Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Joyce Kilmer.
III
WHERE TO WALK
Anywhere. Surely the pedestrian may claim for his recreation this advantage: it may be enjoyed when one will and wherever one may be. But this does not mean that there is no choice, no preference. Says Thoreau again, “If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!” And Emerson has this fresh, breezy comment:
“The true naturalist can go wherever woods or waters go; almost where a squirrel or a bee can go, he can; and no man is asked for leave. Sometimes the farmer withstands him in crossing his lots, but ’tis to no purpose; the farmer could as well hope to prevent the sparrows or tortoises. It was their land before it was his, and their title was precedent.”
Stevenson would make the surroundings a matter of small import; the landscape, he says, is “quite accessory,” and yet, within a page after, he rallies Hazlitt, and playfully calls him an epicure, because he postulates “a winding road, and three hours to dinner.”
Choice of Surroundings
There is the region about home, the region one knows best. For muddy weather, macadam; but, when they are at all negotiable, then always country roads by preference. The macadam road is all that is unpleasant—hard, dry, glaring, straight, monotonous; overrun with noisy, dusty, evil-smelling machines, with their curious and often unpleasant occupants. It is bordered, not with trees, as a road should be, but with telephone poles; a fine coating of lime dust lies like a death pallor on what hardy vegetation struggles to live along its margin; it is commercial, business-like, uncompromising, and unlovely. But the country road belongs to another world—a world apart—and is traveled by a different people. It, too, has its aim and destination, but it is deliberate in its course; it neither cuts through the hills nor fills the valleys, but accommodates itself to the windings of streams and to the steepness of slopes. It is soft underfoot, shaded by trees; it finds and follows the mountain brooks; rabbits play upon it, grouse dust themselves in it, birds sing about it, and berries hang from its banks black and sweet. The people who live in the country travel upon it; it is instinct with the life of a hundred years.