EMBLEMS OF TRAMPING
THE fire is the altar of the open-air life. Its wandering smokes go upward like men’s thoughts; its sparks are like human lives.
The coffeepot is the emblem of conviviality.
The roughhewn staff, the tramp’s third leg, is the emblem of his will to jog on.
The knapsack, like Pilgrim’s burden, is the confession of mortality, and of the load which every son of Adam carried on his shoulders.
Every door and gate which he sees means the way out, not the way in.
There are three emblems of life: the first is the open road, the second is the river, and the third is the wilderness. The road is the simplest of these emblems—with its milestones for years, its direction posts to show you the way, its inns for feasting, its churches for prayer, its crossroads of destiny, its happy corners of love and meeting, its sad ones of bereavement and farewell; its backward vista of memory, its forward one of hope.
Life certainly is like a road, or a network of roads; like a highway for some, like a pleasant country road for others, like a crooked lane for some, like a path that bends back to its beginnings for most.
There is the narrow way of the Puritans, a passage between walls of righteousness; there is the broad way of the epicureans, so broad they mistake the breadth for the length and lose themselves on it. But, broad or narrow, the road seems inadequate as an emblem of the tramping life. There shall be roads in our life but our life shall not be always in roads.
The road smacks rather of duty and purpose, of utility, and of “getting there.” Our penchant is to get off the road. I do not care to link tramping with utility. It may be good for the physical health, but that shall not be its object; it may be good for broadening the mind and deepening the sources of pleasure, but these are not the goal. Tramping is a straying from the obvious. Even the crookedest road is sometimes too straight. You learn that it is artificial, that originally it was not made for mere tramping. Roads were made for armies and then for slaves and laborers, and for “transport.” Few have been made for pleasure.