The Boy and His Gang

by Joseph Adams Puffer

The life of the woods has, moreover, yet another important function in the development of a boy’s inner life. I have often, in taking cross country walks with boys, attempted to switch out from among the trees into open meadow or pasture land to save distance. Over and over again, however, have the boys protested. “No, don’t. Let’s stay in the woods,” they have entreated. I am inclined to believe that the religious life in boys has its natural birthplace in the forests, in the temple not made with hands, where their fathers have been worshiping these ten thousand years. If this be true, the Sunday School teacher might well, at times, exchange the benches of an uninteresting room for the spots where our race, from the beginnings of its existence, has been learning its lessons of piety and reverence.

Sunday is, in fact, the great day of the week, for or against the home. It is, as appears from the boys’ reports of their activities, characteristically Nature Day; and there is a well-marked practice among boys, no matter what they may do through the week, to go off in groups into the country on Sunday. Parents who wish to keep control of their boys should recognize this natural impulse, and be their companions on their Sunday excursions. Family migrations, on the one day of the week when the father is free to go with his boys, would be an efficient means of keeping the home influence around the boy. Surely there can in this be nothing irreligious.

Such a practice would, moreover, powerfully aid the parent in controlling one of the most troublesome of gang instincts, the Wanderlust. The roving impulse takes a sudden rise at the dawn of adolescence, and then gradually subsides. Most red-blooded young men hear the call of the red gods in the spring; not a few remain vagabonds all their lives.

Certain it is that this strange Wanderlust of man has been a tremendous force in history. It drove the Angles and Saxons into Britain, the English into North America, and the New Englanders into the great West. The traditional Westerner is planning to sell out and move farther on. The mere sight of the horizon is a challenge; and the boy longs to repeat the ancestral experience.

In the normal boy, the migratory instinct is at times the most imperious of his impulses. Many boys are driven by it to run away from home; few, indeed, are there of us who have not made our plans to go—and then changed our minds. It commonly takes the combined influence of good parents, good teachers and good playmates to cool us down; and where the neighborhood spirit is lost, as it often is in city life to-day, or the home is broken by death or desertion, or made inefficient by drunkenness, ignorance, or poverty, there is little to check the boy’s response to the old fret. Off, therefore, the boy goes, first by day, then by night. How far this running-away instinct contributes to delinquency, it is difficult to estimate, but certainly it is one of the greatest factors. About one boy out of every five in most of our large cities is arrested before the age of twenty-one; and in a considerable proportion of cases the beginnings of wrongdoing can be traced to early wanderings.

On the other hand, running away from home does not always result in permanent moral harm; while even at the worst, the boy gains a self-reliance which nothing else can teach. Often, too, the impulse, instead of growing with what it feeds on, tends to disappear with its gratification. There is something to be said also for giving the boy his fill of one sort of adventure before he is old enough for another.

As the migratory impulse is far too deep-seated and powerful to be altogether restrained, the only method is to indulge it under supervision and educatively. The boy should be taken on any sort of interesting trip. If the expedition involves some bodily hardship, so much the better. The son of a good home is usually made too comfortable, and unconsciously he feels the need of some more invigorating substitute for warm room and soft bed. When, therefore, nothing better offers itself, it often does a boy good to sleep out in his own back yard, with a dismantled revolver in his belt, and a lasso hung beside him on the clothes pole. He will probably not get much sleep, and he may catch cold; but the experience will be a powerful stimulus to his imagination, and at the same time will help, at small risk, to gratify a wholesome instinct.

The wise parent will take every opportunity to go on trips with his sons to city or country; the gymnastic instructor will arrange cross-country runs for his boys in spring and fall; and the school-teacher will plan nature-study walks, trips to historic spots, or visits to industrial plants, where, under a well-informed guide, the class will learn about manufacturing processes from the raw material to the finished product. All these persons are killing two birds with one stone. They are satisfying the runaway instinct, while at the same time they furnish the best sort of education.

In all sections of our land there are sacred historic spots, buildings, graveyards, battle-grounds, which help to keep alive the memory of noble men and women. There is a period in boy life when these have an intense interest; when the boy, eager for any form of experience or adventure, has his imagination powerfully stirred by whatever he associates with the adventures and experience of other human beings. I have often visited historic Concord with groups of school-boys, and though they were of all nationalities, I have yet to find one who could not be deeply impressed at the sight of Concord Bridge and the statue of the Minute Man. Teachers who were present, and told their pupils the story of what had happened on that ground, reported after their return the extraordinary interest of the boys’ essays on their pilgrimage. The boys had seen with their eyes and the past had become real. Could there be any more effective method of teaching history, quite aside from the incidental satisfaction of a deep instinctive need?

If, in addition to such informative trips, the parent or teacher can go camping or tramping with his boys, then the climax is reached. Some pond should be selected with good boating, fishing, and swimming, and there ought to be a mountain near by which the boys can climb, camp on its sides overnight, and go to the top for sunrise. Such an experience will never be forgotten. Not only will it tend to kindle a lifelong interest in hills and mountains; in addition and more important still, the companionship in adventure gives the man a hold over his boys that nothing else can bestow. In the woods, on the mountain top and around the camp fire at night, come feelings of mystery, of awe, and of friendliness, to which the boy is at other times a stranger. Here is the opportunity for genuine moral and religious instruction. Better one straight talk under these conditions, than a whole year of lessons forced upon boys. Genuine morality and genuine religion are such deep and sacred and natural things that a little real inspiration lasts forever.