FullReads

“Why, there they were, right before the greatest view they ever saw, talkin’ about the fashions!”

Impossible to convey the accent of contempt in which he pronounced the word “fashions,” and then added, with a sort of regretful bitterness, “I was a great mind to come down, and leave ’em there.”

In common with the Greeks, Old Phelps personified the woods, mountains, and streams. They had not only personality, but distinctions of sex. It was something beyond the characterization of the hunter, which appeared, for instance, when he related a fight with a panther, in such expressions as, “Then Mr. Panther thought he would see what he could do,” etc. He was in “imaginative sympathy” with all wild things. The afternoon we descended Marcy, we went away to the west, through the primeval forests, toward Avalanche and Colden, and followed the course of the charming Opalescent. When we reached the leaping stream, Phelps exclaimed,

“Here’s little Miss Opalescent!”

“Why don’t you say Mr. Opalescent?” some one asked.

“Oh, she’s too pretty!” And too pretty she was, with her foam-white and rainbow dress, and her downfalls, and fountainlike uprising. A bewitching young person we found her all that summer afternoon.

This sylph-like person had little in common with a monstrous lady whose adventures in the wilderness Phelps was fond of relating. She was built some thing on the plan of the mountains, and her ambition to explore was equal to her size. Phelps and the other guides once succeeded in raising her to the top of Marcy; but the feat of getting a hogshead of molasses up there would have been easier. In attempting to give us an idea of her magnitude that night, as we sat in the forest camp, Phelps hesitated a moment, while he cast his eye around the woods: “Waal, there ain’t no tree!”

It is only by recalling fragmentary remarks and incidents that I can put the reader in possession of the peculiarities of my subject; and this involves the wrenching of things out of their natural order and continuity, and introducing them abruptly, an abruptness illustrated by the remark of “Old Man Hoskins” (which Phelps liked to quote), when one day he suddenly slipped down a bank into a thicket, and seated himself in a wasps’ nest: “I hain’t no business here; but here I be!”

The first time we went into camp on the Upper Au Sable Pond, which has been justly celebrated as the most prettily set sheet of water in the region, we were disposed to build our shanty on the south side, so that we could have in full view the Gothics and that loveliest of mountain contours. To our surprise, Old Phelps, whose sentimental weakness for these mountains we knew, opposed this. His favorite camping ground was on the north side,–a pretty site in itself, but with no special view. In order to enjoy the lovely mountains, we should be obliged to row out into the lake: we wanted them always before our eyes,–at sunrise and sunset, and in the blaze of noon. With deliberate speech, as if weighing our arguments and disposing of them, he replied, “Waal, now, them Gothics ain’t the kinder scenery you want ter hog down!”

It was on quiet Sundays in the woods, or in talks by the camp-fire, that Phelps came out as the philosopher, and commonly contributed the light of his observations. Unfortunate marriages, and marriages in general, were, on one occasion, the subject of discussion; and a good deal of darkness had been cast on it by various speakers; when Phelps suddenly piped up, from a log where he had sat silent, almost invisible, in the shadow and smoke, “Waal, now, when you’ve said all there is to be said, marriage is mostly for discipline.”

Discipline, certainly, the old man had, in one way or another; and years of solitary communing in the forest had given him, perhaps, a childlike insight into spiritual concerns. Whether he had formulated any creed or what faith he had, I never knew. Keene Valley had a reputation of not ripening Christians any more successfully than maize, the season there being short; and on our first visit it was said to contain but one Bible Christian, though I think an accurate census disclosed three. Old Phelps, who sometimes made abrupt remarks in trying situations, was not included in this census; but he was the disciple of supernaturalism in a most charming form. I have heard of his opening his inmost thoughts to a lady, one Sunday, after a noble sermon of Robertson’s had been read in the cathedral stillness of the forest. His experience was entirely first-hand, and related with unconsciousness that it was not common to all. There was nothing of the mystic or the sentimentalist, only a vivid realism, in that nearness of God of which he spoke,–“as near some-times as those trees,”–and of the holy voice, that, in a time of inward struggle, had seemed to him to come from the depths of the forest, saying, “Poor soul, I am the way.”