O how shall I find you out, safe words . . . .
When from a mountain far away
The wood wakens.
When from a mountain far away
Comes a song that I understand?
Roberta Teale Swartz Chalmers
Mountain Day, to be in its most delightful tradition, should come as a surprise. One may know in a general sort of fashion that it is bound to come sometime. There are signs of its imminence that one may intelligently discern. But it is a mistake to plan on it.
In the olden times, we used to suppose that the Day was as much a surprise to the authorities as it was to us. We used to think that the Administration woke up early on a radiant October morning, saw that the weather was ideal for Mountain Day, called up Mr. Burnham on the spur of the moment, and asked him to ring the Chapel bell for 'No Chapel.' Mr. Burn'm, dressing hastily, would then repair to the belfry in a trice. A surprised trice, at that.
Just how we supposed that the food for all our picnic lunches happened to be ready in the college kitchens may well be asked. I do not remember that we gave thought to the food, except to pack our share. There naturally had always been extra bread for sandwiches on Mountain Day, together with quantities of sliced meats, cheeses, apples, jams, and salads, topped off with doughnuts (or crullers - transcontinental feud) and cakes. Instead of going to Chapel, we rushed to long tables where all these luncheon ingredients were set forth, made our own sandwiches, packed them neatly, and the campus would be practically empty before nine. Everybody was off to the mountains on foot. Only the plutocrats could dream of hiring a horse, and if we met a croupy Pope-Hartford or Stanly Steamer on the Smith Ferry Road, we all drew up observantly alongside to watch the horseless wonder chugging past.
Nowadays students really are more canny. We had one sign only that we guessed by: when the big sugar-maple tree near Shattuck on North Campus was entirely yellow, it was time for Mountain Day. But of course the term 'entirely yellow' was hardly a term to clock by. Today the students look into the activity of the College Bakery and narrowly scan the comings and goings of the College Steward. They watch the foliage as well, and the charts of the weather bureau, and the distribution of known events in the college bulletin. If the most probable Mountain Day turns out to be rainy, they are caught with their assignments unprepared. That is where we were different. Taken by surprise at the early bell-ringing we were often caught with our work all ready for classes - a tremendous waste.
Deploring waste of all kinds, and hoping thriftily to conserve such preparation without letting it get cold, the college during one benighted era decided to set the day forward (or should one say backward?) so that if Mountain Day happened Monday, the academic Monday would occur on Tuesday, with events like Monday's except for Tuesday's fixed engagements. This avoided running into academic Tuesday unprepared, and would have been very nice indeed except for Tuesday's fixtures. Academically the plan was sound, preserving as it did from superannuation all of Monday's laboratory setups, zoological specimens, and prepared reports. It sounds logical enough. But let me quote from the News:
We're all mixed up trying to decide if Wednesday were Mountain Day, would we have yesterday's classes tomorrow, or today's classes day before yesterday, and what classes we have then - and why. Suppose Mountain Day were Tuesday. Then the next day is academic Tuesday, but with chocolate ice-cream for dinner as of Wednesday. The day after, academic Wednesday is God's Thursday - and what do we do about choir rehearsal and dates?
This is clear enough if you read it in print. But try saying it aloud to a friend. Unless he has his wits remarkably about him, he will think for a moment that the News editor got it wrong. The day after academic Wednesday was surely God's Friday, was it not? Or was it? Then you must explain to him that there are commas around academic Wednesday: the day after, comma, academic Wednesday, comma - making all the difference. As one bewildered Thinker, after such a parley, was heard to say in a daze, 'When's Wednesday Wednesday?'
But even this nightmare was better than the still more hapless experiment tried in 1926 and thereabouts, when Mountain Day became for a while a fixed date. There was a day appointed, not subject to change. That date was to be the one and only unshakable Mountain Day, rain or shine. Pessimists predicted rain, and it did rain. 'But,' inquires the News for one of those unlucky years, 'we wonder how many extremists there were who predicted hail and snow along with the usual moisture.' In spite of the hail and the rain and the snow, hardy hikers there were (called by the News the 'future supports of the nation') who went up the mountains regardless. But that's no kind of Mountain Day for a college to have. One could just as suitably imagine the Old Testament angels going up and down Jacob's Ladder in the rain.
