Firm active: 1907-1921
Minneapolis, Minnesota :: Chicago, Illinois
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania :: Portland, Oregon
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Purcell and Elmslie, Architects Firm active: 1907-1921
Minneapolis, Minnesota :: Chicago, Illinois |
Camp-Fire Musings
Musing the First: The Camp-Fire
MANKIND has never willingly relinquished the camp-fire. It is not preference, but necessity, that has driven him indoors. Even there he carried and rekindled its embers, and it became the hearth-fire: a flame, sister to the flame of love. So much he rescued from the loss of Paradise. It is not till the overcrowding of his own kind has exterminated the game and ravaged the forests with steel and fire, and not till the increase of competing herds has exhausted the pastures, that man will fence in for himself a patch of the wilderness, domesticate for himself a few of its birds and quadrupeds, and build for himself a castle. Civilization is to him a choice of evils, and he has never forgot- ten nor ceased to long for Paradise, with its unlimited breadth and freedom—with its camp-fires glimmering on distant hill or mountain-side or stream; their rays telling of fellowship, hospitality, and liberty. Civilization is tyranny. At its best it is the most tyrannical. Its limitations and restrictions follow us and harass us wherever we are and whatever we do, and remind us at every turn that we are slaves. It intrudes upon us in most unreasonable and capricious particulars. We may not wear comfortable clothing, must swelter in the heat, be sodden in the rain, and pinched and frozen in the cold. It follows us with its requisitions from the cradle to the grave, and snatches at our fleeing spirits for a further dole.
Our little boys do not forget. They are epitomes of the early life of the race, as their whole lives will, in old age, be handbooks of the history of man, each individual volume complete in itself. The charming little barbarians do not forget. In no way can they be more delighted than by permitting them to build a mimic camp-fire, a thing which has no attraction except curiosity for any other creature that creeps or flies. To the boy it is a resistless attraction and an unfailing delight. Wordsworth finds expression for this fact in the higher realms of being when he says:
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness.
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home."
Nature is a munificent mistress, but she is a sulky slave. We
may grow plants under glass, but their flowers are without perfume and their
fruit without flavor. We may bring in the roots of the cranberry and strawberry,
and be sure from the growth in form and color that we have effected a capture,
only to find that the exquisite tang, the spirit of the fruit, has fled back to
the woods. We do not know whether nature weeps or laughs at our blackberries and
raspberries, backed stiffly up against the garden fence, and fettered with
pieces of lath; but seek out those of her own growing, in some secluded nook,
the hooked vines bending with ebon or ruddy clusters, hidden away under canopies
of dewy leaves, while a saucy bird scolds at you from a twig above.
We have domesticated the duck, but we have failed to domesticate its beautiful
plumage and its matchless flavor. The speckled beauty which cuts the foam of the
cascade with your line is nature's; hers the bass which makes it sing like a
harp; hers the muskallonge which puts such an ache in your fingers, as you
handle the reel, that you think you can stand it no longer. Compare a quarter of
beef, hung at the door of a marketman's shop, with the sudden apparition of a
crowned stag, in his new uniform of blue, upon the shore of a lonely lake; or a
roast of pork in a basket to a bear shambling along a hillside. Nature's birds
of plumage and song are not for your prison. The poor canary does his
best to remember the music of his tribe, but how
can he? How can he sing the songs of Teneriffe in a strange land? What, indeed,
are his best efforts to the mellifluous ring of the thrush in our own woods?
Your love at a summer resort is sweet—there is no denying it; but you are not to
her what you would be in a ramble with her alone in a solitary wilderness. It is
as chivalrous as the circumstances will permit to pick up her purposely dropped
glove; but what is that to gathering her in your arms, and wading the swirling
rapids or the treacherous swamp, letting her rest timidly yet securely upon your
stalwart manhood, endurance, and courage.
There is an impalpable, invisible, softly stepping delight in the camp-fire which escapes analysis. Enumerate all its charms, and still there is some-thing not in your catalogue. There are paths of light which it cuts through the darkness; there are elfish forms winking and twisting their faces in the glowing ash-veiled embers; there are black dragons' heads with red eyes, and jaws grinning to show their fiery teeth; the pines whisper to the silence; the sentinel trees seem to advance and retire; you may hear the distant scream of the wolf, or the trumpet of the moose, or the note of a solitary night bird, or the more familiar note of the loon. All these surround and conceal some other delight, as the body veils while it reveals the soul.
Our birth is a sleep and a forgetting, and yet a remembering. It is the memory of the wide, wide world that has come down to us in our blood, and of the camp-fire of our tribal ancestors, and of their and our original ancestor who built his camp-fire under the. trees of the garden, eastward in Eden. Sitting in its glow we are home again, though we know it not, nor can tell whence cometh the delight. It is rest and freedom from care. The sheltering trees look down upon us with calm pleasure, and soothe us to sleep with their whispered lullaby—a song which the mother yet sings to the baby cradled upon her breast, without knowing who composed it or whence it came.
