Chapter XIV: The Miner’s Rainy Day

No work on the claim to-day. It rains too hard. It is the winter rain of California--a warm, steady, continuous drizzle. The red earth is soft and soppy. It mires to the ankles. The dark green of the chaparral on the hill sides seems to-day almost black. The hue of the river by my cabin door is yellower than ever. The water-mark is three feet higher than last night and it creeps upward every hour. Over the mountain crags yonder white sheets of foam are tumbling where none has been seen before for many months. This is an enforced day of rest. I have finished my breakfast and sit down for a few minutes in a keen enjoyment of idleness. There is a ceaseless patter of raindrops on the cabin roof. The river roars louder than ever over the riffle close by. That roar is the first sound I hear in the morning and the last at night. It has roared thus for me these three years. In one sense of times’ duration they seem as three hundred years; in another, they seem not much over three months. It is three months when I think only of the date of my arrival on Frazier’s flat. It is three hundred years as I attempt to recall the daily round of experience and thought since I came here. Outwardly it has been what many would consider a monotonous experience. Weeks have been so much alike that they leave no distinguishing marks in my memory. A big freshet or two, a mining lawsuit, an election, a few weeks when the claim “came down rich,” a fight at the bar store, a bigger spree than usual, a visit from county candidates travelling for votes, a giving out of ditch water, a break in the reservoir, a man drowned in the river--these are the great events on Frazier’s flat.

I wonder how many years more I shall spend here. I wonder if I must live and die here. I am no nearer fortune than three years ago, not so near by three years. I seem more and more chained down here by force of habit. I seem fit for little else but to dig. I long to see something of the great world beyond this lone foothill nook. Yet without money I feel less and less capable of going out and “getting on” in that world. And as for saving money--well, we call this a “three-dollar claim,” which means an average daily profit, when all expenses are paid, of two dollars more or less. These thought are making it as gloomy within as the weather is without. I must get out of this. My gray flannel working shirt needs mending. The right sleeve is ripped from wrist to elbow. It has been so ripped for about six weeks. I have rolled that wet sleeve up to the elbow about a hundred times a day, and at every tenth stroke of the pick it has unrolled again and flapped in my face. I sew up the sleeve with a very large needle and a very coarse thread doubled. This is a good time to clean up a little. I will be domestic to-day. I will bake a fresh batch of bread and make a pie. It shall be a mince pie. We are ten miles from the nearest baker’s mince pie. It shall be made of salt beef previously soaked to freshness, dried apples, molasses and vinegar in lieu of cider. The crust I roll out with a junk bottle on a smooth, flat board. I bake it on a shallow tin plate. It will be, when done, a thin, wafery pie; but it will be a pie--the shadow of a pie at least--such as I used to eat at home; only a shadow.

Rain, rain, rain. The wind is up and about too, tearing around among the trees and shaking the cloth roof of my cabin. Here and there little trickles of water are coming through and running down the logs. Mine is a log cabin of the roughest make. Four logs piled atop of each other form the sides. A mud chimney at one end; a door at the other. The logs are very dry and very rotten and abound in those insects that delight in rotten wood. I have found scorpions under the bark and occasionally an earwig promenades over the table. I open the door and look out on the river. It is rising. Wrecks are coming down--boards, logs, lumber and an occasional sluice and pieces of fluming. There is an eddy around the turn of the hill above, where much of this drift runs in. I repair thither and make a few hauls. I secure a half-dozen good boards, some pieces of joist, some driftwood for fuel, and pile it up on the bank out of the swelling water’s reach. “Halloa!” That cry is from a couple of men on the other side of the river, plodding down the trail in oilskins. I know them. Two of the “boys” from Poverty Bar. They are going to Price’s store two miles below--store, grogshop, boarding-house, polling booth at election, ferry, etc. Being a rainy day they are going there to get drunk. That is not their avowed purpose on setting out, but it’s as near a certainty as anything can be in this world.

I return to my cabin. The pie has baked. It is browner than I intended it should be. On one side it is almost black. It is ornamented about the rim with a row of scollops made by pressure of the thumb. Now I put in the bread, previously mixed and kneaded. I am not a good breadmaker. It is always bread too much baked, or too little, or too sour, or too yellow, or too heavy. But I don’t care. I bake only for myself and I am unfortunately too easily pleased and probably too lazy to take that care and elaborate preparation necessary for good bread. I never measure accurately the proportions of flour, water, and yeast powder necessary for good bread. I throw them together at random. It’s a “hit or miss”--generally miss. It’s too much trouble to bother about these small details. A particular friend of mine who stayed with me a few days reproved me for the poor quality of my bread and the general slovenliness apparent about my cooking utensils.

“You have no pride,” said he.