With the intention of avoiding the same damp fate on one of the last of those years, a surprise vote was taken in Chapel. On the day of the vote, the seniors had 'come out' in cap and gown. The weather was not only ideal, but idyllic. Mountain Day had been inflexibly set for the day following. But so perfect was the weather on this Cap and Gown morning that the college was given a choice in Chapel: should they wait for the morrow and risk the usual rain, or should they go forthwith from Chapel into an unexpected and abbreviated Mountain Day? The vote was overwhelmingly for going when the going was good. Off went the college, delightfully astounded, taken unaware as of yore; but without the advantage of an early start.
Now, to the praise of all the powers, the old custom of unprognosticated bell-ringing has come around again. In the News of 1930 we read, 'Among the various organizations to which the sudden announcement of Mountain Day came as a complete surprise and quite a shock was the Outing Club. Counting on at least a day's notice . . .' You see? This heretical concept of 'notice' will indicate exactly to what depths of corruption the original pure tradition of surprise had by that time fallen. The very idea - counting on notice! But the Outing Club with its usual resourcefulness rallied round, got itself up into its cabin, and during the day served coffee to more than a hundred and fifty souls. Ambitious hikers paused there going or coming, in spite of the elfish prank of a construction man on the road, who repainted the signpost near the entrance to the camp (after the hostesses had gone in) so that instead of reading simply OUTING CLUB, it read, when he got through touching it up, OUTING CLUB, FOURTEEN MILES TO GO.
The year just described was the forerunner of a series of correctly impromptu Mountain Days, though not without attempts, on the part of the celebrants, to plan. So convinced were the students about the wrong date on one occasion that the News prints this revealing item:
8 a.m. Dress rehearsal for Mountain Day. Heads seen hanging out of windows, girls listening intently - hoping . . . . No soap. [In the jargon of the moment, no soap, of course, meant 'nothing doing' - no hope.] But the good old chapel bells really sang a pretty tune on Tuesday morning.
This was the year when it was stoutly averred that one of the seniors 'did SO make it up Mount Holyoke on a bike.' If that was true, to the bitter top, it was the peak, so to say, of vehicular exploits yet to be studied in our records.
Two more glimpses from the News will show that the one right custom has now returned in force. Here is a notice from October 7, 1933:
Mountain Day will be announced this year by the ringing of the chapel bells at eight o'clock some fine morning, and the classes of that day will be omitted in order that the day may be enjoyed by all out of doors.
Note well the italics. The day itself will be omitted. No trifling with God's Thursdays any more, nor with God's Fridays, nor with God's chocolate ice-cream on Wednesdays. This is as it should be. The profound philosophy of Mountain Day is essentially this: that a whole heavily programmed day, full to bursting of unshatterable appointments, can be suddenly dropped out of the calendar by a thousand persons, and the earth not quake.
Yet still, incorrigibly, the students try to plan. In the following item, joyous as it is, we get a distinct 'feeling' of planning, much as an architect might notice a modernistic 'feeling' in a house.
It was with great relief, therefore, that we heard the chapel bells ringing and Miss Woolley's dogs howling in mournful obbligato. May it be said, here and now, that no dogs were ever so averse to any bells, as are Miss Woolley's dogs to the chapel bells. Or maybe it's all in a spirit of friendly rivalry. In any case they heartily seconded the announcement of the holiday.
Why was it with 'great relief' that the bells and the dogs were heard? Because, forsooth, the undergraduate had made plans; and if the bell had failed to ring, those plans would have suffered a quick change.
And just why has planning so inexorably crept in? Why cannot the modern maiden take her proposal of marriage and her Mountain Day unsuspectingly, out of a blue sky?The automobile is partly responsible. It gives you fair warning of the one, and you have to engage it for the other. Long before Mountain Day is due, great squads of cronies charter what a reporter of the News staff once termed (happily, I think) 'a patient bus.' In this they cover the tiresome stretch between their starting point and whatever natural scenery they may wish to surmount on foot. At the nether slope of any hill on Mountain Day you may see several of these 'patient' trucks drawn up, facing one another over their nose-bags, and waiting with never so much as a switch of their tail-lights until their riders return from the steeps.
