The Convalescent (Willis)/Letter II
Spontaneousness in Writing—An Adventure in Riding—Mounted at one time on a Horse and a Cow—A Story by a neighbor Fisherman—Cathcing a Snapping-turtle—Ward's Adventures—The Difficulties of Winter Pilotage of Steamboats, before the Railroad on the Hudson—Bald Eagle on the Ice, etc., etc.
- January 27, 1855.
New events and fresh information are more interesting than essay-writing, I believe, even if the events are small and the information homely. It is this supposition (with an eye only to the preference of our readers, and the probability of interesting them) which, week after week, makes me throw aside a first half-page of a speculating or criticising "leader," and fall to describing, instead, some new phase of my every-day life in the country. I am ready to cease being thus autobiographic, when the new incidents and fresh information give out. I never sent you one of those homespun letters, in fact, without quite a persuasion that it will be the last. But life always seems to keep new, somehow; and apresent hour always seems to me worthy any two of the past or the future. "Yours to command," however. My hope of interesting, is by making this column differ, in case of its failing to excel. I will go oftener to town and dissipate at parties, whenever those rides are more amusing (say) than the one I describe to-day, or whenever city brains are better worth borrowing from than the brains of our country droppers in—such (say) as my friend the fisherman's, of whose water-life on the Hudson, as he gossipped it over our blazing wood-fire last evening, I will jot down an item or two while I remember it.
And now to my hobnail commonplaces—more sure of a pleasant understanding after this "strictly confidential" apology.
You may wonder how a zeal in our common service, should add to my experiences the new sensation of being mounted upon a cow! But this, and ride upon a camel in Asia Minor, are two of this planet's possible emotions with which I shall not pass to another star unacquainted. It was a trifle of a surprise—coming as it did after that hardest day of in-door drudgery which least prepares one for perilous adventure. You know my weekly crisis, the Thursday evening's mail—closing at Newburgh at six, and inevitably to be reached, storm or starlight, by the "final copy for the printer." I had scribbled, up to the last moment, as usual, hopped into the saddle at dusk, gallopped the four miles rather nervously for free of missing the inexorable bag, reached it, and was trotting leisurely home. It was a cloudy night—dark as half-past six had ever the liberty to be—when I reached the covered bridge across the mouth of the Moodna.
The small and single lamp, usually making darkness visible at the far end of this rickety old tunnel, was not yet lit. The outline of an entrance, under an arch of hopeless black, was all I could distinguish—a promise of emergence to light on the other side, which required the faith of a gimlet. My horse took a sniff of suspicion, and half bolted; and as he had thrown me over his head a week or two before, and that was my first experience as a one-horse missile, I hesitated a second before putting on the compulsion. In went both heels, however—for it was a bitter cold night, and my lungs are not the customers for winter air without exercise—and in sprung Sir Archy upon the unseen planks. I loosed the rein—instinct being more to be trusted than reason (I have always observed) in "feeling one's way." The smothered sound of the hoofs upon the never-swept carpet of lumber-dust and manure, came down in stifled echoes from the room. Paff! paff! paff!—which side we should bang against, and what hole of the remembered short planks my dancing animal would back into in rearing, I could only guess. A sudden plunge! Half a leap to go over something—but the twitched curb (with the flash across my mind that it was the warped flooring out of place) balked the effort, and the next moment we rose into the air—to explanatory music! The gasp of a cow told the story, while the balance of uncertainty, as to whether I was to fall backwards or forwards, gave me leisure to listen. With the ten legs under me actuated by three different conceptions of the crisis—the cow crossways, the horse for proceeding, and I for retreating—there was a very miscellaneous scramble, for an instant. My horse fortunately recovered his footing without a fall—but whether we had slid to earth over the horns or the tail of the animal that had lifted us, the discreet belly of my horse shows to the inquisitive daylight no sign. As the reclining cow commonly rises first behind, the declivity for us was doubtless towards the head—though the improbability that a gentleman and his horse would ever travel over the horns of old Smith's cow, the most vicious animal in the neighborhood, without a scratch, makes it likely again that we dismounted over the tail. Either way "very happy," of course; for, with so close a shave upon a cow-tastrophe, I should not stand upon ceremony in the dark.
With my neighbor, last evening, the conversation naturally fell upon the perils in our daily experience; and he, having passes his life (and accumulated a very snug property) by varying his farming with shad-fishing in the season, steamboat-piloting when they run through the ice in the winter, stopping of drift timber and shooting of ducks, has a truly amphibious knowledge of the Hudson and its land and water liabilities. I must say I listened to him with great interest, and picked here and there a valuable hint for my own using; though the question occurs, naturally, whether the readers of the Home Journal, not being river-rustics themselves, will be as much entertained. But I shall try to be brief.
