Chapter 57Through the Canadian Rockies to ChicagoDURCH DAS KANADISCHE FELSENGEBIRGE NACH CHIKAGO
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
This time the passage to San Francisco went off smoothly. There too I kept a reunion! How much had been newly built up since the previous year! Then I went out to the Muirwoods at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. Greater halls of sequoia with more gigantic trees do not exist in all the world. In the city everyone was talking of the World Exhibition of 1915 (we were writing 1913)1, whose building ground was first to be fetched up out of the bottom of the sea at the entrance of the “golden gate.” The undertakings of America always run to the monstrous.
And then I travelled northward, along the snowy Coast Range.
I had arranged it so that I travelled by day, spent the night somewhere at dusk, and went on again the next morning. In three days I got as far as Portland in this way, past high mountains, through wild forests, along sea coasts. At the snow colossus Mount Shasta, at Shasta springs, there was a halt.
The forest land of Oregon with its giant trees gave me an idea of the primal force of America.
At Portland I got out and went up the majestic Colombia river as far as Dalles and back. Then it went on by rail to Seattle, a most interesting and flourishing city. And then by ship to the delightful island of Victoria, on which the gorse was everywhere in bloom in yellow flames2. Wonderful is that bay with its distant chain of snow.
At Vancouver I rested some days. The situation of this most flourishing of northern cities too is magnificent beyond all conception. The new city layouts on the heights are imposing. The chain bridge very remarkable.
At last I was at the starting point of my “Canadian rockies Expedition.” It was really much too early still, only the end of May. All the same, I could never have set eyes on the Selkirk range and all the snow mountains of the Rockies more magnificently than now. And so I revelled from the bottom of my heart; I positively waded in beauty, in ice and snow.
At the very loveliest points I stopped. So first at Glacier point, a stay which I imagine, to be sure, as more enjoyable in summer. For it was bitterly cold. I took long walks to the foot of the glacier and into the snowed-up valleys, and painted my high-mountain view as well, from the window.
My next stop I made at Field, beneath sky-high mountains, in a thoroughly American luxury hotel. From there I treated myself, together with an American woman painter who was just as thrifty as I, to a carriage out to the Emeraldlake, which reminded me a little of the Achensee, only it is far grander. The finest excursions were still shut off by ice and snow. Then I travelled on to Laggan, the pearl of the Rockies.3 From here I went on foot along a very good road to Lake Louisa. The gigantic hotel there on the lake was not yet open, but the Italian cook gave me something to eat as a kindness. Now I wanted to go on to “the lakes in the clouds.”4 And this walk very nearly cost me my life, and cost me at any rate a heavy catarrh that pursued me for months.
There was far too much snow still lying; I had indeed been told that the snowplough had cleared the paths. Perhaps I also strayed from the right way. It was supposed to be only an hour and a half as far as the view of the upper lakes, but I had already been walking three hours in dense forest, sometimes waist-deep in snow. With a heavy heart I decided to turn back with nothing accomplished. Iced through and through, I came back as the day was sinking. They had already been anxious, for woodcutters had met a big bear soon afterwards in the direction I had gone off in.
And here at “the lakes in the clouds” these animals were not so tame as in the Yellowstone park.
At any rate the bear missed me, but the bronchial catarrh did not. I sat by the kitchen fire and dried my stockings; the good-natured Italian brought me hot tea. At last, in the alpenglow, I walked back along the carriage road to Laggan.
The view from the hotel over Lake Louisa is unearthly beautiful, with its wild chain of glaciers.
At Banff I got out again, after a night at Laggan.
There I stayed this time a fortnight, in an abominable hotel, the “King Edward.” For the fairy-tale hotel above the waters was beyond my means. But every day I sat on its terrace, from which one has all the snow ranges before one as on a map.
