Enjoyment of the Outdoors

Sigurd gave this talk late in 1935 or early in 1936, shortly before he became dean of Ely Junior College (the photo is his first yearbook photo as dean), apparently to a male civic group audience in one of the towns of northeastern Minnesota's iron range. It was the middle of the Depression, and he focused his talk on how spending time outdoors can help people keep psychologically healthy during times when they have little or no work to occupy their time.

This is one of Sigurd's earliest preserved talks, and not surprisingly it is not as polished as his later book essays. But parts of it are quite good, particularly his section on "at-homeness." That section and the final section of the talk examine what we would today call "a sense of place," and Sigurd was able to give examples and insights that would have made sense to his audience, few of whom would have been college-educated.

In these days of coming enforced leisure, shorter working hours and spare time, we are faced with how best to employ the additional hours and days that will be ours, how best to escape the tragedy of boredom and live happily in spite of the fact that we will not be working. In the old days, one of the recipes for happiness was to keep constantly at work, and that recipe still holds, but there is one hitch and that is that there is not enough work for all anymore and if there was there would be no compensation for a great deal of it. It becomes therefore a problem: how to deal with the spare time that is hours to the best advantage, how best to forestall the deadliness of boredom.

Elmo Scott says that one cure for boredom is the development of a hobby. Someone else says that by the development of many facets to our natures we can keep happy. Others say that by the enjoyment of simple things we can be happy. [Still] others that [only] by the development and use of our own particular talents and genius can we ever hope for true contentment. All those things are true and there are as many different recipes for living happy and contented lives as there are individuals to live them. One thing is certain and that is that people are all different, that what would make for happiness in one individual would not make for happiness in another.

During the past ten years and more people have been turning to the out of doors for their use of their spare time, and this is as it should be, but, sad as it may seem, many fail to get the utmost of enjoyment out of their expeditions into the woods and lake regions. To some these expeditions are no more than attempts to get game or fish, to some nothing more than getting exercise or getting away from people. To some, on the other hand, they mean a great deal more than just that, a great deal more in a way that is perhaps more spiritual and of the mind than physical.

We are all familiar with such names as Thoreau, Emerson, Burroughs, Ruskin, Muir and others, men who seemed to get more out of their contacts with nature than others. It was not that they saw more than we see, but that they saw with the eyes of understanding and sympathy. They read between the lines as it were and saw the hidden meanings of things. To them there was more than just the surface, more than what just met the eye, and this is what they gave us, their vision of things as they are. Someone once asked Burroughs why it was that he saw so much more than they, and he answered that it was because he understood. Ruskin once said that the great accomplishment of man was to see, and what he meant was that the important thing was to see more than the surface, to see with the understanding heart.

These men gave formulae of happiness not directly but indirectly. As we study their works, we see that they could read into natural objects their own emotions; we see that things meant more to them than they did to others because they had a different attitude of mind.

One of the approaches to enjoyment in the out of doors is the development of the adventurous view point, and this is something that we all can do. Roy Chapman Andrews said recently that we do not have to travel thousands of miles into the wilds of Tibet, that if we only develop the right attitude of mind we can find adventure right close to home. It is within our own capacities to make adventure of our own in many diverse fields. An adventure is something unusual happening to us, something that perhaps we have looked forward to for a long time and longed for. They do not necessarily have to be physical adventures, they can be spiritual as well, or both. The stamp collector, when he is on the lookout for a new stamp, experiences adventure when he finds a rarity; the bird lover, when he has been on the lookout for a long time for some particular species and finally finds it in some unexpected place, has an adventure. When I saw a mocking bird in the town of Ely once Christmas Day a few years ago, that was an adventure for me. When as I did on the Christmas see for the first time the staghorn sumac on Lac Coudery, that was in the nature of an adventure also.

Some of you are hunters and some fishermen. If you are a trout fisherman you are constantly hoping to get a four-pound speckle on a fly in some quiet pool where everything is perfect, and when the moment comes, as it came to me this summer on the Yellowstone River, that is adventure. You duck hunters are always looking for the perfect setup. You will willingly endure cold and wind, freeze for days at a time and go home again and again empty-handed, if once in a great while you will get the perfect setup. That to you is an adventure.

Such an adventure was mine just three years ago. It was during the first month of the season, when the mallards were still in the country. I had pushed up the Stoney River to Sand Lake. On that day a gale was howling out of the west and the entire surface of Sand Lake was white with combers. We stopped first at the narrows and watched flock after flock of bluebills fly by high out of range. After wasting a couple of boxes of shells trying vainly to bring a few down out of the sky, we went back in the woods on the lee side of the point to cook lunch and it was there that I saw what for years I had been looking for: flock after flock of mallards butterflying down into a little pothole in the end of a bay a mile away. We pushed hurriedly over, threw out our decoys, and had barely gotten set before they started coming in. The pothole was perfectly sheltered and we basked in the warm sun while the gale howled by outside. Every fifteen minutes or so a pair or triple would come in, the most perfect shooting I have ever seen. That was the sort of thing I had been dreaming about, and if I live to be a hundred and hunt ducks every season, that is the sort of setup I will always be looking for. I was back there this fall and only got one poor little bluebill, but always in the back of my mind I am looking for another combination of circumstances that will give me the thrill that was mine that day. That was adventure for me.

