Forgotten Treasures #17: SIXTEEN MILES OF AWE

SIXTEEN MILES OF AWE

Chapter II of "The River and I"
by John G. Neihardt
New York
The Macmillan Company
1927

______________________________________

Our party of three left the railroad at Great Falls, a good two days walk up
river from Benton, the head of Missouri River navigation, to which point our
boat material had been shipped and our baggage checked.

A vast sun-burned waste of buffalo-grass, prickly pears, and sagebrush
stretched before us to the north and east; and on the west the filmy blue
contour of the Highwoods Mountains lifted like sun-smitten thunder clouds in
the July swelter. One squinting far look, however, told you that these were
not rain clouds. The very thought of rain came to you with the vagueness of
some birth-surviving memory of a former time. You looked far up and out to
the westward and caught the glint of snow on the higher peaks. But the
sight was unconvincing; it was like a story told without the "vital
impulse." Always had these plains blistered under this July sun; always had
the spots of alkali made the only whiteness; and the dry harsh snarl and
snap of the grasshoppers' wings had pricked this torrid silence through all
eternity.

A stern and pitiless prospect for the amateur pedestrian, to be sure; for
devotees of the staff and pack have come to associate pedestrianism with the
idyllic, and the idyllic nourishes only in a land of frequent showers.
Theocritus and prickly pears are not compatible. Yet it was not without a
certain thrill of exaltation that we strapped on our packs and stretched our
legs after four days on the dusty plush.

And though ahead of us lay no shady, amiably crooked country roads and bosky
dells, wherein one might lounge and dawdle over Hazlitt, yet we knew how
crisscross cattle-trails should take us skirting down the river's sixteen
miles of awe.

Five hundred miles below its source, the falls of the Missouri begin with a
vertical plunge of sixty feet. This is the Black Eagle Falls, presumably
named so by Lewis and Clark and other explorers, because of the black
eagles found there.

With all due courtesy to my big surly grumbling friend, the Black Eagle
Falls, I must say that I was a bit disappointed in him. Oh! he is quite
magnificent enough, and every inch a Titan, to be sure; but of late years it
seems he has taken up with company rather beneath him. First of all, he has
gone to work in a most plebeian, almost slave-like fashion, turning wheels
and making lights and dragging silly little trolley cars about a straggling
town. Also, he hobnobs continually with a sprawling, brawling, bad-breathed
smelter, as no respectable Titan should do. And on top of it all--and this
was the straw that broke the back of my sentimental camel--he allows them to
maintain a park on the cliffs above him, where the merest white-skinned,
counter-jumping pigmy may come of a Sunday for his glass of pop and a
careless squint at the tiling Titan. Puny Philistines eating peanuts and
watching Samson at his Gaza stunt! I lit it not. Rather would I see the
Muse Clio pealing potatoes or Persephone busy with a banana cart! Encleadus
wriggling under a mountain is well enough; but Encleadus composedly turning
a crank for little men--he seemed too heavy for that light work.

Leaning on the frame observation platform I closed my eyes, and in the dull
roar that seemed the voices of countless ages, the park and the smelter and
the silly bustling trolley cars and the ginger-ale and the peanuts and my
physical self--all but my own soul--were swallowed up. I saw my Titan
brother as he was made--four hundred yards of writhing, liquid sinew,
strenuously idle, magnificently worthless, flinging meaningless thunders
over the vast arid plain, splendidly empty under sun and stars! I saw him
as La Verendrye must have seen him--busy only at the divine business of
being a giant. And for a moment behind shut eyes, it seemed very
inconsequential to me that cranks should be turned and that trolley cars
should run up and down precisely in the same place, never getting anywhere,
and that there should be anything in all that tract but an austere black
eagle or two, and my own soul, and my Titan brother.

When i looked again, I could half imagine the old turbulent fellow winking
slyly at me and saying in that undertone you hear when you forget the
thunders for a moment: "Don't you worry about me, little man. It's all a
joke, and I don't mind. Only to-morrow and then another to-morrow, and
there won't be any smelters or trolley cars or ginger-ale or peanuts or
sentimentalizing outers like yourself. But I'll be here howling under sun
and stars."

Whereupon I posed the toiling philosopher before the camera, pressed the
bulb, and descended from the summit of the cliff (as well as from my point
of view) to the trail skirting northward up the river, leaving Encleadus
grumbling at his crank.

Perhaps, after all, cranks really have to be turned. Still, it seems too
bad, and I have long bewailed it almost as a personal grief, that utility
and ugliness should so often be running mates.

