What Forests Give

FOREST PLAYGROUNDS

Besides goods and services and knowledge, our forests give us the greatest playgrounds a people ever had.

From the time that we human beings began to live in communities we have been neighbors to the forests. Since we started on the long up-slant toward civilization, to go into the forest has always been an adventure. From our remote great-grandfather who ventured in under the trees step by step, his sensitive ears pricked up for any rustle of leaves or breaking twigs, his nostrils twitching for some dangerous scent, his eyes glancing right and left for some menacing thing that moved, his whole body poised to scramble up the bole of a tree at the first alarm, we who ride through the crimson autumn woods of New England on concrete highways with no more danger than that of running out of gasoline, inherit the longing for the sense of adventure that the forests give us.

That ancestor of ours must have had plenty of time to wander through the forest. Enough to eat and some sort of shelter were about all he had learned to want. When he discovered how many things he needed to make himself comfortable and happy and began to work to get them, he hadn't much leisure left. Only since we have discovered that instead of working hard and long to get what we want we can let machines work for us, have we got back some leisure. Today we are just beginning to get time to play and are returning to those early playgrounds of ours, the forests.

The forests which we own through the Nation or the different States are playgrounds open to us all and within the reach of most of us. Upward of 23 million automobiles are owned by the American people, and the smooth, hard white roads stretch out toward our forests and into them, and through them further and further, year by year. In 1936 more than 70 million of us passed through our forests, and 24 million stopped over to enjoy them.

What makes them such good playgrounds? What did we do there?

In the Forest—New Hampshire

The millions of us who just rode through the forests and looked at the legions of pines and the cohorts of the hardwoods, with an occasional unregimented deer or bear for contrast, took our pleasure in a moving picture in colors. More than a third of these pleasure seekers, who come usually from the cities, picked out spots that pleased them and set up tents, or they stopped in one of the 3,000 free campgrounds which are provided with good drinking water and sanitary equipment, outdoor fireplaces, rustic tables and benches, or stayed at the inexpensive resorts on the shores of lovely lakes, or at the regular summer hotels. They stayed, these seekers after pleasure, from as little as 1 or 2 days to as long as all the months between the going of the spring snows and the coming of the autumn cold.

They seemed specially interested in finding out how the world was made. They gathered about the scars left by that great battle won by the ice ages ago—the scratches on the rocks which the glaciers had scraped bare of trees—as though they were the battlefields of the World War. They studied the mosses and lichens which after thousands of years are just anchoring a little soil into the hollows in the rocks. They hiked along trails into those 10 million acres which are kept as primitive areas—wild forests with no roads, or stores, or gas stations, and only such signs of civilization as help to guard them from fire. They got out their paint boxes and "did landscapes"; they swam in the cold forest lakes; they climbed up to the snow line, where the trees grow smaller and fewer and the air is colder and the rushing winds more bitter; they listened to the great owls talking together in the dark when their wings make no sound. One way or another they saw a good deal of the forest animals, for the hunting habit is as old as the race. If our greatest great-grandfather had not been able to knock down a little Eohippus with a well-thrown stone his children would have gone supperless to bed. If he had gone ahunting and not brought back a rabbitskin, Baby Bunting would have slept cold. No children of poor hunters could survive.

Mule Deer and White Birch Aspen

But the survival of the race does not any longer depend on our ability to kill wild animals for food or clothing or to catch fish. Babies grow to maturity without ever having seen a rabbitskin. Families flourish in which father never baited a hook. The hunt in the forests has changed from a necessary way of getting food to a privileged way of getting pleasure, and except in the open season for some special animal and with an official permit, the weapons with which we hunt in our national forests are such peaceful things as bird glasses, cameras, and perhaps a flash to "shine for deer."

That "shining for deer" where there is no intention of killing them is an entrancing game. It must be played where the deer come down to drink in the time after the sun is set and before the moon rises. Get into a canoe and paddle without a sound along the water's edge. Your wits are against the wits of the deer and your ears and eyes against his. The other wild things are on his side. If there are loons calling out on the lake they will stop unless you know how to call back. If there are porcupines gnawing noisily they will rest and peer about in the dark when they hear you. If there are heavy-footed bears plodding about they may go crashing away through the bushes. But if no wild thing gives the alarm, and your paddle does not splash and you handle the flash well, then you may see in the sudden light you throw along the shore, two great bright eyes, a delicate nose, and dripping mouth tossed suddenly, a pale, fawn-colored body that lifts in an arching spring and whirls away into the dark.

A, Bobcats—Montana. B, The Bear's Den—West Virginia

Fisherman's Luck—Colorado

Our Great Playgrounds—Virginia

And there's that joy that the fisherman gets in the forest stream where a trout may be in the deep pool shaded by a great tree. Here again it is your wits and patience against his. He's almost invisible when he holds himself in the shadow with the dark stripe on his back toward you and no motion but the slow moving of his tail. You must guess where he lies in wait, and have some sure knowledge of what sort of food he waits for if you are going to tempt him with your bait. If you win against him you will see the rush of a dark streak and then the bright flash of his side as he turns to take the hook. This fishing is an old game, too, and like hunting it began in those long-past days when life depended on a man's ability to win at it. Those early fishermen stood stooping above the water, slender spears pointed with chipped stone poised ready to strike the fish, or they floated in dugouts made of tree trunks and dropped in their lines of twisted sinew with hooks of bone. Their fishhooks and spear heads are in the museums. That they were successful fishermen we know because of the fish-bones in the vast piles of rubbish called kitchen middens left along the banks of streams. We still delight in the thing that our ancestors did so well.

It is not only in the summer that we go to our forests to play. More and more we are finding that we have time for winter sports. In our White Mountain forests are wonderful cleared slopes for ski jumping and tracks for coasting. During the season there are sometimes 10 railroad trains a day from the New England cities—Hartford, Springfield, Boston, and the rest—up into the forests, and about a quarter as many people play there in the winter as in the summer.

There are no rules in these great playgrounds except those which we have laid down for ourselves under the law, and no policing except what is needed for the safety of those 70 million of us who come from all over the land to enjoy them.

Road Through the Redwoods—California