You all have no doubt had similar adventures, but it is the realization of what constitutes an adventure that really counts, the awareness of it. You know the usual thing is that when adventures occur, a man does not realize it until it is all over. Most adventures are unpleasant things until they are through—automobile wrecks, fights and other things are not the pleasurable type until they are over. The type of adventure that I have been talking about is something different, something that a man can fall back upon to enrich his life wherever he is and no matter how long he lives. It is entirely in the attitude of mind and entirely up to us as to their importance.

Another key to enjoyment of the out of doors is the developing of the feeling of at-homeness or familiarity with one's country. I once had a friend who, when asked where we would camp at the end of a day always replied, "Anywhere I hang my hat is home to me," and he meant it, for no matter where he happened to be he was soon comfortable and contented. Feeling at home with a country is much like feeling at home in a house. Country, like houses, must be lived in, and living much in a country means that we are investing it with associations, with memories and experiences that make it mean more to us. For after all, it is the personal association that makes country mean something to you.

I couldn't help but feel this summer, when I visited the Yellowstone and several other national parks, that the majority of people were merely in the role of curiosity seekers. I sat one day in the gorge of Yellowstone River right below the upper falls and watched the crowds climb down to the very brink of the falls. There they would hesitate for a moment, remark about the grandeur, shoot their cigarette butts into the white churning spray and run on hurriedly to see something else just as stupendous. I could see that they weren't getting very much more than if they had bought a package of photographs of the park. They hadn't lived long enough with these phenomena to really enjoy them to the full. They were transients, tourists, and could not possibly get as much out of the country as they could had they lived there long. There were no personal associations, no emotional connections, that bound these things to them.

To find the people who live much with a country we must find those who have learned to love the soil, the rocks and the trees, who have tied themselves up irretrievably with the country's character. They are at home with the country. They know it and it has become a part of them. There is one stream in Wisconsin, the Namakagon River, where I have fished trout since I was a boy. Here I cast my first fly, here I landed my first trout, and, although I have fished many streams since then and have [caught] many more trout elsewhere, when I come back to the Namakagon, I feel at home. Here I know every rock and ripple, here I know the trees and the sky, here everything is part of me and I am at home. Although they don't catch many trout there anymore, still once a year I like to go down there and feel the swift clear water press against my boots and try to recapture the lost youth that once waded down its course.

I know a certain duck blind where I have spent many a weekend during the past ten years. Here I have made some good kills and here I have been often disappointed. But somehow I have come to love the setup of this blind and the view that it commands. On the opposite shore there is not a single stub, not a tree or irregularity of the horizon that I do not know. I know where certain ducks will come in, where they will land when they do come in. I know how it looks in September when the rice is filling out its purple heads, how it looks in October when the aspen and maples begin to flame, and how, at the close of the season, the shoreline is lined with ice. I also know how it looks in the winter time, when it is completely covered with white and a lone snowshoe trail leads by on its way to the border. Here I once had a perfect setup and I hope someday to duplicate that also, but most of all here is the feeling of at-home-ness. Here I am not a stranger, here I belong. It explains perhaps why some do not like to change their hunting grounds, why they like to stay close to the country that they know rather than travel several hundred miles to where they might get excellent shooting. There is more to the hunting of ducks than getting a bag, and I think that perhaps familiarity and its joys is part of the answer.

One other key to the search of happiness in the out of doors is the matter of human history. Personal associations are important, that is true, but if we are to get the utmost in satisfaction out of a country, then we must know something about the life that has gone before. It is true that only when a countryside is invested with human associations does it assume a significance to us beyond pure scenery. We tire of scenery quickly unless there is a meaning to it, unless we know what it has meant in our own lives and in the lives of others. After all, human associations are all important, they make the difference between mediocrity and importance. Last summer, I visited for the first time Grand Portage on Lake Superior, and walked over the nine-mile-portage between the lake and the Pigeon River. Had I not known that 200 years ago this harbor was the center of the greatest fur trade this country had ever known, had I not known that over this nine-mile-trail the old voyageurs carried most of the fur that came from the Northwest, this spot would have merely been a deserted fishing village, a brushy trail; but, knowing what I did, the place was invested with the halo of romance.

The road about the St. Louis River in Duluth, with its bronze plaque describing the location of Fort Fond du Lac and the Indian portage, transform that valley from a smoking industrial site to a river of exploration, the highway to the north. I like to stop on the heights above that valley every chance I can, particularly at dusk. Then I can see the first stockaded settlement, see the arrival of the fur canoes and the toiling across that portage of the men who made history in our own range country. It was here the expeditions started in which the great ore bodies of the iron ranges were discovered, it was here that everything began. This was the beginning of development for our own country. To pass that point and to look down seeing [only] the smoking steel mills, the roiling river and the docks, is not the true picture. There is something beneath the surface.

One who learns the past human history of a country sees with different eyes. One who has developed the feeling of familiarity and at-home-ness with a country through the growth of memories filled with personal associations and experiences, and one who in addition to these two has also developed the adventurous attitude of mind, who has done with the prosaic, will enjoy the out of doors far more than the one who goes just to bring home game or [get] exercise. He has the secret of happiness, he has the key to the philosophy of the ancients. He can see eye to eye with the Ruskin who said that the greatest achievement of man is to see.