James Curwood - God's Country; The Trail to Happiness

Because I have spent much of my time in adventuring in distant wildernesses, and exploring where other men have not gone, it has been accepted by many that my love for nature means a love for the distant and, for most people, the inaccessible wilds. It is true that in the vast and silent places one comes nearer, perhaps, to the deeper truths of life. Of the wild and its miracles I love to write, and when I come to that part of my story, I shall possibly be happiest. But I would be unfair to myself, and the religion of nature itself, if the great truth were not first emphasized that its treasures are to be possessed by mankind wherever one may turn – even in a prison cell. I was personally in touch with one remarkable instance of this in the Michigan State Penitentiary, at Jackson, where a canary-bird and a red geranium saved a man from madness and eventually gained him a pardon, sending him out into the world a living being with a new and better religion than he had ever dreamed of before.

But the open skies and the free air were intended from the beginning of things as the greatest gifts to man, and it is there, if one is sick in body or soul, that one should seek. Whether it is a mile or a thousand miles from a city makes little difference. For nature is the universal law. It is everywhere. It is neither mystery nor mysterious. Its pages are open; its life is vibrant with the desire to be understood. The one miracle is for man to bring himself down out of the clouds of his egoism and replace his passion for destruction with the desire to understand.

I have in mind a case in point.

I had a very dear friend, a newspaper man, whose wife had died. I don’t know that I ever saw a man more utterly broken up, for his love for her was more than love. It was worship. He grew faded and thin, and a gray patch over his temple turned white. The mightiest efforts of his friends could do nothing. He wanted to be alone, alone in his home, where he could grieve himself to death by inches. I knew that his case was harder because he was merely tolerant of religion. One day, the idea came to me that resulted in his spiritual and physical salvation. I took him in my auto, and we went out into the country four or five miles, opened a gate, drove down a long lane, and stopped at the edge of a forty-acre wood.

“Fred, I am going to show you a wonderful city,” I said. “Come with me – quietly.”

We climbed over the fence, and I led him to the heart of the wood, and there we sat down, with our backs to a log.

“Now, just to humor me, be very still,” I said. “Don’t move, don’t speak – just listen.”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, that wonderful time of a summer day when nature seems to rouse herself from midday slumber to fill the world with her rustling life. The sun fell slantwise through the wood, and here and there, under the roofs of the trees, we could see golden pools and streams of it on the cool earth.

“This is one of the most wonderful cities in the world,” I whispered, “and there are hundreds and thousands of such cities, some of them within the reach of all.”

The musical ripple of a creek came to our ears. And then, slowly at first, there came upon my friend the wonder of it all. He understood – at last. About us, through all that forty acres of wood, the air seemed to whisper forth a strange and wonderful life. Over our heads, we heard a grating sound. It was a squirrel gnawing through the shell of a last autumn’s nut. On an old stub, a woodpecker hammered. Close about us were the “cheep, cheep, cheep,” and “twit, twit, twit,” of little brown brushbirds. A warbler burst suddenly into a glorious snatch of song. A quarter of a mile away, a crow cawed, and between us and the crow we heard a fox-squirrel barking, and, a little later, saw it, with its mate, scrambling in play up and down the trees. My friend caught my arm and pointed. He was becoming interested, and what he saw was a fat young woodchuck passing near us on a foraging expedition to a neighboring clover field.

For an hour we did not move, and through all that city was the drone and voice of life, and that life was a soft and wonderful song, soothing one almost to sleep. And when, at last, my friend whispered again, “It sounds as though everything is talking,” I knew that the spirit of the thing had got into him. Then I drew his attention to a colony of big black ants whose fortress was in the log against which we were resting. They were working. Two of them were trying to drag a dead caterpillar over my friend’s knee. When we rose to go, I led him past a little swale in which a score of blackbirds had bred their young. On a slender willow, a bobolink was singing. A land-turtle lumbered back into the water, and the bright eyes of green-headed frogs stared at us from patches of scum. Under a bush, a score of toads were teaching their tiny youngsters to swim. When my friend saw the little fellows clinging to their mothers’ backs, he laughed – the first time in many months.

When we went back to the car, I said:

“You have seen just one ten-thousandth of what nature holds for you and every other man and woman. You haven’t believed in God very strongly. But you’ve got to now. That’s God back there in the wood.”

That was four years ago. To-day, that man not only lives in the heart of nature but, from a special assignment man, he has risen to the managing editorship of a big metropolitan daily. He has only his summer vacation in which to get out into the big woods, but he has made room for nature all about him. From early spring until late autumn, his front and back yard fairly burst with life. And it is not, like most yards, merely for show and passing pleasure to the eyes. He has brought himself down out of the clouds of man’s egoism, and is learning and taking strength from nature – which he now worships as the great “I am.” He has developed a hobby for “interbreeding plants,” as he calls it, and especially gladioli. Each morning in spring and summer and autumn, he goes out into his garden, and, from the thousand living things there, he receives strength for his nerve-racking duties of the day; and at night, after his task is done, he returns to his garden to seek that peace which is the great and vibrant force of the life that is there. During the months of winter, he has his little conservatory. And this man – for more than thirty years – hardly knew whether an oak grew from an acorn or a seed!

Yet has he one great regret. And more than once he has said to me, with that grief in his voice which will never quite die out: “If we had only found these things before, she would be with me now. I am convinced of it. It was this strength she needed to keep her from fading away – to build her up into joyous life again. Sometimes I wonder why the Great Power that is above did not let her live to go into the wood with us that day.”

Hours have passed since I first sat down to write these thoughts that were in my mind. The storm has passed, and, following it, there has come a marvelous silence. Both my door and window are open, and there is rare sweetness in the breath of the rain-washed air. I can hear the near-by trees dripping. The creek runs with a louder ripple. The moon is shimmering through the fleecy clouds that are racing south and east – toward my “civilized” home, fifteen hundred miles away. Over all this world of mine there is, just now, a vast and voiceless quiet. And if I were superstitious, or filled with the imagination of some of the prophets of old, I am sure I would hear a Voice speaking out of that mighty solitude, and it would say:

“O you mortal, blind – blind as the rocks which make up the mountains!

“Blind as the trees which you think have neither ears nor eyes!

“Made to see, yet unseeing; making mystery out of that which was born with you; seeking – yet seeking afar for that which lies close at hand!