It was perhaps a mile across the col to Lincoln. “And beyond that another mile or more—up all the way—to Lafayette!” the Scout Master cried. “Shall we make Lafayette before we lunch, or not?”
The Scouts all voted for it, and moved on again, across the col to Lincoln. The path lay entirely over stones, not great levels of ledge, but small, broken stones, making walking with anything but very stout boots on extremely trying to the feet. All the way, on their left, they could see down into the forests of the Notch, and they could look, too, down upon the Lonesome Lake plateau, and even upon the top of Kinsman, for they were higher than Kinsman already. On the other side, toward the east, they looked down into a spectacle of indescribable desolation—a wild region of deep ravines and valleys separated by steep mountains, and the entire region stripped to the bare earth by the lumbermen. On some of the steep hillsides, slides had followed, to complete the destruction. This desolation extended as far eastward as they could see, and was evidently still going on, for off to the south they could see a logging railroad emerging from the former forest, and once they heard, very faint and far off, the toot of a locomotive whistle.
“When I was a boy your age, Rob,” said Mr. Rogers, “all that country in there, which is known as the East Branch region, because the East Branch of the Pemigewassett rises in it, was primeval wilderness. There was a trail through from North Woodstock over Twin Mountain to the Twin Mountain House, with branches to Thoreau Lake and Carrigain. It was wonderful timber—hemlocks a hundred and fifty feet tall, great, straight, dark spruces like cathedral pillars! I tramped through it once—took three days as I remember. And look at it now!”
“Oh, why do they allow it!” cried Rob. “Why, they haven’t planted a single new tree, or let a single old one stand. They’ve just stripped it.”
“Yes, and spoiled the soil by letting the sun bake it out, too,” said Lou.
“We aren’t such a progressive people, we Americans, as we sometimes think we are,” the Scout Master replied. “In Germany they’d have taken out only the big trees, and planted little ones, and when the next size was bigger, they’d have taken them out, and planted more little ones, and so on forever. And we Scouts could be hiking down there, beside a rushing little river, in the depths of a glorious forest.”
“I’m never going to read a Sunday paper again—’cept the sporting page!” Peanut answered.
“Do you read any more of it now?” Art asked.
“It wasn’t the Sunday papers which stripped that region,” said Mr. Rogers. “It was a lumberman, who made boards and beams of the timber. What did he care about the future, so long as he got rich? Still, I blame the state and the nation more than I blame him. He should never have been allowed to lumber that wasteful way—nobody should. Look, boys, there’s a cloud on Washington again.”
The boys had almost forgotten Washington in their interest in the stripped forest below them. They looked now far off to the northeast, twenty-five miles away as the crow flies, and saw just the blue bases of the Presidentials, wearing a white hood.