About once in every so often, we, as a race, all lay back our heads, shut
our eyes, and let out the shuddering shriek: “Back to Nature!” It is so
loud and heart-felt a cry that it makes you wonder why we have to go back
at all—why we didn’t stay there. If the Get-Strong-Quick professors are
right, this thing of our wearing clothes, and dwelling in houses, and
eating dainty cooked food three times a day is sheer tom-foolishness, all
the more tom-foolish in that once we led the healthy, happy life that
inevitably results from fasting three or four days in the week, then
dining on goobers and timothy hay; wearing nothing but a nose-ring and a
dash of paint, and sleeping in the hollow trees.
For most of us, “Back to Nature” is too long a road to travel—all
the way. Nevertheless, the cry is so loud, and so general throughout
the civilized world that we cannot dismiss it as impracticable and
meaningless. It betokens something. I think I know what, and if it didn’t
look so much like serious thinking for you and me, I’d write out what
I think it means. I’ll say this, though: If we judge the future by the
past this universal impulse to touch the naked earth once more, and so to
gather strength and vigor from it, means that the world is pregnant with
a great event, and we must be fortified for the labor-pains of it. A new
age is struggling to be born. Mark my words.
The timid venture, on the way back to Nature, of a two-weeks’ sitting on
the front stoop of a boarding house in the mountains or at the seashore
does not satisfy us now. Bold and daring spirits have even gone to live
in the wild woods, and have come back to tell us it was bully. We all
know it is great fun to play at being boys again, but for most of us
the problem is complicated by our having wives and daughters whom we
cannot well put in cold storage during our absence. I know that under the
pressure of the need to go back to Nature some have even taken the women
with them. I—I—I don’t know about that. It doesn’t look very alluring to
me. Mind you, I don’t know a thing about living in the wilderness except
what I have read and heard, but as near as I can come to it, there seems
to be considerable packing to be done. There’s the canoe in the first
place. If I were thinking of going into the woods, I shouldn’t stir a
stump unless I had a canoe. But you take one fifteen or eighteen feet
long, and carry it about three miles through thick-set timber, and I
should say along about the last half of the third mile you’d begin to
notice it. You’d have to have some kind of a tent, and even when they’re
made of silk, I should think they would make something of a bundle. You’d
want your gun and ammunition; you’d want your fishing tackle; you’d need
a small ax; you’d have to carry a coffee-pot, a frying-pan, a deep pot,
a plate, a knife and fork and cup; you’d need at least one blanket and
a rubber sheet of some kind; you’d need to pack your bacon and your
flour, and erbswurst, and matches, and quinine, and morphine, and rags
for bandages in case—you know—and saccharine, and whisky if there are
snakes around, and—oh, yes, tobacco; don’t let me forget tobacco—and,
oh, I don’t know what all. No women’s fixings in this partial list, you
see. I don’t know. I knew a man that took his wife along with him to the
woods—but then, don’t you see, it was on their honeymoon. Oh my! It makes
all the difference in the world when you’ve been married ten or fifteen
years. Yes, I should say so.
I once read a most fascinating series of articles by a woman who had
this delightful experience. The intention was to chirrup: “Come on,
girls! It’s perfectly elegant!” But she didn’t fool me. I could see that
whenever there was anything that was arduous, or tedious, or mussy in the
housekeeping line “the gentlemen of the party eagerly volunteered.” Yes.
M—hm. I can just see ’em. Mind you, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a
woman in the woods is a darn nuisance. No indeed. Only—Well, I tell you.
Her husband may be eager to play Injun, but I don’t believe she would be
very keen to play squaw. That is, and “tote fair.”
There is this in favor of taking ’em along: Not every man can cook. I
know that out there in the forest, when you make camp as the shadows
lengthen after a long day’s tramp, when every muscle aches, but aches
with glad fatigue; after a day in which your lungs have drunk in the pure
air thinly fragrant with the vague odors that the glazed leaves distill,
as it were offering incense to the god of day; when you have quenched
your thirst from a spring in the bottom of whose earthen bowl the sands
are reeling and staggering in the delirium of glee; when you have
hearkened to the wild beauty of some unknown bird-call echoing through
the lofty Gothic aisles; when the western sky flames into undreamed-of
glories and then fades away until the lonely stars come out, I know they
say that you can choke down any old mess and relish it. Maybe so. I am as
good a hand at eating pancakes as anybody else, but I don’t know about
them for every meal and every day; bacon is my favorite vegetable, but
there comes a time; fish once a week is all I care for. No. It doesn’t
seem alluring to me.
