My Last Frontier
I SAW the two doctors who stood over me exchange glances. Then the one with the pointed beard said casually, ‘You had better go West and live out of doors. Massachusetts in the month of March —’ And again their eyes met for a telltale second. I had returned to Boston from the tropics far gone with jungle fever, and I had every reason to believe that these gentlemen were pronouncing my death sentence.
So here I stood among great Douglas firs in the Washington forest, looking at the first piece of land I had ever owned. I had fooled the two doctors by partly recovering my health, had got a job in Tacoma, and had bought five acres of wild land at one hundred dollars an acre — five dollars down and five dollars a month. All about me the usual gambling in Western land was going on, and by taking advantage of the misfortunes of others I gradually was able to increase my holding to fifty acres. Those hazards of fortune whereby I profited included, I remember, such things as a mysterious disappearance, embezzlement and flight, divorce, insanity, murder.
The years have passed, and where those giant firs once stood are my farm buildings, equipped with every convenience of the city except gas, and surrounded by acres of cherry trees, over which will soon ‘ break the white foam of the Spring.’ In place of the forest trails that once surrounded me are paved roads, and along the valley just below my ranch now pass three transcontinental railroads, the blasts from whose whistles have heartened me many a time in the dead of night when I have lain awake discouraged by the sheer enormity of the thing I had undertaken. Looking back over those years, what I accomplished seems incredible, and I find myself studying as if he were a stranger the fellow who did it. Sometimes I approve, sometimes I condemn; but I always wonder at the tenacity of purpose he displayed. There was something elemental, impersonal, in that patient striving against apparently hopeless odds that suggests the basic fighting man, stripped of the frills of civilization. It is, I like to think, the same quality that has enabled the American people to reclaim a continent from the wilderness in a trifling two hundred years, and establish upon it the most forceful and dynamic civilization the world has ever known.
I
I had owned the beginnings of my property something over a year when I hired a van in which to move all my worldly possessions out to ‘the ranch.’ With my wife, who had crossed the continent to join me, and my two little children in the seat with the driver, we set out for the wilderness with, I fancied, the shades of a thousand pioneers looking approvingly on. The last thing to be loaded into the van was my typewriter, which had been an inseparable companion on three continents, and by whose keys I had won a livelihood until sickness obliged me to put it aside. ’I’ll soon be pounding away at you again,’ I thought, as I wrapped a sweater about it to lessen the jar of the road. How little I knew!
A bachelor whose land adjoined ours was leaving his two-room shack for the summer to work in a logging camp, and he allowed us to occupy it until I could build a cabin. Three things I remember about that shack: the rats that used to scurry across the floor in the dead of night, frightening the children; an irate old skunk I inadvertently trapped under the doorstep; and a Plymouth Rock hen that a neighbor had given us on our departure from the city. The hen hatched out eleven chickens, and although I now keep hens by the thousand, they have small interest for me when compared with that militant old biddy who fought off skunks, rats, weasels, hawks, with a valor that should win her a distinguished place in whatever Valhalla is reserved for the brave spirits of the feathered world.
Of course I held on to my job in the city, and night and morning I walked a mile to the nearest station, rode ten miles on an interurban train whose motion suggested sea rather than land travel, and then walked half a mile farther to my work. Through drenching rains and occasionally through kneedeep snow I made that round trip for years, until at last Henry Ford came to the rescue for $250 down and $33.50 a month — for me at that time a staggering sum. Jungle fever returned regularly every spring and fall, warning me against the danger of the inside job I was holding; but, poorly paid as I was,
I dared not give it up, as that small monthly income was all that made possible my farming venture. Occasionally I thought of sums of money I had squandered here and there about the earth with a light heart, and then ‘ the rose’s scent was bitterness to him that loved the rose.’