I silently pocketed a caution as to my next summer's swimming, while the talk fell upon snapping-turtles (among the dangers of the neighborhood), and Ward gave us an account of catching one. He was out in his decoy-boat after ducks, and had chanced to shoot a wild goose, that he left to float among the edges till he should have leisure to pick him up. Meantime, lying flat in his boat, and watching through the straw bulwark for the game, he observed the dead goose bobbing under occasionally. The water was clear, and, with a little closer look, he saw, that, to the broken leg of the goose, which hung down, a large snapping-turtle was roaching up, and trying to get the right hitch to pull the dead bird to the bottom. Ward quietly floated that way, stripped up his sleeve, and, with a sudden pluck, caught the snapper by the middle (out of reach of his head), and threw him into the boat. He was about the size of a chair-cushion, and made "great soup." Happy river, of course, that has such live succulents for poor folks—but, to gentlemen that swim partly under water, the risk of being nibbled at by an animal whose bite does not loosen even when its head is cut off, makes it one kind of "wild game" too many!
Ward himself is a native growth of "American," in which I take a patriotic delight. The country's reliance, for energy in daily matters and for resource and courage in emergencies, is in the likes of him—few though they be, and yet constituting the centre that holds together the whole wheel of our national energy. His life is to mind his business. He says little—his ideas always keeping ahead of his words. What practical knowledge he needed, he has "come at" by a shorter cut than books, having had no education, and yet doing everything with a "knack" that works like science. At present he is building himself a boat, "just to pass a spare month of the winter," and he thinks no more of that untaught exercise of his ingenuity than an Irishman of peeling a fresh potato. With his early savings (as a sloop-skipper and steamboat pilot), he bought the river farm of which Idlewild was a part, and has since turned everything to account within reach—supplying Newburgh and New York with shad and bass in immense quantities by his skillful hauling and netting, growing the best fruit, stopping the drift-timber after the freshets, killing more wild game than all the other neighbors together, raising famous grain, breeding the best fowls and pigs, and—taking summer boarders. With all this variety of tribute-levying upon air, earth and water, Ward is as soft-spoken and as quiet-moving as the most indolent man in the world, and, among his neighbors, he stands for the most simply honest and kind-hearted of men, who knows his own rights pretty well, but is willing to help everybody else to theirs.
But Ward's plums and peaches are not the only "largest of their kind," for which he could take the premium. As he sat down by our hickory-fire for an evening's chat, I could not but confess I had rarely seen, out of England, such a specimen of stock for a farmer to be proud of as the well-developed, handsome daughter, of sixteen, who had come in with him, and to whose lap my children ran with their dolls in the opposite corner. I had admired her fine proportions and energetic movement as she skated on the river a day or two before; but her frank and truthful manners, liberally-moulded features, and joyous expressions of health and happiness, made her show even better in a drawing-room; and I patriotically wished, as I compared her with the slices of American loveliness principally looked to for the continuation of our country, that such whole girls were plentier.
To return to river dangers, however.
Ward thought he had run one or two risks of drowning, even in such small waters as the Hudson. He was once made "almost too sea-sick to hold on," here in this Highland bay, by being sent to the topmast of a sloop, in one of our mountain hurricanes. A small boy, then, and with only the rope he had hugged his way up on, to cling to, the pitching and lurching of the sloop, which was all but upset with every blast, threw him about like the knot on the end of a whip-lash, and disturbed his breakfast. But his nearest approach to "giving over breathing with a job half done," was in trying to get up a barrel of salt shad from the bottom of the river. He had been sent with another young man, by his "boss," to take it to a customer, in a boat, and they had accidentally rolled it overboard in deep soundings. It was in the early spring, "before the water was any way pleasant," but he off with everything but his trowsers, tied a rope round his waist, and dived—the other young man agreeing to pull him up when he should telegraph by a kick that he had got hold. A barrel of fish is heavy thing to lift, under water or out of it, but he got hold of the two ends; and then the trouble was to wait to be pulled up. He hung on, though it was awkward landing it, even after he got it to the top. How near drowning he was, of course he don't now know. He would not care to be any nearer to it, however, for that money's worth of fish.