I owned up. What was the use of pride about a tin kettle. This friend was my backer. He had set me up on this claim and put me, after a fashion, on my feet. He had come to see how I was getting along. While on this visit a man of some standing from a camp up the river came along looking for a stray cow. My friend asked him to dinner--one of my dinners--graced by about the worst baking of bread I ever accomplished. My friend did not realize what he was about when he asked the future Lieutenant-Governor of the State of California to that dinner. But when he sat down to my board and when they tried to eat my bread, he sorrowed in secret and gave me some good and forcible advice afterward relative to culinary and domestic matters. In these matters he was a very particular man. During his stay he inaugurated a reign of neatness and for me one of terror and discomfort. He put his whole mind on cooking and covered the stove with dishes. He was an animated bill of fare. He scoured all the tinware brightly. I was quite surprised at the new, fresh look of things, and in secret thought seriously of reform, and hoped he wouldn’t stay long.

But the man didn’t enjoy eating his elaborately prepared meals so much as I did. He worked too hard getting them up. He exhausted too much of his force in planning, worrying, and cooking. He worked his mind in too many channels at once. He lacked repose. There’s where I had the best of him. I was reposeful, and if you please so to term it, lazy. He is dead--I am alive. There’s the result of different mental conditions. It is noon. I have no clock to tell the hours, but we acquire a faculty of feeling when noon arrives. The rain has ceased temporarily, but it will soon recommence, for which I am glad, as it will prevent work on the claim during the afternoon. Having eaten dinner, finishing with a piece of my mince pie, it occurs to me that this is a good time to write home. It’s hard work writing home. I put it off for weeks and months. It lays a load on my mind. I receive at times letters from people complaining of my neglect. I know I ought to write, but what is there to write? Nothing but the same old story “Hope soon to do well.” I have written in this strain for the last six years until I am tired and sick of it. It is of no use telling any more about the country. All that has been told. If my people only knew how much I suffered in this endeavor to be dutiful, perhaps they would not insist on my writing more than the line, “I am still alive; yours truly.” Thousands more of letters from California wanderers would have been received by anxious relatives had they been content with this. But you were expected to write. Bricks without straw.

It is a hard thing to realize, and few will realize it, that no matter how close the tie of relationship, in reality there can be a wider and wider drifting apart. Interests are not the same; associations are not the same; location, surrounding, environment are not the same. Through some or all of these influences you are growing into another man; another woman. You would hardly recognize yourself could you see your own identity and individuality as it was ten years ago; you believe differently, you are another individual. What is that cry from the old home so far away? It is the longing for some expression from the being of 1850 and not from the one of 1860, who, did he stand under the shadow of that roof and sit at that well-remembered table, would still after a few days show the change, proving in himself or herself the lack of something which once existed, and so prove a disappointment. The ink in my cabin is thick, the pen a bad one and my mind seems in this epistolary effort thicker and rustier than ink or pen. “Dear ----” and then a big blot, and then a long pause and the patter of the rain and the roar of the river. I write about a page and a half, feeling as if every stroke of the pen were encumbered with a ball and chain. I accomplish half a dozen more blots and I finish in a wretched state of mind and in a prickly heat. It is a barren, pithless, sapless effort. I will go out and get a breath of fresh air and rain. It is four o’clock. Still it rains. The heavens are dark and already the first shades of the winter’s night are coming on. I revisit my haul of lumber from the river. It is gone. The river has not reached the spot where I placed it. It is the work of those thieving Chinamen on Chamber’s Bar, half a mile above. There is no use in going after them. My lumber is deposited and hidden amid the piles they have to-day dragged out of the river.

I spend about an hour getting in fuel. I have a woodyard on the hillside yonder. Nature has kindly felled and seasoned there a few scrub oaks for my use. I drag down a few branches. The land here is free--very free. No fences, no boundary lines, no gates, no proprietors. It’s a pretty flat when the sun shines. A dark background of mountain, in front a river, with its curving and varied outline of tule and bank up and down stream, and close about the oaks are so scattered as to give one the impression of a park and an old mansion hidden somewhere in the background. What a luxury would be this spot to thousands in crowded cities who haven’t even the range of a back yard nor the shadow of a tree! Yet I am discontented and would get away to these crowded cities. The early darkness has come. I light my candle. My candelabra is of glass--dark olive-green--a bottle. I did use a big potato with a hole therein scooped. But the esthetic nature requires constant change and I adopted a bottle. I spread the evening repast. I sit down alone. From the window I see lights glimmering in the few other neighboring cabins.

McSkimmins drops in after tea. I know all that McSkimmins will say, for I have often heard it before; but McSkimmins is better than nobody--or rather better than one’s own thoughts, unrefreshed and unrelieved by mixture with any other minds’ thought. McSkimmins goes. I take refuse in the effort to repair my best and only pair of broadcloth pantaloons. I brought these with me from the States. They show decided signs of wear. I am putting in a patch. It is a job I take hold of at intervals. There is about it a mystery and a complication I can’t fathom. I can’t get the patch to fit, or, rather, to set. There is more in the tailor’s art than I imagined. Every time I have put them on I find a difference and a seeming division of action and sentiment between the new cloth I have sewed inside and the old cloth outside. They won’t hold together. The stitches rip apart and everything goes by the run. I seem to fail in making the new cloth accommodate itself to the varying proportions of this part of the garment. And so the dreary night wears on. Rain, rain, rain; roar, roar, roar. Is this living?