How vividly I recall my first glimpse of the spot where our cabin was to stand. I had crawled through a tangle of salal brush and over huge fir trees that some ‘twister’ had uprooted and piled crisscross to the height of a good ten feet. I was standing on top of one of these monsters when I spied a glacial dump that sloped gradually away in three directions, affording a rare view not only of Mount Rainier, but of a hundred miles of the Cascades and the Olympics. On that spot, in sight of those life-giving mountains, I would build a house, however humble, that would be my very own, and for the use of which no landlord could collect rent. That vision was one of the rare moments of my life. II
The dump, however, was buried deep under fallen logs and a tangle of shrubs. I had brought with me a sevenfoot saw, and I set to work with a will. But before I had cut the first log halfway off I collapsed. The fear that came over me as I lay there in the leatheryleaved salal and realized the thickness of that fir trunk still grips my heart at times in memory. But I sawed the log off before dark, and finally succeeded in junking up enough down timber to make room for the unpretentious structure I wished to erect. With the help of a neighbor and his span of horses I at last uncovered a few square rods of mother earth, and when a couple of loads of lumber had been brought in over an old logging road I was ready for my first job of carpentry.
Planning a skyscraper could not have been undertaken with a weightier sense of responsibility. A saw, a hammer, a square, a spirit level, made up my entire stock of carpenter’s tools, and in the use of these I was far from proficient. For a foundation I had the horses draw together three cedar logs, and when I had leveled these the work of house building seemed well under way. How to brace the walls so that they would not collapse under the first stiff sou’wester presented a problem hitherto undreamed of in my philosophy, and my wholly original solution of it has since amused more than one carpenter. The roof I shingled by lantern light, often working until after midnight. I remember an owl that came occasionally and perched on the peak, eying my every movement with an air that seemed a mixture of amazement tinctured with contempt.
If I should build a mansion, the pleasure of occupying it could not compare with the sheer joy I experienced the first evening the little family sat down in what was kitchen, dining room, and living room of the partly completed cabin. After years of hotel and boarding-house life I was in a house of my own at last! And the following winter, when there were only the shingles between us and the Puget Sound downpours, or the snow sifted in upon our faces through the space under the eaves that I had failed to close properly, it was still home in that instinctive, factual sense which is the foundation of the family, the community, and the nation.
A house we now had, but what should we do for water? Why, dig a well, of course! But there were discouraging rumors that the subsoil in this part of the state was composed of glacial drift as hard as cement, into which pioneers had driven shafts to the depth of more than one hundred feet without striking water. I found a couple of Swedes who were willing to undertake the job for $1.50 a lineal foot, and they brought with them a thick-thewed giant who, with the aid of a forked hazel branch, was to designate the site for the well. After much solemn foolery he declared that the only water available was directly under the house! I was for moving the house, but my very sane wife objected; so we compromised on the one spot that, according to the giant with the hazel branch, was dry straight down to China. The two Swedes agreed to this with alacrity, as it seemed to hold the promise of an all-summer’s job.
I had enough money to progress toward China a trifling thirty feet, and it was with decidedly mixed emotions that I saw the pile of earth and empty ‘Copenhagen’ cartons growing beside the steadily deepening hole. At mealtime my wife occasionally glanced out of the window in that direction, but maintained a discreet silence. Silence, I have come to think, is the most eloquent language in the world. Then one evening on my return from work I saw the Swede with a head like Burne-Jones’s ‘Odin’ emptying some muddy water from a bucket! The sight of that water gave me as much joy as did ever an oasis in the desert to a thirsty traveler. The Swedes had found water at a depth of twenty feet — much to their disgust.
The story of that well would fill the proverbial volume, with a deal of good material left over for a supplement. It had the perverse habit of overflowing in the winter and going bone dry in the late fall, compelling me to haul water for cows and hens from a distant pond in the night, as I thought the daylight too precious to devote to such a task. Once I lowered that well ten feet in a single night, drawing out the water with a twelve-quart pail and a leather strap to fight a forest fire that threatened the buildings. On another occasion, when I forgot to replace the cover, a full-grown skunk fell in — to the decided detriment of the water. One morning after a torrential rain I drew up a large snake, as gaudily decorated as any viewed by the Ancient Mariner. Now the well is full of stones, a water main passes just in front of it, and my car goes over it as I enter the garage.
