Day, the Fifth

The Elephant Hath Joints, But None for Courtesy

Some Random Words Over the Years – Published and Unpublished - About Thomas Cole and Elephant Head

2016 - Baby U cups her hands and digs into a thin layer of gravel, rocks and dirt. The wind at the top of Elephant Head in Crawford Notch comes up valley and tussles her already wild and unruly wall of hair. We’ve been exploring the AMC’s Highland Center area of the notch these past couple days, just her and I – dipping our feet into the muddy water, picking wild flowers in the fields near the center, crawling and climbing on any stable surface, and a few unstable ones.

We are exhausted, and filthy, and we both stink.

But our eyes are clear, and she looks up at me with a handful of dirt and twigs and roars like a tiny 15 pound dinosaur and dumps the entire concoction into my own outstretched hand.

Baby U and I from the head of Elephant Head. This glorious Rock Face is also featured in our field guide, “NH Rocks That Rock.”

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This is our training. Well, my training. At some point during my upcoming year exploring Mount Washington, I plan on putting her on my back and getting her to the top. I might be solo, I might not. We might take the Cog Railroad down. But however the results, the method will be her and I, and the rocks and dirt under our feet and the wind in our hair. So, we hike, little by little, inch by inch.

First, little woods hikes like this – a round trip of about .7 miles up to this extraordinary lookout, shaped like the head of an elephant, about 600 feet above the notch that marks the entrance to Crawford Notch.

And besides singing “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” about 1,000 times, Baby U is perfectly at home on my back, patting the back of my head saying “hat, hat” over and over at my bandana.

She is still fearless – steep cliffs, buzzing bees, mushrooms – none of those things appear to give her any pause at all, and we’ll have to work on that some. But for now, we have this little summit to ourselves with no worries.

She goes back for another load of rocks, stumbles and goes down in the dirt. I move to sweep her up, but instead she just wipes her hands on her sweater and moves on. She’s focused, happy, disheveled, in the mountains.

And dirty. But the dirt just makes us stronger.

Elephant Head and the Gateway to Crawford Notch through the years. From top, Thomas Cole painting, 1839, middle, Detroit Publishing Company, c1900, bottom, the gateway today, 2020.

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2017 - Nearly 200 years before you bolt, lightning quick, across the bright green lawn of Thomas Cole, life in these parts was really hopping. We are in Catskill, New York, just over the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, on the west side of the Hudson River.

We came across this pastoral setting in much the same way that Thomas did in 1825, more or less by accident. The famous founder of the Hudson River School of Art took a steamship north up the Hudson, passed West Point, before discovering this glorious bluff which a few years later would become his home, Cedar Grove.

Today, Cedar Grove is a National Monument, pastoral, lush; a place where the very air smells like dandelions, acrylic and creative possibility. I attempted to follow in the footsteps – or perhaps the palette - of Thomas when discovering Mount Washington, and now, my little one is the latest in that line of discoverers.

Cole was here around the same time the Erie Canal had just opened, around the same time my home town, Buffalo, had become the most important port on the Great Lakes and around the same time that Cog Railway founder Sylvester Marsh came to Buffalo to use the Erie Canal to make his fortune in grain and flour.

I wonder if maybe, right where you are playing among the groves, Thomas watched one of Sylvester's canal boats chug its way down the Hudson to New York. They were both famous in different ways by then, but creating, one with metal and smoke the other with colors and canvas.

And you? Well, I don't need to tell you that this is a sacred place, by design a place of power through art. I can see the fire in your eyes as you skip through the deep set trees, hide behind the art canvases hung from branches. I jump behind one of the hanging canvases with you, and there we are, two sets of feet sticking out below. And you howl in laughter at the idea that all your mother can see is our feet.

“If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see,” Thomas wrote, “seldom will anything truly great be produced either in painting or poetry.”

A romantic artist, two centuries ago, insisted that we need to look deeper than just living. That life, like art, is more than what we perceive, more than what's in front of us, more than what we THINK we can achieve.

When you swing, punch up. When you reach your limit, go further. As Tolstoy said, “If you wish to be happy, then be.”

