A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening—as the five of us did—it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold.

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one.

One day while I was sitting in a Santa Fe coach at Lawrence, Kansas, waiting for a branch line train to arrive, so that our train could go on west, I watched a section hand shoveling cinders into a flat car. He was alone. He seemed to have much trouble with his pipe. Between walking around the cinder pile and caring for his pipe he put just ten small shovelsful of cinders in the car in the first twenty minutes during which he was under my observation.
Then a small red-headed Irishman puffing on a short-stemmed cob-pipe came around the end of a string of cars hopped up on a pile of ties and sat there smoking. As long as the Irishman sat there, fifteen shovelsful per minute of those cinders went into that car.
The red-headed Irishman did not say a word, or do any work so far as I could see; but as long as he sat on that tie pile close to the cinder pile, the cinders went into the car thirty times as fast as when he was not there.
In railroading they call him a section boss. In chemistry it is a catalyst.