And the fight that was waged to secure that water main suggests those that preceded a herd law, rural mail delivery, electric light, paved roads, and the many other improvements that go to the making of an up-to-date American community. When I arrived among the Scandinavians who have been my companions in arms through all these combats I was a somewhat arrogant ‘highbrow,’ but I have sweated the most of that affliction out of my system along with the jungle fever.
III
The first tree I felled on our future ranch was, so far as I am concerned, one of those milestones in history of which we used to hear in our school days. The tree — a fir that might have served for Satan’s spear as he crossed the burning marle — was ‘ fast-rooted in the fruitful soil’ some three rods away from our cabin door. Fuel we had to have, so I set about to fell the nearest source of supply. With the aid of a ‘chink’ (a spring pole so placed that it holds the farther end of the saw against the tree), I doggedly severed the proud old monarch from his stump. He reeled in the gathering dusk as if afflicted with vertigo, swayed dangerously toward the cabin, and then, as if in answer to my fervent supplication, turned a quarter circle on the stump and crashed down in a spot where no damage was done. I was too ignorant of woodcraft to undercut the tree on the side toward which I intended it to fall. Later I became proficient at toppling over these giants, placing them within a few inches of the spot where I wished them to lie. But the memory of that near extinction of my family removed any trace of rashness from those operations.
The building of the barn taxed my ability as a carpenter almost to the breaking point. For, unlike the cabin, it had to be a two-story affair in order to provide a hayloft. The nails that entered into that structure seriously depleted the family treasury, and to this day they are occasionally pointed out to visitors by my wife as an example of shocking extravagance. Indeed, the walls so bristle with nails that she declares that one could pick up the entire building with a giant magnet and transport it to the next state. She does not know what I do — namely, that the magnet would draw the nails and leave the lumber behind. Women are so unscientific!
The barn completed, we must have a cow. If, gentle reader, you never have passed that particular milestone, your life’s pilgrimage has not been as full of interest and diversion as it might have been. Early one Sunday morning I started off in search of a cow, followed by my wife’s benediction and the best wishes of the children, who never yet had had all the milk they wanted. With the ‘ For Sale’ page of the Sunday paper in my pocket, I at length came to a dairy owned by a red-faced, sandyhaired Scot. His herd of Jerseys were feeding knee-deep in clover about his house, and drew me like a magnet. Yes, he was selling off the entire herd — did n’t like the Sound country as well as Alberta. A fawn-colored creature with big appealing eyes arrested my attention, and I asked the price of her. ‘Eighty-five dollars,’ came the prompt reply. His slatternly wife gave him a look of surprise and started to speak; but he silenced her with a sidelong glance. The cow’s udder was so perfectly formed that it did not occur to me to try out each quarter before closing the deal. When the Scotchman delivered the cow in my absence the next day he produced a small glass tube and a ‘needle,’ explaining to my unsuspecting wife that I should have to use the two instruments on one of the hind teats at milking time, as the cow had been run into by a wood truck that very morning and her udder slightly injured. Barnum may have been right in his estimate that the world is presented with a fool every minute, but in the light of my transaction with that Scotchman it seems a bit conservative.
But Sooky proved a most lovable creature, even if she did promptly go dry in one hind quarter, and the children feasted and grew fat on her rich yellow milk, until one day I fed her too much ‘shorts’ and killed her. The look in the children’s eyes as they gathered about her bloated body the next morning made me feel like a murderer. But milk we must have, so I was obliged to borrow money with which to buy another cow — a wise old Jersey with many wrinkles on her blunted horns, with which she could demolish the stoutest rail fence and lead all the stray cattle in the neighborhood in a raid upon some unsuspecting Swede’s cabbage patch.
After Old Boss came a herd of elephantine Holsteins, which I used to milk night and morning in addition to my work in Tacoma. I would finish my chores about midnight, and be up by four o’clock the next morning. The abiding fear of falling asleep at my job in the city sometimes took the form of a nightmare rivaling those ‘terrible dreams that shake us nightly’ with which poor Macbeth was afflicted. Evenings, as I passed down the line milking Trixie, Bess, Silky, Sally, and the rest, my little boy would move along with me and beg for stories. These I improvised as I tugged and sweated at the great udders, failing him only when I reached White Elephant, whose teats were as large as my wrist and as hard as gas pipe.
