02: “The Strength of the Hills Is His Also”

Copyright © 2007¹

Chapter 2 of the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

IT IS HARDLY FAIR to refer all the meaning there is in these words of inspiration to the mineral treasures hid in the hills, or their wealth of timber or pasture, or in their springs, or rugged fastnesses, na­ture’s strong fortifications. “Our fathers worshiped in this moun­tain,” said Jesus.² Always in the heights of the hills has there been a sug­ges­tive­ness in the minds of the races, that as heaven was “on high,” so the heights were nearer to God. It is true also that re­markable events, some of them the most momentous that humanity knows, occurr­ed on these same heights. The second cradling of the race was on Mt. Ararat.³ The Law for God’s whole world was a mountaintop revelation.⁴ Mount Mor­iah was the scene of Abraham’s greatest trial,⁵ and the heaven-ap­point­ed place for the greatest temple the world ever saw was also a moun­tain peak.⁶ The transfiguration,⁷ as well as the crucifixion, occurred on di­vine­ly chosen mountain sites.

Hill-life necessarily develops a rugged type of manhood. The true typ­i­cal Scotsman is the Highlander. David’s life in the hill country shines out in his rugged physical organization, in his self-reliance and self-thought-out prob­lems, while his whole poetic nature pours itself through the type of material life manifest in his contact with the hills. It is harder to climb the steep upgrade than to move easily along the plain. The hillside is harder to plow than the level of the valley. The inhabitant of the hills must travel more miles to school and church than the dweller on the level plateau. Indeed, one gets almost everything harder. It costs more, and so develops more. Two steps from my door at Sunnyside⁸ I pump abun­dance of water. In the city⁹ I had only to turn a faucet. But at the old home among the hills, the spring and mother’s springhouse were down quite a grade, and hundreds of feet away. A pail of fresh water cost us more, and was much prized. My heart cries when I think how my dear mother toiled up and down that awful hill for me, before I was able to do anything for myself, and afterward before I knew what it was cost­ing her.

Front view of the author’s birthplace in Walnut Ridge, Indiana. The photo was taken in 1893. The author put this picture in a photo album made for his grandchildren. His handwritten note reads, “Where Grandpa was born April 16, 1836, 8 miles north of Salem, Ind. Photo taken 74 years after the house was built.”¹⁰

I see now that I was subject to many influences that I was then en­tire­ly unconscious of, which have largely made me what I am. Child­like, I was at first afraid of the deep old forests, and the dark valleys with moss-covered logs, where the sun scarce ever shone in summer or win­ter. I avoided them, yet they were ever impressing and shaping thought. It mattered not so much that I did not understand. Accompani­ed by my father, fear was gone and I loved the deep solitudes, and travel­ed in a kind of mis­understandable wonderland so long as the tramp lasted.

Every way we went out for a distance, we had the hills to consider. They checked us when we were in danger of going too fast. We had to “lock” the wagons when going down hill, and “scotch” them when go­ing up, for the horses to rest. In many ways the hills restrained us, and all men need restraint. They were continually developing various expedients. On the playground at the schoolhouse we always sought for a level place, for we knew the ball would always make us chase downhill after it if there was a hill within range. The road to our sugar camp we had to dig around the brow of a very steep hill in order to get there with a team of horses, unless we went miles around. The hills made us work. The cost increased values.

There was also the suggestion of beauty, grandeur, and sublimity in the hills. They seemed to unite earth and sky as the prairie cannot. From their heights we saw the summer cloud sailing above us. Its shadow ran over hill and through valleys, shading temporarily the landscape from the brighter light of the sun. In the valley threaded the silver stream. The long range of hills faded far away in deeper shades of blue. There was something grand and awful when the great storm wind tossed in fury the giants of the forest. The roar of strife seemed to shake the earth. When lightning struck one of these five-hundred-year-old monarchs the earth rocked with the sound, and the torn pieces of timber were hurled through the air in all directions.

When spring came our flowers were not all on the ground as we have them on the prairies. In places they were one hundred feet deep or more, for treetop vied with violet, anemone, and buttercup to display its wealth of vernal glory. When autumn came there was the same munificence in splendor and gorgeous array, the earth being carpeted with green and crimson and gold, while the forests wore holiday attire which even Solomon in all his glory could not rival.¹¹

But I did not see then, even if I do yet, how all this was molding me or how all these voices and sights were marking my deepest nature. Like all chil­dren, I accepted the instinctive feeling and thinking as true, though I had never thought out these truths. We cannot be agnostics if we try, at least in youth. I did not even question the gigantic forces about me, though I never doubted them. I believed the trees would stand, the apple trees bear apples, the spring continue to run pure water, the sun to shine and the rains to come. Am I any better off now, when I presume to think I can reason about them and understand the how of them? I had faith in childhood. It was real. It had its reward perhaps more surely than faith now, for then I knew no doubt. I realized no question.

Looking through the vista of intervening years, I see that these early as­so­ciations with nature in its native, original purity did much to make my whole trend of inner being. I was affected much by other environments, but here I call particular attention to what the world of nature about me did for me. Do you know there is yet a cry in my very nature, oftentimes, to flee away again to the hush and companionship of the hills and mountains? The old walks among the mighty forests, in springtime or in autumn, laden with fragrance, gorgeous with bloom and uncommon, inexplicable beauty, thrill me as I think of them. The pure, limpid rill that laughed its way down through the sugar-camp, singing good cheer and making its own psalm of praise as it went, was for more than the passing day. The pure, sweet air in the clover field, musical with bees and birds under the deeper blue of the sky overhead, flecked with passing clouds whose mysterious mission I never yet am able to un­derstand, filled me with wonder and joy. On the higher part of the fields I could see away across the valley to “Brenneman’s”¹² and westward to the deeper-shaded line of hills farther away still, and feel some kind of a thrill within me I did not comprehend.

There was something much higher in the associations I found about me than in the schooling children get in the dirty, crowded streets of a city. There were the bees drinking nectar from the flowers; the grasshoppers trilling their strange music and waltzing their strange pantomimes; and the butterflies zigzagging their lazy, leisurely way over the fields red with bloom, decked in silken robes, purple, gold and silver, ever keeping up their undisturbed flirtations. Beneath my feet in forest wild, nature withdrew her curtain and showed me the springing flowers and the opening blooms of her earliest and fairest jewels, tender and deli­cate, “born but for one brief day,”¹³ while above them birds built their nests with song and cheery glee, and the squirrels chased each other from tree to tree.

As Bryant says:

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