Lure of a Camp Fire

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 851, 20 December 1929, Page 8 (Supplement)

Lure of a Camp Fire

By

GEO. F. PARSONSON

SffiS art ot learning to play is rather a difficult one and likely to slip from us with our childhood. It is hard to preserve it in a world where we are all so serious. As our years total up. inroads are not so easily made to our impressionable parts, and we become set and fixed in our ways like a star, so that anything that comes to us out of our accustomed orbit gives us a -hock. But it should not be so. We should preserve open-mindedness and a capacity to be blown here and there with the wind, learning only a little how to temper it. Holidays do all this for us. They drive us out of our ruts, upset our complacence which is neutral and unavailing in a world of promise. We are all at our best on holiday, when we have escaped from the net that has caught us fast. If we cannot be charitable and welldisposed on these state occasions, we never can be. There is an ancient maxim that if a man shall not work he shall not eat, and one would like to add as a rider to it, that if a man cannot take a holiday he cannot work. For the person born in the midst of a world of pavements, there is no holiday like getting away from them. That is why I like to holiday in some mountainous region where the pavement ends and the air is clear. It is change and novelty, grandeur and magnificence. It is nature in reality, uncivilised aiyl unkempt. If man’s life is a war against nature, there is an element here of taking the war into her own country, where you are thrown on your own resources to do battle. When an excursion is made with tent and food it has an element of challenge. It is alluring to set up a primitive home in the midst of all this might, to cook food in a rough healthy way, and to climb until it seems like work. To enjoy the achievement of some heights above the snow line leaves littleness behind, and withal has a fascination for the undaunted that is difficult to express. To be back at camp in the evening, eating with an appetite unknown before and with the feeling that you’ve earned it, is to put town holidays to the blush. In the warmth of the campfire in the evening, when the body is too weary to permit of serious thought you become strangely peaceful, almost glad you can’t think. Quietly smoking away at your pipe, you chat lightly as you watch the yellow lights dancing in the trees and the sparks flying up, taking all jour troubles' with them. With weariness and • content you roll up like a ball in your blankets for a night of rest. There are occasional far calls from the owls of the bush, then all is quiet except for the mountain stream hurrying on its y/ay. All .this is irresistible, perhaps because it appeals to our resourcefulness in a world where everything is usually ready. Perhaps it is something of the spirit that brought us to this far country in the first place, something of the inherited wanderlust, that sent our people out here to try issttes with the unknown. But there it is. It is the holiday I like best. And why? Because it is like a little adventure into a won leriand.