I wish I had committed those sheer whimsicalities to paper. There were stories of a beautiful bronze swallow that every fall led his fellows over a great snow-capped mountain into a valley where there were no guns and boys never threw stones; of an ‘Admiral Bullfrog’ whose mighty voice hushed all the other frogs as he summoned them to make war on the mosquitoes in the next pond, and how they sailed away in trim green galleons made of lily pads with fireflies for ship’s lanterns; of a huge brown bear that took brave boys on his back to fight Indians. How the little fellow’s eyes would shine when I reached the place where the bear charged on his hind legs into a band of pesky redskins that had stolen a white child, and how eagerly he would call ‘More, more,’ whenever I paused for breath! In due time he discovered that they were ‘just stories,’ and gradually forsook me for adventures of his own, making the milking seem doubly long and hard.
Tending each heifer through the birth of her first calf was always a trying experience, and one that sometimes moved me profoundly. The recurrent birth pangs, the patient suffering, the troubled look in the big smoky eyes, and then, when it was all over, the gentle nuzzling of the new life, accompanied by many soft calls of endearment, are a part of my ranch experience that I treasure beyond riches. Separate a man from intimate association with domestic animals and you have robbed him of a part of his birthright; transfer him to the pavement where his feet seldom touch the life-giving mother earth and he is poor indeed. Never to have served an ailing dumb brute is never to have fully lived.
IV
My fear of the first box of dynamite I handled is still fresh in my memory. I drove Old Bill, a treacherous cayuse that I had picked up for thirty dollars, over to the store and gingerly placed on the back of the wagon a box of 60 per cent dynamite. Every time a wheel struck a rock I glanced apprehensively back to see if there were any signs of an explosion. To-day I am regarded as a first-class ‘powder man,’ treating dynamite with so much contempt, however, that I have had some narrow escapes. Once when a shot hung fire for more than an hour I had nearly reached it when it went off, planting a hefty boulder so close to me that the mud on it soiled the tip of my shoulder as it passed. On another occasion I had loaded five shots, and in counting them as they exploded got one shot ahead. I was within a few feet of the fifth stump when I spied the still-burning fuse, and barely had time to fling myself behind a near-by log before a third of the stump went hurtling over me.
How to dispose of the great firs that, standing or fallen, still encumbered the land was a knotty problem, of which dynamite and fire seemed the only solution. So I felled beautiful five-foot trees rising one hundred feet without a branch, bored into their butts with a two-inch ship auger, and, after cracking them open with dynamite, set fire to them. As a successful shot split a log a good thirty feet, the work progressed rapidly. A wanton destruction of timber, you say. Yes; but what was I to do? Either for lumber or for firewood, the logs would not pay the cost of labor and transportation.
Outside of heavy artillery in war, I can think of nothing more exciting than blasting out large Douglas-fir stumps with dynamite. There are several patented devices for burning them in the ground, but the experienced land clearer always returns to dynamite. Some of the stumps on my land were seven feet in diameter, with a root radius of thirty feet. It took a man two days to dig a suitable dynamiting hole under one of these giants that stood within ten rods of my house. Under the stump I placed two hundred sticks of dynamite, and the cavity formed by the explosion would have come near to holding the house, which, by the way, escaped undamaged. Indeed, an experienced dynamiter can blow a stump within a rod of a house and not crack a pane of glass.
On one five-acre lot with a bumper crop of large stumps I was obliged to use an electric blaster, as there were electric-light wires on two sides of it which the power company owning them was obliged by law to lay on the ground every morning before the dynamiting began, and replace in time for lighting purposes at night. Under these conditions I was expected to work with all possible speed, and we would shoot as many as thirty of the monsters at one time. The upheaval that accompanied the shoving home of the switch had something truly diabolical about it, which I occasionally recall as I trim the cherry trees that now occupy the land.
Once a partly deaf Bohemian who was working for me on that job did not hear the warning cry of ‘Dynamite!’ and found himself in the midst of one of these upheavals. Incredible as it may seem, he escaped without a scratch, only to die six months later from a tap on the head.
