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Marooned in Crater Lake
By Alfred Powers copyright 1916
IN OCTOBER, 1910, before George Washington’s profile had displaced the picture of Benjamin Franklin on the one-cent stamps, Jim Turner bought a book of this denomination at Medford, Oregon, securing only twenty-four of the green rectangles for twenty-five cents. But the protective book was well worth a penny when carrying stamps in a warm pocket. He tore out five of them as postage for five scenic postcards which he mailed, three for his aunt and two for Mrs. Harry Smith.
Mailing postcards was one of his duties as the only boy member of the two-car tourist party which included his uncle and aunt and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. He put the book with its nineteen remaining stamps in a hip pocket of his khaki trousers and promptly forgot all about it until two days later, at the edge of the blue waters of Crater Lake, when he had occasion to use it under circumstances that made those nineteen one-cent stamps of greater value to him than nineteen dollars or even nineteen hundred dollars. ??When the man on mule back, who accidentally discovered Crater Lake, cast the first white man’s gaze down the precipitous and far descending walls of that deep basin, it was his belief that the unruffled blue water, a thousand feet below, would forever remain inviolate to human touch it would never slake thirst, or wash dirt from hand or face, or be navigated.
Yet Jim Turner, on that October day in 1910, had done all that the discoverer, seeing no possibility of man’s descent down those sheer precipices, thought never would be done. Lying prone, with no cup but the lake itself, he had taken a drink of the cold, satisfying water. He had dipped up in his hat some of it with which to loosen the jelly that clung to his fingers from the sandwiches of his lunch. Finally, that morning at eleven o’clock, he had come in a rowboat to the tiny beach upon which he still stood, dismayed by a universal solitude, menaced by approaching night deserted, alone! ??At six o’clock that October evening he still remained there, the only soul anywhere about the edges of the lake, the unattainable rim itself virtually left unpeopled. The winds that rocked the firs far up on that rim, descended to him with abated strength. But the cold crept down, piercing and numbing, so that he had to pace his cramped beach for warmth.
Gathering dusk had already changed the indigo water to black and was blurring the silhouette of Wizard Island out in the lake. The stars brightened and increased. He imagined they were visible to him earlier than to others, as he looked up from the darkening depths of that vast hole in which he stood. Those stars promised that the first snows, due at this season of the year, mercifully would not come that night. ??Weather and chance could do with him as they pleased. He could not help himself. He could not attract the help of others. He was marooner in Crater Lake! ??All around, in a grim circle, rose the almost perpendicular walls, from eight hundred to two thousand feet high. In front of him extended the silent and now forsaken waters of the lake, two thousand feet deep. It was impossible to scale the one. It was equally impossible to swim the other.
As he paced up and down on the narrow strip of beach, with darkness closing in around him, Jim had opportunity to review the events that had made him a captive in that majestic prison. ??With his uncle and aunt and the Smiths, he had reached Crater Lake on the last day of the season. The Lodge was already closed to guests, and a single caretaker of the property had been left to prepare everything against the approach of winter. Late in the season as it was, a half-dozen automobile parties had come up to look at the lake, for the bad weather, though expected at any time, had not yet set in. The man in charge offered to give this late-season group boat service on the lake until four o’clock in the afternoon. But he explained that this was the last time he would go down the trail and that, before returning to the Lodge, he would haul out the boats for winter. ??But it was not this circumstance alone that had brought about Jim’s plight. ??On the long motor trip, he had been in the habit of riding sometimes in his uncle’s car and sometimes in that of the Smiths. After the trip to Crater Lake the two cars expected to separate. His aunt and uncle intended to go back to Portland by way of Medford and the Pacific Highway, while the Smiths meant to tour the country a week longer, returning to Portland by way of Klamath Falls and Eastern Oregon.
