A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  They rose at dawn and Isabella crowded upon her short thick body all the clothes she had, ‘which gave me the squat, padded look of a puffin or Esquimo’. Two natives, one of them a goat-hunter by trade, led the way, and by mid-morning, when they stopped to tighten the animals’ girths, the sterile land had taken on the cruel tense glitter of an empty mountain world. The ground, weird as a moonscape, was contorted and crushed into a-a and pahoehoe, bizarre formations of igneous rock. A-a, the cruellest kind, was vindictively jagged; pahoehoe, ‘satin rock’ by comparison, lay in smooth whorls, with ‘the likeness, on a magnificent scale, of a thick coat of cream drawn in wrinkling folds to the side of a milk-pan’. Over such terrain, progress was slow: ‘Horrid streams of a-a, which after rushing remorselessly over the kindlier lava, have heaped rugged pinnacles of brown scoriae into impassable walls, have to be cautiously skirted. Winding round the bases of tossed up fissured hummocks of pahoehoe, leaping from one broken hummock to another, clambering up acclivities so steep that the packhorse rolled backwards once and my cat-like mule fell twice, moving cautiously over crusts which rang hollow to the tread; stepping over deep cracks, which, perhaps, led down to the burning fathomless sea, traversing hilly lakes ruptured by earthquakes and split in cooling into a thousand fissures, painfully toiling up the sides of mounds of scoriae frothed with pumice-stone, and again for miles surmounting rolling surfaces of billowy ropy lava – so passed the long day, under the tropic sun, the deep blue sky.’

  At one point they had to cross a stream of a-a, a slowly moving mass of ‘upright rugged adamantine points … wide as the Ouse at Huntingdon Bridge’ and the animals ‘shrank back, cowered, trembled, breathed hard and heavily, and stumbled and plunged painfully. It was sickening to see their terror and suffering, the struggling and slipping into cracks, the blood and torture. The mules, with their small legs and wonderful agility, were more frightened than hurt, but the horses were splashed with blood up to their knees and their poor eyes looked piteous.’ Eventually, when they were sick and silent with exhaustion, their pulses racing, they reached a fissure of frozen snow. They jumped it, and there, eight hundred feet below, yawned the crater. It was six miles round, its infinite blackness intermittently shattered to incandescent gold by the famous ‘fire fountains’ of Mauna Loa, whose jets of pure flame roared some 300 feet high. These fountains erupted with volcanic unpredictability, and Isabella was lucky to see them, to feast her eyes on their terrible and glorious certainty.

  They pitched their tent precariously near the crater; the natives got a fire going and a cheery kettle was put to boil – at which ‘Mr Green discovered that he had forgotten to bring the tea of which I had reminded him over and over again.’ So she brewed up a brandy toddy instead to wash down the tinned salmon and more doughnuts, and then William Green and Isabella Bird ‘huddled up in blankets, sat on the outer ledge in solemn silence to devote ourselves to the volcano’.

  It was an awesome spectacle, as if all the firework displays the world had ever produced were pitched into one terrifying, violent celebration of nature’s energy. Fires were everywhere, ‘burning in rows like blast-furnaces,’ lone and ‘unwinking like planets,’ tossing skyward ‘like golden wheatsheaves’; the light from them was molten red, sunset amber, blue-white as frozen spray. Reluctant to tear her eyes away, but yearning to share the exaltation of it all, Isabella got out her writing materials and, in a quavery script, penned a triumphant heading: ‘Edge of Crater of Mauna Loa, Mokuaweoweo, 6 pm. June 6th, 1873, 13,650 ft. above the sea. Great mountain of fire below…. My Pet,’ she began, ‘Probably you are the only person in the world who has ever had a line from this wonderful place …’ And only a few lines it was, for her hands and the ink were freezing, her head was reeling with vertigo, and she was forced to seek rest inside the tent – for pillow a wooden saddle, for mattress the spiked ridges of lava, for lullaby the crash, boom, rattle of volcanic detonations, the ‘ebb and flow of the thunder-music’ from the fiery fountains.