From a practical point of view there is much to be said for the bus. In one such, painted red and yellow, Mr. Roger Holmes took a large party to the foot of Mount Toby, on the Mountain Day of 1935. With them went Admiral Byrd's second in command, Doctor Thomas Poulter, he who led the tractor party to the Advance Base; he who measured the six-hundred-foot depth of the Antarctic icecap with seismic devices; he who had been lecturing to the College the night before on the discoveries at the Pole, and now had a free day for a climb.
The forenoon was unseasonably cold. Many of the girls wore mittens. Doctor Poulter, who has children of his own, took an almost paternalistic interest in those mittens, not for themselves alone, but in their conjunction with the total costume in which the girls had elected to climb. If, argued the antarctic explorer, it is cold enough so that mittens are needed for the hands, surely a little something is in order for the knees? If, on the other hand, one is Spartan enough to climb in cotton ankle socks and abbreviated garb, then why the woolen mitts? He really should have seen the correct climbing costume of the nineteen-tens. We had on no woolen mittens, to be sure, but we had on everything else.
In the midst of all these changes, there is one thing that remains fairly steadfast: the mountains. We climb the same peak to which Professor Hitchcock and Miss Mary Lyon took the Amherst young gentlemen and the Mount Holyoke young ladies in 1845. And it would be possible, some Mountain Day, on the top of Mount Nonatuck, to read aloud the account in Professor Hitchcock's Reminiscences of Amherst College, of how he again invited the Mount Holyoke students to be present at his christening of that mountain. According to this account, he christened Mount Nonatuck with fragments of stone which he had chipped from the edges of the specimens in the mineralogical cabinet of Amherst. Since Professor Hitchcock was largely responsible for the collection, he had a right to chip them; but he told the students that he asked permission of the specimens before he broke the pieces off. These fragments were 'specimens of mountain rock from the Alps, Mount Tom, the White Mountains, Egypt, Mount Holyoke, Africa, the Green Mountains, Mount Lebanon and Olympus.' Into the air he tossed these bits of famous peaks, letting them fall as they would on Mount Nonatuck, and said, 'This mountain is now received into the fellowship of other mountains.' It would be interesting to know if somewhere on top of Mount Nonatuck there is still a little fragment of Olympus, tossed there by Professor Hitchcock in that imaginative 'baptism with stones.'
One of the earliest student descriptions of Mountain Day is found in a letter written by Harriet Landon to her family. Harriet Landon, at 17, wrote the letter on June 24, 1844.
Well, then [she writes], the sum and substance of what I wished to tell you is, that I spent a most delightful day yesterday. Delightful, did I say? No, for there was no unalloyed happiness on this earth of ours, but pleasant, yes, for once I think the reality was equal to the anticipation. I did not anticipate much, and realized all. I rose in the morning early, marched into Em Stiel's room, invited her to take a jaunt with me to the mountain, and started at eight o'clock with my lady, feeling as proud as could be . . . .Well, we had quite a respectable company I can assure you. It amounted to 117, I believe. A part went at six, the other half at eight. I had domestic work after breakfast, so I was obliged to go in the last group, but then, Em and I had first-rate times. The night before we petitioned Mr. Hyde to whittle us off some broom-sticks for walking canes.We rode about four miles and then began to climb. The mountain was very steep in some places, but by observing Prof. Hitchcock's direction, to go slow, 2nd go slow, 3rd go slow, we got along pretty well. On the summit of the mountain is a house, part of which is blown down, by the way. Here we procured some water, at two cents a glass, opened our baskets, took out our lemons and sugar with which we had furnished ourselves. Probably you will infer from this that we had some fine lemonade. Then Em and I went out, took a squint at the surrounding country, and at last, seated ourselves under the shade of some bushes to eat our lunch. We talked first of this, then of that, but it would take all the paper I could get to tell you all we did, so I must stop short, by telling you we visited some most beautiful rocks, and returned home much fat-i-gued. Charlotte says she feels like a natural fool to-day; you can judge of my feelings by the manner in which I write.
