Letters from an Oregon Ranch/Chapter 5
V
I have been thinking, dear Nell, that my letters have shown you only the sombre side of our ranch life. When you think of us in our new Oregon home, you probably imagine a dreary, grim old house, perched high on a hillside; only that, and nothing more. You know nothing of the beauty of our surroundings, nothing of the semicircle of towering hills clad from base to summit with the living green of fir trees, seen from our front windows and separated from us by only a very narrow glen,—the latter as green and fresh in January as are our lawns at home in May. Curving and winding through this little valley, with a tracery of green trees and leafless ones, is the loveliest mountain stream that ever the sun shone on,—in summer-time a dreamily murmuring rivulet; in winter a rushing, roaring torrent. Then it comes rollicking and roystering through our little glen, like some mad bacchanalian half crazed by mountain vintage, plunging over rocky terraces, leaping mossy logs, whisking around curves, surging and eddying against ferny banks, clutching in its white arms dead limbs and branches, held one instant, hurled broadcast the next, as vaulting over them with a tossing of green billows and flying spray it reels stormily on, bent upon still madder pranks. You may call this ranting, and perhaps think it inspired by this same mountain vintage; but you have never seen the mountain streams of Oregon. Ours seemed so wild and elfish that we immediately christened it “Deer Leap.” When we came here, a high, strong bridge spanned it. In one of these recent night carousals that bridge was lifted bodily and borne away, and no plank of it was ever seen again. One day last winter, after heavy rains, Deer Leap was tearing and plunging down from the hills, floating a mighty drift of logs, stumps, boards, and such débris, when, seeing Mary and me watching from the bank, in sudden fury he hurled the whole mass at us, and there it remains to this day.
In summer-time, when canopied by green leaves and swinging vines, with birds singing glad hallelujahs above it, and the elusive speckled trout darting through it, then indeed is our brook a thing of beauty and a joy forever. However, it is but one of the many charms of this old place. We have lovely springs of pure soft water. One of these, high upon the hill back of the house, gushing from a rocky ledge beneath a clump of pines, comes tumbling down in a mossy fern-shaded rill, to slip beneath the shadows of a near-by alder and creep into an ugly wooden spout, and thence be carried to a still uglier wooden trough at the end of the kitchen porch. Upon our arrival here, a well-mannered stream of water about two inches in diameter was flowing from this spout; but one morning after the rains I heard Tom exclaim, as he stepped out on the porch, “Great Scott! isn’t this getting a little bit too gay?” I looked out, and, lo! a stream of water as thick as the stove-pipe was gushing from that spout and dashing half-way across the porch. Tom had to construct a sort of breakwater of boards in front of it, in doing which he was half drowned, shouting at me through the roar of the breakers, “Life may seem extinct, but don’t give up till you’ve rolled me over a barrel.” Not being familiar with the habits of mountain springs, this “rampage” surprised us; but we afterwards learned that they are as much given to “rampagin’” as was Mrs. Joe Gargery herself.
Lower down the hill, at one side of the front lawn, under a giant alder, another spring pours from the cavern-like side of a big rock, and goes dancing away over a stony path to lose itself in the green pasture-lands below. Upon the massive rock overhanging this spring we might have carved,—
“The mountain air
In winter is not clearer, nor the dew
That shines on mountain blossoms.”
The water of this spring is most delicious, icy-cold and pure; “the more you drink, the more you want.” Here too are growing wonderful ferns,—long feathery fronds, just such as we buy of the florists at home, who call them “Boston ferns.” Here they are found growing wild, three or four feet high; a reckless profusion of them in all moist shady places. Think of this, and groan, the next time you pay a dollar for a little stingy one six inches high! The moss about this spring is exquisite, as if woven by fairy fingers, of tiny velvety ferns. In fact, the Oregon moss is wonderful; it covers trees, stumps, rocks, fences, and even the roofs of houses. Tom says the moss business is overdone here; but I like it.
At one side of the lawn is a large orchard, bearing fine apples, pears, peaches, plums, prunes, and cherries; and winding through this bower of lusciousness is a little path leading to the garden,—a pretty place, all embowered by trees, giving it that touch of seclusion so dear to the heart of the gardener. Just above the garden is another spring, hidden away in a tangle of greenery. Back of the house is a precipitous hill, crowned with fir, laurel, and young oak trees, the latter draped with pendent fringes of silvery moss, in fine contrast with the green of the firs; while straggling down toward the house are trees of various kinds, clumps of bushes, and tall brown ferns, with a perfect network of dewberry vines covering the ground and forming a snare for the foot of the unwary. Here too is fine old oak with mistletoe growing in its branches. Oh, the joy of having that lovely mistletoe growing right in one’s own dooryard!
“The mistletoe hung in the castle hall,
The holly branch shone on the old oak wall!”
We shall use buckthorn for holly, and when the blessed Yuletide comes round, this old rancho shall blossom as the rose.