Jim was free to go with either, but had not yet made up his mind. ??He was still postponing his decision when, at the edge of the lake, Mr. and Mrs. Smith took passage in one crowded motor-boat, his uncle and aunt in another, while he selected a rowboat with two cordial strangers, inclined, like himself, to fish for the famous trout of Crater Lake. ??He was having some luck with the fish and was by no means ready to go, when his aunt and uncle hailed him from a motor-boat that drew up to take him aboard. ??”Are you going with us or the Smiths?” they asked. “We are starting right away and expect to get to Medford tonight. The Smiths won’t be leaving for a couple of hours. We have already told them our plans. They said to be at their car at four o’clock, if you are going with them. If you are not on hand at that time, they will know you have gone with us.” ??Jim was reluctant to give up his fishing, and this reluctance prompted his decision. ??”I’ll go with the Smiths,” he said. “Take these three fish for your supper at Medford. Good-by. I’ll see you next week in Portland.” ??”Good-by,” returned his aunt and uncle. “Be sure to be at the Smiths’ car not later than four o’clock. We won’t see them again.”
At a small recession in the universal wall, on a tiny shelf or beach, where the water way deep and where the fishing seemed even more promising than from the boat, Jim asked to be put ashore. He told the men in the rowboat that he would catch one of the launches as it came by and that they did not need to wait for him or bother to call for him later. ??Glad of the chance for two hours more of fishing, he expected to catch the motor-boat in which the Smiths were touring the lake. But this boat failed, after a long interval, to appear. He remembered now that it had come this way when it started out. He saw it, far on the other side of the lake, going in the direction of the landing and the foot of the trail. He shouted, but they did not hear him. He waved his hands and his handkerchief, but they did not see him. The boat disappeared from sight! ??He expected that another boat of some sort would be along, but as he scanned the surface of the lake he saw none. None put out from behind Wizard Island. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter of four. He remembered what the caretaker of the Lodge had said at four he would begin hauling out the boats for winter.
Even now he was probably covering them with tarpaulin. No more oars would dip in the blue waters before the next summer. The deep silence would be unbroken by the chug-chug of a motor. Navigation had ceased upon the lake, which was being left to its long winter solitude. ??He was stranded! ??He began to shout at the top of his voice, but he was more than two miles from the boat landing, and the near-by walls caught and returned his calls in echoes. He kept shouting until he was hoarse and his throat was sore. It did no good. Nobody heard him, nor was it possible for him to be heard. ??The chance was no better that anybody would see him. The wall back of him went straight up for a hundred feet. From that point it slanted backward toward the rim. He had noticed this topography when he had approached it by boat in the morning. If the whole face of the wall had been perpendicular, there would have been more hope of attracting the attention of a possible observer from above. But the sloping upper part and the sheer drop at the bottom, put him in a concealed position. He could no more be seen than some one leaning close against the side of a house could be seen by a person sitting on the ridge of the roof. He was completely out of the line of sight. ??Nobody knew that he was shut up in that great caldron. His aunt and uncle thought he was with the Smiths. The Smiths thought he was with his aunt and uncle. It would be a week before they would see each other in Portland and find out that he was missing. ??The caretaker of the Lodge would not be coming back down to the lake. He had made his final visit. He would be working back at the Lodge.
There was no way to attract his attention. ??Could he survive until his uncle found out what had happened, or was he doomed to a grave in the lake he had so long looked forward to seeing? He had two jelly sandwiches and two raw fish. He would not starve, but if winter set in, scantily clad as he was, he could not live through the cold of seven autumn nights. His imagination took a tragic direction. Maybe his aunt and uncle would never find him. The next summer, boats would pass by the little beach where he stood. The deep snows in the meantime would have come and gone. The people in the boats would be startled by what they saw there. The world would know that a boy had been left to perish in that great abyss of the Cascades, giving fresh fears to the Indians, who refuse to look upon its enchanted waters.
He recalled the Indian legends of the lake and of its sinister toll of savage life. He had read them idly in a folder. They now assumed an oppressive meaning. For an hour or more he was entirely miserable. ??Then his thoughts began to take a more practical turn. If he could get over to Wizard Island diagonally in front of him, he might signal successfully from its top.
