog in the midst of the arid waste, where the lichens crackle under your feet, is your slumping a foot into wet moss.
Methinks there cannot be so much evaporation going on up there,—witness the water in the clintonia leaves, as in the solidago by the sandy sea shore, — and this (which is owing to the coolness), rather than the prevalence of mist, may account for the presence of this moisture forming bogs.
In a shallow rain-water pool, or rock cistern, about three rods long by one or one and a half wide, several hundred feet below the summit, on the west side, but still on the bare rocky top and on the steepest side of the summit, I saw toad-spawn (black with white bellies), also some very large spawn new to me. There were four or five masses of it, each three or four inches in diameter and of a peculiar light misty bluish white as it lay in the water near the surface, attached to some weed or stick, as usual. Each mass consisted of but few large ova, more than a quarter of an inch in diameter, in which were pale-brown tadpoles flattened out. The outside of the mass when taken up was found to consist of large spherical or rounded gelatinous projections three quarters of an inch wide, and blue in the light and air, while the ova within were greenish.
This rain-water pool was generally less than a foot deep, with scarcely a weed in it, but considerable mud concealing its rocky bottom. The spawn was unusually clean and clear. I suspect it to be that of bullfrogs, though not a frog was to be seen; they were probably lurking beneath the rocks in the water at that hour.
This pool was bounded on one or two sides by those rounded walls of rock five or six feet high. My companion had said that he heard a bullfrog the evening before. Is it likely that these toads and frogs ever hopped up there? The hylodes peeped regularly toward night each day in a similar pool much nearer the summit.
Agassiz might say that they originated on the top. Perhaps they fell from the clouds in the form of spawn or tadpoles or young frogs. I think it more likely that they fell down than that they hopped up.
Yet how can they escape the frosts of winter? The mud is hardly deep enough to protect them.
Having reached the neighborhood of our camp again and explored the wooded portion lower down along the path up the mountain, we set out northeast along the east side of the mountain. The southeast part of the mountain-top is an extended broad rocky almost plateau, consisting of large flat rocks with small bogs and rain-water pools and easy ascents to different levels. The black spruce tree which is scattered here and there over it, the prevailing tree or shrub of the mountain top, evidently has many difficulties to contend with. It is generally of a yellowish green, its foliage.
The most exposed trees are very stout and spreading close to the rock, often much wider close to the rock than they are high, and these lower, almost their only, limbs com pletely filling and covering openings between the rocks. I saw one which grew out of a narrow crack in the rock, which was three feet high, five inches in diameter at the ground, and six feet wide on the rock. It was shaped like a bodkin, — the main stem.
The spruce commonly grows in clefts of the rocks; has many large limbs, and longer than the tree is high, perhaps, spreading close and flat over the rock in every direction, sometimes eight or ten within a foot of the rock; then, higher up the stem, or midway for three or six feet, though perfectly perpendicular, is quite bare on the north side and commonly smooth, showing no trace of a limb, no stubs, but the limbs at this height all ray out southward, and the top is crowned with a tuft of tender twigs. This proves the violence of the storms which they have to contend with. Its branches love to run along flat on the rocks, filling the openings between the rocks. It forms dense coverts and forms, apparently, for the rabbits, etc. A single spruce tree of this habit would sometimes make a pretty good shelter, while the rocks on each side were your walls.
As I walked over this plateau, I first observed, looking toward the summit, that the steep angular projections of the summit and elsewhere and the brows of the rocks were the parts chiefly covered with dark- brown lichens, – umbilicaria, etc., – as if they were to grow on the ridge and slopes of a man's nose only.
It was the steepest and most exposed parts of the high rocks alone on which they grew, where you would think it most difficult for them to cling. They also covered the more rounded brows on the sides of the mountain, especially the east side, where they were very dense, fine, crisp, and firm, like a sort of shagreen, giving a firm footing or hold to the feet where it was needed.
It was these that gave that Ararat-brown color of antiquity to these portions of the mountain, which a few miles distant could not be accounted for compared with the more prevalent gray. From the sky-blue you pass through the misty gray of the rocks, to this darker and more terrene color. The temples of the mountain are covered with lichens, which color the mountain for miles.
The west side descends steeply from the summit, but there is a broad almost plateau on the southeast and east, not much beneath the summit, with a precipitous termination on the east, and the rounded brows of the last are covered with the above-named lichens.
A spur of moderate length runs off northerly; another, but lower, southwesterly; another, much longer, a little higher than the last, southerly; and one longer and higher than these, one or two miles long, northeasterly. As you creep down over those eastern brows to look off the precipice, these rough and rigid lichens, forming a rigid crust, as it were baked, done brown, in the sun of centuries, afford a desirable hand and foot hold.
