Mountain Mania

I MAY as well admit at the outset that I climb mountains myself. I spent the summer in a community in the White Mountains where one was considered hardly respectable unless on every brisk day one dressed up like a pirate and went steaming off up a peak; and I admit that I steamed with the best of them. I wore a flannel shirt that could hold its own against any. No khaki trousers in the neighborhood were more variously spotted, more quaintly discolored, than mine. No tin cup jangled more loudly at any hip than did mine. No sneakers, once white, took on more exactly the sombre hue of the mountain trails up which they twinkled. No one devoured dry sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs with more gusto.

But to everybody who climbs there comes at last a moment of introspection and doubt. That moment came to me one night when I was camping, without shelter, high on a mountain slope, and when, at about 2 A.M., I felt a first drop of rain on my nose. That drop of rain quickened my torpid brain; the events of the preceding hours passed in review and I asked myself, ‘Why do we climb mountains?’

I had ascended that mountain the previous afternoon, bent double under the weight of a pack that, in any civilized place, under any normal circumstances, I should n’t dream of carrying, if I could hire a porter or an express company to carry it for me. If any employer had paid me, for any useful purpose, to fume and struggle as I did on that climb, and the Consumers League had caught hint at it, we should have heard a lot about a new sweated industry. When I arrived at my destination, I built a fire which for cooking purposes was practically worthless. On that fire I cooked what I was pleased to call a meal. I am convinced that if that meal had been set before me in any restaurant, at the first mouthful I should have risen from my seat and walked resolutely from the room. The doctors and the Life Extension Institute and similar organizations spend thousands of dollars every year trying to educate the public not to eat the sort of meal that I ate on that mountain.

A friend of mine, who is chemically inclined, tells me that he thinks the trouble with that meal was that there were n’t any vitamines in it. He explained to me that, if people go without vitamines for a while, they die. I told him his description convinced me that the meal I cooked did n’t have a single vitamine in it. He asked me if I thought there were any carbohydrates in it, and I told him that if carbohydrates were any good to eat, I believed we did n’t have any. But I admitted that along about midnight I had had an uneasy feeling that a calorie must have got into the soup while I was n’t looking.

After supper, I stretched my wearied limbs to rest on a fir-balsam bed of my own manufacture; and I may say that, if any reputable furniture concern were to put on the market a bed which embodied any of the salient characteristics of mine, an enraged public would sweep it out of business in a week. Finally, at 2 A.M., it began to rain. And I asked myself, ‘Why do we climb mountains?'

I remembered that the theory had been advanced that mountains are climbed for the sake of solitude. I had heard many voices lifted in praise of the solitude of the mountains. Solitude! At the mere suggestion I laughed a dismal laugh. I was not thinking of the dense crowds of mountaineers whom I was wont to encounter on this peak or that, or of the thrilling moments I had spent on the upper rocks of the mountains, dodging the flying ginger-ale bottles and sandwich boxes of those who had already gained the summit. I was thinking of the devoted attentions of the ambassadors of that great triumvirate, mosquitoes, black flies, and midges, of whom, it has been justly said, the greatest of these is midges. In ordinary society, I said to myself, we can generally at least choose our companions. But in the mountains — Well, I am no snob, but there are some visitors who don’t know when to leave. They will not take a hint. No; the solitude hypothesis was a feeble one.

It occurred to me that some persons claimed to go camping in the mountains for the sake of rest. My idea of rest on a mountain, I said to myself, would be to sleep in a spacious four-poster bed, with a roof over me, and at about ninethirty in the morning to open one eye and say to my faithful valet, ‘Meadows, my good fellow, have you warmed the pool and put out my clean clothes for me? Very well, then; now you may describe the sunrise to me. No, I doubt if I shall do any climbing to-day. I may climb out of bed, but I’m not sure.’

Not until I got home from the mountain that night did I discover why it is that we go climbing. Then at last I discovered the secret. It is that only by absolutely depriving ourselves of the comforts of home on the mountains do we learn to enjoy them when we get down. The usual devotee of the mountains, poor wretch, will tell you, as he crawls in under a fifty-pound pack and staggers off up the trail, that the only way really to appreciate the mountains is to go up them. But what I discovered is that the only way really to appreciate the mountains is to come down from them.

That night, when I got home, I found myself in a real house, with a watertight roof over my head. I began to realize what an ingenious device a house is. Windows, for example, which let in light, let in the view, let in air when we want it, and keep it out when it is too hot or too cold for us — I wanted to congratulate the fellow who invented windows. The house, I found, had a kitchen in it, which I had hitherto seldom visited; and in the kitchen was a stove, which sent the smoke up the chimney, collected the heat for the wanning of the food, and kept the rain out of the fire. You may not have realized what a great thing it is to be absolutely sure, when a shower begins, that it won’t put out the fire in the kitchen stove. I appreciated the vast superiority of the stove over a stone fireplace where the smoke blows in your eyes wherever you sit, the ashes deposit themselves in a fine rain on the surface of the coffee, and the fire, after you have finally wheedled it into burning, does so most hotly at the opposite end of the fireplace from the miserable receptacle in which the oatmeal is trying to keep comfortably warm.

That night I ate dinner off a table, sitting in areal chair. For comfort and convenience, rocks simply were n’t in it with that table and chair. Separate spoons for soup and dessert — why, I could hardly believe it. I slept in a bed, with sheets, and with blankets that tucked in, so that you did n’t imperil the whole structure whenever you turned over. And, for that matter, why turn over? The impelling urge that comes from the gradual numbness of a sharp left hip was absent. And pillows! — what an improvement on a knapsack containing a can of condensed milk, a flash light, and half a loaf of bread!

I found myself pausing in rapture before such commonplace objects as a bureau. A contrivance for keeping clothes, — dry clothes, plenty of them, — all stowed away out of sight and out of the dust, combined with a shelf where one can place a comb and brush, and a lamp: how exquisitely adapted to its manifold purposes! I had always taken bureaus for granted. When I came down from the mountain, the mere presence of a bureau in my room made me feel like a millionaire. I had made a great discovery. This modern civilization, which we hear so much decried, is great stuff.

Now that I have learned my lesson, I look with an indulgent eye upon mountain climbers. When morning dawns cool and fair, and I see them plodding forth into the forests, with their tin cups clanking and their drawn faces peering out from under their gigantic rolls of blankets, I wish them well. Sometimes I walk beside them a little distance, until the trail begins to get uncomfortably steep; and then I wave them a jaunty good-bye. They are on their way to the great discovery, I say to myself; and then I walk back to my shady porch, surrounded with mosquito netting; and I sit down, and put my feet up on another chair; and as I comfortably settle myself for the morning, I reflect upon the delights of mountain climbing.