We had some lesser gossip about snakes and drift-timber, ice-cracks and snow-floods, and then we got Ward upon experiences that will be of more interest to the public at large—his winter-pilotings of the steamboats that made their passes while sleighs were running on the river.
The railroad has lessened the urgency of the demand for the winter navigation of the Hudson, but it could always be done "when it would pay." The damage to boats was very great. A gang of ship carpenters was kept waiting on the dock, both at Newburgh and New York, to commence repairs at the moment of arrival. A pipe was arranged to turn steam out upon the wheels, and this melted the ice and dried the wood immediately, so that the carpenters could handle them. They never lost a passage from breakage of paddle-boxes, though they were sometimes terribly shattered. The railroad was then building, and the demand for freight of tools and materials, and passage of workmen, was very great; so that Ward's boat, the Highlander, tried to make two passages in the twenty-four hours—down in the day time and up at night—but the ice in the dark proved too much for them. Another boat was then put on (the Utica), and they crossed each other with day passages.
From the narrowness of the river, at the pass through the Highlands, the ice always closed again where the boat had made a channel, and was often crowded together and piled up "so as to look rather ugly." The Highlander was once stuck, and remained two weeks frozen fast, just opposite West Point; and she was only got out, at last, by blowing up the ice around her with bomb-shells. The "standing from under," when the slabs rained down, after those explosions, was "spry work."
I supposed that the sharper the boat, or the more like a wedge—with the wheels far aft, so that she could take advantage of the cracks in the ice—the better. But it was quite the contrary. They needed the length of the boat for a lever to make her wheels act short on the bow, and then, having once entered a crack (which could not be followed far without bending away from their course), they could manage to break out of it. When ice was thick enough to bear an ox-team, as it was most of the time, the only way to get through it was to crush it down with the weight of the boat. They had a false bow put on, therefore, cased in copper, which would enable them to slide up over the edge, with the force of their headway. This would crush it under, for a short distance, and then they would back, get on another head of steam, and charge again. It was sometimes a long and tedious job, breaking through the winding narrows of the Highlands in this way, and there was danger, always, of letting the boat stop long enough for the ice to tighten around her.
Passengers jumped on board almost anywhere, with a projecting plank jutting out, while they slackened a little. Freight was taken on board, and landed, by horse-teams coming out to them on the ice. It was droll, sometimes, to be going along through a narrow channel with the sleigh-bells keeping pace on the ice alongside—like a sailing and trotting-match on the same element. The business was profitable, as the railway people could afford to pay very high for freight, which they would otherwise have to draw with teams over the back country. Then the Cold-Spring forge was casting bomb-shells, etc., for the Mexican war; and that heavy freight could hardly be got to New York at all, without a boat. At one time there was such a pressure for these war materials that they were obliged to make extra passages on Sundays.
Ward mentioned one of our well-known neighbors who has lately taken to a new amusement. He seems to be fond of sitting on a cake of ice, any sunny noon, and floating down the river, just in front of us. This idler—a bald eagle, and the largest remember in this part of the country—has haunted Idlewild for a year past, and his circlings of swoop around the projecting eminence on which our house stands, are the admiration of man, woman and child, for some distance. He lives, as is well known, by taking tribute of the fish-hawk, from whom he receives the fish just dived for, on presenting his bill; but to do this he must be on the wing and ready to pounce down, any instant, with his superior swiftness—so the ice-rafting is probably but a royal amusement. The nest of this monstrous eagle (larger than any goose, Ward says), is somewhere on the peak of the Storm King, whence he sails down upon us, with a turn up the bend of the ravine, by a propulsion which I cannot easily understand. It must be "od-io force," or the exercise of my motto (Will is might), for he stirs not a wing, and the three miles are done like an arrow-flight. Eagles are sacred among sportsmen, and this one has evidently no fear of being shot; though Ward, whose gun is inevitable, said it was hard not to bring him down, sometimes, when his white head and snowy tail sailed along so temptingly within reach. Of course I plead—spare the King!
The ice has a very flattering way of making a man's farm seem larger—extending out Idlewild some acres into the Hudson—and my boy, Grinnell, who is skating just now, on this apparently new permanency of meadow, expects me down every moment to witness his progress in the art. I would resume it myself—for, being "split up a good way," as the boys used to say of my long legs, I was among the fast ones on Frog Pond, in Latin-school days—but, like a churn that makes no butter by gently being carried along, I have a liver that requires an inward exercise beyond skates. Churning and horse-trotting for butter and bile! So, a look at my boy's new accomplishment, and then to the saddle, to take a churn. Yours.