tramping
tramping
CHAPTER NINE
EMBLEMS OF TRAMPING
THE fire is the altar of the open-air life. Its wandering smokes go upward like men’s thoughts; its sparks are like human lives.
The coffeepot is the emblem of conviviality.
The roughhewn staff, the tramp’s third leg, is the emblem of his will to jog on.
The knapsack, like Pilgrim’s burden, is the confession of mortality, and of the load which every son of Adam carried on his shoulders.
Every door and gate which he sees means theway out, not the way in.
There are three emblems of life: the firstis the open road, the second is the river, and the third is the wilderness. The road is the simplest of these emblems—with its milestones for years, its direction posts to show you the way, its inns for feasting, its churches for prayer, its crossroads of destiny, its happy corners of love and meeting, its sad ones of bereavement and farewell; its backward vista of memory, its forward one of hope.
Life certainly is like a road, or a network of roads; like a highway for some, like a pleasant country road for others, like a crooked lane for some, like a path that bends back to its beginnings for most.
There is the narrow way of the Puritans, a passage between walls of righteousness; there is the broad way of the epicureans, so broad they mistake the breadth for the length and lose themselves on it. But, broad or narrow, the road seems inadequate as an emblem of the tramping life. There shall be roads in our life but our life shall not be always in roads.
The road smacks rather of duty and purpose, of utility, and of “getting there.” Our penchant is to get off the road. I do not careto link tramping with utility. It may be good for the physical health, but that shall not be its object; it may be good for broadening the mind and deepening the sources of pleasure, but these are not the goal. Tramping is a straying from the obvious. Even the crookedest road is sometimes too straight. You learn that it is artificial, that originally it was not made for mere tramping. Roads were made for armies and then for slaves and laborers, and for “transport.” Few have been made for pleasure.
But was life merely meant for pleasure? Perhaps not. But it was meant for happiness or for the quest of happiness.
You are more likely to meet your enemies, if you have any, upon the road than off it. But then also you are more likely to meet friends there, too. You may seek your friends with success on the road. And if you wish counsel they are there to help you. “Life is like a road,” says a Kirghiz proverb. “If you go astray it is not your enemies who will show you the way, but your friends.”
Still, where the Kirghiz live, in CentralAsia, there are few roads and you cannot go astray on them. The proverb must refer to mountain tracks. “Life is like a mountain track.” Yes, that is better. Let the mountain track be our first emblem of life.
For the Sokols and the Scouts, the roads shall mean much more, because their lives are auxiliary to military efficiency. They learn to be ready to resist an enemy of their homeland. A good scout becomes a good volunteer soldier, a good route marcher. But scout and sokol are transitional. The Scout movement is like a tug to take an ocean-going ship out of harbor. There comes a point when the ship can make its destiny under its own steam. The Scout and Guide movement helps boys and girls out of the rut of home and village, starts them moving, and once set going, many of them keep moving all their lives and never once stagnate. On the roads that lead out into the great world they march in their companies, with scoutmasters and commanders. Then the road is a glorious symbol of freedom and life.
The second emblem is the river, which, clearand innocent, finds the easiest and most charming way from birth to eternity. We were born on an invisible river which keeps gliding and singing and filling and flowing. We do not know where we go, but we know we are on the stream. We do not always perceive the movement, but we observe that the landscape has changed.
So when we look on a river we are affected by its hidden relationship to our own life. The river interprets our mood. The road suggests God as a taskmaster who would have us work; the river suggests Him as a poet who would have us live in poetry. The Creator must be a poet—not a General or a Judge or a Master Builder; there is so much of pure poetry in His creation. The river, like a child’s definition of a parable, is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.
When we look on a river with a poet’s eyes we see in it the reflection of an invisible river, the river of Time, the river of man’s life, the river of Eternity. “Man may come and man may go, but I go on for ever.”
There is a strange and wonderful vigilanceabout the river which rolls past us where we sleep in the grass, murmuring and calling the whole night long, something of the vigilance of the starry sky. You sleep, but an eternal sleepless sentry paces by all the while.
Then in the morning, when we bathe in the river, we are our own John the Baptists, out in the wilderness, baptizing ourselves with water, and saying: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Turn away from the road for Heaven is near by.” And we eat that wild honey of the wilderness, which the prophet ate when his baptizing was done.
When we wash in the stream we are washing ourselves with life. When we swim in the stream, especially against the stream, we are joying the heart of an unseen Mother who takes pride in us all, knowing that, although we must at last flow out with the stream, we can triumph over it for moments.
And, drinking from the stream, we partake of the water which flows from the mountain of God—Nature’s communion cup.
The third emblem of life is the wilderness—that place to which wise men and poets andsaints are driven in the last resort. “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,” wrote Byron. “There is society where none intrudes.” The wilderness tells you more, when you are attune to it. That is seldom the experience of the tramp on his first long divagation from the beaten track. The wilderness tires him, the forests blind him, the mountains wear him down, the endless plain rises under him and he smites his feet.
But there comes a point when there is a symmetry even in the wildest disarray of Nature, when man’s symmetry of parks and garden cities and roads and rides is a poor joke, a strange aberration of the human mind.
The universe is a most complicated lock with innumerable wards and windings and combination numbers. If the starry sky at night is a lock—you would say there is no key in the world to fit it. No key in the world truly—but in the human heart somewhere there is a wonderful key. “Have I not in my bosom a key called ‘Promise?’” said Pilgrim. When you find that key you can plunge it into the cunning aperture of Nature or Night.But you must know the combination numbers, and even then it will not turn if you do not first sing a verse of the Song of the Heart.
Quite a fairy tale. Even so. Life is a fairy tale, one of a series, like theArabian Nights. And if it is a fairy tale rather than what Darwin and Herbert Spencer and Einstein have averred, how much more important to us all the fairy tale becomes.
Fairy tales are begun in the midst of woods, in strange forgotten glades, and at moments between dawn and the morning, and sunset and night.
“Fairy tales,” wrote Novalis, “are dreams of our homeland—which is everywhere and nowhere.” And to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time means to be in the wilds, and preferably quite lost. The absolute tramp, whom, I may say, I have never met, is a man with no address, no card, no reliable passport, no recognizable finger prints. But of course he is no ape man, no Tarzan, or son of Tarzan. Choice, not accident, leads him to the wilds.
The starry sky is the emblem of home, thehighest roof in the universe. The sun is the mind, by whose light man seeks his way; the moon is the reflection of the mind on the heart, and is the emblem of melancholy and poetry.
However, of all these emblems, the coffeepot is apt to be the most real and vital. You will be on your knees morning and evening before your altar fire, abasing your brow and blowing the flames which are beneath it. Sun, moon, forest, river, road—these pass, but the coffeepot remains. It is so in life generally, and the tramp, however much a poet he may be, is a mortal like the rest of us. The moon may be hidden by a cloud, but that is not nearly so calamitous as having left the coffeepot at the last camping place.