They tell me hemlock boughs make a fine mattress. Yes? I know where I can
get better for less money. They tell me that sleeping on the ground with
the high sky for a ceiling is simply great. If it comes to that, I have
slept on the ground, and the morning after I knew exactly where my hips
and shoulders were. I don’t mind granddaddy long-legs tracking over my
face. They’re kind of interesting. But I have never been able to put away
the thought that if it should turn chilly in the night, and some snake
should come and crawl in bed with me, and smuggle his cool slimy body
down my back, it would probably break my rest. I shouldn’t fancy it, I’m
positive.
I tell you. I compromised the matter thus last summer. I got back to
Nature—part the way. Not so far though as to get out of touch with the
milkman. I had things cooked to suit me; I slept high and dry upon a
Christian bed, and yet I wasn’t indoors a minute of the time the whole
enduring summer. And I’m never going to be another summer under a wooden
roof if I know how to help it. I’ll tell you about it if you like.
There were five of us that wanted to live in the outdoor air for
twenty-four hours out of every twenty-four. There was the Honest Man who
went to gainful business every day; there was the Lazy Man who didn’t do
one tap the summer long, though often besought to do so, who now takes
his pen in hand to drop you these few lines; there was the Honest Man’s
wife; and there were the Lazy Man’s Wife, and his growing Daughter.
The Honest Man already had in stock a 12 × 14 tent, and a small A-tent.
The Lazy Man bought a 10 × 12 tent for himself and wife, and the next
size smaller for his daughter. Each family brought bed-clothing and
personal apparel. (It was a first-rate opportunity to wear out old
clothes.) The communal property, dishes, oil-stove, egg-beaters, and all
such were paid for half-and-half. It stood the Lazy Man for outfit just
$49.27 all told, and the outfit is now down cellar waiting impatiently
for summer to come again, when it will be as good as new and won’t cost
anything.
The summer previous, the Honest Man had gone exploring and found a spot
on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie within an hour’s ride on the steamer
from his business. A whopping big maple tree, thick and umbrageous, stood
a hundred feet or so back from the water’s edge, on a sand slope carpeted
with wild grape vines. The beach was of fine white sand, without a pebble
bigger than a moth-ball, and it slanted so slowly into the water that
breast-deep was fully a hundred yards from shore. This made it rather
poky for the men-folks when they went in swimming, but it was ideal for
the women, to whom a foot of depth is drowning depth. The lake being soft
water, nobody can adequately express the joy the women had in washing
their hair. This favored spot was a shade more than a mile away from the
steamboat pier at which, six or eight times a day, excursion steamers
unloaded revelers who sought the pallid ecstasy of a non-alcoholic
pleasure resort. (It was Canada, remember, and while you might go in
swimming on the Lord’s day, you could not ride upon the giddy-go-round.
A district attorney from the smoky city on the American side presumed to
fish on Sunday, and got sassy to the constable who said he shouldn’t.
Thereupon they snaked him off to a neighboring village to the hardware
store where the ’Squire kept court and fined him $20 and the costs.) We
were far enough away on the long board walk to miss the transients, and
by looking carefully through the trees you could just see one house from
our place, the castle of our landlord. I am aware that it’s nice to be
exclusive, and get away from common folks, but it’s so blamed expensive.
Even millionaires when they want to make sure of getting any place have
to travel with the cheap crowd. You can think that over. You will find
it’s so, although I haven’t time to work it out in detail.
The Honest Man having lived on this spot the summer before, the floors
were laid of boughten lumber, and the frames were up. Also, the private
walks, made of such bits of board as the Good Lord had pleased to
send upon the rolling waves, nailed upon saplings from the wood back
of the camp, were still in place, so that there wasn’t much to do, a
circumstance that grieved the Honest Man no little. He liked to be busy.
The Lazy Man was patient under this affliction. He did help when there
were things to do. He got the nails and handed the hatchet, and generally
fetched and carried, knowing full well what are the drawbacks incident
to being a heaven-gifted literary genius, such as not being of the least
account about a place.
