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218 Woodcraft Birch Bark Roll IN IV F2 A Woodcraft Cabin When Moses instituted the Feast of Tabernacles and started the world out on an annual camping trip, he undoubt- edly had several good reasons in the back of his mind. I imagine the smallest of them was in reference to the very poor but necessary trip that his people, “his forty-niners,” made across the plains. _ The most important part of it all probably was the com- plete hark back to the primitive. His people were told to put on wilderness clothes, eat wilderness food, dwell in wilderness tabernacles, and live the wilderness life their fathers had done in the desert. The resumption of simple life was essential—this elimi- nation of the middleman—the masterful contact of the man with wild nature—this elemental face to face of man and the wilds. | I am sure this is the most valuable thing in it; and when I see a New York family building a Fifth Avenue mansion in the Adirondacks, then nailing a few slabs on the outside and calling it a “camp’—I marvel at their poverty. It does not surprise me when I learn that they add tennis, billiards, moving pictures, etc., to relieve their boredom. It does not surprise me but it fills me with sorrow. Let us face the matter frankly. There are certain great benefits and certain great dangers in camp life. It is the leader’s job to get all the good for his band, and dodge all the evil. The good things are the sun-and-air life, the calm, the sweetness of the night, and the total change of thought and home world. This last is maybe the best of all, yet the one that some campers are deliberately leaving out. It seems to me that we should begin our camping plans by leaving out everything unnecessary that we can get at home or in town—mansions with oriental fittings, electric lights, graphophones, yes, baseball and tennis as well as billiards, motor boats and motor cars, because we can get them elsewhere. They belong to another life. For the complete hark back we have two usual plans. One, the wilderness traveling trip in which we are perforce tied to dog-tents and one-night stands. This is very close to ideal. But a much larger number are limited to the per-