Across the rear of the yard, half-way up the hillside, are the remains of an old fence, which we shall remove, except one portion of it, which is formed by a fallen log. This must have been one of the monarchs of the forest. It is seventy-five feet long, and so thick that when Tom stands on one side of it and I on the other, we are not visible to each other. In winter it is a mossy, lifeless thing; but in summer vines clamber over it, running along the top and festooning its sides; chattering squirrels play over it, and tuneful birds meet there for choir rehearsals. Our woodland is truly a “forest primeval,” as wild as an African jungle. From a hilltop beyond Deer Leap, when the skies are clear, we can plainly see Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, and the Three Sisters, yes, and Mary’s Peak. Why it is called that I don’t know, when it has its pretty Indian name, “Chintimini.”
I have now indifferently sketched for you, dear Nell, a few of the more pronounced attractions of this old place; but, believe me, it has hundreds of minor though
Copyright, Kiser Bros., Portland, Ore.
DEER LEAP, NEAR ITS MOUTH
"In summer-time, a dreamily murmuring rivulet" (page 42)
no less witching ones. Nature in making this mountain region dealt out grandeur and beauty with a lavish hand. I cannot say as much for man’s work, for surely here are the ugliest buildings that ever blotted and disfigured a landscape. Rickety, weather-beaten, and boarded up and down, they are so irredeemably ugly that one longs to sweep them off the face of the earth. There are two buildings, however, made of logs, that I would spare, as they seem to fit in with their rugged surroundings. One is a big, wide, roomy barn; the other a “root-house.” I had never seen or heard of such a thing before, and inquiring of the lord of the manor what it was for, I was told that “it was a place to root in when you feel like it,”—an evasive reply, which proved to me that he knew no more about it than I did. This building, hidden by climbing vines and green moss, is picturesque as an old ruin; only it is no ruin,—it is good for a century yet.
The fences on the place are of rails, which would be all right and appropriate if only they were good rails; but, alas! the storms and stress of the seasons have borne so heavily upon them that they have mostly given up trying to be fences, and have lain down in discouraged and straggling heaps along the boundary lines. We are told that this ranch was well kept up by its former owners when they were living here, but since then has been sadly misused and abused by tenants. It now, I fancy, resembles the “abandoned farms” of the East. At first these unsightly things worried us; but soon there came to us a reproving voice from the everlasting hills, saying, “Oh, you poor anxious atoms away down there in the glen, fretting your small souls because of an inartistic cowshed, forgetting God’s beauty all around and above you. Are you not ashamed?” We were ashamed, and these things at least are no longer “a speck in our sunshine.”
Many of our Eastern friends have written us that the Oregon rains must be terrible, the many gray days pressing heavily upon us poor mortals cooped up in our little mountain home. But this sympathy is not altogether called for. In the first place, the rains here don’t come with a wind that wraps your skirts about you like a winding-sheet and turns your umbrella inside out. They fall straight down from the heavens, in a decent, unhurrying way. Having six months to do it in, there is no occasion for haste or bluster. As to wet days being depressing here, they are not half so much so as in a city where one sees only wet muddy pavements and a black sea of bobbing umbrellas. Now, as this happens to be a rainy day, let me describe it to you. In the old stone fireplace pitchy pine knots are blazing like campaign torches, filling the big room with a ruddy glow. Outside are gray skies, falling rain, and sodden earth; but from a window here by my desk, I see the wet leaves of the orchard trees ablaze with color, and through this vista, just below, an old fence overgrown with blackberry and wild rose-bushes; beyond it, a narrow strip of gray stubble land, splotched with the brown of dead ferns and weeds; skirting its farthest side is the fringing foliage of the brook, a mass of tender green, yellow, and russet; and back of all this, the mighty hills, an unbroken wall of dark green, splashed with the scarlet and gold of autumn, and just now enmeshed in purple mists.
While writing the last sentence or two, Nature’s scene-shifter must have been busy; for now, as I look, a thin gauzy veil of mist stretches straight across these heights. Through this shadowy screen the hills seem remote, the trees vague and spectral; the vivid hues of autumn have faded to the late afterglow of a summer sunset. These hills are my joy and my despair. I could cry with vexation when I try to picture them to others. Such fleeting and changeful beauty should be sketched only by the hand of a master. I knew this all the time, but fools, you know, rush in where angels fear to tread, and I did so want to show you something of this out-door beauty, that you might at least partially understand why we are not depressed in gloomy weather.
As to being “cooped up” in this little mountain place, I should think we were rather less cramped for room than those friends who write us from city houses and “flats.” We have our own broad domains, besides free range of the whole of the Coast Mountains, for here are no “no trespassing” signs for the unarmed intruder. Here, too, we are free from “the tyranny of clothes.” If one feels a sudden longing for a walk in the fresh air, no careful street toilet need be made in fear of critical eyes, as in a city, where, Thoreau says, “the houses are so arranged, in lanes and fronting one another, that every traveller has to run the gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child gets a lick at him.” Here, with rubber overshoes added to the in-door toilet and a shawl thrown over the head, one is equipped for the woods and fields, no eye beholding save those of the beasts of the fields and the fowls of the air; and their eyes are kind, not critical. One year of this free life in the Oregon hills, untrammelled by conventionalities, is better than “fifty years of Europe,” and when I leave these glorious solitudes it will be to enter “that low green tent whose curtain never outward swings.”