But three quarters of a mile or so of deep water intervened between him and it. He couldn’t swim it clothed; he doubted whether he could swim it at all. If he stripped and succeeded in getting across, there was no telling how long he would have to remain, exposed to the October chill of mountain nights, before attracting help. He would surely freeze. ??Around the edge of the lake from where he stood, it was more than two miles to the boat landing and the beginning of the trail. There would be a few short stretches of beach along which he could walk, or shallow water which he could wade ; but, for the most part, there would be deep water bordered by perpendicular walls offering no supporting hold for a cold and exhausted swimmer. Again, he would have to leave his clothes behind. The frigid October night that kept him walking his little beach for warmth, reminded him that such a course would be suicide. ??It would be better, he decided, to wait till his uncle began a search, rather than try to gain Wizard Island or the trail, with almost certain failure ahead in either attempt. ??His mind worked round to the idea of a signal. He took an inventory of his possessions in the dark. He had two raw fish, as has been said, and two jelly sandwiches, wrapped thickly in newspaper.
He had his watch, his jack-knife, one hundred feet of heavy three-ply trolling line, with fifteen feet of leader, fifty feet of smaller fishing line, with a short leader, and an alder pole that he had cut while coming down the trail that morning. For the purpose of getting a signal up to the rim, there seemed no value in all this. He included his clothes in the inventory. Although he had done so several times before, he felt again for matches, but found none. All he found in his pockets, in addition to his handkerchief, knife, purse, and watch, was what he remembered was a little book of one-cent stamps, which seemed worthless enough at that place and time. In his impatience at finding this stamp-book instead of matches, he had an impulse to send it sailing out into the lake. But he put it back in his pocket. ??Upon reflection, he was less disappointed about the matches. He had nothing to burn except a small pine board which he had found upon his little beach, the newspaper in which his sandwiches were wrapped, the stamps, and possibly his green alder fishing rod, if it were whittled into fine enough shavings. Such scant fuel would not produce a flame that would be discernible over the thousand foot precipice that shut him in, nor produce a volume of smoke that would rise to such a height before dissolving into the air. With a match, however, and this meager supply of wood, he might have been able to cook one of his fish. ??He realized he couldn’t give a signal, for he had nothing to give it with nothing that could remotely be worked into a signaling device of any kind. He would simply have to wait a week until his uncle began a search, and trust that meanwhile the Cascade storms would hold off.
His teeth chattered with the cold. The prospect of spending seven such nights as this was dismal enough. ??His mind tired out with thoughts that got him nowhere, and his legs weary from pacing his small refuge, he sat down with his back against the wall, put his coat over his head, and attempted to get some sleep. He dozed fitfully. Frequently he would have to get up to exercise his cramped and chilled legs and to thaw out his congealed blood. ??In the morning he ate one of his two jelly sandwiches. He would eat the second one the next day; after that, the raw fish.
He had no more idea of how he was going ??to get out of Crater Lake than he had had the night before. But he was more reconciled to his plight, and his mind, freed from panic, was clearer. ??While rummaging in his pockets, he idly took out the book of one-cent stamps and turned through the green rectangles of the pictured Ben Franklin. He wet his finger and tested the gummed lower surfaces. This time he had no impulse to throw them into the lake. He wouldn’t have traded the little stamp-book for ten thousand matches. He put it carefully back into his pocket as though it were a great treasure. ??He had hit upon a possible way of giving a signal. He meant to work out his plan with great care, taking all the time necessary. The man undoubtedly was still at the Lodge. He could scarcely have finished his work so soon. If this man’s attention could be attracted, Jim felt there was a good chance that he would be rescued. But the only way was to get a signal above that thousand-foot wall that hemmed him in. It wasn’t likely that the caretaker of the Lodge, who was an old-timer in the region, would give any particular scrutiny to Crater Lake scenery. He might not find it convenient to walk down to the edge of the rim to look out over the magic blue waters of the lake. At best, he would be a passive observer.
An occasional and indifferent glance across the lake, as he straightened up from his labors, was as much as could be expected from him. To catch and hold the man’s eyes during one of their casual and roving inspections of the landscape that was what Jim meant to do. ??Gradually, he was figuring it all out. He was certain he could do it if the wind would blow blow only hard enough to ruffle the smooth water shut in by those protecting walls. The afternoon before, he had seen it shake the firs on the rim, like prune-trees under the hands of the harvesters, and had felt it descend a thousand feet to where he stood, not wholly becalmed. A breeze, a breeze that, above all else, he wanted. That necessity alone was now absent from his inventory, which he took once more, this time with definite purpose.
Laying aside his remaining sandwich for the next morning’s consumption, he smoothed out the newspaper that had wrapped it and its fellows. In one place a jelly stain had soaked through, moistening and weakening the fabric beyond all use, but this was in such a position that an unharmed area of paper two feet square could be secured.
