20 FOREST OUTINGS 



not know the value of leisure. There is some truth to that. Surely we work 

 like mad. many of us. and take a strange, perverted pride in it. The remark 

 of a farm wife, "Overwork is the most dangerous form of American in- 

 temperance. " suggests habits certainly not confined to excesses of weary, 

 stumbling toil afield. Great executives and lesser ambitious officers and 

 clerks of our greatest city business firms send out for a sandwich and milk 

 shake, then nibble at their desks as they dictate, push buttons, grab at 

 phones, bark, and display — in excessive and sometimes hysterical form all 

 day long and after the electric lights are lit — good old 100-percent pioneer 

 American drive, pep, and spizzerinctum. 



Then these businessmen clump wearily to their feet, all possibility of 

 a sane and collected judgment long since dulled. Xo hay hand bras; gin? at 

 the fifth beer of inhuman feats of overexertion under the blazing sun of a 

 Montana harvest is prouder than the wan slave of business, be he the 

 president of the company or a file clerk, who is the last man out of such an 

 office for the day. The last man out turns out the lights. That is his privilege, 

 and an omen. 



And not unusually these hired men crawl home through traffic by car, 

 bus, or subway laden with bulging brief cases and portfolio; more work. 

 They snap at their dinners and their families and perform further lonely 

 prodigies of toil. And when such excesses drive them, as happens fairly 

 often, to alcoholic frivolities, to the divorce courts, and to the waiting rooms 

 of highly specialized doctors, these tired businessmen are very sorry and 

 somber about it. Then, if they are wise, the doctors advise them to seek 

 escape, to take to the woods, to strike out into the wilderness and get away 

 from it all. 



The Great Outing . . . The days of our pioneering are not ended. 

 But our simple and brutal concepts of pioneering are changing. We no longer 

 look at it as altogether doleful or as a matter for long-faced lamentation. 

 Why should we, for in a manner of speaking the whole American settlement 

 from coast to coast was an adventure, a grandiose outing, a burst of escape 

 from overcrowded, overdriven civilizations that were not working any too 

 well in Europe. 