Professor Hitchcock had evidently given intensive instruction on how to climb a mountain. He has left us a complete account of the best way to appreciate the view from Mount Holyoke. I quote from his Geology of Western Massachusetts as reported for the State:
The man who means to feast to the full upon mountain scenery should be accoutred in such a manner that he can turn aside from the beaten track, urge his way through the tangled thicket, and climb the craggy cliff. There is a peculiar pleasure, which such a man only can experience, in feeling that he has reached a point perhaps never trodden by human foot, and is the first of the rational creation that ever feasted on the landscape before him.In the view from Holyoke we have the grand and the beautiful united; the latter, however, greatly predominating. The observer finds himself lifted up nearly a thousand feet above the midst of a plain which, northerly and southerly, is of great extent; and so comparatively narrow is the naked rock on which he stands, that he wonders why the winds and storms of centuries have not broken it down. He soon, however, forgets the mountain beneath him, in the absorbing beauties before him. For it is not a barren unenlivened plain on which his eye rests, but a rich alluvial valley, geometrically diversified in the Summer with grass, corn, grain, and whatever else laborious industry has there reared. On the west, and a little elevated above the general level, the eye turns with delight to the populous village of Northampton; exhibiting in its public edifices, and private dwellings, an unusual degree of elegance. A little more to the right, the neat and substantial villages of Hadley and Hatfield, and still further east and more distant, Amherst with its college, Gymnasium, and Academy, on a commanding eminence, form pleasant resting places for the eye. But the object that perhaps most of all arrests the attention of a man of taste, is the Connecticut, winding its way majestically, yet most beautifully, through the meadows of Hatfield, Hadley, and Northampton, and directly in front of [Mt.] Holyoke, as if it loved to linger in so tranquil a spot, it sweeps around in a graceful curve of three miles extent, without advancing in its oceanward course a hundred rods. Then it passes directly through the deep opening between [Mt.] Holyoke and Tom, which its own waters, or more probably other agencies have excavated in early times. Below this point the Connecticut is in full view, like a serpentine mirror, for nearly twenty miles. And through a deception, explicable by the laws of perspective, there seems to be a gradual ascent of the river, the whole distance, till at its vanishing point it seems elevated nearly to a level with the eyes: - just as the parallel sides of a long avenue seem to approach nearer and nearer until they meet.
The descriptions go on to enumerate the towns that may be seen to the south - South Hadley, 'indeed a pleasant object,' Springfield [Holyoke did not exist], the spires of Hartford, and hills near New Haven. Mount Tom to the southwest, 'one or two hundred feet higher than Holyoke,' comes in for honorable mention, and in the northwest the Greylock, the Hoosic and Green Mountain Ranges, the Sugar Loaves, and Toby, 'while far in the northeast stands in insulated grandeur the cloud-capt Monadnock.'
'Probably under favorable conditions, not less than thirty churches in as many towns, are visible from Holyoke.The north and south diameter of the field of vision there can scarecely be less than 150 miles.'
Sylvester Judd, in his History of Hadley, tells us that Paul Coffin, who graduated from Harvard in 1759, visited the top of Mount Holyoke in 1760, described the view, and 'was delighted, especially with the crops on the intervals, which "looked like a beautiful garden."' He found strawberries and the feathers of wild turkeys, and said that the 'prospect was surprisingly beautiful, when one stooped down and looked backward.' 'A singular posture,' comments the editor in a note.
