They hauled these "slips" into
Monterey County by the wagon-load after the settlers began their great
rush for the prairies; and how they grew! It was no bad symbol of the
state itself--a forest on four wheels.
What I began to write a few moments ago, though concerned the difference
between our winter climate then and now. Then the snow drifted before
our northwest winds in a moving ocean unbroken by corn-field, grove, or
farmstead. It smothered and overwhelmed you when caught out in it; and
after a drifting storm, the first groves we could see cast a shadow in
the blizzard; and there lay to the southeast of every block of trees a
long, pointed drift, diminishing to nothing at the point where ended the
influence of the grove--this new foe to the tempest which civilization
was planting. Our groves were yet too small of course to show themselves
in this fight against the elements that first winter, and there I had
hung like a leaf caught on a root in a freshet, an eighteen-year-old
boy, lonely, without older people to whom I could go for advice or
comfort, and filled with dreams, visions and doubts, and with no bright
spot in my frosty days and frostier nights but my visions and dreams.
And I suppose my loneliness, my hardships, my lack of the fireplaces of
York State and the warm rooms that we were used to in a country where
fuel was plentiful, made my visions and dreams more to me than they
otherwise would have been. It is the hermit who loses the world in his
thoughts.
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