He placed the paper on a dry rock. He picked up the pine board, whittled off some shavings to test its soundness, and placed it beside the paper. To the collection on the rock he added his hundred feet of trolling line, his smaller fishing-line of fifty feet, and the leader from both lines. On top of all he placed the little book of stamps as the crowning jewel of his possessions. If any one had been there to see, he would have wondered what purpose this miscellany was meant to serve. ??The first thing Jim did was to untwist the three strands of his trolling line, securing three hundred feet of cord instead of one hundred. In the same way, he got one hundred feet from his fifty feet of small line.
The untwisting of the kinky and cork-screwing strands completed, he surveyed the resulting four hundred feet of stout cord, but regarded it as only a good beginning toward his complete needs. ??He pulled off his high-topped boots, removed his long woolen socks, put his boots back on bare feet, and began unraveling the socks. These yielded two big balls of thread. But as he tested the strength of the yarn he was not satisfied. Reversing the process of the fishing lines, he twisted the two strands tightly together until the two balls of yarn formed a double cord. This had cut the length in half, which wasn’t enough for his purpose. He drafted still another garment he took off his sweater and reduced it likewise to twine, which he doubled and twisted as in the case of the yarn from the socks. At last he had, all told, slightly more than two thousand feet of string. This cordage manufacture, however, had consumed the whole day.
Darkness came and forbade further labor. ??Once more, sleep was difficult, in spite of the fact that it was greatly in arrears. He suffered from the cold more than he had the night before, for he was now deprived of his socks and sweater. The hours seemed interminably long, but he obtained a few brief periods of repose. ??In the morning, while it was still dark, he ate his last sandwich; and, as soon as it was light enough, he took his knife and whittled from the pine board three straight thin strips. Two of these splits were about twenty-three inches long. The third was about fifteen inches long. The two longer ones he crossed in the form of an “X,” but with the intersec tion three or four inches from the center toward the upper ends. The third and shorter he placed horizontally across the other two, its center at their intersection. He lashed the joint with cord. Around the outside; in grooves previously cut in the six ends of the three sticks, he stretched the leader of his trolling line, so that he had a strong and rigid six-sided framework.
With his knife, he cut from the newspaper a covering of the same shape as the framework, but with an inch margin all round. ??On a smooth, dry place on his little beach he laid down the paper, and, over this, the framework of sticks and catgut. He then took out of his pocket the book of stamps. With his knife he slit each of the nineteen stamps into four pieces, making in all seventy-six gummed seals, quite narrow, but long enough in each case to have much adhesive tenacity. With these stickers he fastened down the border of paper, which he folded over the catgut rim. ??Crossing and adjusting three strings with great care and exactness, he fashioned a “bridle,” and arranged a short pendant loop at the lower end. ??To the crossed strings, or bridle, he tied one end of his two thousand feet of twine.
He tore his handkerchief into strips, which he pieced into a string and which he tied in the center of the pendant loop. Then from his shirt, he slashed off a section of additional cloth and tied it to the lower end of the handkerchief string. ??The signal was ready to carry upward its message of an imprisoned boy. Jim had built a kite! ??A breeze to fly it was the next need. He held it up in front of him, but the pressure against it was hardly noticeable. Something of the calm of morning still prevailed. He looked across and up at his barometers on the rim the trees and saw by their comparative quiet that the wind had not yet come in from the mountain-tops. He would be patient until the afternoon. ??At two o’clock, from a perch as high up as he could gain, he held the precious kite above his head. If it ever dropped into the water, all his labor would be lost. He held the kite up and threw it from him, but it dropped down, not to the water, for he gave it but little line, and, besides, he held the tail in his hand. It seemed a lifeless thing. ??Many times he tried. Always it dropped. It seemed without buoyancy. It was heavy and spiritless, without the grace and lightness of flight. His heart sank. It would not fly! ??He adjusted and readjusted the bridle. He subtracted from and added to the tail. Still it fell like a shot bird. For an hour he tried. ??In the meantime, the wind increased. The firs on the rim no longer stood still, but bowed and courtesied.
