Green Laurels by Donald Culross Peattie

Author:Donald Culross Peattie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2013-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

9

WILDERNESS PLANTSMEN: BARTRAM AND MICHAUX

Now let me sing a new song. Now forget the small­est of the continents, the most long-loved, the most richly inhabited, and let me go far away and far back into time. There will be no Padua, no Göttingen, no Upsala, no museums, no academies. And no systems and no theories.

But there will be a land slowly buckling, rising, por­tentous and naked, a whale-back out of the sea, shoulder­ing the brine away, and for the first time taking on its face of rock the rain from heaven. Many times the great whale continent rolls and turns, but the backbone ridge, the Appalachians, never again goes under. There are no sea-made fossils in those hills, and life, microscopic and protean, has never ceased its breathing there, its growth, decay, renewal. After millions of years, a warm shallow bay is emptied by a gentle uptilting of the land, and where the waters rushed out, leaving their vast lime silt, a stream began to run, watering deepest fertility, gather­ing other streams to itself, gathering like a great chief mighty sons to its council. Mississippi, the river, brown serpent, carrying water to the sea, winning it back again at the source, serpent with its tail in its mouth, closed cycle, life-giver.

And westward, the young steppe, great New World meadow, sunset prairie that flowers not in spring but in autumn, a land without echoes. By insensible gradations it rolls up, a thousand feet, two thousand, four thousand, six thousand, still a plain, climbing the sky till it meets the first broken arid buttes thrown out by giants when the rock was raw. Then in the sharp air the red and yellow features, lined with blue shadows, of the Indian-faced Rockies. Here are no flowering trees, no Appalachian mist or wistfulness, no perfume and no mossy age. This is youth, this is maleness, with the lodgepole pines, the incense cedars, Gothic spruces, lakes lifted quietly near the sky, and canyons where a silver thread is a thundering river. Then a burning desert, and abruptly out of it peaks capped and carved with the purity of ice, Sierra Nevada. Alpine meadows spilling out mariposa lilies, and march­ing out of Time the mighty columns of the redwoods. And rolling up to meet this land, another ocean, a greater, tumbling the giant red sea-kelp lazily in tempered waters.

This is the continent I sing, not ours by a million years, not named, one of the six great blocks of the world, the most intemperate, with a heartwood the hardest. For ages without number it stood grandly, indifferently empty of men. While Asia was filling with humans and human debris, it was still empty of them, the sun shining only on grass in the valley, the night finding beasts in the forest. It was full already with roots in the soil, and armies of birds sweeping northward, going southward; it was al­ready perfection; nothing in it knew a lack.

Then, where the most northerly islands lie like stepping-stones on the blue sea map, came a leak out of Asia, of the little, erect, intentional species called men.

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