And then, when a block of land was ready, there was the tree planting, that age-old acknowledgment of man’s stubborn belief in the goodness of God. To prune the trees in the way they should go was nothing short of a religious rite, and the understanding between man and tree goes deeper, I suspect, — reaches further into the ‘dark backward and abysm of time,’ — than any human relations.
How well I remember the first apple that grew on the ranch! It was nestled away among thick-clustering leaves on the south side of a Jonathan tree, and, owing to the shade, only a small part of the cheek was red. How disappointed I was when I picked it and found a hole drilled to the core by the bill of a sharpeyed blue jay!
V
Through all these stirring times I led a dual life, in odd moments falling upon some treasured volume like a famished man upon food. For a time I continued to jot down plots for fiction and ideas for articles in a large-sized Bank of California check book that, for want of anything better at hand, I had once seized upon for the purpose. A novel I had long been plotting kept evolving, until the characters in it seemed so familiar that I would see them and hear them talking in my dreams. Sometimes ‘Joe’ would try to tell me all about the marvelous things he saw and heard in the bottom of the pond when he got entangled in the lily pads, and cursed us with scorching curses for bringing him back to life; but, outside of the curses, the words I listened to so breathlessly would never quite carry over into my waking consciousness.
But a sixteen-hour day on a ranch leaves neither time nor surplus energy for writing, and, although I occasionally crawled away into the haymow and wrote a little, my wife always found me asleep with only a paragraph or two completed and an illegible scrawl for the last penciled word. I would wake with a start and, with a feeling of guilt at having neglected the ranch, go back to the land clearing with redoubled vigor. A chance glimpse of the dustcovered typewriter would occasionally bring on a fit of black despondency; but I came to avoid that too potent reminder of other days, until gradually the attacks grew fewer and at last ceased.
Popular fiction I never have been able to read, and my favorite authors I had to avoid. To reread them was like reverting to a drug habit that one had fought long and desperately. Carman, Henley, Watson, Phillips, Housman, Yeats, Moira O’Neill, I could not escape, for I virtually knew them by heart; but Amiel, Hardy, Conrad, Olive Schreiner, I came to avoid as I would the plague. If of an all-too-brief evening I started a volume by one of them, I would not put it down till daylight, and the family would find me a bit difficult the following day.
One morning I was about to rush out of the house for further land-clearing operations, when my wife detained me. She gave a preliminary glance about the room, and as I followed her eyes I realized that something was about to happen. ‘The children can’t live in this way any longer,’ she announced quietly, folding her slim, flour-covered hands in her apron with an air of finality that permitted of only one reply. ‘We’ll build an addition to the house,’ I decided. But thus far all our available cash had gone into either land buying or land clearing, and I had come to take the weather-beaten cabin for granted. Suddenly I realized the privations she had endured through our farming venture, and for a little I wished from the bottom of my heart that I had remained a poor renter in the city. But this, I have since come to realize, was wasted sympathy, for her love of the ranch and her pride in its development have been even greater and more single-minded than my own.
As we had no money with which to build an addition to the house, we should have to borrow it. We were both of old Puritan stock, to whom going in debt was little short of a crime, and the execution of a mortgage wholly abhorrent. Scourging myself to the point of asking a stranger to lend me money was one of the most trying experiences of my life, and the signing of that small mortgage required more courage than to face artillery fire.
VI
‘Bulldozing’ the huge granite boulders that glacial ice had at some remote time brought all the way from Canada and deposited here and there over the ranch was always a first-class adventure. I would climb on top of the boulder, determine as nearly as I could the centre of gravity, and, surrounding this with a framework of boards, fill the enclosed space with wet clay. In this I would bury 60 per cent dynamite, — occasionally as many as one hundred sticks, — cover it with more clay, and, when I had ignited the fuse, rush out upon the highway to intercept passing automobiles, shouting ‘Dynamite!’ at the top of my lungs as I ran. To hold in check some irate motorist while waiting for the ear-splitting explosion was occasionally a stirring experience. Sometimes the enforced delay would open in the man at the wheel the floodgates of profanity, and on one occasion he attempted to translate his wrath into something more substantial than words. Once while flagging a fast-moving ‘eight’ I was mistaken for a hold-up man and narrowly escaped with my life.