They tell me that the Matterhorn never did a tap of work; and you couldn't
color one Easter egg with all the gorgeous sunsets of the world! May we all
become, some day, perfectly useless and beautiful!


At the foot of the first fall, a mammoth spring wells up out of the rock.
Nobody tells you about it; you run across it by chance, and it interests you
much more in that way. It would seem that a spring throwing out a stream
equivalent to a river one hundred yards wide and two feet deep would deserve
a little exploitation. Down East they would have a great white sprawling
hotel built close by it wherein one could drink spring water (at a quarter
the quart), with half a pathology pasted on the bottle as a label. But
nobody seems to care much about so small an ooze out the everything else
is so big. And so it has nothing at all to do but go right on being one of
the very biggest springs of all the world. This is really something; and I
like it better than the quarter-per-quart idea.

In sixteen miles the Missouri River falls four hundred feet. Incidentally,
this stretch of river is said to be capable of producing the most tremendous
water-power in the world.

After skirting four miles of water that ran like a mill-race, we came upon
the Rainbow Falls, where a thousand feet of river takes a drop of fifty feet
over a precipice regular as a wall of masonry. This was much more to my
liking--a million horse-power so busy making rainbows! Bully!

It was a very hot day and the sun was now high. I sat down to wipe the
sweat out of my eyes. I wished to get acquainted with this weaver of
iridescent nothings who know so well the divine art of doing nothing at all
and doing it good and hard! After all, it isn't so easy to do nothing and
make it count!

And in the end, when all broken lights have blended again with the Source
Light, I'm not so sure that rainbows will seem less important than rows and
rows of arc lights and clusters and clusters of incandescent globes. Are
you? I can contract an indefinable sort of heartache from the blue sputter
of a city light that snuffs out moon and stars for tired scurrying folks:
but the opalescent mist-drift of the Rainbow Falls wove heavens for me in
its sheen, and through its whirlwind rifts and crystal flaws, far reaches
opened up with all the heart's desire at the other end. You shut your eyes
with that thunder in your ears and that gusty mist on your face, and you see
it very plainly--more plainly than ever so many arc lights could make you
see it--the ultimate meaning of things. To be sure, when you open your eyes
again, it's all gone--the storm-flung rainbows seem to hide it again.

A mile below, we came upon the Crooked Falls of twenty feet. Leaving the
left bank and running almost parallel with it for some three hundred yards,
then turning and making a horseshoe, and returning to the right bank almost
opposite the place of first observation, this fall is nearly a mile in
length, being an unbroken sheet for that distance. This one, also, does
nothing at all, and in a beautifully irregular way. Somehow it made me
think of Walt Whitman! But we left it soon, swinging out into the open
parched country. We knew all this turbulence to be merely the river's bow
before the great stunt.

As we swung along, kicking up the acrid alkali dust from the cattle-trail
that snaked its way through the cactus and sagebrush, the roar behind us
died; and before us, far away, dull muffled thunders grew up in the hush of
the burning noon. Thunders in a desert, and no cloud! For an hour we swung
along the trail, and ever the thunders increased--like the undertone of the
surf when the sea whitens. We were approaching the Great Falls of the
Missouri. There were no sign posts in that lonesome tract; no one of whom
to ask the way. Little did we need direction. The voice of thunder crying
in the desert led us surely.

A half-hour more of clambering over shale-strewn gullies, up sun-baked
watercourses, and we found ourselves toiling up the ragged slope of a bluff;
and soon we stood upon a rock ledge with the thunders beneath us. Damp
gusts beat upward over the blistering scarp of the cliff. I lay down, and
crawling to the edge, looked over. Two hundred feet below me--straight down
as a pebble drops--a watery Inferno raged, and far-flung whirlwinds all but
exhausted with the dizzy upward reach, whisked cool, invisible mops of mist
across my face.

Flung down a preliminary mile of steep descent, choked in between soaring
walls of rock four hundred yards apart, innumerable crystal tons rushed down
ninety feet in one magnificent plunge. You saw the long bent
crest--shimmering with the changing colors of a peacock's back--smooth as a
lake when all winds sleep; and then the mighty river was snuffed out in
gulfs of angry gray. Capricious river draughts, sucking up the damp defile,
whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiraling towers that
leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond and pearl and
amethyst.