  Before dawn she woke, and unable to resist the unearthly son et lumière outside, climbed over the sleeping forms of Mr Green and the natives, and stepped into a world of light – vivid, broad, rose-coloured, that stained to a deep ruby the white tent-walls, the grey humps of lava, the silvery index of her thermometer, which stood at 23° F. She sat on the ledge alone, overwhelmed by the sublimity and power of the scene. It was, for her, an apocalyptic vision, prodigal, infinitely mysterious. The whole world fell away, the moon faded wan and dull and, in the intensity of her passionate devotion to this fiery miracle, ‘all lighted homes, and sea and ships and cities and faces of friends, and all familiar things, and the day before, and the years before, were as things in dreams, coming up out of a vanished past.’ She was elevated, ecstatic: ‘How far it was from all the world, uplifted above love, hate and storms of passion and war and wreck of thrones, and dissonant clash of human thought, serene in the eternal solitudes.’

  After that experience, the nearest she ever comes to describing her semi-mystical adoration of nature’s grandest dramas, the rest was inevitable anti-climax. In the morning, the climbers’ limbs were heavy with extreme lassitude, they felt too ill to eat, the water in the canteen was frozen, one of the natives was writhing on the ground with altitude sickness. Wearily they stumbled down towards the mundane earth, and about ten hours later rode triumphantly into the corral of the grass hut, where the ranch-hands ‘seemed rather grumpy at our successful ascent, which involved the failure of all their prophecies, and indeed, we were thoroughly unsatisfactory travellers, arriving fresh and complacent, with neither adventures nor disasters to gladden people’s hearts’. And the last day of the exploit, being a Sunday, they luxuriated in the ‘sybaritic’ comforts of a wealthy ranch-house down in the valley, where she and William Green sat on the verandah and contemplated with considerable complacency the conquered summit rearing above them, and Isabella, finishing the next instalment of the letter home, told Hennie, ‘I read a great deal of Paradise Lost with new admiration today, though I dislike the helpless idiotic jellyfish style of Eve’s speeches to Adam.’

  Back on the rolling Waimea plains, she found her particular Adam, in the shape of blunt hopeful Mr Wilson, still waiting; from her he received not one ‘idiotic jellyfish style speech’. They sat together in a tree one sunny afternoon and she told him that ‘he was mistaking liking for deeper feeling,’ and that ‘he had never succeeded in making me feel that he loved me’, to which Mr Wilson mumbled that he thought he did. On their ride together the next day however, perhaps realising that his suit was hopeless and needing to salvage his wounded pride, he affirmed that she was right – he had ‘the greatest liking and respect’ for her instead. To which she sternly replied (rubbing salt, perhaps unconsciously) that she ‘hoped he would never again propose to anyone till he was quite sure of the state of his own heart’. And then he laughed, she concludes, ‘and we took a tremendous gallop back again’.

  So the remote contingency of Mr Wilson was firmly put away, and Isabella, in a mood of reaction, went on to complain about the predominating ‘low American influence’ on the Islands, the insular, shallow, hybrid atmosphere, and the surprising – undoubtedly true – fact that she had met scarcely any intellectual equals there. ‘You can hardly imagine,’ she explains, ‘what an unpleasant feeling the lack of large public interests gives … You hardly feel the beat of the great pulses of the world.’ The fretful note continues. She suddenly felt ‘out of her element’ at Waimea; and yet even the Hilo missionaries were ‘of the coldest, driest, hardest, shrewdest type of American piety and have not the manner or tone of American gentlemen, with the single exception of Mr Coan’. When ‘stationary’, (that is, out of her saddle) she was assailed by lassitude and nervousness ‘as if everything were a drag’; she worried about Hennie who was ‘going about in England incurring the perils of trains’ – and peril was Isabella’s preserve. She realised it really was time to leave, though she refers again and again to the soft pull of the deep
banana shades where she could lie lax as a lotos-eater and ‘no longer roam’.