If the charge was well placed, the blow delivered by the bulldozing process was sufficient to reduce the toughest granite boulder to a formless heap of rubble, the only part escaping disintegration being that immediately under the dynamite. Once I tackled a large flat boulder situated about one hundred feet from the new addition to the house, in which I had placed unusually large panes of glass. So far as the boulder was concerned, the shot was successful; but the vacuum formed by the explosion sucked out all the glass on two sides of the house, depositing some of the fragments ten feet away upon the lawn. My good wife promptly appeared in one of the paneless sashes, and the look with which she looked on me has never faded from my memory.
By a process of trial and error the place gradually shaped itself into a hen and fruit ranch, providing enough revenue for steady expansion and improvements. Life in the open had at last conquered my jungle fever, and I looked out over the costly plant and fruitful acres with a sense of real achievement. Gradually I became deeply attached to it all, among other things to the wealth of bird life that frequented every nook and shelter. Cutting away the gloomy fir forest increased rather than diminished the number of my feathered friends. Gay Chinese pheasants and sprightly Rocky Mountain quail multiplied, filling the spring sunshine with their ecstatic mating calls, and enjoying the tender green grass of our lawn before the household was abroad. Varied thrushes, wood thrushes, towhees, bluebirds, flickers, grosbeaks, sparrows in great variety, meadow larks, robins, were, one or another, seldom out of sight of our dining-room window.
My long hours made me familiar with the ‘sunsets and great dawns’ that burned down into the Olympics and flamed up over the Cascades, until their seasonal procession behind these sharply serrated ranges became an inseparable part of my life. I had worked until I indeed belonged to those ‘horny-handed sons of toil’ of which the punsters speak so facetiously. As my hands gradually muscled out, I was obliged to remove my wedding ring from the ring finger of my left hand (I am left-handed) to that of my right; and there it must remain, for it is now so tight that it cannot again be removed. Of course, some of our friends dropped us; but a few remained loyal, and with the coming of paved roads and the fast automobile we again became neighbors. Life had never seemed more worth while.
VII
Then one day a totally unexpected thing happened. I was looking for something in a dark closet, when I chanced upon my typewriter — that faithful but long-neglected servant that had accompanied me the globe around, and through whose chipped and darkened keys copy had been typed for more newspapers and magazines in America, the British Empire, and the Orient than I could well remember. It was a spring day, spiritual with the stainless white of cherry blossoms and the Te Deum of birds and bees; but these did not save me from a sudden feeling of desolation. So fierce had been the struggle to make a ranch out of the intractable wilderness that fifteen years in the best period of my life had passed like a watch in the night, and, so far as my writing was concerned, the waters of oblivion had rolled over me. I took down the dust-covered machine with the feeling of one who disinters a long-buried friend. Removing its case, I found under the roller a time-stained sheet of paper on which I had stopped typing in the midst of a Polynesian story, the plot of which I had utterly forgotten.
On coming to the ranch I had stored in the attic a box containing either copies or memoranda of most of the things I had published, and with the feeling of one who summons spirits back from the dead I hunted it up, only to find that mice had made their nest in it and reduced its contents to fragments. To recover the originals would take me through the files of magazines and newspapers scattered over three continents; so I cleared out the bits of paper, filled the box with some monthly statements from my bank, and went out into the cherry orchard with the feeling that I had indeed sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.
But, now that I have had time to think it over, I am not so sure that my life has been an unqualified failure. Had I not lost my health, I probably should have added a few philosophic novels to the already glutted fiction market, but I have no reason to presume that they would have lived beyond the usual brief span enjoyed by the average run of fiction. As it is, I have made a modest but real contribution to my country, one that starts no controversies, sows no discontent. The ranch which I have won from the Washington forest with characteristic American enterprise and hard work is my monument, and it will hearten my fellow men long after any book I might have written would have been forgotten.
The scent of cherry blossoms steals in through the open door as I write these words. I’ll go out and watch the bees at the eternal miracle of making nature fruitful.