WORK IN A NATIONAL FOREST 



BY 



Charles Howard Shinn, Supervisor of Sierra (North) National Forest 

 No. 6: Christmas in Sierra North 



"T* HE holiday season away up here 

 '- among the oaks and pines has 

 had a charm all its own. I cannot do 

 better than to leave for a little my 

 stories of toil and war, to give you, 

 my readers, a glimpse of how forest 

 people pass happy winters in their 

 cabins. 



This will be printed in February, I 

 suppose, but you are to think of it as 

 written the last day of the old year, 

 on a hilltop, in the midst of brown 

 acres just beginning to color with the 

 green of future hay-fields and under 

 the pulses of a soft, warm rain. 



Some of the rangers are away on 

 their leaves of absence. They get fif- 

 teen days a year, you know, and if ill, 

 can have fifteen days of sick leave. 

 Most of them, however, think sick 

 leave is more or less disgraceful, and 

 a man who asked for it regularly 

 would be laughed out of camp. The 

 total of sick leave taken by thirty men 

 in a year has been eighty-eight days, 

 or an average of less than three each. 

 Rheumatism, due to exposure, and the 

 malarial and typhoidal fevers due to 

 the bad sanitary conditions of some of 

 the mills where the rangers who scale 

 lumber have to stay, were responsi- 

 ble for forty-five days out of the 

 eighty-eight, which reduces the inci- 

 dentals to less than one and a half 

 days' average loss per man. 



There is no doubt that we are a 

 healthy lot. and love our work too 

 well to moon over a fire, even in win- 

 ter. Unless a ranger is really sick 

 enough to stay in bed, he does not 

 want sick leave. To take it otherwise 

 seems to him exactly what it is — try- 

 ing to swindle the Service. 



Leave of absence is quite a different 

 thing. All the men have friends in 



town. They like to think that when 

 Christmas holidays approach they can 

 "blow into" some vast place on the 

 railroad — some county seat with stores 

 and hotels and electric lights and 

 theatres — and live in the midst of ex- 

 citements. Most of them will sol- 

 emly take out their fifteen days, or all 

 that is coming to them. Then they 

 drift away with great splendor of cow- 

 boy attire. In a few days one hears of 

 them as back again, chopping wood, 

 putting shelves in their cabins, or oth- 

 erwise making themselves comfortable 

 for the winter. The thirty men on 

 record here have averaged about ten 

 days of actual time off. Some "have 

 no use for it;" some find their time 

 hangs heavy and come laughing back, 

 re-married to their life and work. And 

 they come back sober, strong, anxious 

 to learn more, eager to do better 

 work. The Service has gotten hold 

 of them ; it is in no wise the result of 

 individual enthusiasm, of my daily 

 word, or an inspector's visit, or the oc- 

 casional man from Washington ; it is 

 merely an atmosphere which they 

 have learned to love. Everywhere 

 else they miss its sharp, cold ozone. 



We begin to prepare for our holi- 

 days in midsummer at Ellis Meadow, 

 in the Sugar Pines. There is a for- 

 est there which seems to us as if it 

 were finer and more wonderful than 

 anything else on earth. Some of us 

 live there, open to the heavens for the 

 most part, and we look out over the 

 burning valleys across miles of foot- 

 hills and see the far-off twinkle of the 

 lights of Fresno, sixty miles away as 

 the crow flies. It happens that we 

 have a house for headquarters, and .^ 

 fire-place, but we do not need it at all. 

 In fact most of us prefer to slap down 



