“It looks so to you,” he said, “but often it ain’t.”
CHAPTER III—THE BANKS OF THE RIVER
The river-bank boys pick up, as easily as they breathe, knowledge as miscellaneous as the drift piled on the shores. They know all the shoals and principal eddies, without the aid of buoys. They know the ways and seasons of the different fish. They learn to recognize the owner’s marks on the logs, and they know the times and ways of all the humbler as well as the larger river craft, the scows and smacks, and the “gundalows” which spend mysterious month after month hauled up among the sedges at the mouths of the streams. Their own row-boats are heavy, square at both ends, and clumsy to row, but as I have said, they are out in them in the spring before the floating ice is out of the river, rescuing logs and fragments of lumber from between the ice-cakes.
There is a good deal to the business of picking up logs. The price for returning “strays” to the right owners is ten cents a log (the rate increasing as you go down stream), and a good many can be towed at once by a small boat. The price per log rises to twenty-five cents, near the sea. In times of high freshet, the up-river booms often break, and then there is a tremendous to-do at the mouth of the river: men, women, and children, all who can handle or half-handle a dory, are at work at log-rescuing. Incoming ships have found the surface of the ocean brown with logs at these times, and have a great work to get through them.
Logs that have lost their marks are called “scalawags,” and these are sold for the benefit of the log-driving company. Hollow-hearted pine logs are known by the curious term “concussy,” or “conquassy.” To show the immense change in the prices of lumber, the best pine lumber, which in 1870 was worth ten dollars a thousand feet, is now one hundred dollars a thousand.
Now and then a boy takes to the river so strongly that he makes his life work out of its teachings. The captains and engineers of most of our river and harbor steamers, and of bigger craft, too, began life as riverbank boys. Some of them take to fishing in earnest, some become lumbermen, or go into the Coast-Survey service, or the Rivers and Harbors; and the winter work on the ice leads to an interesting life for a good many others. Once in a while one of these boys goes far from home. We have had word of one and another, serving as pilot or engineer in Japanese, Brazilian, and East Indian waters.
The three Tucker brothers, Joel, Reuel, and Amos, three finely-built men, all worked up to be registered pilots. Joel, the eldest, was pilot of an ocean-going steamer all his life. He grew very stout, and had a fine nautical presence, in blue cloth and brass buttons. Reuel was lazy. He never went higher than small raft-towing tugs, and he often gave up his work and loafed about, fishing. He was the man who swam five miles down river, and stopped then because he was bored, not because he was tired. Amos, the finest of them, a gallant looking fellow, with very bright blue eyes, was a pilot for a good many years, and then a foreman in the ice business. He was a man of such shining kindness that he was always up to the handle in work in the heart of his town, as selectman, honorary and volunteer overseer of the poor, and helper-out in general. In a case of all-night nursing, in a poor family, where a man’s strength was needed, Amos was on hand, rubbing his eyes, but watchful and ready. Once, when a neighbor’s wife had to be taken to the Insane Hospital, Amos undertook the sad task, and his gentleness made it just bearable. Parents looked to him for help in the care of a bad or unruly boy.
Then there were the Tracys, who ran—and still run—a queer little ferry at Jonestown, “according to seasons.” When the ice begins to break up they row the passengers across, somehow, in a heavy flat-boat, between the ice cakes. Their regular boat, in which they embark wagons and even a motor, is a large scow pulled across by a chain, with a sail to help when the wind serves. The Tracys’ ferry is, I think, unique for one regulation; man and wife go as one fare.
Some of the river bank people are mere squatters. The squatter, as we called him, par excellence, pulled the logs and bits for his dwelling actually out of the river, as a muskrat collects bits of drift for his house. He was a Frenchman, and such a house as he built! Part tar-paper, part bark, part clay bank, the rest logs, barrel-staves, and a few railroad sleepers. But there he lived, on a tiny level plot under the railroad bank, so near the river that each spring freshet threatened entire destruction. He made or acquired a boat that matched his house, and presently he brought not only his wife and children, but two brothers and an old mother to live with him. The women contrived some tiny garden patches on the slopes of the river bank, and with the rich silt of the stream these throve wonderfully. The men fished, and “odd-jobbed” about.
Then came the Great Freshet. Dear me! shall we ever forget it? We woke one March night to hear every bell in town ringing, while a long ominous whistle repeated the terrifying signal of the freshet alarm.
There was a confusion of sounds from the river, wild crashings and grindings and thunders, as the ice broke up in its full strength, with a noise almost like cannon.
The water rose and rose. By daybreak it was up to the shop-counters in the street, and people paddled in and out of the shops in canoes, rescuing their goods. The ice-cakes were piled ten feet high on our unfortunate railroad. Then a great holding-boom broke, a mile up river. A twenty-foot wall of logs swept round the bend, and the watchers on the roofs and raised platforms saw it splinter and carry out the Town Bridge as if it had been kindlings.
Sheds and boat-houses and wharfing were whirled past all day in the tumble of ice cakes. Like other people in danger, the Squatter carried out his gipsy household goods, and moved up town with his family; all but the old French mother. She would not be moved, but sat in the middle of the road on a backless chair, watching her dwelling. She could have done nothing to save it, but nothing could tear her away. The rain poured all that day and the next. Some one lent her a big broken umbrella, and there she sat. I could think of nothing but a forlorn old eaves swallow, watching the place where her mud dwelling was being torn off.
By some miracle of the eddy, however, the house stayed intact; but soon after they all moved away, to safer, and, I believe, more comfortable quarters.
The Lamont family lived a mile north of the Town. They had a ramshackle house and barn, in a bit of open meadow by the mouth of one of the brooks. You might say of the Lamonts that they were so steeped in river mud that every bone of them was lazy and easy and slack. There were the father and mother, and seven children. They were as unkempt and ragged as could be, but they always seemed cheerful and smiling, and the younger children were fat as little dumplings. The three eldest were shambling young men; they and the father seemed perfectly content with a little fishing and odd-jobbing, and now and then one of them took a turn as deck-hand or stevedore, or—as a last resort—as farm-hand. The girls and the mother dug and sold dandelion greens, dock, and thoroughwort and other old-fashioned simples.
None of them had ever gone to school a day beyond the time required by law, and they kept the truant officer busy at that; then all of a sudden the youngest and fattest Lamont, whose incongruous name was Hernaldo, appeared at the High School. He was an imperturbable child, and quite dull, but he worked with a cheerful slow patience. He only held on for a year, but no one had imagined he could keep on for so long, and he did not do badly.
The elders died before the younger children were quite grown, and the family scattered; one night, after it had been empty a year or two, the ramshackle house burned, leaving the barn standing.
One morning about ten years afterwards a radiant being appeared at the High School, a fat young man in frock coat and tall hat, who came forward and shook hands effusively. It was Hernaldo Lamont! He was now chef, it appeared, at one of the great California hotels through the winters, and in Vancouver in summer, at a very large salary. A pretty girl, charmingly dressed, whom he introduced as his wife, waited modestly at the door.
His clothes were quite wonderful. He was shining with soap and with fashion, and so full of warmth and of pleasure. He brought out colored photographs of his two fat little