Doctor and Patient

by S. Weir Mitchell

As to inconveniences, they are, of course, many, but, with a little ingenuity, it is easy to make tent-life comfortable, and none need dread them. Any book on camp-life will tell how to meet or avoid them, and to such treatises I beg to refer the reader who wishes to experiment on this delightful mode of gypsying.

The class of persons who find it easy to reach the most charming sites and to secure the help of competent guides is, as I have said in another place, increasing rapidly. The desire also for such a life is also healthfully growing, so that this peculiarly American mode of getting an outing is becoming more and more familiar. It leads to our young folks indulging in all sorts of strengthening pursuits. It takes them away from less profitable places, and the good it does need not be confined to the boys. Young women may swim, fish, and row like their brothers, but the life has gains and possibilities, as to which I would like to say something more. In a well-ordered camp you may be sure of good food and fair cooking. To sleep and live in the air is an insurance against what we call taking cold. Where nature makes the atmospheric changes, they are always more gradual and kindly than those we make at any season when we go from street to house or house to street.

My brothers during the war always got colds when at home on leave, and those who sleep in a chinky cabin or tent soon find that they do not suffer and that they have an increasing desire for air and openness.

To live out of doors seems to be a little matter in the way of change, and that it should have remarkable moral and intellectual values does not appear credible to such as have not had this experience.

Yet, in fact, nothing so dismisses the host of little nervousnesses with which house-caged women suffer as this free life. Cares, frets, worries, and social annoyances disappear, and in the woods and by the waters we lose, as if they were charmed away, our dislikes or jealousies, all the base, little results of the struggle for bread or place. At home, in cities, they seem so large; here, in the gentle company of constant sky and lake and stream, they seem trivial, and we cast them away as easily as we throw aside some piece of worn-out and useless raiment.

The man who lives out of doors awhile acquires better sense of moral proportions, and thinks patiently and not under stress, making tranquil companions of his worthy thoughts. This is a great thing, not to be hurried. There seems to me always more time out of doors than in houses, and if you have intellectual problems to settle, the cool quiet of the woods or the lounging comfort of the canoe, or to be out under "the huge and thoughtful night," has many times seemed to me helpful. One gets near realities out of doors. Thought is more sober; one becomes a better friend to one's self.

As to the effect of out-door life on the imaginative side of us, much may be said. Certainly some books get fresh flavors out of doors, and you see men or women greedily turn to reading and talking over verse who never dream of it when at home. I am tempted to mention the poets, and even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the gentle company of lake and wood and stream. I should frankly name Walt Whitman and Thoreau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration. A good many of them—read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump in the woods—shrink to well-bred, comfortable parlor bards, who seem to you to have gotten their nature-lessons through plate-glass windows. The test is a sharp one, and will leave out some great names and let in some hardly known, or almost forgotten. Books to be read out of doors would make a curious catalogue, and would vary, as such lists must, with every thoughtful reader, while some would smile, perhaps with reason, at the idea of any such classification. Certainly all would name Wordsworth, and a few would add Clough, whilst the out-door plays of Shakespeare would come in, and we should soon be called on to feel that for this sort of congenial open-air poetic company we have still to fall back on the vast resources of English verse. Somehow, as yet, our own poets have not gotten fully into imaginative relation with what is peculiar in our own flowers, trees, and skies. This does not lessen our joy in the masters of English verse, because, of course, much of what they have sung has liberal application in all lands; yet is there something which we lose in them for lack of familiar knowledge of English lanes and woods, of English flowers and trees. A book of the essentially American nature—poems found here and there in many volumes—would be pleasant, for surely we have had no one poet as to whom it is felt that he is absolutely desirable as the interpretive poetic observer who has positive claims to go with us as a friendly bookmate in our wood or water wanderings. I have shrunk, as will have been seen, from the dangerous venture of enlarging my brief catalogue. What I have just now spoken of as one's bookmates will appear in very different lights according to the surroundings in which we seek to enjoy their society. If, as to this matter, any one doubts me, and has the good luck to camp out long, and to have a variety of books of verse and prose, very soon, if dainty of taste, he will find that the artificial flavoring of some books is unpleasantly felt; but, after all, one does not read very much when living thus outside of houses. Books are then, of course, well to have, but rather as giving one texts for thoughts and talk than as preachers, counsellors, jesters, or friends.

In my own wood-life or canoe journeys I used to wonder how little I read or cared to read. One has nowadays many resources. If you sketch, no matter how badly, it teaches and even exacts that close observation of nature which brings in its train much that is to be desired. Photography is a means of record, now so cheaply available as to be at the disposal of all, and there is a great charm of a winter evening in turning over sketch or photograph to recall anew the pleasant summer days. Beyond all this, there is botany. I knew a lady who combined it happily and ingeniously with photography, and so preserved pictures of plants in their flowering state. When you are out under starry skies with breadth of heaven in view, astronomy with an opera-glass—and Galileo's telescope was no better—is an agreeable temptation which the cheap and neat charts of the skies now to be readily obtained make very interesting.

I should advise any young woman, indeed, any one who has the good chance to live a camp-life, or to be much in the country, to keep a diary, not of events but of things. I find myself that I go back to my old note-books with increasing pleasure.

To make this resource available something more than the will to do it is necessary. Take any nice young girl, who is reasonably educated, afloat in your canoe with you, and ask her what she sees. As a rule she has a general sense that yonder yellow bank, tree-crowned above the rippled water, is pleasant. The sky is blue, the sun falling behind you. She says it is beautiful and has a vague sense of enjoyment, and will carry away with her little more than this. Point out to her that the trees above are some of them deciduous poplars, or maples, and others sombre groups of pines and silky tamarack with a wonder of delicate tracery. Show her that the sun against the sloped yellow bank has covered the water with a shining changeful orange light, through which gleam the mottled stones below, and that the concave curve of every wave which faces us concentrates for the eye an unearthly sapphire the reflex of the darkening blue above us. Or a storm is on us at the same place. She is fearless as to the ducking from which even her waterproof will hardly protect. The clouds gather, the mists trail on the hills, ragged mosses on the trees hang in wet festoons of gray, and look in the misty distance like numberless cascades. It rains at last, a solid down-pour; certain tree-trunks grow black, and the shining beech and birch and poplar get a more vivid silver on their wet boles. The water is black like ink. It is no longer even translucent, and overhead the red scourges of the lightning fly, and the great thunder-roar of smitten clouds rolls over us from hill to hill.