Among the triumphs of the Honest Man’s saw and hammer were the tables,
prime among them being the dining-table under the same maple tree,
whereon we ate our every meal from July 2 until September 3. It is
fitting that in this public manner I should return thanks for our kind
and considerate treatment by the weather. I can cheerfully recommend
it to all and sundry. It rained at times, I won’t deny. It had to. I
can see that. But I must say it was most forbearing in the matter, and
rained only out of meal hours. Once or twice it was plain to see that it
strained a point in our behalf, for example, that time we had to have our
Sunday ice-cream in our tents, and the two or three occasions when the
breakfast dishes were practically storm-washed.
This dining-table, the serving-table, the table in the cook-tent, and
the china-closet—Oh my yes! We had a china-closet. It was made out of
a packing box, had shelves in it, and four plank legs—these articles
of furniture were covered with marbled oil-cloth, and the door of the
china-closet was of the same rich material, being secured with loops and
nails. The cook-tent reared its lofty A on a frame with a waist-high
board-wall, lined with shelves. It was so studded with nails that for
once in their lives the women were speechless of complaint that there
weren’t places enough to bestow the junk without which, so it seems, life
in the kitchen is insupportable.
Hard by the china-closet was the refrigerator, in whose construction, let
me say, the Lazy Man bore his part. He dug the hole in the sand in which
was sunk a barrel with a perforated bottom through which the melting ice
drained off. The women professed they lay awake nights listening for the
things piled upon the ice to topple over into smash. They had to worry
about something. There wasn’t a thing else for them to do but cook, and
make the beds and wash the dishes.
I suppose that cooking by a camp-fire is the extreme of picturesqueness.
It is also mighty hard upon the back, to say nothing of its blinding you
with smoke, and frying the grease out of your face, even after you have
learned that it isn’t really necessary to have a conflagration big enough
to melt the nose off the coffee-pot, but that a cupful of live coals and
a tiny bunch of twigs will do the trick. You have to stand over such a
fire to keep it going, and when it rains it is the deuce and all. So we
had a blue-flame oil-stove with an oven, and had everything cooked in the
highest style known to the art, just as it was before we started on our
way back to Nature. There was just one thing the women missed. Endless
hot water laid on. Their heaviest burden was to remember “the dying
woman’s advice.” Don’t you know what that is? “Sally,” she whispered with
her latest breath, “always put on the dish-water before you sit down to
your victuals.”
But if the Lazy Man could not bring his mind to penning deathless
Literatoor, he could at least tote water from the lake, so it wasn’t so
bad after all.
The need of cooking was great indeed. In no spirit of carping criticism I
desire to say that I have seen the Honest Man, many and many’s the time,
wolf down six big potatoes at a meal and other things accordingly. We
others did our feeble best, but we never quite compassed that. I did eat
six ears of green corn once, but you must remember that they were right
off the vines, as you might say, and you know how good green corn is when
it’s fresh.
This was no lonesome wilderness wherein we had to scuffle for our food.
The milkman came right after breakfast with the morning’s milk. The
morning’s milk remember, not the night before’s. Then came the iceman. I
want to tell you about him. I had seen him pushing the lawn-mower on a
green velvet lawn before a mansion up the beach a ways. I thought he was
turning an honest penny taking care of it for some one else. Bless your
heart, he lived there. He had a fine big farm behind it, but it was all
seeded down in grass, because the harvest of ice from the lake before him
in the winter brought him more money for less work than the rich loam
behind him could raise in summer crops. Then came the grocer from the
village back in the country. He always brought us kerosene, sometimes he
brought us groceries, and all too seldom he brought us the flat loaves
of the Italian baker in the village, flat and crusty loaves, which the
grocer scornfully called “dog-bread.” There was “the bearded lady”
that brought us home-made bread just once—just once. Evidently she had
confused the relative proportions of the yeast and flour. Then came the
old man with the broken hand, talk about which shortened the day for him
and us; also, his wife, a dear old soul, who sold us from time to time
bouquets picked from her garden, old-fashioned flowers made up so round
and hard that if a man were clouted on the head with a nosegay you’d have
to take him to the hospital. There was “the bonnet lady,” a sweet-faced
Dunkard in the habit of her faith. There were several whom we came to
know right well, and after they began to suspect that, like as not, we
weren’t as crazy as we seemed, living in tents—Did you ever hear the beat
of that?—they showed they were just folks, same as anybody else. But
the one I liked the best was the man that came on Saturdays to fetch us
eggs and butter. I aroused his interest by telling him that where I came
from they sold eggs by quarter’s worth; so many for a quarter, more when
eggs were cheap, fewer when eggs were dear. Well sir, he like to never
got over that. It was like the returned missionary, telling how the poor
heathens live in China. He was a very conscientious man. “I’m sorry,” he
would say, “but I’ve got to charge you 21 cents for them there eggs. They
ain’t worth it. No eggs is worth that much, no time o’year. They ortn’t
to be more’n 18 cents at any time. But the others is sellin’ ’em for 21,
and I s’pose I got to, too.”