They seemed to me wild robins that placed their nests in the spruce up there. I noticed one nest. William Emerson, senior, says they do not breed on Staten Island. They do breed at least at Hudson’s Bay. They are certainly a hardy bird, and are at home on this cool mountain-top.
We boiled some rice for our dinner, close by the edge of a rain-water pool and bog, on the plateau southeast from the summit.
Though there was so little vegetation, our fire spread rapidly through the dry cladonia lichens on the rocks, and, the wind being pretty high, threatened to give us trouble, but we put it out with a spruce bough dipped in the pool. I thought that if it had spread further, it must soon have come to a bog. Though you could hardly tell what was moist and what dry till the fire came to it. Nothing could be drier than the cladonia, which was often adjacent to a mass of moss saturated with moisture. And wet the ground with it.
You cook beside such a moss for the sake of water. These rain-water pools or cisterns are a remarkable feature. There is a scarcity of bubbling springs, but this water was commonly cool enough in that atmosphere and warm as the day was. I do not know why they were not warmer, for they were shallow and the nights were not cold. Can there be some concealed snow or ice about? Hardly. They are quite shallow, but sometimes four or five rods over and with considerable mud at the bottom at first, decayed lichens, and disintegrated rock.
Apparently these were the origin of the bogs, Eriophorum vaginatum, moss, and a few other boggy plants springing up in them and gradually filling them; yet, though sometimes filled with sedge (?) or fine grass, and generally the dwarfish Eriophorum vaginatum in the moss, they were singularly barren, and, unless they were fairly converted into swamps, contained very little variety.
You never have to go far to find water of some kind. On the top, perhaps, of a square half-acre of almost bare rock, as in what we called our wash-room by our camp, you find a disintegrated bog, wet moss alternating with dry cladonia (sign and emblem of dryness in our neighborhood), and water stands in little holes, or if you look under the edges of a boulder there, you find standing water, yet cool to drink.
After dinner we kept on northeast over a high ridge east of the summit, whence was a good view of that part of Dublin and Jaffrey immediately under the mountain. There is a fine, large lake extending north and south, apparently in Dublin, which it would be worth the while to sail on.
When on the summit of this, I heard the ring of toads from a rain-pool a little lower and northeasterly. It carried me back nearly a month into spring (though they are still ringing and copulating in Concord), it sounded so springlike in that clear, fresh air. Descending to that pool we found toads copulating at the bottom of the water.
In one or two places on this side of the mountain, which, as I have said, terminated in an abrupt precipice, I saw bogs or meadows four or six rods wide or more, but with only grass and moss and eriophorum, without bushes, in them, close to the edge of the mountain or precipice, where, if you stood between the meadow and the summit, looking east, there would appear to be a notch in the rim of the cup or saucer on the east and the meadow ready to spill over and run down the mountain on that side; but when you stood on this notched edge, the descent was seen to be much less precipitous than you had expected.
Such spongy mountain bogs, how ever, are evidently the sources of rivers. Lakes of the clouds when they are clear water. Between this and the northeast spur or ridge was the largest swamp or bog that I saw, consisting, perhaps, of between one and two acres, as I remember. It was a grassy and mossy bog without large bushes, in which you sank a foot, with a great many fallen trees in it, showing their bleached upper side here and there but almost completely buried in the moss.
This must once have been a dense swamp, full of pretty large trees. The trees buried in the moss were much larger than any now standing at this height. The outlet of this, if it had any, must have been north westerly. This was a wild place enough.
Having ascended the highest part of the northeastern ridge north of this bog, we returned to the summit, first to the ridge of the plateau, and west on it to the summit, crossing a ravine between. I noticed, in many places upon the mountain, sandy or gravelly spaces from a few feet to a rod in diameter, where the thin sward and loam appeared to have been recently removed or swept away. I was inclined to call them scars, and thought of very violent winds and tempests of rain as the cause, perhaps, but do not know how to account for them.
We had thus made a pretty complete survey of the top of the mountain. It is a very unique walk, and would be almost equally interesting to take though it were not elevated above the surrounding valleys. It often reminded me of my walks on the beach, and suggested how much both depend for their sublimity on solitude and dreariness. In both cases we feel the presence of some vast, titanic power.
The rocks and valleys and bogs and rain-pools of the mountain are so wild and unfamiliar still that you do not recognize the one you left fifteen minutes before. This rocky region, forming what you may call the top of the mountain, must be more than two miles long by one wide in the middle, and you would need to ramble about it many times before it would be gin to be familiar. There may be twenty little swamps so much alike in the main that [you] would not know whether you had seen a particular one before, and the rocks are trackless and do not present the same point. So that it has the effect of the most intricate labyrinth and artificially extended walk.
