96 FOREST OUTINGS 



scenic highway, protected from billboards and other commercial encroach- 

 ments, is widely and generally broken into by private holdings. 



As you drive up through that gorgeous mountain country now, up 

 through Franconia Notch, Pinkham Notch, the climbing highways descend 

 at rather frequent intervals to the aesthetic level of U. S. Highway No. 1, 

 between the cities of Baltimore and Washington, say at its worst. Billboards 

 and hot-dog stands; playful little signs that shriek for you to GO SLOW, 

 else you miss some of Auntie Bessie's Yum- Yum- Yum Cookin'; wayside 

 tourist cabins with names like Dew-Kum-Inn, and Little Rhody there 

 they are. 



Some of the newer cabin camps are quite decent and comely. Some of 

 the private resorts have manifestly tried to follow the practice of the forest 

 in keeping signs keyed down to a quiet tone. On stretches of road traversing 

 private land, here and there, the commercial babble, the blatant aiming at 

 one's eye, pawing at one's arm and purse, has been individually recognized 

 as an indecency, in such a site, and has been somewhat moderated. But too 

 many stretches of mountain road that traverse private land here toward the 

 most majestic heights of the White Mountains in staid New England, are 

 rimmed with shouting greed, shameless ballyhoo, and a desperate ugliness 

 and confusion. 



If this were a more cheerful desecration, it might be easier to understand. 

 But it is, for all its clamor, cheerless, insincere shame-faced. It is a sad 

 desecration. Most of the private-resort proprietors, native and transient, 

 great and small, do not really want to carry on like this in order to make a 

 living here in the mountains. You can talk with them and find that out, 

 easily. 



Forget it for the moment; put it out of mind. It's too bad that cut- 

 throat competition and the introduction of more decent standards of out- 

 door recreation should arouse such fierce growing pains in what begins to 

 be our greatest industry, but the result in the end may be beneficial, and 

 the industry will survive. The growth will come from its sounder parts. 

 The pirates and panderers are killing their part of the game, anyway, 

 themselves. Americans are rather patient suckers in the mass, but not 

 eternally so, only for a while. 