One and all, as soon as ever they could in decency get round to it, had
this one question to ask: “What do you do when it rains?” They’d ask it
with such a now-I-got-you look that it was funny to see how set-back they
were when we made answer: “We do the same as you, we go in out of it.”
But on the rebound you could notice the doubt forming itself in their
minds as to whether we knew enough to do that. I’m sure they drove away
thinking we were kind of be-addled in our intellects. I’ll have to own
up to having asked: “What do you do when it rains?” in the beginning;
and also, “What do you do when it blows?” But now I am convinced that a
canvas tent well staked is equal to any weather, and I believe that if it
had a red-hot stove in it, a body might be right cozy in a tent even in
zero weather. I am going to preserve that conviction unshaken by never
putting it to the test.
I said that the grocer from the village inland stopped. You notice that
I didn’t say the butcher. He wouldn’t. You might go out and “holler” at
him: “Hay! Hay there! Hay you! I want to talk to you. Hold on a second.”
He never let on he heard you. I didn’t have a revolver, or I should have
held him up. I did corner him once down at the Grove, and he explained
to me he really could not be bothered with our money for his meat. He and
his two men had all they could attend to now, what with their regular
trade and the two hotels and the boardinghouses down along the beach.
If he sold to private customers, he’d have to hire more help. When I
suggested that he do that very thing and make more money, he smiled at me
as one smiles at the foolish prattle of a child. Nup. He was awful sorry
he couldn’t accommodate me, but—. And that ended it.
So for awhile, whenever we paddled down to the Grove in the canoe for the
mail we stopped at the meat-shop. The Grove was where the giddy-go-round
was; the razzle-dazzle air-ship, the whistle of whose tiny engine
squealed like a frightened pig; the cake-and-coffee shop, the “red-hot”
stand; the high-class “vawdvill,” admission ten cents, children five; the
dancing floor, patronized by youth and beauty in duck jumpers and sleeves
rolled high on red and peeling arms, ragged with strips of tissue-paper
hide, each mouth distorted with an “all-day sucker” whose pine stem
appetizingly protruded; the combination barber-shop and post-office where
they were all out of two-cent stamps for weeks together, and “Joe’s.”
I’ll get round to “Joe’s” in a minute if you’ll just be patient, but now
I must tell you about the meat-shop. He was a fine fellow, the first
butcher, much sought after when he had got into people’s confidence.
There was the landlord that rented him the shop; there was the landlady
where he roomed and boarded; there was the man he bought his meat of;
there was the man he bought his twine and paper of; the man he borrowed
$20 of and the man he borrowed $5 of—all seeking him and not finding him.
He was—and then he was not. It was one of those mysterious disappearances
you read about.
After he went away, we summer folks ungratefully conspired to ruin the
land that sheltered us. You know there is no quicker and surer way to
do that to a country than by shipping valuables into it. The more iron
and steel and wool and chinaware and diamonds—all kinds of things you
pay money for—the more of them are brought into a country, the poorer it
gets. If it were possible to cover the ground knee-deep with all that
heart could wish but brought from another country, the inhabitants would
have to give right up, and everything would go to smash. Conversely a
country which imports nothing is always immensely rich and prosperous.
