Forest Outings By Thirty Foresters

All things invite this earth's inhabitants
To rear their lives to an unheard of height,
And meet the expectation of the land —Henry D. Thoreau.

"THE EXPECTATION of the land!" Writing in 1926, Lewis Mumford echoed this phrase of Thoreau's, and added, "One comes upon that phrase or its equivalent in almost every valid piece of early American thought."

It is plain that in recent years our expectation of the land is faltering. In the same book, The Golden Day,¹ Mumford spoke of "the bucolic innocence of the Eighteenth Century, its belief in a fresh start, and its attempt to achieve a new culture." Against that belief and hope he posed a picture of destruction: "The epic march of the covered wagon, leaving behind it deserted villages, bleak cities, depleted soils, and the sick and exhausted souls that engraved their epitaphs in Masters' Spoon River Anthology."

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¹Entered, as are all books here noted, in the Bibliography, page 285, Appendix.

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Later in his book Mumford declares: "What Thoreau left behind is still precious. Men may still go out and make over America in the image of Thoreau. What the pioneer left behind, alas, was only the burden of a vacant life."

Our early pioneers left us, indeed, much to answer for. But the drubbing they have been taking from modern American writers lately seems, on the whole, excessive. If anything at all certain may now be said to come out of all our talk about the pioneer forebears, their faults and virtues, it is this: Pioneer restlessness, pioneer excessiveness, along with the pioneers' hope "to rear their lives to an unheard of height" remain surgingly alive on this land, and in its cities.

"An April restlessness," Bernard DeVoto called it, in 1932, writing Mark Twain's America. DeVoto is more concerned in displaying the pioneers as human than in depicting them as persons of special virtue. The despoiled resource he most deplores is space, and stillness. The early pioneer, he writes, "knew solitude and was not frightened by it. Always a mile would take one into the quiet." And, nobly, in closing, DeVoto describes the great body of our mainland: ". . . the beauty of the land across which the journey passed. Whatever else the word 'frontier' means, it has also meant water flowing in clear rivers, a countryside under clean sun or snow, woods, prairies, and mountains of simple loveliness. It is not necessary to think the literature of America a very noble literature in order to recognize the fact that one of its principal occupations has been the celebration of that beauty. Layer after layer of experience or frustration may come between but at the very base of the American mind an undespoiled country lies open in the sun."

To anyone deeply concerned in conserving or restoring that basic resource, it seems that the most hopeful change thus far has been expressed less in action than in words. Among historians and economists, Frederick Jackson Turner, Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, and the Beards, Charles and Mary, had called the turn by the dawn of this century. This list is far from complete; it omits many who have done or are doing yeoman writing. Among the poets, Robert Frost and more lately Archibald MacLeish and Pare Lorentz, proclaim the wickedness of wounding land, and the human consequences.

"Build soil!" sings Frost.² Assembling photographs of washed-out Americans, adrift, homeless on land which but a few decades ago seemed wide, rich, endless, MacLeish makes you hear the people dispossessed murmuring, wondering, all but despairing; "We wonder . . . We don't know . . . We're asking."³ Lorentz's film, The River (1938), has been mentioned. His picture, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), was as noteworthy.

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²See: A Further Range, Bibliography, p. 285, Appendix.

³See: Land of the Free, Bibliography, p. 285, Appendix.

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REAPPRAISAL of American sources and growth is proceeding now so vigorously that there is perhaps some danger of our falling into hopeless thinking about ourselves and our country. That would be a natural reaction from optimistic excesses in the past.

Even so, to all who whack us awake from childish dreams of illimitable wealth and beauty forever to be grabbed and squandered, thanks. One such is H. L. Mencken of The Baltimore Sun papers. His journalistic flail went to work early in the century. His whoops of praise and derision, as a literary critic, high-lighted talents such as those of Sinclair Lewis, the creator of Babbitt. Like Mencken, Lewis plays rough with some of our fondest illusions; but there was a sort of tenderness in Lewis' presentation of this fellow creature, Babbitt, the pioneer turned timid burgher, fat, pursy, afraid to look at forces encompassing his spirit, afraid to knock or say his say against them, afraid to awaken, to shatter the waning dream, to take stock honestly.