I caught myself tightly gripping the ledge and shrinking with a shuddering
instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle all memory of
sound--and left only the silent universe with myself and this terribly
beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I loved it with a
strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself so magnificently;
and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a mountain, or a flower, or
a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean or a thunderstorm has to do in
this world. And it was doing it right out in the middle of a desert, bleak,
sun-leprosied, forbidding, with only the stars and the moon and the sun and
a cliff-swallow or two to behold. Thundering out its message into the waste
places, careless of audiences--like a Mater! Bully, grizzled old
Master-Bard singing--as most of the do--to empty benches! And it had been
doing that ten thousand years, and would do so for ten thousand thousand
more, and never pause for plaudits. I suspect the soul of old Homer did
that--and is still doing it, somehow, somewhere. After all there isn't much
difference between really tremendous things--Homer or waterfalls or
thunderstorms--is there? It's only a matter of how things happen to be big.

I was absent-mindedly chasing some big thundering line of Sophocles when
Bill, the little Cornishman, ran in between me and the evasive line: "Lord!
what a waste of power!"

There is some difference in temperaments. Most men, I fancy, would have
enjoyed a talk with a civil engineer upon that ledge. I should have liked
to have Shelley there, myself! It's the difference between poetry and
horse-power, dithyrambics and dynamos, Keats and Kipling! What is the
energy exerted by the Great Falls of the Missouri? How many horse-power did
Shelley fling into the creation of his "West Wind? How many foot-pounds did
the boy heart of Chatterton beat before it broke? Something may be left to
the imagination!


We backtrailed to a point where the cliff fell away into a rock-strewn
incline, and clambered down a break-neck slope to the edge of a the crystal
broil. There was a strange exhilaration about it--a novel sense of
discovering a natural wonder for ourselves. We seemed the first men who had
ever been the that was the most gripping thing about it.

Aloof, stupendous, terrific, staggering in the intensity of its wild beauty,
you reach it by a trail. There are no 'busses running and you can't buy a
sandwich or a peanut or a glass of beer with ten miles of its far-flung
thunders. For twentieth century America, that is doing rather well!

Skirting the slippery rocks at the lip of the mad flood, we swung ourselves
about a ledge, dripping with the cool mist-drift; descended to the level of
the lower basin, where a soaking fog made us shiver; pushed through a
dripping, oozing, autumnal sort of twilight, and came out again into the
beat of the desert sun, to look squarely into the face of the giant.

A hawk wheeled and swooped and floated far up in the dazzling air. Somehow
that hawk seemed to make the lonely place doubly lonely. Did you ever
notice how a lone coyote on a snow-heaped prairie gives you a heartache,
whereas the empty waste would only have exhilarated you? Always, it seemed,
that veering hawk had hung there, and would hang so always--outliving the
rising of suns and the drifting of stars and the visits of the moon.

A vague sense of grief came over me at the thought of all this eternal
restlessness, this turbulent fixity; and, after all, it seemed much greater
to be even a very little man, living largely, dying, somehow, into something
big and new; than to be this Promethean sort of thing, a giant waterfall in
a waste.

I have known men who felt dwarfed in the presence of vast and awful things.
I never felt bigger than when I first looked upon the ocean. The skyward
lift of a mountain peak makes me feel very, very tall. And when a
thunderstorm comes down upon the world out of the northwest, with jagged
blades of fire ripping up the black bellies of the clouds, I know all about
the heart of Attila and the Vikings and tigers and Alexander the Great! So
I think I grew a bit out there talking to that water-giant who does nothing
at all--not even a vaudeville stunt--and does it so masterfully.

By and by they'll build a hotel in the flat at the edge of the lower basin;
plant prim flowers in very prim beds; and rob you on the genteel European
plan. Comfortably sitting in a willow chair on the broad veranda, one will
read the signs on those cliffs--all about the best shoes to wear, and what
particular pill of all the pills that be, should be taken for that ailing
kidney. Bit it will not be I who shall sit in that willow chair on that
broad, as yet unbuilt, veranda.


The sun was glinting at the rim of the cliffs, and the place of awe and
thunders was slowly filling with shadow. We found a steep trail,
inaccessible for vehicles, leading upward in the direction of Benton. It
was getting that time of day when even a sentimentalist wants a beefsteak,
especially if he has hiked over dusty scorching trails and scrambled over
rocks all day.

Some kind man back in the town, with a fund of that most useless article,
information, had told us of a place called Goodale, theoretically existing
on the Great Northern Railroad between Great Falls and Benton. We had
provided only for luncheon, trusting to fate and Goodale for supper.

