Fun in the Forests

Above: A scene typical (except, Perhaps, or the size of the fish) of many parts of the country.

NEW VALUES IN THE MINDS OF MEN

L. F. KNEIPP.

RECREATION" and "recreate" mean refreshment, to give fresh life to, reanimate, revive, divert, amuse, gratify. The terms apply to mind and spirit and body. The ways in which the forests of the United States serve these purposes are many.

Years ago, for recreation, most people oftener went away from the forest than toward it. But as the country settled, as industry and commerce gained ascendancy over rural activities, as the population concentrated in cities, the forest gained increasing significance as the scene of wholesome recreation.

New living conditions modified natural forces and elements. New forms of economic activity, highly mechanical and monotonously repetitive, were established. New tempos of thought and action gave birth to new tensions and nervous strains. Time brought increasing realization that physical and spiritual well-being required periodic escape from the strains of the new modes of daily life.

The qualities with which their forebears met the challenge of nature began to assume new values in the minds of men who felt a desire to revert to more primitive conditions under which such skills and qualities could be regained. A major contributing cause was probably the changes that were occurring in working standards and habits. As the average working day dropped from 12 hours to 10 and then to 8, as the average workweek dropped from 6 days to 5, as the practice of vacations ceased to be the privilege of a few, both the time and the physical energies requisite to the return to nature became increasingly available. Then automobiles overcame handicaps of distance and immobility, and many an American enthusiastically became outdoor-minded.

But while nature was regaining a hold on the minds and affections of people, it coincidentally was losing dominance over the land. Farms and fields had occupied all land suitable for such use and much that was not suitable. Hamlets grew into villages and villages into cities, and their impact on nature extended far beyond their legal limits. To link them together, networks of highways came into being, fringed, often, with garish structures that closed off the fields and woods from the roads. Within the zones tributary to roads, nature was subdued until it offers little appeal and no challenge other than the walk to the nearest filling station when one runs out of gas.

Only three major land classes had escaped even partly such modification the shores of the oceans and lakes, the great mountain masses, and the forests. Of the three, the forests are of the greatest extent and the widest geographic distribution; they also are of the greatest variety and diversity of natural interest the major area in which future needs of the American people for essential outdoor play can be met in properly balanced coordination with the needs of commerce, industry, and other elements of the economic structure.

PERHAPS IT IS THE INFLUENCE of atavism that makes trees appeal so strongly to human emotions. The forest is the antithesis of the city, from which a respite is desired. Within the forest confines peace and calm normally prevail. The play of shadow and sunlight on majestic columns, the response. of leaf, twig, branch, and trunk to the movement of the air, the complexity of the biological pattern, the myriad forms of plant, insect, bird, and animal life, the placid or turbulent flow of waters, the variations in topography and geology, all combine to stimulate, yet soothe, the senses and rid the body and mind of their adversities. In this effect lies the general charm of the forest; but beyond that is its illimitable capacity to gratify the individual interests and cravings of each visitor within its precincts.

One visitor may desire no more of the forest than to traverse it in a fast automobile over a high-speed highway, but only if his eyes can be gladdened by long tangents closely margined by stately ranks of trees or by vistas that reveal constantly changing expanses or perspectives of thrifty and beautiful tree growth against the majestic backgrounds of slope, canyon, or peak.

There is, however, a less numerous type of motorist whose greatest pleasure is in exploring areas accessible only by dim and difficult roads, that lead into distant and primitive reaches where his comforts will depend on his own skill and where his normal world temporarily is remote.

Beyond the latter class is the visitor who travels on foot or with saddle and pack horses or by canoe. He seeks quiet glades fringed with aspen or birch and watered by a trickling spring, or some little meadow where the eventide clang of horse bells will be music to his ears, or some tree-crowned point from which he can watch the golden birth of a new day or the descent of dusk and darkness upon a lake. Complete detachment from the throng is his purpose and his reward.

But most visitors to forests love nature too greatly to be content to experience it only at a speed of 60 miles an hour, but not enough to enjoy its close intimacy at a speed of 3 miles an hour. They are gregarious and have no desire to detach themselves completely from the crowds. They are comfort loving, with no inclination toward forms of subsistence, habitation, and transport that entail discomforts and deprivations. They have a love for nature in general and for the forest in particular, but they see no inconsistency in a reasonable intermixture of modern facilities and techniques.

Second in numbers are the visitors who frequent forest areas only between dawn and dusk of a single day, to lunch, play, ramble, and relax. Over the years their habits in the woods have been subject to drastic changes. Knowing more about the widespread pollution of streams and springs, they prefer locations where water of assured purity is available. With responsibility for fire damage now more rigidly attached and enforced, they see the advantage of building their luncheon fires in safe fireplaces. The more general recognition of the hazards of poor sanitary practices, not only to the visitors but to all users of the watershed, has popularized areas that have good sanitary facilities. Thus, this type of forest recreational use, once so widely diffused throughout the forest as to be a menace to health and property, now largely is concentrated, at least on those forests under public management, in picnic and camp grounds that are equipped and developed to afford full protection.

Scores of thousands of lakes and ponds and miles of flowing streams intersperse and thread the forests. In them the fresh-water varieties of game fish generally are more abundant than elsewhere. Only in the forest environment have game animals and some species of game birds been able to survive in material numbers.