Mencken could hardly be called a devotee of the natural order, of woods, of pastoral scenes, or of country matters generally. He is a born cockney, little interested in yielding earth. But the roaring courage with which he spoke out against that in his immediate environment which he found damaging and preposterous set an example now widely followed by editors and columnists; and this has been enormously invigorating, especially in the South.

You see many better-tended areas of woodland and farm land now as you travel southward than you saw 10 years ago; but the most vigorous portent of an actual reconstruction is to be seen, in little patches, in the columns of southern papers. In editorial pieces, in contributed articles, in letters from the people, in stray news items, and the work of signed columnists, hammering away, it is evident that a new leaven is at work. Visitors from without, if at all polite or prudent, still may hesitate to speak harshly of the southern scene and prospect. It is now less necessary. The livest minds of the South, academic and technical, agrarian and industrial, are talking it out, openly, in print.

The very source of most southern writers' strength is a deep attachment to what is left of the southern pastoral and woodland scene. This somewhat narrows their general appeal, and southern editors and columnists are generally not as widely heard as Washington and New York City columnists are. But no better writing is now being done anywhere in the country than in the South or by writers at the border, facing South. And many of these writers are moved simply by what they see from day to day all around them to examine with intense interest all proposals to strengthen and beautify the South's remaining natural resources from the ground up.

To this end Gerald W. Johnson, Hamilton Owens, and Phillip Wagner, particularly, contribute to Maryland's Sun papers strong writing, and editorial direction. In North Carolina, on the Raleigh News and Observer, there is Jonathan Daniels; in South Carolina, on the Columbia State-Record, James Derieux; in Kentucky, Herbert Agar of the Louisville Courier; in Alabama, John Temple Graves of the Birmingham Age-Herald. Many others might be named who, if they write less often about conservation, know what they are writing about in terms of the land they live on, and who, when they do write about it, hit hard. For instance, Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News since 1905; and in Texas, Peter Molyneaux of The Texas Weekly.

To the north, there are among many, J. N. Darling and W. W. Waymack of the Des Moines Register-Tribune, William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette, William T. Evjue of the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital-Times, Henry J. Haskell of the Kansas City Star. On the west coast, to name but two, Paul Smith of the San Francisco Chronicle and Richard Neuberger of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, stand forth to defend the land from harm.

REPORTERS' books describing, interpreting, both the world scene and the domestic scene, stand remarkably high on any list of books that Americans are reading now, and the same lists carry many a work by statesmen and scholars who have learned to write with the direct thrust expected of reporters. It is not strange that men in the Government service, and especially in the Department of Agriculture, should write continually and with growing concern of land and tenure problems. By the very nature of their work they have been for years up against a realization that with the continent settled, in the main, forests slaughtered, natural beauty and quiet laid to waste, soils skinned, waters sullied, and water tables sharply altered, basic conditions can no longer be described as fundamentally sound. But it is heartening and significant that there should have been so many contributions on the question from writers not in government service, and less specialized in their interests. To note a few:

In 1935, Herbert Agar's Land of the Free, from which, at the head of chapter 13, we have quoted; and Paul Sears' Deserts on the March, described by Hendrik Willem van Loon as a new way of writing history. In 1936, Stuart Chase's Rich Land, Poor Land; Arthur Raper's Preface to Peasantry. In 1937 Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White published their terrifying collection of words and photographs, an album of dispossessed and hopeless hands and croppers, You Have Seen Their Faces. In the same year, Gerald Johnson compressed Howard Odum's monumental Southern Regions of the United States into a brisker, more personal study, The Wasted Land, and Walter Prescott Webb, author previously of a great and scholarly analysis, The Great Plains, relaxed into the mood of an unreconstructed southern agrarian and issued a challenging book-length pamphlet, Divided We Stand. In the same year, 1937, Paul Sears followed his Deserts on the March with a broader popularization of ecology, This is Our World, and in this work extended his previous argument.