There was a rush for home, a tumbling together, and away we flew, two hundred and fifty miles due north, the last dozen of it in a caboose of an iron-ore train, which slacked up for us far out in the trackless forest. The tumbling Brule in front, the charming Chicagoan Lake back of us in the woods, a spring of the sweetest, coldest water at the root of an old hemlock; pines, birches, cedars, maples, all around. The first question that is asked me at home is, "How about the mosquitoes?"—a question which displays ignorance of this high-spirited siren. She is a stickler for etiquette. She demands precedence in the procession and attention to her music. She bites you because you invade her urban temples before she has finished her oratorios. You must wait till she has concluded her outing, sung her last madrigal, and gone over to bite the angels. There is nothing mean about her. She does not, like her human counterpart at Newport or Saratoga, seek to monopolize everything. She leaves all her possessions to you for the most delightful months of the year, August, September, and October.
"
Charlie's" ax is ringing, and down comes a hemlock. What's that for? Your bed, of course. The tent is spread. The corner selected for sleeping is piled with hemlock twigs, and a sweeter bed, or one more springy, is not to be had for love or money. First a rubber blanket, then a sheet, and then a woolen blanket, and sleep needs no wooing.Everything here that is found is in unbounded opulence. Amid thousands of square miles of virgin forests, and with good axes in hand, why should we not have imperial camp-fires? The knack of the ax-man, when acquired in boyhood, is never lost. The blow that will go deepest and throw out the encumbering chip is an achievement of high art. And such fires as rewarded a half-hour's labor! The logs, cut from twelve to fifteen feet long, and piled high, have the promise and potency of three splendid fires, one, and the first, from the middle portion, and one more to be taken as required from each end. Three cords of good wood for an evening is no waste, and the air is cold enough to make the heat as agreeable as the flame is inspiring. While no desolation is so sad as a fire-swept forest or city, yet the destructive agent is the source and the revealer of all material beauty and glory.
Nothing that was known to primitive men was so worthy an object of worship. It awakens a sense of dangerous power like the lion; of lithe beauty like the leopard; of whelming mastery like the flood. Yet it delighted the eyes, warmed the heart as well as the hands, was a warrior against the cold, a signal for the lost, a sentinel which drove off beasts of prey. The spirit of the fire was the spirit of a man, as kindly and as fierce—a thing of human contradictions. "Fire that is kept closest burns most of all" ; and whether in the passions or in literal coals, is wedded to bitter ashes and smirch. But our camp-fire waves banners of joy and fires volleys of victory. With savage imprecations Caliban resented his task of bringing in the logs, and Ferdinand posed as a martyr of love when Prospero put upon him the same burdens.
"My sweet mistress
Weeps when she sees me work, and says such baseness
Had never like executor."
Miranda was sure the burning logs would weep for having wearied him, and woman-like, wanted to carry them herself.
"If you'll sit down
I'll bear the logs the while: pray give me that;
I'll carry it to the pile--"
and more of that exquisite story of love and logs. There was this difference between the two scenes: our girls were all married; Miranda wanted to be. I will not say that our girls would not have helped us carry the logs if there had been any occasion for it. The specific evidence of this love-loyalty on their part was that they insisted on punching the fire.
The campers in these solitudes are not solitary. In the daytime the trees are trees. Very beautifully and loftily the spires of pine and hemlock rise out of the valley, and the birch and maple over-shadow us, but they are only trees. At night, when the torch is applied to the wealth of accumulated fuel, they are trees no longer. They leave their places and come out of the darkness to join our company. They say not a word, and yet not even to man is given such a variety of character and so much of the mystery of the spiritual world. We catch the thought of that white and stately birch—calmness, purity, and dignity. And so of that mighty pine, somber and lofty. This rustling maple is an old friend. We understand him. He is no mystic, no poet. He talks about. sweetness, shade, and beauty—familiar topics.
That keen but musical and somewhat plaintive note which sounds so far and clear through the forest is that of the white-throated sparrow. There is a tramping heard in the silence of the night, the cause of which is revealed by deer-tracks in the morning near the tents. A few squirrels invite themselves to breakfast, one little chap taking his piece of cracker in his right hand. The crossbills and moose-birds soon establish confidential relations with us. The sweetly plaintive song of the sparrow suggested an interpreter—that its "fancies into fancies linking" should be transferred from the leaves of the forest to the leaves of memory—that the bird should be asked to confess all that was in its little overful heart; therefore:
| THE POET: Sweet sprite of the forest unseen 'Mid its canopies somber and green, Art thou Love that is baffled and crossed? Is the cry that we hear, So plaintive and clear, Sweet Love in the wilderness lost? Ah me—me—me! |
| THE SPARROW: And dost thou not know, my sweet swain, That Love's the twin brother of Pain, And reaches the heart through a wound ? I'm not Love that is crossed, I'm not Love that is lost, I am Love in the wilderness found. Ah me—me—me! |
| THE POET : Aphrodite was born of the sea, And so it has happened for me My white lily bloomed on the tide; Her sweet-breathed charms Floated up to my arms Fate must have decreed her my bride. Blest me—me—me! |
| THE SPARROW : But nymphs who are born of the sea You know are capricious and free, And sometimes defiant of fate. Remember, sweet swain, Like Rapture and Pain, That Love is the brother of Hate. Ah me—me—me! |
| THE POET : Sad sprite of the forest, thy song Is omen of pitiless wrong, And sweetly bemoaneth my fate. Too oft, as with you, The false wins the true— Love's arrows are stolen by Hate. Ah me—me—me! |
NEXT Camp-Fire Musings: Nature and the Supernatural