This mountain is said in the Gazetteer to extend north east [and] southwest five miles, by three wide, and the streams on the east to empty into the Contoocook and Merrimack, on the west into the Ashuelotand Connecti cut; is 3718 feet high; and, judging from its account, the top was wooded fifty years ago.
We proceeded to get our tea on the summit, in the very place where I had made my bed for a night some fifteen years before. There were a great many insects of various kinds on the topmost rocks at this hour, and among them I noticed a yellow butterfly and several large brownish ones fluttering over the apex.
It was interesting to watch from that height the shadows of fair-weather clouds passing over the land scape. You could hardly distinguish them from forests. It reminded me of the similar shadows seen on the sea from the high bank of Cape Cod beach. There the perfect equality of the sea atoned for the comparatively slight elevation of the bank.
We do not commonly realize how constant and amusing a phenomenon this is in a summer day to one standing on a sufficiently elevated point. In the valley or on the plain you do not commonly notice the shadow of a cloud unless you are in it, but on a mountain-top, or on a lower elevation in a plain country or by the seaside, the shadows of clouds flitting over the landscape are a never-failing source of amusement.
It is commonly easy to refer a shadow to its cloud, since in one direction its form is preserved with suficient accuracy. Yet I was surprised to observe that a long, straggling downy cumulus extending north and south a few miles east of us, when the sun was perhaps an hour high, cast its shadow along the base of the Peterboro Hills, and did not fall on the other side, as I should have expected. It proved the clouds not so high as I supposed.
It suggested how with tolerable accuracy you might easily calculate the height of a cloud with a quadrant and a good map of the country; e. g., observe at what distance the shadow of a cloud directly over head strikes the earth, and then take the altitude of the sun, and you may presume that you have the base and two angles of a right-angled triangle, from which the rest may be calculated; or you may allow for the angle of elevation of the mountain as seen from the place where the shadow falls. Also you might determine the breadth of a cloud by observing the breadth of the shadow at a given distance, etc., etc. Many such calculations would be easy in such a locality.
It was pleasant enough to see one man’s farm in the shadow of a cloud, — which perhaps he thought covered all the Northern States, — while his neighbor’s farm was in sunshine.
It was still too hazy to allow of our seeing the shadowof the mountain, so we descended a little before the sun set, but already the hylodes had been peeping for some time. Again the wood thrush, chewink, etc., sang at eve. I had also heard the song sparrow.
As the sky was more cloudy this evening, we looked out a shelving rock near our camp, where we might take shelter from the rain in the night if necessary, i.e., if our roof did not prove tight enough. There were plenty of clefts and small caverns where you might be warm and dry. The mosquitoes troubled us a little this night.
Lying up there at this season, when the nighthawk is most musical, reminded me of what I had noticed before, that this bird is crepuscular in its habits. It was heard by night only up to nine or ten o’clock and again just before dawn, and marked those periods or seasons like a clock. Its note very conveniently indicated the time of night. It was sufficient to hear the nighthawk booming when you awoke to know how the night got on, though you had no other evidence of the hour.
I did not hear the sound of any beast. There are no longer any wolves to howl or panthers to scream. One man told me that many foxes took refuge from dogs and sportsmen on this mountain.
The plants of cold northern bogs grow on this mountain-top, and even they have a boreal habit here, more dwarfish than such of them as grow in our swamps. The more memorable and peculiar plants of the mountain top were the mountain cranberry and the Potentilla tridentata, the dwarfish spruce, Arenaria Graenlandica (not now conspicuous).
The Ribes prostratum, or fetid currant, was very abundant from quite near the summit to near the base, and its currant-acid fragrance was quite agreeable to me, partly, perhaps, from its relation to the currant of the gardens.
You also notice many small weed-like mountain-ashes, six or eight inches high, which, on trying to pull up, you find to be very firmly rooted, having an old and large root out of proportion to their top.
I might also name in this connection not only the blueberry but the very common but dwarfish Eriophorum vaginatum and the Lycopodium annotinum, also the amelanchier, variety oligocarpa.
I was not prepared to find vegetation so much later there than below or with us, since I once found blueberries ripe on Wachusett unexpectedly early. However, it was a pleasing lateness, and gives one a chance to review some of his lessons in natural history.
On the rocky part, the only plants, as I noticed, which were or had been in bloom were the salix, now generally done; Ribes prostratum, in prime; Eriophorum vaginatum ; Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum, just begun; Amelanchier oligocarpa, little, not long; water andromeda, ditto, ditto; and probably (?) the populus, birches (?), mayflower, and spruce.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 3, 1858
No comments:
Post a Comment