The pattern of lichens on rock, Sears says, the grazing habits of elk in our remaining forests and mountain meadows, and the group behavior of elks on picnics, and of all other human groups seeking comfort and sustenance, are related growths. In 1938 there came DuPuy's The Nation's Forests, Lord's Behold Our Land, A Southerner Discovers the South by Jonathan Daniels, Roads to a New America by David Cushman Coyle, and Richard Neuberger's Our Promised Land. In 1939 the city reviews were appraising a variety of basic works on conservation such as Seven Lean Years by T. J. Woofter, Jr., and Ellen Winston, Romances of the National Parks by Harlean James, These Are Our Lives by members of the Federal Writers' Project, George Leighton's brilliant study of Five Cities and their wasting backgrounds, and, perhaps the most influential tract of all, though it is not strictly speaking a reporter's book, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

HUMAN CONSERVATION . . . There was a time when foresters could not see the people for the trees. This, perhaps, was a natural tendency at the beginning of the present century when the American conservation movement first took form. There seemed to be plenty of room in this country then. Population pressure upon public parks and forests was not so intense. The initial cry was to preserve timber, minerals, soil, and water. There was a tendency to regard forest residents and forest visitors as inconvenient interlopers, probably up to no good. There were old-line foresters who regarded every forest resident or visitor as a suspected wood thief, firebug, or squatter. A few early rangers and supervisors, even after 1906, dealt in that spirit with people trying to make a living in the forest, and with people who came to the forests on pleasure bent. This was never the idea of Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the Forest Service; nor of any of his successors. As public pressure on the forests mounted, the number of forest officers concerned only with trees, never with people, diminished.

Not only in forestry, but on all the fronts of conservation, the narrowly materialistic view, which seeks to preserve this segment or that of our national resource and ignores all the other interrelated segments of the life cycle is on the wane. Unified planning with a view to final values is distinctly on the up.

Ferdinand Silcox, Chief of the Forest Service from late 1933 through 1939, worked hard to advance, to humanize, and to coordinate land-use planning throughout our land. His first thought was always of the final crop—the people. He never visited a forest without asking "Who lives here?" or "Who uses this forest?"; he always put that first in his inspections.

He is dead now; but his way of looking at land lives on. "Damage to the land is important only because it damages the lives of people and threatens the general welfare," said Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, before the Association of Land Grant Colleges late in 1939. "Saving soil and forests and water is not an end in itself; it is only a means to the end of better living and greater security for men and women. Human conservation is our first and greatest goal."

The year 1940, as this book goes to the printer, is barely a month along; but the year has brought forth already a number of extraordinary pronouncements as to conservation, in the broadest sense of the word. "I can see," writes E. B. White in the February issue of Harper's Magazine, "no reason for a conservation program if people have lost their knack with earth. I can see no reason for saving the streams to make the power to run the factories if the resultant industry reduces the status and destroys the heart of the individual. Such is not conservation, but the most frightful sort of dissipation."

In the February 1940, Survey-Graphic, Albert Mayer: "If we mean to gain and to retain healthful living in pleasant communities for ourselves, our children and our fellow citizens, then we must reckon with the new hot dog stand suddenly erected and noisily operating in our midst, with the old swimming hole being polluted by the new factories being built upstream, with the dust storms making our lives physically impossible. Whether we live in big cities or in small towns or in the country, we are affected by the forces of disintegration."

The editors of Fortune, in their Tenth Anniversary Issue (February 1940) sum up: "The U. S. is faced with problems different from those in almost any country in the world, and these problems have their origins in plenty. . . . These problems involve the land, the population, the national income, the distribution of wealth, the reinvestment of income all of the headaches of our time. . . .

"The American cannot live effectively and decently without a vision; when the vision fails his whole system collapses. His new vision, his new future, his new project will of necessity be different from the old, both internally and externally. But unless the American is extinct, a project there will be. . . .

"If the dream is reborn, it must have some of the characteristics of maturity: it must relate the present to the future in a realistic way; it must demand a certain amount of planning and sacrifice. . . . So long as he is an American, the American will be an idealist. But there is no reason under the sun why he should always remain a wildman."

Well employed, or out of work, well to do or ill to do; riding high, dead broke and on the road; or rich enough to pay in terms of a couple of gallons of gas for a forest outing, we remain, in the main, a people of some spirit. The spirit of the people is the final crop of any land. The final crop, as well as the intermediate material crops, and the source the land itself need to be conserved. Viewed thus, recreation on the national forests is no mere adjunct to timber and water and soil conservation; it is in itself conservation designed to preserve and strengthen the American spirit.

