I have attended to various kinds of labor, but never have I entered upon any half so pleasing as that usually performed in the “logging swamp.” Although greatly jeopardizing my reputation for taste, I will utter it. Positively, it is delightful. I have since had some years’ experience in one of the professions, in the enjoyment of some of the refinements of life, yet, if it could be done consistently, I would now with eagerness exchange my house for the logging camp, my books for the ax, and the city full for those wilderness solitudes whose delightful valleys and swelling ridges give me Nature uncontaminated — I had almost said, uncursed, fresh from the hand of the Creator. To write of those things makes the hustling city seem dull and irksome. Fain would I hie away once more to those pleasant pastime labors. Happily, all tastes are not alike. Yet there are few who, on entering a beautiful native forest, would not experience delight; the varieties of trees set out by the hand of Nature, their graceful forms and spreading branches interlocked with neighborly affection and recognition; the harmonious confusion of undergrowth; the beautiful mosses, the ever-varying surface — old age, manhood and youth, childhood and infancy — massive trunks and little sprouts; the towering Pine and creeping Winter-green, intermingled by the artless genii of these wild retreats, all combined, serve to explain the attachment of the Aborigines to their forest abodes, and give to savage life the power of enchantment. John S. Springer, Forest Life and Forest Trees, … Camp-Life Among the Loggers … on the Various Rivers of Maine and New Brunswick, New York, 1851 johnwood1946.wordpress/
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 16:12:31 +0000
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