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John Burroughs
American Naturalist
1837-1921 A selection from THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE
Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach
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running time is 11 minutes
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Yosemite won my heart at once, as it seems to win the hearts of all
who visit it. In my case many things helped to do it, but I am sure
a robin, the first I had seen since leaving home, did his part. He
struck the right note, he brought the scene home to me, he supplied
the link of association. There he was, running over the grass or
perching on the fence, or singing from a tree-top in the old
familiar way. Where the robin is at home, there at home am I. But
many other things helped to win my heart to the Yosemite—the whole
character of the scene, not only its beauty and sublimity, but the
air of peace and protection, and of homelike seclusion that pervades
it; the charm of a nook, a retreat, combined with the power and
grandeur of nature in her sternest moods.
After passing from the hotel at El Portal along the foaming and
roaring Merced River, and amid the tumbled confusion of enormous
granite boulders shaken down from the cliffs above, you cross the
threshold of the great valley as into some vast house or hall carved
out of the mountains, and at once feel the spell of the brooding
calm and sheltered seclusion that pervades it. You pass suddenly
from the tumultuous, the chaotic, into the ordered, the tranquil,
the restful, which seems enhanced by the power and grandeur that
encompass them about. You can hardly be prepared for the hush that
suddenly falls upon the river and for the gentle rural and sylvan
character of much that surrounds you; the peace of the fields, the
seclusion of the woods, the privacy of sunny glades, the enchantment
of falls and lucid waters, with a touch of human occupancy here and
there—all this, set in that enormous granite frame, three or four
thousand feet high, ornamented with domes and spires and peaks still
higher,—it is all this that wins your heart and fills your
imagination in the Yosemite.
As you ride or walk along the winding road up the level valley amid
the noble pines and spruces and oaks, and past the groves and bits
of meadow and the camps of many tents, and the huge mossy granite
boulders here and there reposing in the shade of the trees, with the
full, clear, silent river winding through the plain near you, you
are all the time aware of those huge vertical walls, their faces
scarred and niched, streaked with color, or glistening with
moisture, and animated with waterfalls, rising up on either hand,
thousands of feet high, not architectural, or like something
builded, but like the sides and the four corners of the globe
itself. What an impression of mass and of power and of grandeur in
repose filters into you as you walk along! El Capitan stands there
showing its simple sweeping lines through the trees as you approach,
like one of the veritable pillars of the firmament. How long we are
nearing it and passing it! It is so colossal that it seems near
while it is yet far off. It is so simple that the eye takes in its
naked grandeur at a glance. It demands of you a new standard of size
which you cannot at once produce. It is as clean and smooth as the
flank of a horse, and as poised and calm as a Greek statue. It
curves out toward the base as if planted there to resist the
pressure of worlds—probably the most majestic single granite
column or mountain buttress on the earth. Its summit is over three
thousand feet above you. Across the valley, nearly opposite, rise
the Cathedral Rocks to nearly the same height, while farther along,
beyond El Capitan, the Three Brothers shoulder the sky at about the
same dizzy height. Near the head of the great valley, North Dome,
perfect in outline as if turned in a lathe, and its brother, the
Half Dome (or shall we say half-brother?) across the valley, look
down upon Mirror Lake from an altitude of over four thousand feet.
These domes suggest enormous granite bubbles if such were possible
pushed up from below and retaining their forms through the vast
geologic ages. Of course they must have weathered enormously, but as
the rock seems to peel off in concentric sheets, their forms are
preserved.
One warm, bright Sunday near the end of April, six of us walked up
from the hotel to Vernal and Nevada Falls, or as near to them as we
could get, and took our fill of the tumult of foaming waters
struggling with the wreck of huge granite cliffs: so impassive and
immobile the rocks, so impetuous and reckless and determined the
onset of the waters, till the falls are reached, when the obstructed
river seems to find the escape and the freedom it was so eagerly
seeking. Better to be completely changed into foam and spray by one
single leap of six hundred feet into empty space, the river seems to
say, than be forever baffled and tortured and torn on this rack of
merciless boulders.
We followed the zigzagging trail up the steep side of the valley,
touching melting snow-banks in its upper courses, passing huge
granite rocks also melting in the slow heat of the geologic ages,
pausing to take in the rugged, shaggy spruces and pines that
sentineled the mountain-sides here and there, or resting our eyes
upon Liberty Cap, which carries its suggestive form a thousand feet
or more above the Nevada Fall. What beauty, what grandeur attended
us that day! the wild tumult of waters, the snow-white falls, the
motionless avalanches of granite rocks, and the naked granite shaft,
Liberty Cap, dominating all!
And that night, too, when we sat around a big camp-fire near our
tents in the valley, and saw the full moon come up and look down
upon us from behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent
booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees that
towered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the great
valley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every
hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls—surely that was a
night none of us can ever forget. As Yosemite can stand the broad,
searching light of midday and not be cheapened, so its enchantments
can stand the light of the moon and the stars and not be rendered
too vague and impalpable.
Going from the Grand Canon to Yosemite is going from one sublimity
to another of a different order. The canon is the more strange,
unearthly, apocryphal, appeals more to the imagination, and is the
more overwhelming in its size, its wealth of color, and its
multitude of suggestive forms. But for quiet majesty and beauty,
with a touch of the sylvan and pastoral, too, Yosemite stands alone.
One could live with Yosemite, camp in it, tramp in it, winter and
summer in it, and find nature in her tender and human, almost
domestic moods, as well as in her grand and austere. But I do not
think one could ever feel at home in or near the Grand Canon; it is
too unlike anything we have ever known upon the earth; it is like a
vision of some strange colossal city uncovered from the depth of
geologic time. You may have come to it, as we did, from the
Petrified Forests, where you saw the silicified trunks of thousands
of gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew millions of years ago,
most of them uncovered, but many of them protruding from banks of
clay and gravel, and in their interiors rich in all the colors of
the rainbow, and you wonder if you may not now be gazing upon some
petrified antediluvian city of temples and holy places exhumed by
mysterious hands and opened up to the vulgar gaze of to-day. You
look into it from above and from another world and you descend into
it at your peril. Yosemite you enter as into a gigantic hall and
make your own; the canon you gaze down upon, and are an alien,
whether you enter it or not. Yosemite is carved out of the most
majestic and enduring of all rocks, granite; the Grand Canon is
carved out of one of the most beautiful, but perishable, red
Carboniferous sandstone and limestone. There is a maze of beautiful
and intricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like forms
and monumental remains, and noble architectural profiles that
delight while they bewilder the eye. Yosemite has much greater
simplicity, and is much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Its
grand and austere features predominate, of course, but underneath
these and adorning them are many touches of the idyllic and the
picturesque. Its many waterfalls fluttering like white lace against
its vertical granite walls, its smooth, level floor, its noble pines
and oaks, its open glades, its sheltering groves, its bright, clear,
winding river, its soft voice of many waters, its flowers, its
birds, its grass, its verdure, even its orchards of blooming apple
trees, all inclosed in this tremendous granite frame—what an
unforgettable picture it all makes, what a blending of the sublime
and the homelike and familiar it all is! It is the waterfalls that
make the granite alive, and bursting into bloom as it were. What a
touch they give! how they enliven the scene! What music they evoke
from these harps of stone!
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