4 
201 
DISCOVERING OUTDOOR AMERICA 
LIKE THE WONDERS OF YOUR OWN CITY THAT A STRANGER HAS REVEALED 
TO YOU, THE CHARM OF BROOK AND WOODLAND IS OFTEN NEAR AT HAND 
Part I. 
D ID you read Julian Street’s “Discov¬ 
ering America”? 
The chances are that you did. As 
you read the description of your own or 
some familiar nearby city, did you not 
wonder, as I did, why you had never no¬ 
ticed the near-at-hand things that Street 
saw so clearly: the lights and shadows, 
the beauties and the sordidness, the won¬ 
ders of the common place? Did it occur 
to you that these were all there long be¬ 
fore the stranger discovered them for you 
and showed them to you through his eyes, 
revealed as something new? 
Have you, yourself, ever started out 
with the intent of discovering that other 
America—the America of the out of doors 
that is near at hand in the brooks and 
ponds, perhaps even within the confines of 
your own village or city? If not, the 
chances are that your very first voyage of 
discovery will be sufficient to cast the shut¬ 
ters from your eyes, and reveal 'to you uti- 
dreamed-of possibilities, in territory that 
you have long regarded as uninteresting 
and hopeless from the standpoint of the 
sportsman. 
We are a nation that loves the great 
outdoors. Few are they who love not 
rod, or gnn, or camera or sweeping pad¬ 
dle. Unfortunately, however, where there 
lives one who can leave home and business 
and the stress of modern competition for 
a year’s sojourn in the distant, unex¬ 
plored country, or can choose his own 
time and place for the big game hunt or 
the canoe cruise along the trout-filled 
stream, there live a thousand of us who 
can only read with eager avidity the lucky 
one’s accounts, and make them ours only 
in imagination. 
F ORTUNATE the thousand if ail oc¬ 
casional day is theirs for visiting 
stream, or pond, or wood land. And 
a right royal gift from the gods is an 
entire week spent in the open. 
My message is to this great majority— 
not to the more fortunate minority. The 
man whose month in forest wilderness is 
succeeded by a month among the quail of 
the Carolinas, and that in turn by a month 
among the leaping beauties of the Maine 
lakes, needs no word from me. The world 
is his, and we can but live over on the 
printed page his experiences, and drown 
our vain longings with the wonders of 
his tale. 
It is my opinion, based on personal ex¬ 
perience, that scarce a city or village with¬ 
in the boundaries of our eastern states, 
exists without many dormant possibilities 
for the lover of rod and line, and but few 
where the devotee of the firearm can not 
find pleasure and recreation in its use. 
You who have your home in any one of 
the thousand villages or smaller cities, pass 
daily streams and ponds long ago “fished 
By RAY E. SMITH. 
(With Apologies to Julian Street.) 
out” where, for years gone by, the penny 
hook and string line of the small boy, 
“sucker fishin’,” has been the nearest ap¬ 
proach to angling that the water has 
known. Think a moment. Isn’t that true? 
When did you ever hear of anyone trying 
to see if there were fish to be caught in 
Eddy’s pond, or Whipple creek? Ridicu¬ 
lous! there are nothing but suckers there. 
Why, the stream runs right through the 
town, with half a dozen mills and factories 
along its banks. Fish? Nonsense! 
But just a moment. What was the sub¬ 
ject we have rambled from? Discovering 
Amer—That’s it: Discovering. 
(continued on page 232) 
The Penny Hook and String-Line Are Perhaps All'the Water Has Known 
