Back To Nature—Part The Way
BY EUGENE WOOD.
About once in every so often, we, as a race, all lay back our heads, shut our eyes, and let out the shuddering shriek: “Back to Nature!” It is so loud and heart-felt a cry that it makes you wonder why we have to go back at all—why we didn’t stay there. If the Get-Strong-Quick professors are right, this thing of our wearing clothes, and dwelling in houses, and eating dainty cooked food three times a day is sheer tom-foolishness, all the more tom-foolish in that once we led the healthy, happy life that inevitably results from fasting three or four days in the week, then dining on goobers and timothy hay; wearing nothing but a nose-ring and a dash of paint, and sleeping in the hollow trees.
For most of us, “Back to Nature” is too long a road to travel—all the way. Nevertheless, the cry is so loud, and so general throughout the civilized world that we cannot dismiss it as impracticable and meaningless. It betokens something. I think I know what, and if it didn’t look so much like serious thinking for you and me, I’d write out what I think it means. I’ll say this, though: If we judge the future by the past this universal impulse to touch the naked earth once more, and so to gather strength and vigor from it, means that the world is pregnant with a great event, and we must be fortified for the labor-pains of it. A new age is struggling to be born. Mark my words.
The timid venture, on the way back to Nature, of a two-weeks’ sitting on the front stoop of a boarding house in the mountains or at the seashore does not satisfy us now. Bold and daring spirits have even gone to live in the wild woods, and have come back to tell us it was bully. We all know it is great fun to play at being boys again, but for most of us the problem is complicated by our having wives and daughters whom we cannot well put in cold storage during our absence. I know that under the pressure of the need to go back to Nature some have even taken the women with them. I—I—I don’t know about that. It doesn’t look very alluring to me. Mind you, I don’t know a thing about living in the wilderness except what I have read and heard, but as near as I can come to it, there seems to be considerable packing to be done. There’s the canoe in the first place. If I were thinking of going into the woods, I shouldn’t stir a stump unless I had a canoe. But you take one fifteen or eighteen feet long, and carry it about three miles through thick-set timber, and I should say along about the last half of the third mile you’d begin to notice it. You’d have to have some kind of a tent, and even when they’re made of silk, I should think they would make something of a bundle. You’d want your gun and ammunition; you’d want your fishing tackle; you’d need a small ax; you’d have to carry a coffee-pot, a frying-pan, a deep pot, a plate, a knife and fork and cup; you’d need at least one blanket and a rubber sheet of some kind; you’d need to pack your bacon and your flour, and erbswurst, and matches, and quinine, and morphine, and rags for bandages in case—you know—and saccharine, and whisky if there are snakes around, and—oh, yes, tobacco; don’t let me forget tobacco—and, oh, I don’t know what all. No women’s fixings in this partial list, you see. I don’t know. I knew a man that took his wife along with him to the woods—but then, don’t you see, it was on their honeymoon. Oh my! It makes all the difference in the world when you’ve been married ten or fifteen years. Yes, I should say so.
I once read a most fascinating series of articles by a woman who had this delightful experience. The intention was to chirrup: “Come on, girls! It’s perfectly elegant!” But she didn’t fool me. I could see that whenever there was anything that was arduous, or tedious, or mussy in the housekeeping line “the gentlemen of the party eagerly volunteered.” Yes. M—hm. I can just see ’em. Mind you, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a woman in the woods is a darn nuisance. No indeed. Only—Well, I tell you. Her husband may be eager to play Injun, but I don’t believe she would be very keen to play squaw. That is, and “tote fair.”
There is this in favor of taking ’em along: Not every man can cook. I know that out there in the forest, when you make camp as the shadows lengthen after a long day’s tramp, when every muscle aches, but aches with glad fatigue; after a day in which your lungs have drunk in the pure air thinly fragrant with the vague odors that the glazed leaves distill, as it were offering incense to the god of day; when you have quenched your thirst from a spring in the bottom of whose earthen bowl the sands are reeling and staggering in the delirium of glee; when you have hearkened to the wild beauty of some unknown bird-call echoing through the lofty Gothic aisles; when the western sky flames into undreamed-of glories and then fades away until the lonely stars come out, I know they say that you can choke down any old mess and relish it. Maybe so. I am as good a hand at eating pancakes as anybody else, but I don’t know about them for every meal and every day; bacon is my favorite vegetable, but there comes a time; fish once a week is all I care for. No. It doesn’t seem alluring to me.
They tell me hemlock boughs make a fine mattress. Yes? I know where I can get better for less money. They tell me that sleeping on the ground with the high sky for a ceiling is simply great. If it comes to that, I have slept on the ground, and the morning after I knew exactly where my hips and shoulders were. I don’t mind granddaddy long-legs tracking over my face. They’re kind of interesting. But I have never been able to put away the thought that if it should turn chilly in the night, and some snake should come and crawl in bed with me, and smuggle his cool slimy body down my back, it would probably break my rest. I shouldn’t fancy it, I’m positive.
I tell you. I compromised the matter thus last summer. I got back to Nature—part the way. Not so far though as to get out of touch with the milkman. I had things cooked to suit me; I slept high and dry upon a Christian bed, and yet I wasn’t indoors a minute of the time the whole enduring summer. And I’m never going to be another summer under a wooden roof if I know how to help it. I’ll tell you about it if you like.
There were five of us that wanted to live in the outdoor air for twenty-four hours out of every twenty-four. There was the Honest Man who went to gainful business every day; there was the Lazy Man who didn’t do one tap the summer long, though often besought to do so, who now takes his pen in hand to drop you these few lines; there was the Honest Man’s wife; and there were the Lazy Man’s Wife, and his growing Daughter.