You know how that is in private life. The man that raises everything he
eats; that does his own butchering, makes his own shoes, whose wife spins
all the flax and wool the family needs—such a man is always well-to-do;
he’s independent. While those who have to buy everything are always poor
and forlorn. We all know this, but such is the depravity of the human
heart, we want to buy things without asking whether they are made in
our country or not. If it wasn’t for our wicked hearts prompting us to
want things, we could easily keep out the foreign goods. So as to sort
of even up the injury we do our country, it is arranged that whenever
we thus sinfully buy foreign wares we pay a fine for it. The fine for
ruining Canada by bringing in fresh meat to eat is six cents a pound. Now
I want to tell you that when we had no butcher and the village butcher
wouldn’t stop for us, there were people so selfish that they not only
ruined Canada by bringing over fresh meat, but they smuggled it! Yes sir!
Smuggled it. And King Edward needing the money so badly, with all the
expense he is under.
The United States is just as up and coming, though, as Canada. Every bit.
We don’t propose that our fair land shall be devastated by a flood of
cheap Canadian mutton (it is most mighty good mutton; I’ll say that for
it), so there is a fine on anybody that brings it over. The Beef Trust
has expensive families to send to college too.
In response to popular demand, the baker consented to run the
butcher-shop. If you found the place locked up, you stamped on the stoop
and yelled awhile. He would come out, rolling the dough off his fingers
and cut you off some meat. Sometimes, though you’d have to wait until he
got those pies out.
He was as good-hearted a man as ever lived, but he caused me many a
sleepless night. I’ll tell you how it was. One day I didn’t go for the
meat. The Honest Man’s Wife went. She got a roast, five pounds and a
quarter it was, at 18 cents a pound. The man figured on the cost. He put
it down 70 cents, but that didn’t look quite right to him, so he set down
a figure 1.
“Dollar seventy,” he said.
Now the Honest Man’s Wife had taught school, and was right good at
ciphering.
“Would you mind,” she asked as innocent as a cat lapping milk, “would you
mind figuring that out for me?”
“Sure thing, lady,” said the baker-butcher. “Five pounds and a quarter.
There’s your 5¼, at 18 cents. There’s your 18. Five tums 8 is 40. Put
down the aught and carry 4. Five tums one is 5, and 4 is—is—er—er—Five
times 8 is 40. Put down the aught and carry—Hold on. I guess I made a
mistake. Call it 97 cents.” He smiled pleasingly.
“Seven cents,” mused she. “M—, won’t you please figure out for me how
one-fourth of 18 is 7?”
Well now. I had been paying for meat without ever figuring it out.
Considering that with his limited arithmetical powers he was certain to
make mistakes, and considering that those mistakes were equally certain
to be all in his favor, can you wonder that I have tossed and tossed for
hours upon a sleepless couch trying to recall the times I bought meat of
him, how much it weighed and what I paid him?
I promised to speak of “Joe’s.” Behold I show you a mystery. I saw a
billhead of his. His initial was M. Try my best I couldn’t make out to
spell Joe with an M. Yet everybody called him Joe. I asked the Signora,
his mother-in-law. She pressed her lips strongly together and wildly
shook her head. “Eena Cannodda dey gotta no sensea,” she exclaimed. “Eesa
nemma notta Joe. No. Eesa nemma Mike. Michaele. Seguro. Surea tinga.
Cannodda mans ee say: ‘Eh Joe? Youra nemma Joe? Eh?’ Ee know dey gotta
nuss sense a eena Cannodda. Ee say: ‘Sure a-tinga.’ Eesa neema notta Joe.
No. Eesa nemma Mike. Michaele. Seguro. Surea tinga.”
At Joe’s you could buy all things necessary to support life from ham to
hairpins, including Canadian tobacco, which needs a protective tariff if
ever anything does in this world. Not because it is a weakling though. It
biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. Funny thing about that
Canadian smoking tobacco. Sometimes it puts you in mind of sauerkrout,
and sometimes it puts you in mind of boneset. I don’t think it is quite
as bitter as boneset, though.
Shelter, and food, and water and tobacco being thus accounted for, there
remains another prime necessity of life, and that is, sleep. I don’t
believe there is one person in a hundred that knows the real luxury of
sleep. Consider the uncounted hordes that live in terror of “night air.”