We are burning morning by being here, there's lots ahead of us. But these grounds feel intense. You run and we give chase. You hide and we all hide, and we run some more. We grab handfuls of leaves and acorns, you hide under the steps of Thomas' home and climb the grand steps with me. I touch your hand to the door and say “A great artist lived here.”

And the ghost of Thomas Cole whispers in your ear, “You're great too.”

2018 - In his now-classic work on the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, author and travel writer Bill Bryson spends some time thinking about a famous painting by the New Jersey born artist Asher Brown Durand.

In 1849, when Durand painted Kindred Spirits, he was a member of the burgeoning group of artists that would create a style that would come to be known as the Hudson River School. The founder of that school, Thomas Cole, had just died, and Durand wanted to honor Cole’s memory with the painting. In it, Cole and his friend, the poet William Cullen Bryant, are standing high on a ledge, wearing formal overcoats and cravats, looking down into a deep valley. Cole is holding what appears to be a paint brush.

Far in the distance, below the friends, is a waterfall called the Kaaterskill. Like much of the Hudson River School, the landscape is idealized; there is not a place in the Catskill Mountains that looks like that.

But Bryson doesn’t dwell on that. Instead, he’s mesmerized by the temptation of the scene, the draw created by the juxtaposition of the two explorers in fancy clothes—the artist and the poet—against the hostile but beautiful background.

“I can’t tell you how much I would like to step into that view,” Bryson writes. “The scene is so manifestly untamed, so full of an impenetrable beyond, as to present a clearly foolhardy temptation. You would die out there for sure.”

Bill is not alone. Nearly two hundred years later, those early paintings of the Catskills, Adirondacks, and the White Mountains and Mount Washington—in the early days of tourism—are as powerful a draw now as when tourists in wool skirts and top hats braved a trip to explore the scenes they saw in those paintings.

Over the years, I had the great fortune of exploring some of those wild places, of being able to drop myself into the fantastical landscapes depicted by the great artists of that time—the Emerald Pool, Elephant Head, Cathedral Ledge and, of course, the craggy top of Mount Washington.

I knew what it felt like to explore places I’d seen in glorious landscape paintings. I understood the powerful draw those artists created— celebrating the majesty and danger, the power and awe, of my beloved mountain.

But I didn’t know how they did it. I hadn’t put brush to canvas since, perhaps, elementary school. I couldn’t draw. I couldn’t cartoon. How could paint on cloth serve as inspiration? How were artists able to sway your soul?

I planned on finding out, and to do that I needed to become an artist. Which made my current situation all the more perplexing. I’d come to Bartlett, New Hampshire, to learn to paint, but here I was tromping through the undergrowth alongside a highway trying not to get my feet wet.

My plan was to immerse myself in the goings-on of the twenty or so artists from around the region who annually descended on the Bartlett Inn for four days of workshops, discussion and landscape painting. As I traveled backward into the history of Mount Washington, it became clearer and clearer that it was the artists of the mid nineteenth century, with their wildly imagined landscapes of the rough and rugged wilderness of the White Mountains, that first made upper-crusters from around the world curious about just what the heck was going on in that little known, distant state anyway.

Landscapes from what became known as the Hudson River School of Art started showing up in exhibits in Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco and in Europe, with their romantic images of the valleys of Conway, the deep and impenetrable notches and the towering spires of Mount Washington. And before long, those folks began showing up in White Mountains, searching for those views.

Tourists had already started trickling in by the 1830s, but those paintings opened the floodgates.

I wanted to see what they saw, feel the inspiration of those mountains myself. I wanted to gaze upon Mount Washington and be inspired to do something I’d never yet done; paint her.

But first, with my coffee in one hand and my notebook in the other, I had to find Byron Carr. Based on information from a quick cell phone call, I had parked my car near an overpass along Route 302 in Bartlett, just about two hundred yards down the state highway where the artists held their retreat. Byron had already left that morning to set up near the water before the sun got too high.

Master Byron Carr at work

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I trotted across the road and walked to the middle of the bridge before seeing him standing on a rock in the middle of Albany Brook. Now, after some scrambling through the weeds, I manage to make it down myself. He hears me coming, thrashing through the undergrowth.

“Hey, you found me,” he calls out, eyes never leaving his canvas. My education was about to begin.