Essays of Travel Tale 13 - Health and Mountains

Robert Louis Stevenson (0:00)

Section 13 of Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson. The SleeperVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 10, Health and Mountains. There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed in the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago, and the wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up, together in some basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive yards, with an earshot of the interminable and unchanging surf, idle among spiritless idlers, not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after livelier weather and some vivifying change. These were certainly beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its softness, yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine. You were not certain whether you were being wooed, and these mild shores would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death. There was a lack of a manly element. The air was not reactive. You might write bits of poetry and practice resignation, but you did not feel that here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears after all that there was something just in these appreciations. The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps. A rudder air shall medicine him. The demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded in his den. For even winter has his dear domestic cave, and in those places where he may be said to dwell, forever tempers his austerities. Anyone who has traveled westward by the great transcontinental railroad of America, must remember the joy with which he perceived after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone, the southern sky.

It is among these mountains in the new state of Colorado, that the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of his ailments, but the possibility of an active life and an honest livelihood. There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew his life. Instead of the bath chair, the spade, instead of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick room, these are the changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of self-respect, with what a revolution and all his hopes and terrors, none but an imbecile can know.

Resignation, the cowardice that apes, a kind of courage and that lives in the very air of health resorts, is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect. The man can open the door, he can be up and doing, he can be a kind of a man, after all, and not merely an imbecile.

But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains. We cannot all of this go farming in Colorado, and there is yet a middle term, which combines the medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of the old. Again, the imbecile has to lie aside from life in its wholesome duties. Again, he has to be an idler among idlers. But this time at a great altitude, far among the mountains, with a snow pile before his door, and the frost flowers every morning on his window. The mere fact is tonic to his nerves. His choice of a place of wintering has somehow to his own eyes, the air of an act of bold contract. And since he has willfully sought low temperatures, he is not so apt to shudder at a touch of chill. He came for that, he looked for it, and he throws it from him with the thought. A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either hand that rise higher and higher, and shoot up new summits the higher you climb. A few noble peaks seen even from the valley, a village of hotels, a world of black and white, black pine woods clinging to the sides of the valley, and white snow flowering it, and papering it between the pine woods, and covering all the mountains with a dazzling curd. Add a few score imbalances marching to and fro upon the snowy road or skating on the ice rinks, possibly to music or sitting under sunshades by the door of the hotel, and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium.

A certain furious river runs curving down the valley. Its pace never varies. It has not a pool for as far as you can follow it, and its unchanging senseless hurry is strangely tedious to witness. It is a river that a man could grow to hate. Day after day breaks for the rarest gold upon the mountain spires and creeps growing and glowing down into the valley. From end to end, the snow reverberates to sunshine. From end to end, the air tingles with a light, clear and dry like crystal. Only along the course of the river, but high above it, there hanks far into the noon, one waving scarf of vapor. It were hard to fancy a more engaging feature in a landscape. Perhaps it is harder to believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature of the incontinent stream, whose course it follows. By noon, the sky is arrayed in an unrivaled pomp of color, mild and pale, and melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of purple blue.