Regardless of posture, these mountains are worth seeing in the height of autumn color. There are many higher mountains on the crust of the earth, and many far more famous. Everest and Rainier would hardly call our hills mountains at all. Yet geologically they qualify - and certainly they are precisely the peaks for a college land to have. Their contours are the contours of mountains. You may take your choice of shapes and sizes - loaf-shape, cone-shape, flatiron formation, half-loaf shape with one 'mural'straight up and down. There are certain favorites - Sugar Loaf, Toby, Nonatuck, Mount Holyoke, Tom, and Bear. Any one of them can be climbed in a morning. You can drive on one or two. There are assortments of Ladies' Paths, Devil's Paths, spiral roads and scrambles. From the top of Mount Tom, with a good glass, you can see five States.
From Mount Holyoke you see less, but with an undistracted eye. There is nothing here to attract a crowd of tourists; but there is much to store in the imagination, with October colors and a congenial crowd and a picnic lunch, and a whole vast uninterrupted Mountain Day to spend as you please. Nobody minds if you spend it sitting perfectly still on a summit looking down on the backs of flying crows.
If, on the other hand, you feel ambitious, you may walk the range, scalloping up and down from crag to crag along the skyline, until you come out near the stone-crusher at the Notch. This Notch in the skyline used to be the roosting-place for so many flocks of wild turkeys that the orginal settlers named the place 'Turkey Gap.'
The Notch makes a good getting-off place for hikers not in training. The whole range from end to end should not be attempted by a tenderfoot, and neither should the novice choose the trail from the crest of Nonatuck to Tom. That it has been attempted, however, will be seen in the following item from the College sporting news, written in the vivid present tense at the time:
A worn Mountain Climber prostrate on the top of Mt. Tom, moaning over her infirmities, announces her intention of remaining there for the night. Unsympathetic friends suggest that the Administration would not be favorable to the plan.'That's all right,' says the Mountain Climber, 'but the Administration ain't got no blister.'
You don't get a blister if you really know how to climb, unless there is something the matter with your shoes. The best adventure involving footwear befell Miss Florence Purington, some years ago, when she started out in a very comfortable old pair of shoes, thinking that the mountain hike would just about finish them up. The shoes took her up the mountain safely, but on the way down one of them split wide open along the beam. [sic] She tried to walk on regardless, Spartan fashion, but her friends protested. How to calk the seam? In the midst of the discussion, Miss Purington happened to glance at the surrounding trees, and there, on a branch, like some strange fruit, a rubber sandal hung - a rubber sandal of the kind we used to call a 'foothold.' It was the correct size. It was for the correct foot. The only thing that could have made the miracle more dramatic would have been for the clouds to arrange themselves in smoke-writing to form the message, 'If the shoe fits, put it on.' Miss Purington accepted the gift from the ravens and walked comfortably home.
Of course it is not strictly necessary to climb at all on Mountain Day. There are plenty of other things to do. You can fill the hours with urban occupations. You can ride with the Boots and Saddle Club to Aldrich Lake. You can go to Sunderland; or to Paradise; or even to Buckland to visit the birhtplace of Mary Lyon. All these things have been done by groups on Mountain Day.
Or you can walk to that valley called 'The Orient,' gorgeous with flaming colors in October, with maples of Ming yellow among maples of mandarin red. Lacquered sassafras in the undergrowth - if you ever go there, sit down on a rock by a cool stream from the ledges among the pale ferns touched with frost, and look through your half-closed eyelids straight down the long shafts of sunshine, letting the colors blur a little as you gaze. Wait there long enough and passively enough to memorize forever the fragrance of moss and New England trees in autumn; the cool dripping sound of what the early settlers called 'riverets' on the rocks; the myriad transparencies of sheer crimson and pale gold spread to the sun, layer upon layer - not as if the leaves had taken on color, but as if pure color had taken on the shapes of leaves.
There is plenty of beauty in the valleys.
But when possible, on Mountain Day, in all generations, the true lover of the uplands will drop every horizontal matter and head for a peak. It is a thing to remember for a lifetime, the authentic Mountain Day: a sound and lovely legend that many a girl has perpetuated later in a household tradition of her own. It is pleasant to know that there is still in South Hadley one day a year when sheer landscape is permitted to upset every program; one day a year when beautiful weather is permitted to abolish routine; one day a year when an entire college flings its cap over the belfry and makes off in a hurry - for love of the hills.