Out from shore the surface of the water had lost some of its glassy smoothness. The reflection of the wall in front of him trembled slightly. The sweat that came out on his face from his anxiety and his labors, was evaporated quickly. ??He kept trying, and at last began to have periodical promises of success. Finally, a breath of wind bellied the kite and tautened the paper against the sticks back of it. He threw it out several feet. A timely breeze that he felt against his cheek caught it. It shot out straight, and even rose a little. He dropped the tail and gradually let out line. The kite darted from side to side, and once it made a quick dart downward like an airplane on a tail-dive it was a dangerous moment. But it rallied like an airplane, though the tail dripped a few drops of water as it rose. Steadied by that tail, it climbed diagonally upward above the blue of the lake slowly toward the blue of the sky. It began to pull so strongly that Jim had a new alarm. But he let out string two hundred feet, five hundred, a thousand, and at last two thousand. ??It hung in the air at a great altitude, its tail, the crudities of which were softened by the distance, waving beneath it. It soared high enough above the sunken waters of the lake and far enough away from the encircling cliffs so that it could surely be seen from the Lodge, if there was anybody at the Lodge to see. ??He took what remained of the newspaper, tore it into round pieces the size of saucers, punched a hole in the center of each, and strung them on the kite-string in his hand. From time to time he would let one of these loose and watch it scud up the string to the kite. He hoped these might help to guide the caretaker of the Lodge to the base of the string and to himself. ??But it began to be dusk, and still no sign that anybody had seen the kite. After all, had the man fastened up the doors, prepared the building against the winter storms, and left?
Had no stray and late-season tourist paused for a moment on the edge of the crater? He was beginning to debate whether to pull the kite in or risk leaving it up all night. He might have trouble or find it altogether impossible to get it to fly again in the morning, if he drew it in. But if he left it out, there might be snow or rain, the wind might grow too strong or die down, the all-night pull might weaken the string, and any of these contingencies would be hazardous to the kite. ??At last, he heard the exhaust of a motorboat in the direction where the trail led up from the lake to the Lodge. The staccato beats at first sounded a great distance away, but soon the chug-chug grew closer and friendly calls were added to the sounds of navigation. ??”Where are you?” he heard. “Where are you?” repeated frequently and loudly. ??”Here,” answered Jim. “Here over here!” ??The boat came up to the little beach, and Jim, still holding the kite-string, greeted the caretaker of the Lodge. ??”It’s a good thing you flew that kite,” Jim’s rescuer told him. “I never dreamed anybody was down here. I thought it was a bird at first. But I looked over there several times from where I was working at the Lodge and thought it wasn’t quite natural for a bird to do like that to stay high up in the air above the lake in about the same place, not moving much and sort of hanging there like it was held up by a string from the sky.
A smaller bird kept right underneath it. So I came down to the edge of the rim and got a closer look. You can imagine how surprised I was when I saw it was a kite and that the second bird was the kite’s tail. I couldn’t figure it out. The only way I could explain it was that maybe somebody had left it flying without my noticing it before. I took a squint through the field-glasses that I brought along and saw pieces of paper mounting up to it, and remembered how we used to do that when I was a boy. So I reckoned somebody was down here at the botton end of the kite-string, who was signaling and who needed help pretty bad. It made me kind of shiver when I realized it was probably some one everybody had forgotten and left at some part of the lake where he couldn’t get back to the trail. So I beat it down here faster than I ever did before.
Jim did you say your name is? Well, turn loose the string and let ‘er go. It ’11 probably land over on the other side of the lake somewhere. It saved your life and no mistake, for you might never have got out of here. Jump into the boat, Jim, and we’ll go. There’s a warm fire in the fireplace at the Lodge and something to eat. You must be about frozen here, put on my coat and I expect you could eat a whole ham.” ??”It sure was lucky” he went on, as he started the motor-boat, “it sure was lucky you flew that kite. But how did you make it, Jim? Where did you get your stickem? When I was a boy we used to make paste out of flour and water. Did you have a tube of glue or paste in your pocket, maybe?” ??”No, I used postage-stamps,” said Jim; “one-cent stamps,” he added, as though two-cent stamps and the multiple image of George Washington might not have had the same result at all. “You see,” he explained, “Ben Franklin’s picture on the stamps suggested the idea of a kite to me.”
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