There’s no music like a little river’s. It plays the same tune (and that’s the favorite) over and over again, and yet does not weary of it like men fiddlers.—Robert Louis Stevenson, Prince Otto.
A narrow vale winds away northeastward from the city of North Adams to Stamford, Vermont. A short walk from the terminus of the car line in The Beaver leads to the junction of Hudson Brook with the Mayunsook River. The Mayunsook is often called the Little Deerfield. It is the North Branch of the Hoosac, rising near Stamford Ponds, and draining the southern and western slopes above Stamford Hollow. The Greater Deerfield River rises also near these lakes, and drains the same mountains from their northern and eastern slopes, flowing around through Readsboro to Zoar, where travellers meet it as they pass out of the eastern portal of the Hoosac Tunnel into the Deerfield Valley. Thus, from their mysterious sources our turbulent rivers and mountain streams bring restful, cooling news from out the higher lands, where scarce the foot of man has been.
On August 7th I explored about Natural Bridge on Hudson Brook. I wore hob-nailed boots, and made a long day’s excursion. Hawthorne knew and loved this wonderful natural feature of northern Berkshire, and here gathered many fancies, which he has woven into his tales. The chasm of Hudson Brook is described as the “Cave” in his Notes. His description of the ravine is the finest ever written.
Hudson Brook, tradition tells us, took its name from the hunter Hudson, who, one twilight, dragging homeward a deer he had killed, lost it in this chasm. He narrowly escaped following it himself.
The region is entered either by walking up the bed of the stream itself, or following around the road above Marble Quarry, just east of the chasm. The former is the more direct, but the latter a longer and safer way. In this instance, I followed the travelled highway. I proceeded up the stream where the erosions begin, and readily descended the ravine, following its course downward until I came to a beautiful marble basin or pot-hole formation, which very few see, since it is hidden under the wooden foot-bridge above the natural bridge of rock. Logs and immense rocks barred my way, and I was forced through dark fissures in my ascent to the sunlight.
The pot-hole was evidently the same pool of which Hawthorne wrote: “As the deepest pool occurs in the most uneven part of the chasm, where the hollows in the sides of the crag are deepest, so that each hollow is almost a cave by itself, I determined to wade through it ... there was an accumulation of soft stuff on the bottom, so that the water did not look more than knee-deep; but, finding that my feet sunk in it, I took off my trousers and waded through.”[57] He visited this stream often: “The cave makes a fresh impression upon me every time I visit it,—so deep, so irregular, so gloomy, so stern,—part of its walls the pure white of marble,—others covered with a gray decomposition and with spots of moss, and with brake growing where there is a handful of earth.”[58]
Hawthorne believed firmly that “a complete arch of marble, forming a natural bridge over the top of the cave,” must have covered the whole chasm of the stream at an unknown period. The pot-hole, I am most certain, has been forded by few lads, and it is hardly probable that any other poet or prose master ever disrobed and bathed in its waters as Hawthorne did in 1838. The basin is from six to eight feet deep, with a beautifully rounded, highly polished brim. I christened this bowl “Hawthorne’s Bath-Tub,” and, unable to wade it, climbed out of the “Cave” to the light above. I, however, descended again to see the northern portal of the arch below the Bath-Tub. I was interested in the names painted high and low upon the marble rocks. Some visitors had evidently tried to place their initials as high as possible, while others more modest sought to write theirs as low, and in more obscure places. I regretted that I had not brought a pot of red paint and a brush to daub my own title there, with the ambitious crowd.
The stream, as it approaches the arch of the Bridge, is deep and of a dark green color. The chasm, from the top of the ledge, is about sixty feet deep, and the ravine three hundred feet in length. Geologists say that the ravine was formerly spanned by two ledges of rock, one of which is now in ruins. The piles of rocks in the chasm south of the southern portal of the arch are dazzling white, seen in the noonday sunshine. The fall of water, in its descent through the ravine, is about forty feet to the three hundred feet, so that the eddies play and whirl rapidly through the irregular bed. A wooden tile, or raceway, was hung high over the chasm, across a leaning crag of the original ledge,—conveying water power thereby to mills below. This old structure leaked, and as I descended the banks below, I saw some of the most gorgeous miniature rainbows spanning the depths, as the sunshine fell upon the mist near the arch.
A lad once made a wager with his comrades that he could cross over the ravine upon this wooden tile. The old weather-worn log was slippery with mould and mosses. In making his daring and perilous trip, the youth lost his footing, and fell headlong into the heart of the chasm. Following the fall, a terrific thunderstorm passed through the Hoosac, and night closed over the chasm. The next morning the boy’s lifeless body was recovered. The wooden structure is now replaced with an iron tiling.
I passed on down the path on the west bank, until I reached an immense marble boulder, which was draped with dainty ferns and mosses. Little rivulets flowed from its sides, and climbing around to its southern brow, I was delighted to find many luxuriant plants of Walking Ferns—this making the fifth excursion in succession in which I had found this rare plant.
I entered the ravine below the boulder, and picked my way up the chasm to the southern portal of the arch, where I became wet through from the mist above, as I ventured to look through the cave. Returning, I found a path up the east bank leading to Marble Quarry and the mill below, where grave-stones, door-stones, and various ornaments are manufactured. The most useful piece of work ever turned out here was, in my mind, the Williams College sun-dial tablet, which Hawthorne observed in 1838 as being as large as the top of a hogshead.[59] I have later discovered that this dial was placed near that old Astronomical Observatory on Consumption Hill, near the present College Library,—the first building of its kind erected in the United States, for the study of the worlds above, by Professor Albert Hopkins, in 1838. The bronze sun-dial was supported upon the marble table which Hawthorne saw at the quarry. Around it was carved in the soft marble the now dim inscription:
“HOW IS IT THAT YE DO NOT DISCERN THIS TIME.”
This dial is now among the relics in the College Museum.
The overhanging crag, near the southern side of the arch, will in another half-century or more tumble also into the ravine. One large pine tree and many bushes, growing on this leaning tower, are plying their roots deeply in the marble fissures, and are slowly splitting the rock asunder. I have designated this pile Captain Skipper’s Monument, in memory of him who recorded the last evidences of the Beaver Dam across this stream. Tradition says that the beavers labored centuries before the white man arrived in the Mayunsook Valley, building better than they realized, since they erected a dam which stopped the rippling flow of Hudson Brook. Originally, this stream flowed nearer the surface of the Natural Bridge. It is believed by some that the dam clogged the driftwood from the domes, and thus set the waters back. The force of the eddies, combined with the chemical action of the waters whirling among the logs and rocks, eroded dimples in the soft marble, until they wore the present archway through.
The Marble Arch of the Natural Bridge, North Adams, Massachusetts.
“Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens, and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome, or Greece, Etruria, or Carthage, or Egypt, or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?”—Thoreau.
I followed down the bed of the stream, stepping from rock to rock easily, until I reached the path far below the Marble Quarry, and entered The Beaver, a little village where every one works like the small animals for which it is named. I was now near the junction of Hudson Brook and the Mayunsook; and not wishing to return to the City until sunset, I scrambled up the slippery sides of the hemlock hills above the little river. With the echo of the cavern’s tumultuous roar still in my ears, I now heard, in pleasant contrast, the distant gentle murmur of that flowing stream. When I departed from the vales of these talking streams, I carried with me back to the busy world the remembrance of the voicing fantasies of their songs of wilderness and solitude.