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Show 357. THE REAL MEANING OF RECREATION When one comes out of the woods everything is novel. . . . even our fellow beings are regarded with something of the same keenness and freshness of perception that is brought to a new species of wild animal. - John Muir, November, 1875 Few tourists spend all of their time contemplating wild scenery. Even if Muir himself was primarily interested in the "original" condition of the West, he still found himself thinking about the way the landscape was being recreated by men. The direction this recreation might take troubled him deeply, because he knew it was inescapable. Agriculture certainly offered the best hope for the future, if only it would take a careful and moral direction, he thought, but there was little evidence of that happening. Agriculture as a way of life might be the least of evils, if conducted on a reverential and scientific basis which led to a harmonious and lasting relationship between men and the land. Muir flirted with agriculture as a pastoral compromise. Like the narrator of Thoreau" s "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," Muir seemed to contemplate every place he visited in the late seventies as a possible site for permanent residence. He sent along observations to the Bulletin, sketches of the inhabitants of La Grange, Pasadena, Salt Lake City - all thought they had found a good thing. An old friend who had settled in Pasadena told him, "[There] is a block of land that is for sale; buy it and be my neighbor; plant five |
