SOME THOUGHTS

Collected by Barry Williamson

It should not be denied that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history, oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. (Wallace Stegner)

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. How the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is. (Letter from Everett Rues)

As to when I shall visit civilisation, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded by beauty. (The last letter ever received from Everett Rues, November 1934)

The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. (John Haines)

I cannot now tell exactly, it was so long ago, under what circumstances I first ascended, only that I shuddered as I went along. I steadily ascended along a rocky ridge half-clad with stinted trees, till I lost myself quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity. What distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know the path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. (Journal of Henry David Thoreau, US Naturalist, 1817-62)