The River and I | Page 8

strenuously idle, magnificently worthless, flinging
meaningless thunders over the vast arid plain, splendidly empty under
sun and stars! I saw him as La Verendrye must have seen him--busy
only at the divine business of being a giant. And for a moment behind
shut eyes, it seemed very inconsequential to me that cranks should be
turned and that trolley cars should run up and down precisely in the
same place, never getting anywhere, and that there should be anything
in all that tract but an austere black eagle or two, and my own soul, and
my Titan brother.
When I looked again, I could half imagine the old turbulent fellow
winking slyly at me and saying in that undertone you hear when you
forget the thunders for a moment: "Don't you worry about me, little
man. It's all a joke, and I don't mind. Only to-morrow and then another
to-morrow, and there won't be any smelters or trolley cars or ginger-ale
or peanuts or sentimentalizing outers like yourself. But I'll be here
howling under sun and stars."
Whereupon I posed the toiling philosopher before the camera, pressed
the bulb, and descended from the summit of the cliff (as well as from
my point of view) to the trail skirting northward up the river, leaving
Encleadus grumbling at his crank.
Perhaps, after all, cranks really have to be turned. Still, it seems too bad,
and I have long bewailed it almost as a personal grief, that utility and
ugliness should so often be running mates.
They tell me that the Matterhorn never did a tap of work; and you
couldn't color one Easter egg with all the gorgeous sunsets of the world!
May we all become, some day, perfectly useless and beautiful!
At the foot of the first fall, a mammoth spring wells up out of the rock.
Nobody tells you about it; you run across it by chance, and it interests
you much more in that way. It would seem that a spring throwing out a
stream equivalent to a river one hundred yards wide and two feet deep
would deserve a little exploitation. Down East they would have a great
white sprawling hotel built close by it wherein one could drink spring
water (at a quarter the quart), with half a pathology pasted on the bottle

as a label. But nobody seems to care much about so small an ooze out
there: everything else is so big. And so it has nothing at all to do but go
right on being one of the very biggest springs of all the world. This is
really something; and I like it better than the quarter-per-quart idea.
In sixteen miles the Missouri River falls four hundred feet. Incidentally,
this stretch of river is said to be capable of producing the most
tremendous water-power in the world.
After skirting four miles of water that ran like a mill-race, we came
upon the Rainbow Falls, where a thousand feet of river takes a drop of
fifty feet over a precipice regular as a wall of masonry. This was much
more to my liking--a million horse-power or so busy making rainbows!
Bully!
It was a very hot day and the sun was now high. I sat down to wipe the
sweat out of my eyes. I wished to get acquainted with this weaver of
iridescent nothings who knew so well the divine art of doing nothing at
all and doing it good and hard! After all, it isn't so easy to do nothing
and make it count!
And in the end, when all broken lights have blended again with the
Source Light, I'm not so sure that rainbows will seem less important
than rows and rows of arc lights and clusters and clusters of
incandescent globes. Are you? I can contract an indefinable sort of
heartache from the blue sputter of a city light that snuffs out moon and
stars for tired scurrying folks: but the opalescent mist-drift of the
Rainbow Falls wove heavens for me in its sheen, and through its
whirlwind rifts and crystal flaws, far reaches opened up with all the
heart's desire at the other end. You shut your eyes with that thunder in
your ears and that gusty mist on your face, and you see it very
plainly--more plainly than ever so many arc lights could make you see
it--the ultimate meaning of things. To be sure, when you open your
eyes again, it's all gone--the storm-flung rainbows seem to hide it
again.
A mile below, we came upon the Crooked Falls of twenty feet. Leaving
the left bank and running almost parallel with it for some three hundred

yards, then turning and making a horseshoe, and returning to the right
bank almost opposite the place of first observation, this fall is nearly