New Vistas for Old

I had walked up the hill the other night for a look at the sunset, and as I stood there steeping my soul in the long streamers of color, the blues and apple greens of background, I thought to myself that this was the sort of a scene Wallace Nutting would have liked, the silvery clumps of birches against the snow, the black rocks rising beside them, sumac twisted and dark against the stone pile, shadows in the valley below, pinnacled spruce on either side.

Yes, he would have made a grand picture out of that, for he loved the loved the New England setting, and if he could have seen what I saw then, the twinkling lights of a town as a background for it all, he surely would have gone to work to capture it forever.

I liked the work he did, the charm of the New England scene that he caught so many times, a charm that existed because men had stepped in and altered the country to their liking. They had taken the primitive and "rock bound coast" and through their occupancy had given it a warmth and beauty different from what it was before.

As I stood on my hilltop here in the middle west, I tried to picture the hills as they must have looked before the logging not fifty hears before. Then they were covered with dense and somber pine, great banks of it, a solid, mysterious wall against the sunset, catching the last gleams of light on the great reddish boles. Yes, that was a picture too, and a beautiful one in its way. But now, instead of a wall of pine, the country was open and bright with clumps of trees here and there. Through the interlacing branches of birch, I could see the white steeple of a church in the little town of the valley below. I could also see the warm reddish glow of neon lights and the cheery twinkle of bright windows, and I pondered which was best.

When the pine stood there, the country was new, harsh and primitive, and though there was a beauty it was often sinister and threatening.

But now as I looked at it I saw light and color and cheer, and I felt then that here man had somehow improved the landscape. By cutting the pine, he had made fields and pastures and meadows. The sunshine had come in and open space and now there were aspen and birch and maple and a new vista had taken the place of the old.

I have often bemoaned the passing of the primitive, for I have long been a lover of wilderness and its way of life, but standing there that night, looking at the fading sunset, I wondered if I was always right, if there wasn't after all some justification for changing the picture if a new, a different beauty could take the place of the old.

In my heart I knew the answer, for the picture before me, the new vista, could not have been more charming, and had not men come in and occupied the old wilderness, it would have been lost forever.