“Have you been in Banff?” A giant poster of that kind had drawn my attention to this stronghold of the Rockies years ago already, in Munich.5 The most glorious excursions I made from here. Every day a finer one. The Rockies are, I believe, still more awesomely sublime than Switzerland and Tirol together. There are remarkable stalactite grottoes there too.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑(we were writing 1913) — The only year she names outright in the whole of Part Three, and it is wrong. Set it against the rest of the book. She dates the opening of her picture hall to the second of June 1911 and sails from Hamburg that September; chapter 53 says the thief acted trusting to an eleven-month absence, and that she came home in the summer; chapter 52 keeps Christmas at Mombasa in 1911; and chapter 56, one paragraph before this one, has the wireless bring her the loss of the Titanic in mid-Pacific, which happened on 15 April 1912. Every one of those points to a San Francisco landing in May 1912, and the sentence a few lines below — it was really much too early still, only the end of May — fits a 1912 arrival in the Rockies exactly. A May 1913 in California would require an absence of twenty-two months and would leave her nowhere to have been for a year. So the parenthesis is a slip, most likely a two written or set as a three, and it is the one place in Part Three where she tries to help the reader with a date and misleads instead. It is also the reason the chronology of this whole journey had to be rebuilt out of a railway timetable, a colonial official's term of office and a shipwreck.
- ↑the gorse was everywhere in bloom in yellow flames — The yellow she is admiring is an invader, and a famous one — the third such plant she has met on this voyage and taken for the country's own. Ulex europaeus, English gorse, is not native to Vancouver Island. It is there because one man put it there: Captain Walter Colquhoun Grant, the colony's first independent settler, brought seed out with him about 1849 for a hedge at Sooke, and it escaped. By her visit it had taken the whole south end of the island, and it has been fought as a noxious weed ever since — it burns fiercely, and it comes back after fire. The flowering season is exactly right for the end of May. What makes it worth a note is the pattern: the Cattleyas she found smothering a temple at Angkor were American, the frangipani woods round the tombs at Hué were American, and now the gorse burning yellow over a British Columbian island is Scottish. She travels a world that has already been reshuffled, and reads each new place as native to itself.
- ↑Then I travelled on to Laggan, the pearl of the Rockies. — The name is itself a date: the station for Lake Louise was called Laggan until 1914, and by 1912 she was riding a chain of hotels the railway had built to make its own mountains pay. The Canadian Pacific could not haul dining cars over the western grades, so it built places to feed people instead, and then discovered that the places were the business. Glacier House at Rogers Pass, Mount Stephen House at Field — her thoroughly American luxury hotel, which was in fact Canadian and railway-owned — the Chateau at Lake Louise, and the Banff Springs at the far end: a string of hotels a day's run apart, sold in Europe as a single expedition. Laggan was the siding two and a half miles below Lake Louise; the station took the lake's name in 1914 and the old one has almost vanished. And the shape of the chapter is the shape of the package. What she adds to it is the walking, the painting, and an American woman painter as thrifty as herself sharing the cost of a carriage.
- ↑“the lakes in the clouds.” — Lake Agnes and Mirror Lake, in the hanging valley above Lake Louise, and the walk up to them is the one that nearly killed her. The Lakes in the Clouds was the Canadian Pacific's name for the two small lakes on the shelf behind Lake Louise; the path is a well-graded switchback of some two miles and a stiff eight hundred feet, and in a normal summer it is an easy afternoon. At the end of May it was under deep snow. She had been told the snowplough had cleared it, went up anyway, lost the line, and spent three hours in dense forest sometimes waist-deep before turning back — and came down to learn that woodcutters had met a large bear in the direction she had taken. She was fifty-eight. What she brought back instead of the view was a bronchial catarrh that followed her for months, across Chicago, Niagara and the Atlantic.
- ↑A giant poster of that kind had drawn my attention to this stronghold of the Rockies years ago already, in Munich. — The chapter's best sentence, and the one that explains the whole of it: a railway hoarding on a German street, and years later the woman it caught is standing in the Bow valley. The Canadian Pacific advertised across Europe on a scale nothing else in the tourist trade matched, because it had to fill both the ships and the hotels at the ends of its own line, and because Canada wanted immigrants. Its posters went up in London, Paris, Hamburg, Vienna and Munich, and the English question on a German street was part of the effect. She remembers the wording verbatim after what she calls a good many years. It is worth putting beside the general de Beylié of chapter 54, who talked her into Angkor in Siam and Ceylon: those are her two methods of choosing a destination, a friend and a billboard, and this chapter is what the billboard produced.