Roughing It
drove us thither to see it. Three or four members of the Brigade had
been there and located some timber lands on its shores and stored up a
quantity of provisions in their camp. We strapped a couple of blankets
on our shoulders and took an axe apiece and started—for we intended to
take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy. We were on
foot. The reader will find it advantageous to go horseback. We were told
that the distance was eleven miles. We tramped a long time on level
ground, and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles
high and looked over. No lake there. We descended on the other side,
crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand
miles high, apparently, and looked over again. No lake yet. We sat down
tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to curse those
people who had beguiled us. Thus refreshed, we presently resumed the
march with renewed vigor and determination. We plodded on, two or three
hours longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us—a noble sheet of blue
water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea,
and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft
full three thousand feet higher still! It was a vast oval, and one would
have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As
it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed
upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture
the whole earth affords.
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We found the small skiff belonging to the Brigade boys, and without loss
of time set out across a deep bend of the lake toward the landmarks that
signified the locality of the camp. I got Johnny to row—not because I
mind exertion myself, but because it makes me sick to ride backwards
when I am at work. But I steered. A three-mile pull brought us to the
camp just as the night fell, and we stepped ashore very tired and
wolfishly hungry. In a “cache” among the rocks we found the provisions
and the cooking utensils, and then, all fatigued as I was, I sat down on
a boulder and superintended while Johnny gathered wood and cooked
supper. Many a man who had gone through what I had, would have wanted to
rest.
It was a delicious supper—hot bread, fried bacon, and black coffee. It
was a delicious solitude we were in, too. Three miles away was a saw-
mill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings
throughout the wide circumference of the lake. As the darkness closed
down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels,
we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and
our pains. In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand between
two large boulders and soon feel asleep, careless of the procession of
ants that passed in through rents in our clothing and explored our
persons. Nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us, for it had
been fairly earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had
to adjourn court for that night, any way. The wind rose just as we were
losing consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the
surf upon the shore.
It is always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had
plenty of blankets and were warm enough. We never moved a muscle all
night, but waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at
once, thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of
friskiness. There is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience.
That morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day
before—sick ones at any rate. But the world is slow, and people will go
to “water cures” and “movement cures” and to foreign lands for health.
Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy
to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do
not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and
delicious. And why shouldn’t it be?—it is the same the angels breathe. I
think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a
man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a
roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer
time. I know a man who went there to die. But he made a failure of it.
He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand. He had no
appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future.
Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he
could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three
thousand feet high for recreation. And he was a skeleton no longer, but
weighed part of a ton. This is no fancy sketch, but the truth. His
disease was consumption. I confidently commend his experience to other
skeletons.
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I superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in
the boat and skirted along the lake shore about three miles and
disembarked. We liked the appearance of the place, and so we claimed
some three hundred acres of it and stuck our “notices” on a tree. It was
yellow pine timber land—a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and
from one to five feet through at the butt. It was necessary to fence our
property or we could not hold it. That is to say, it was necessary to
cut down trees here and there and make them fall in such a way as to
form a sort of enclosure (with pretty wide gaps in it). We cut down
three trees apiece, and found it such heart-breaking work that we
decided to “rest our case” on those; if they held the property, well and
good; if they didn’t, let the property spill out through the gaps and
go; it was no use to work ourselves to death merely to save a few acres
of land. Next day we came back to build a house—for a house was also
necessary, in order to hold the property.
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We decided to build a substantial log-house and excite the envy of the
Brigade boys; but by the time we had cut and trimmed the first log it
seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate, and so we concluded to build it
of saplings. However, two saplings, duly cut and trimmed, compelled
recognition of the fact that a still modester architecture would satisfy
the law, and so we concluded to build a “brush” house. We devoted the
next day to this work, but we did so much “sitting around” and
discussing, that by the middle of the afternoon we had achieved only a
half-way sort of affair which one of us had to watch while the other cut
brush, lest if both turned our backs we might not be able to find it
again, it had such a strong family resemblance to the surrounding
vegetation. But we were satisfied with it.
We were land owners now, duly seized and possessed, and within the
protection of the law. Therefore we decided to take up our residence on
our own domain and enjoy that large sense of independence which only
such an experience can bring. Late the next afternoon, after a good long
rest, we sailed away from the Brigade camp with all the provisions and
cooking utensils we could carry off—borrow is the more accurate word—and
just as the night was falling we beached the boat at our own landing.
CHAPTER XXIII.
If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber
ranch for the next two or three weeks, it must be a sort of life which I
have not read of in books or experienced in person. We did not see a
human being but ourselves during the time, or hear any sounds but those
that were made by the wind and the waves, the sighing of the pines, and
now and then the far-off thunder of an avalanche. The forest about us
was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with
sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and
breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to Nature’s mood; and its
circling border of mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred with
land-slides, cloven by cañons and valleys, and helmeted with glittering
snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture. The view was always
fascinating, bewitching, entrancing. The eye was never tired of gazing,
night or day, in calm or storm; it suffered but one grief, and that was
that it could not look always, but must close sometimes in sleep.
We slept in the sand close to the water’s edge, between two protecting
boulders, which took care of the stormy night-winds for us. We never
took any paregoric to make us sleep. At the first break of dawn we were
always up and running foot-races to tone down excess of physical vigor
and exuberance of spirits. That is, Johnny was—but I held his hat. While
smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks
put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it
swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests
free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water
till every little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought
in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete. Then to
“business.”
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That is, drifting around in the boat. We were on the north shore. There,
the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white. This gives
the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage than it has
elsewhere on the lake. We usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from
shore, and then lay down on the thwarts, in the sun, and let the boat
drift by the hour whither it would. We seldom talked. It interrupted the
Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the luxurious rest and
indolence brought. The shore all along was indented with deep, curved
bays and coves, bordered by narrow sand-beaches; and where the sand
ended, the steep mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space—rose up
like a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular, and thickly wooded
with tall pines.
So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or
thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat
seemed floating in the air! Yes, where it was even _eighty_ feet deep.
Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand’s-
breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite boulder, as
large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and
seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently it threatened to
touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to seize an oar and
avert the danger. But the boat would float on, and the boulder descend
again, and then we could see that when we had been exactly above it, it
must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the surface. Down
through the transparency of these great depths, the water was not
_merely_ transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. All objects seen
through it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but of
every minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply
through the same depth of atmosphere. So empty and airy did all spaces
seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in
mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions “balloon-voyages.”
We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a week. We could
see trout by the thousand winging about in the emptiness under us, or
sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but they would not bite—they could see
the line too plainly, perhaps. We frequently selected the trout we
wanted, and rested the bait patiently and persistently on the end of his
nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he would only shake it off with an
annoyed manner, and shift his position.
We bathed occasionally, but the water was rather chilly, for all it