The Nature Man of Mount Wilson
Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2010 8:19 pm
This is an excerpt from an article by Charles Francis Saunders (see http://avenuetotheskylakeavenuepasadena ... north.html) entitled "The Yosemite of the San Gabriel", as published in The Southern Sierras of California, 1923. This is Charles' trip report about Eaton Canyon - he references John Muir's writing on the subject (posted here at https://eispiraten.com/viewtopic.php?t=3040), but admits that his is not quite as eloquent. However, I love this anecdote...
"One Sunday, as I lay there, steeping in my being in the heavenly stillness and enjoying the exquisite view down the cañon, shouldering its way past the mountain's colossal butresses out to the great plain of San Gabriel, I became conscious of a movement in the shrubby jacket of the slope some distance below me. By and by it parted and a man emerged into view. Clear of the bushes, he stopped and looked contemplatively about, serene in his unconsciousness of being observed. Had he been a deer or a partridge, he could not have fitted his wild environment more neatly, he seemed such a natural man, so physically perfect a specimen. Tall, symmetrically proportioned, bronzed of skin and without a hat, with long tawny hair and mustache, he looked the primitive, Homeric, or Paphlagonian man, as Thoreau might say. His clothing was of the scantest — a sleeveless, collarless union suit of faded blue that displayed in their fullness his muscular arms and splendid chest. In one hand he carried a stone axe such as a cave man in museums and pictures are supplied with. Save for his shred of modern attire, he might have stepped up from the Stone Age.
In a few moments he caught sight of me and came forward, inquiring in phraseology and accent that bespoke the Scandinavian, if there were many "tourists" in the cañon that day. When I told him I had seen none at all, he was plainly disappointed. He was, he informed me, with mingled simplicity and importance, the Nature Man of Mount Wilson, living by himself upon the mountain, bathing daily in the sunshine, and working on the toll road for the wherewithal to supply such modest necessaries as Nature herself did not provide him. Now that morning, it seems, he had been seized with a desire to have a photograph taken of himself, and to that end he had come abroad thinking to find in the cañon some stroller equipped with a camera and willing to do the service for him. When I held my camera up to view, he fairly crowed with delight and prepared to pose, smoothed down his hair and struck an attitude, with head thrown back and upward gaze, the axe swung well forward. The picture taken, he wrote laboriously in my notebook the address to which I must mail the prints, and I must be sure, he earnestly enjoined me, to keep a good one for myself. He then struck straight up through the chaparral, and disappeared."
"One Sunday, as I lay there, steeping in my being in the heavenly stillness and enjoying the exquisite view down the cañon, shouldering its way past the mountain's colossal butresses out to the great plain of San Gabriel, I became conscious of a movement in the shrubby jacket of the slope some distance below me. By and by it parted and a man emerged into view. Clear of the bushes, he stopped and looked contemplatively about, serene in his unconsciousness of being observed. Had he been a deer or a partridge, he could not have fitted his wild environment more neatly, he seemed such a natural man, so physically perfect a specimen. Tall, symmetrically proportioned, bronzed of skin and without a hat, with long tawny hair and mustache, he looked the primitive, Homeric, or Paphlagonian man, as Thoreau might say. His clothing was of the scantest — a sleeveless, collarless union suit of faded blue that displayed in their fullness his muscular arms and splendid chest. In one hand he carried a stone axe such as a cave man in museums and pictures are supplied with. Save for his shred of modern attire, he might have stepped up from the Stone Age.
In a few moments he caught sight of me and came forward, inquiring in phraseology and accent that bespoke the Scandinavian, if there were many "tourists" in the cañon that day. When I told him I had seen none at all, he was plainly disappointed. He was, he informed me, with mingled simplicity and importance, the Nature Man of Mount Wilson, living by himself upon the mountain, bathing daily in the sunshine, and working on the toll road for the wherewithal to supply such modest necessaries as Nature herself did not provide him. Now that morning, it seems, he had been seized with a desire to have a photograph taken of himself, and to that end he had come abroad thinking to find in the cañon some stroller equipped with a camera and willing to do the service for him. When I held my camera up to view, he fairly crowed with delight and prepared to pose, smoothed down his hair and struck an attitude, with head thrown back and upward gaze, the axe swung well forward. The picture taken, he wrote laboriously in my notebook the address to which I must mail the prints, and I must be sure, he earnestly enjoined me, to keep a good one for myself. He then struck straight up through the chaparral, and disappeared."