Solvent migrants swarm to the forests instinctively every week end of open weather and, in lesser number, throughout the week. It is as if something in their blood drove them to burn the roads, get out of civilization, and then whirl back to civilization again. "Got no new places to go now, so we just run in circles," growls an old-timer viewing with some distaste a holiday throng in a western forest camp. "I like the woods, though," he adds, "Even with a lot of people squealing in 'em, I like the woods!"

RESEARCH must be pushed; research ranging over the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, aesthetics, botany, ecology, pathology, and forestry; research to the end that the people may use the forests for recreation permanently without hurting the forests and, ultimately, ourselves.

The problems are distinctive and challenging not merely in their complexity but in their diversity. One need is closer counts or more accurate methods of estimating the number of persons who come to the forests, and the ability or inability of certain trees to stand human society. This perplexes research foresters, and they have not as yet learned fully what to do about it. Some of the most decorative trees in dry uplands, particularly, seem to shrink from the tread and touch of man. For instance:

The aspen, whose groves have always been favored for camping or picnic grounds, is a thin-barked tree and probably for that reason is very sensitive to heat injury. Aspen trees have frequently been killed by the heat of camp fires at a distance which would have little or no effect upon individuals of other species hardier in this particular. Other tree species, some of great beauty, are sensitive to overuse of their immediate environment because their feeding roots are very close to the surface of the ground. The long-continued compacting of the soil about such trees, preventing the normal development of the feeding rootlets, affecting the normal aeration of the soil, and probably disturbing the delicate relations between the myriads of soil micro-organisms, will slowly load the scales against the efforts of the trees to maintain themselves in the never-ceasing struggle with their nearby competitors.

Meinecke has shown the effect of soil compacting on the redwood groves of California, and some of the unfortunate effects of overuse of campgrounds. General evidence indicates that the Colorado blue spruce of the central Rocky Mountains is also highly susceptible to the type of injury which has caused damage to the redwood. On the other hand, except at its lower altitudinal limits where the never-ending struggle is waged between tree growth and open prairie, ponderosa pine is relatively resistant to the effects of concentrated occupancy of its environment by man.

These are largely western problems. To the East, the birches suffer from the obeyed impulse of thousands to peel off their bark as mementos of a forest outing. "Give me of your bark, O Birch-tree!" Research to amend such habits must enter the field of applied psychology, and be grouped, perhaps, with studies of persuasion in fire prevention such as were noted in chapter 10.

Physical data as to the effects of new roads, trails, and recreational structures upon the tree growth and water yield is accumulating, but still is inadequate. The removal of large quantities of soil where cuts are made on sloping terrain disturbs and often quite radically changes the movement of water within the soil. Trees standing above a cut may find themselves without the supply of moisture which they demand and without which they cannot survive. A fill banking new soil about the base of a tree may result not only in changes in the soil moisture by alteration of the rate of percolation of surface water, but may also prevent proper aeration of the soil levels in which the feeding roots of the tree occur. To cut long swaths of timber through forests of even a moderate degree of density for road construction may cause profound modifications of the micro-climate to which the tree is accustomed. Violent changes in the local direction and velocity of air currents may result, and trees which otherwise might have stood for centuries may suddenly be blown down.

The precise causes of many such effects are as yet little understood. Definite studies and analyses will enable the road engineer and forest administrator to prevent defacement and waste. Obvious causes of deterioration and destruction, such as mechanical injury, can be controlled by administrative regulation. But to guard against the more deeply seated dangers involving slow changes in the relation of each kind of organism to the others, changes in that totality of relations which constitutes the ecology of the forest, is more difficult.

Visibility has long been a subject of Forest Service research. In respect to the location of fire towers and the maximum extent of the prospect from towers, especially, striking advances have been made in recent years. One thing that hand-picked CCC boys and other small, skilled groups of relief workers have been doing for their country is to map it more graphically, beautifully, and accurately than ever before. Relief maps, done to strict scale up and down as well as longitudinally, have been made of some of the national forests. Such maps serve usefully in administrative planning; they show the area not as flat and static, but in its actual living dimensions. They are useful, again, in impressing upon forest visitors the actual lay of the country. The people remember such maps more vividly, and are guided by them more helpfully than by flat, gray maps. And in locating or relocating fire towers, so that almost no spot in the forest remains out of sight from the guards, these maps have proved most helpful. It is possible on such a relief map to place a flashlight bulb at height proportional to that of proposed towers, and then by turning the light on, in a dark room, to plat out in terms of light and shadow the range of visibility from that point.