Goodale! A truly beautiful name! No doubt in some miraculous way the
character of the country changed suddenly just before you got there merely
to justify the name. Surely no one would have the temerity to conjure up so
beautiful a name for a desert town. Yet, half unwillingly, I thought of a
little place I once visited--against my will, since the brake man put me off
there--by the name of Forest City. I remembered with misgivings how there
wasn't a tree within something like four hundred miles. But I pushed that
memory aside as a lying prophet. I believed in Goodale and beefsteak.
Goodale would be a neat, quiet little town, set snugly in a verdant valley.
We would come into it by starlight--down a careless gypsying sort of county
road; and there would be the sound of a dear little trickling bickering cool
stream out in the shadows of the trees fringing the approach to Goodale.
And we'd pass pretty little cottages with vines growing over the doors, and
hollyhocks peeping over the fences, and cheerful lights in the windows.

Goodale! And then, right in the middle of the town (no, village--the word
is cosier somehow)--right in the middle of the village there would be a big
restaurant, with such alluring scents of beefsteak all about it.

I set the pace up that trail. It was a swinging, loose, cavalry-horse sort
of pace--the kind that rubs the blue off the distance and paints the back
trail gray. Goodale was a sort of Mecca. I thought of it with something
like a religious awe. How far was Goodale, would you suppose? Not far,
certainly, once we found the railroad.

We made the last steep climb breathlessly, and came out on the level. A
great monotonous, heartachy prairie lay before us--utterly featureless in
the twilight. Far off across the scabby land a thin black line swept out of
the dusk into the dusk--straight as a crow's flight. It was the railroad.
We made a cross-cut for it, tumbling over gopher holes, plunging through
sagebrush, scrambling over gullies that told the incredible tale of torrents
having been there once. I ate quantities of alkali dust and went on
believing in Goodale and beefsteak. Beefsteak became one of the principal
stations on the Great Northern Railroad, so far as I was concerned
personally. that is what you might call the geography of a healthy stomach.

With the falling of the sun the climate of the country had changed. It was
no longer blistering. You sat down for a moment and a shiver went up your
spine. At noon I thought about all the lime-kilns I had ever met. Now I
could hear the hickory nuts dropping in the crisp silence down in the old
Missouri woods.

We struck the railroad and went faster. Since my first experience with
railroad ties, I have continued to associate them with hunger. I need only
look an ordinary railroad tie in the face to contract a wonderful appetite.
It works on the principle of a memory system. So, as we put the ties behind
us, I increased my order at that restaurant in the sweet little pedestrian's
village of Goodale. "A couple of eggs on the side, waiter," I said half
audibly to the petite woman in the white apron who served the tables in the
restaurant there. She was very real to me. I could count the rings on her
fingers; and when she smiled I noted that her teeth were very
white--doubtless they got that was from eating quantities and quantities of
thick juicy beefsteak!

The track took a sudden turn ahead. "Around the bend," I said aloud, "lies
Goodale." We went faster. We rounded the bend, only to see the dusky,
heartachy, barren stretch.

"Railroads," explained I to myself, "have a way of going somewhere; it is
one of their peculiarities." No doubt this track had been laid for the
express purpose of guiding hungry folks to the hospitable little village.
We plunged on for an hour. Meanwhile my orders to the trim little woman in
the white apron increased steadily. She smiled broadly but winsomely,
showing those charming beefsteak-polished teeth. They shone like a beacon
ahead of me, for it was now dark.

Suddenly we came upon a signboard. We went up to it, struck a match, and
read breathlessly--"GOODALE."

We looked about us. Goodale was a switch and a box car.

Nothing beside remains, I quoted,

'round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Alas for the trim little lady with the white teeth and the smile and the
beefsteak!

We said bitter things there in that waste about the man with the
information. We loaded his memory with anathemas. One cannot eat a
signboard, even with so inviting a name upon it. An idea struck me--it
seemed a very brilliant one at the moment. I sat down and delivered myself
of it to my companions, who also had lusted after the flesh-pots. "We have
wronged that man with the information," said I. "He was no ordinary
individual; he was a prophet: he simply got his dates mixed. In precisely
one hundred years from now, there will be a town on this spot--and a
restaurant! Shall we wait?"

They cursed me bitterly. I suspect neither of them is a philosopher.
Thereat I proceeded to eat a thick juicy steak from the T-bone portion of an
unborn steer, served by the trim little lady of a hundred years hence, there
in that potential village of Goodale. And as I smoke my cigarette, I felt
very thankful for all the beautiful things that do not exist.

And I slept that night in the great front bedroom, the ceiling of which is
of diamond and turquoise


END, SIXTEEN MILES OF AWE
__________________________________________

Wolfgang
This work is in the public domain. To the best of my knowledge, it's
inclusion here violates no U.S. or other copyright laws.