Consider the more enlightened that raise their bedroom windows just a
trifle, to calk them up as soon as ever it turns a little cool. But
even when wide open, a bedroom with a window in it is not by any means
the same thing as a tent to sleep in, a tent by the lakeside, its front
all flaring open, and its sides and top working like bellowses with the
breeze. We had regular wire springs and to the wooden frames we nailed
pieces of 2 × 4 for legs. On these were mattresses and bedclothes, plenty
of them. For when we read of city folk dying of sunstroke and rolling
off their roofs where they had gone to get a mouthful of the lifeless
air, robbed of its ozone before it reached them, we were snuggling under
one and sometimes two pairs of blankets. And then, I had the pleasure (a
small and tepid pleasure you may think it, but very real to me) of trying
to prop my eyelids open every night, as I lay stretched out upon my bed,
till I could thrust my hand out between the sidewall and the baseboard,
and feel the glossy leaves of the cool grapevine, and try to unkink a
tendril before I lost consciousness. Sometimes I couldn’t get that far.
We’d stay up till all hours, nine and even ten o’clock, fighting off
sleep. It was a nightly problem with us which we’d rather do, go to bed
and get that lovely sleep, or stay awake a minute or two longer staring
at the “friendship fire.”
I have vainly tried to think which held the greater fascination for
me: The lake as it shifted its hues before my eyes from reddish brown
to vivid apple-green through leaded gray and royal purple, the farther
shore now so sharp and clear that you could see the houses on it, now
but a thin slice of pearl against a pearly sky, the water between us
and it now a floor veined and streaked like marble, and now ridgy with
billows, that practised, as it were, their scales upon the yellow beach,
their hand-backs remembering what the teacher said, “no knuckles,” and
their finger tips dancing in the white froth: or, the fire of evenings,
fluttering its ribbons of orange taffeta against the back log, snapping
its blank cartridges in sport at us, the red coals so many heaps of
glowing jewels in an Indian prince’s treasure-house. The lake enthralled
me in the day-time. It numbed my brain; it paralyzed my pen-hand, and
left me only the still and speechless joy of living. When the darkness
fell, the firelight drew me with the master-spell. From the lake I now
and then could turn my eyes. The fire was jealous. Not for a full minute
would it let me go. In its genial warmth and light our souls expanded,
and we sang the old songs that everybody knows, the songs that lie so
near the heart its strings must thrill in concord with them, but, through
all, our eyes were fastened on the fire. What magic it must be that thus
can charm unhaltingly through all the long, long centuries that have
drifted by like mist since first men gathered about the friendly flame!
The wonder of it! The wonder of it! Without the Fire there could never be
the Family, with all that means to us; no Hearth, no Home, with all that
means to us. The first priestess was she that kept the coals alive; an
altar is but a cooking-place. Lineal descendant of the first flickering
blaze fed with twigs is all our god-like industry, all that has made us
lords of earth and sea. Back to nature we may go, but farther back than
fire we dare not, lest we perish body and soul.
Perhaps it was the dumb fear of this, the heritage of pre-historic
ancestry that made us sigh when the time came to tear the logs apart and
quench them for the night.
How happy were those dear idle days! Happy, not only in the retrospect,
but each moment savoring pleasant to the taste. Once I thought that
Heaven must be rather bore-ous with nothing left to strive for, no
ambition, no anxiety. I know better now. I could live on and on forever
in that camp and never wish for anything but to live. As I write, the
pictures of the sweet, calm evenings out upon the placid lake in the
canoe return to me. It heaves in gentle swells, the umber water netted on
its ripple-crests with soft reflections of the flushed sky fading into
tints too delicate for words of color. Black against the lucent edge of
heaven march the slim poplars. The stars are struggling out, and taking
pattern from them, the riding-lights of yachts shine yellowly. The waves
plash gently on the shell that holds us, and the water gurgles against
the paddle that urges onward, or tinkles in drops like tiny bells.
Something catches in the throat. It is too beautiful, too heavenly for
earth-born. From far across the waters comes Caruso’s voice, by magic
reproduced, sweet to suffocation.
“Un regal serto sul crin possarti
Ergerti un trono vicino al sol.
Ah! Celeste Aida! Forma divina.”
On the taffrail of the departing steamer we leaned and watched the spot
until the darkness and the distance smothered the pale gleaming of the
tents where our friends lingered yet a little longer. We sighed; we could
not help it. A little more and tears would have flowed.
I want to go back there. I want to go back! Back to Nature—or at least
part way.