  But roaming, as she had just discovered, was her vocation, the talent and passion for the rest of her life when so much else would fall away. And roamers, as she knew in her bones, were doomed to leave even the fairest anchorage. So ‘better a finger off than aye wagging’, she told herself as she prepared to leave Hawaii for the last time. Cannily she re-trimmed her brown travelling hat, and, upon investigating her finances, discovered that life in the Sandwich Isles had cost her only ten pounds a month. To her many friends who saw her off she gave presents of fern-prints and spatterwork; for Mrs Severance was reserved the blue parasol she had used but once ‘when Prince Albert came to Edinburgh’; Mr Wilson received her big gentle horse for consolation. In the bottom of her trunk she packed her ‘bloomer dress’ and spurs that jangled nostalgically, doubting that she would ever have occasion to wear them again. She did not know that before she reached home, she would experience new intensities of physical ordeal and emotional involvement compared with which the climbing of Mauna Loa and the relationship with Mr Wilson were mere trail-blazers.

  That lay ahead; for the present, returned to Honolulu, she was torn with the thought of departure: ‘I am glad that I am so sorry to go’. She boarded the Pacific Mail steamer Costa Rica on the afternoon of 7 August and sailed for San Francisco. ‘Everything looked the same as when I landed in January except … that I know nearly everyone by sight and that the pathos of farewell blended with laughter and alohas, and the rippling music of the Hawaiian tongue; bananas and pineapples were still piled in fragrant heaps; the drifts of surf rolled in, as then, over the barrier reef, canoes with outriggers still poised themselves on the blue water; the coral divers still plied their graceful trade, and the lazy ripples still flashed in light along the palm-fringed shore….’

  CHAPTER II

  The Rocky Mountains

  THE colours simplified and then dimmed. When she reached San Francisco, the gaudy heaps of cantaloupes, peaches, tomatoes, squashes piled on the sidewalks were the only reminders of the bounty she had left. The Californian coastal towns blazed and clanged in the dusty midsummer heat, and she boarded the first train east. Its two jaunty engines, named The Grizzly Bear and The White Fox, pulled seven hundred feet of rolling stock that included a truck filled with grapes, a smoking-car filled with Chinamen, a Wells Fargo express car filled with bullion and several platforms filled with Digger Indians, filthy, ragged and sullen, their hair plastered with pitch, who, according to other derisive passengers, subsisted on a diet of grasshoppers. Isabella was en route to the Rocky Mountains, ‘where, people say, the elixir of life can be drunk,’ she had written to Hennie from Australia when only the joyless dregs of existence seemed hers. At that time she also hoped to find ‘the elixir of life’ in the Rockies and in a sense she did find the elixir of life there – more freedom than she had ever known, more delight than she had ever expected, and passion, if that was the word for it, the one romantic passion she ever experienced.

  The adventure began in Greeley, Colorado, where Isabella left the train and stepped into a world that seemed full of prairie dogs, flies and pioneer waggons. The prairie dogs lived in underground honeycombs on the plains, furry, reddish-brown little beasts that yelped like pups, looked like baby seals and sat on the rims of their burrows ‘begging with their paws down and all turned sunward’. The flies, of a peculiarly noxious kind, spun drowned and drowning in the greasy gravy of the dinner she ate in Greeley’s only tavern, a wooden shack on the edge of beyond where ‘nobody was speaking to nobody’. The waggons, junks of the plains with their white tilts flapping and filled with bone-weary, dusty, gaunt pioneers, creaked alongside the cart she rode the next day from Greeley to Fort Collins.