Invisibility, or a relative invisibility of Forest Service structures set up for purposes of forest administration and forest recreation, is a newer research problem in aesthetics and in forest architecture; and ever since landscape architects were brought to the aid of forest recreation planning good progress has been made. Once forest administrators, in their innocence, painted all such structures green. It now becomes evident that against almost any forest background, with its infinite variety of greens shot through with light, flat green of any shade stands out in sharp contrast, inharmoniously. The darker the color, generally speaking, the more the structure seems to sink into the background, unobtrusively, gracefully. Most Forest Service structures on sites recently developed are painted a chocolate brown. On desert sites, and on sites intermediate between woods and desert, other color combinations are tried with varying success. There remains need for research, along with trial and error afield, in respect to forest and desert light effects and a harmonious introduction of structures.

>In the fields of economics and sociology, forest research lags. Of this most foresters are well aware. "As between the economic benefits which accrue to a forest or near-forest community when tourists come in numbers, on the one hand, and between sociological consequences, both beneficial and harmful, on the other," say the authors of a recent research memorandum, "there should be a more accurate means of accounting." But the difficulties of drawing any such a balance sheet are obvious; for the tourist money thus brought in is a tangible gain, whereas the disruption of cherished local values, when such occurs, may be largely intangible.

THE HEALING FOREST . . . There is a saying often exchanged among visitors to the national forests, a trite saying, possibly, but one that seems to men whose life work has been forestry, profoundly true. Something like this: "I like coming up here. It makes a new man of me." To renew a man, or a woman, worn and weary, to restore them in health and spirit, is the purpose of forest recreation. And along with a restoration of the spirit goes a restoration, a conservation, of the source.

Surely, in this large sense, forestry is a good calling, a calling in which a man may work hard and without great riches, yet be proud. Much of it is inside work, nowadays, paper work; but generally there are outings, trips on business "for the good of the Service"; and professional foresters are in general given far more than most men to know the beauty and wonder of our land.

The office work may be stuffy, the piles of paper "for immediate attention" may tower high, the sense of imprisonment in a great stone city may seem to a range-reared forester at times intolerable; yet there are many compensations—memories of trips afoot or by horse over lone heights where the air went to the head like wine; where each day unfolded a new heaven, a fresher, more beautiful earth.

Our forebears fled an older world. Those were parlous days. So are these. But as our forebears had faith, so must we. Faith in America. Faith in democracy. Faith, too, that our forest lands cannot only create new jobs but can also make life pleasanter and more secure.

There is reason for this faith. Man's first food is said to have been acorns from the Tree of Jove. Three thousand years before Christ was born cedar, cypress, and pine helped establish the maritime supremacy of an ancient Mediterranean civilization to which all the world is heir and debtor. Nehemiah used timbers for city walls and gates when Jerusalem was rebuilt. Here in our own land, forests sheltered, fed, and clothed the American Indian. Larders of Pilgrim Fathers were often stocked with venison and wild turkey. Tall masts of New England white pine helped a tiny fleet defy the Mistress of the Seas. Beaver hats and mink coats founded many a for tune. And trees helped make log cabins and cradles, towns, telephone lines, and transcontinental railroads. They were vital to the winning of the West, and the building of a nation.

"Out of the forests came the might of America—wealth, power, and men." There is a world of truth in that statement by Jenks Cameron. Our homes are a crop of the forest. So are our books, our newsprint, our furniture. And in these modern times perfumes, plastics, naval stores, surgical absorbents, fiber containers, and thousands of everyday things are forest products. Farm woodlands yield fence posts, maple sugar, pulpwood, mine props, fuel, and other products that exceed in value the annual crops of rye, barley, and rice combined. Wages paid workers in the forests and forest industries support 6 million people. Two million live on wages paid for transporting and selling products of the forest. Carpenters, furniture makers, and other artisans of wood support 5 million more. In all, and directly and indirectly, America's forests provide the necessities of life for nearly one-tenth of her population.

Besides all these values there are human values. The tempo of our daily lives has speeded up. Each year we experience less of natural physical activity and greater mental strain. In bustling office or crowded street we long for the friendly forest. Woodland recreation fills a definite need in our lives now, and we plan for it consciously.

TREES TO THE PEOPLE . . . Planned new plantations such as those of the field windbreaks seem likely, as time goes on, to offer more and more, especially to dwellers in our great treeless prairie and High Plains country, places of rest.

The prairie-plains area is for the most part gently rolling. It presents to the outlander a monotonous landscape. Those at home there do not find the landscape monotonous, but they long for rest from the heat of the sun and the thrust of progress; for change and rest in a different sort of country, sheltered by trees.

The need of such change and rest becomes plainly more urgent after one crosses the "dry line," the 100th meridian roughly bisecting Kansas and Nebraska. Dust has been blowing here from the southwest and the northwest, lately. Also, dust has been blowing locally. Heat waves shimmer and dance over this part of our land in summer. Mirage lakes tantalize the eye with visions.

The recreational wants of most of the people here, on farms and in towns, are simple. They lift their eyes to hills far beyond eyesight. They go for rest and change to wooded mountains, if they can.

To the Black Hills of South Dakota, to the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma and the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota, they go for a while, for outings. Still to the west are always the Rockies, and a great many rather poor people of the Midland burn gas to get there and rest for a while at those heights. But most prairie people must seek places for recreation nearer home. Trees for shade and water for swimming and fishing are the essentials most in demand. Remnants of the native forest stands and planted groves have long been utilized as community gathering sites. People frequently drive many miles to enjoy the company of their neighbors at picnic and rodeo time in the welcome shade of the friendly trees. Even such elemental essentials are few and far between.

Under the Prairie States Forestry Project, created by executive order of the President in 1934, large-scale windbreak protective plantings were established on areas where soil characteristics were suitable and within rainfall zones where the annual supply was adequate to support tree growth. The tree resources of the prairies developed through this cooperatively administered Prairie States Forestry Project are helping to solve an economic problem of soil and agricultural stabilization and at the same time are making recreation spots. In many localities these tree plantings are changing the whole aspect of the countryside. Trees in long strips of a half mile apart break up the wide reaches and temper the winds. Many of the trees, after 3 years of growth, are over 20 feet tall. Many of them are more than 30 feet tall.

Children from the schools come to the newly planted strips for their picnics. Farm families are tempted into the open for a watermelon "bust" in the shade of the trees. Where the strips are close to the farmstead, the family may take a noontime siesta there. For the first time in their lives many prairie farm boys are learning what trees were meant for—sheltering places to sprawl, rest, or play. Already there are swings for the young on the limbs of many of these new plantations. These trees are really growing.

When the Prairie States Forestry Project started many Plains residents said it was foolish, that trees would not grow in those parts. And it remains, as David Cushman Coyle remarks in his book Roads to a New America, "a curious fact" that most people who do not live in that part of the country and see those new trees growing "believe that the shelterbelt was just another failure."

"If God didn't make any trees in the Plains, how can man put them there?" they ask. The answer, Coyle continues, "is that a seed cannot grow in that country because the ground dries farther down than its first-year root can reach. But if it is started in a nursery and transplanted after its roots are long enough to reach below the bone-dry surface layer, it will grow. In the first 3 years, 6,500 miles of shelterbelt were successfully established, but the Plains need 220,000 miles of it."

To people accustomed to live with trees, the idea may seem ridiculous, but even at the end of the first 2 years, when most of the plantings did not stand more than 15 feet high, on the average, the Plains people already were starting to have picnics in that new-made shade. Now with a canopy 30 feet high, and in many places—higher, recreational use of plantings has increased; and birds return to add charm and variety to the scene.

On the strips planted under the Prairie States Forestry Project, doves have been known to nest in trees the year they were set out. Scissor-tailed fly catchers, quail, prairie chickens, and other indigenous species are now commonly seen in plantings only 3 years old. This increase in birds has economic value in insect and weed control. But possibly the value that bird life adds, by bringing animation and change into the lives of prairie people, is as great; and the whole project, while not designed for recreational purposes, does suggest important possibilities in open-air recreation for low-income groups. If it is not always possible to bring the people to the forests it is sometimes possible to bring the trees to the people.