  During the journey, Isabella’s three male companions argued politics the whole way, for it was election time and most able-bodied white men ‘were galloping over the prairie to register their votes’. At this date, Colorado was still a territory outside the Union, a brash, unproven, improvised land many of whose settlers had put down still-tentative stakes more recently than, say, those in Honolulu. Its laws, like its railroads, were in the process of being laid down and one of the questions that much fretted the three men in the cart was ‘to drink or not to drink’. Greeley, the settlement she had just left, was a Temperance Colony – its inhabitants a sprinkle of teetotallers in a soke of whisky addicts. Greeley throve as a result, Isabella thought, for there was no violence there and people worked harder. ‘A thousand songs and fifty fights’ were stoppered inside each whisky barrel, said the Indians, and many of Colorado’s inhabitants certainly spent a lot of time singing and fighting. And so, understandably, did the Indians themselves who, when inflamed with the white man’s ‘fire-water’ and armed with his guns, sometimes resorted to carousals, robbery, violence and were thus the sooner reduced to the only role offered them – that of bogeymen, scapegoats and incubi of the territory. ‘“To get rid of the Injun”, is the phrase used everywhere,’ Isabella remarked. ‘The white man has come to take the place of the red and is stamping the superscription of his kingship on the face of the land,’ blared the editor of an early Colorado magazine, whom Isabella later met. ‘And the screaming of his locomotive wakes the echoes which a while ago multiplied to the war-whoops of the savage.’ There had been much ‘Injun trouble’ in the area before Isabella came and it was not quite over yet. Raids and equally brutal massacres of reprisal had been an uncomfortable feature of pioneer life there in the previous decades, and isolated outbreaks occurred in the 1870s, though, by that time, the Indians were cowed with defeat and loss.

  But Isabella evinced little interest in these grim scraps; her eyes were not on the plains – where the deer and the antelope roamed and everyone carried rifles to shoot them with – but on the Rockies beyond. There, she had been told, lay a remote and beautiful valley called Estes Park, and she could feel the place in her bones, a cool promise of peace. Owing to a shortage of reliable horses, helpful information and roads, the first problem was how to get there. From Fort Collins, a place as ‘altogether revolting’ as Greeley, ‘given up to talk of dollars, as well as to making them, with coarse speech, coarse food, coarse everything’, she took a buggy into the foothills and there gained first-hand experience of settler life as it often was, but is seldom depicted.

  She stayed with the Chalmerses, a family from Illinois who had taken up a 160-acre ‘squatter’s claim’ nine years before. They were in all ways hard: their faces were granite-set with ill-humour and disillusion; their thoughts were mean, suspicious and clenched like little fists ready for instant disagreement; their habits were comfortless, laborious, unlovely and monotonous, bound to a treadmill of stark survival. They were frugal and sober, yet shiftless and simply incompetent. They owned a patched waggon, a few animals, a sawmill, a cabin and some cooking-pots. The sawmill kept going wrong, the pots were rusty, the cabin partly in ruins and bits of its roof fell on the table when it rained. The oxen-harnesses kept breaking, the horses were ill-shod, their saddles held together with twine, and the poultry was gaunt. Mrs Chalmers, who always wore the traditional dusty-black sun-bonnet, was ‘lean, clean, toothless’ and spoke ‘in a piping discontented voice which seems to convey personal reproach’. Her husband was a pig-headed, glum, Reformed Presbyterian who loathed ‘England with a bitter personal hatred and regards any allusions … to the progress of Victoria as a personal insult’. Their children were lumpish, unmannerly and ‘unchild-like’.

  Like many of the settlers, Chalmers had been a consumptive and had gone to the territory in search of health; that he found, but the hardships of pioneer life were so great that he lost, if indeed he ever had, all capacity for joy, charity and love. It was a common pattern, Isabella felt, typical of the ‘unornamented existence with which I came almost universally in contact’. She stayed with this doleful ménage for a week or so, making herself useful by showing the women how to knit, and improvising an Hawaiian-styl
e lamp with a wisp of rag in a tin of fat. At length, Chalmers was sufficiently won over to agree to guide her to Estes Park, some fifty miles away, and even ‘to make a frolic out of it’, as he put it, by taking his cheerless wife. It would be hard to imagine a less frolicsome trio than the three who set off early one September morning in quest of Estes: ‘I had a very old iron-grey horse, whose lower lip hung down feebly, showing his few teeth, while his fore-legs stuck out forwards, and matter ran from both his eyes. It is a kindness to bring him up to abundant pasture. My saddle is an old McLellan cavalry saddle, with a battered brass peak, and the bridle is a rotten leather strap on one side and a strand of rope on the other … Mrs C. wore an old print skirt, an old short-gown, a print apron, and a sun-bonnet with the flap coming down to her waist, and looked as care-worn and clean as she always does. The inside horn of her saddle was broken; to the outside one hung a saucepan and a bundle of clothes. The one girth was near breaking point when we started.