Close-in Lands of Adventure

by Raymond S. Spears

EOPLE who keep their gaze too much on the horizon often miss the things they would like most to see close at hand. It is so in seeking adventure, in traveling, in thinking too much in terms of thousands of miles. Often, just around the corner lies an unknown land, as strange as anything to be found on the far side of the continent.

Strange people live in the recesses of the Ramapo and Catskill Mountains in sight of New York City, and in the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains, the Alleghanies—the farthest lands of the continent have no more interesting conditions than within a day's automobile drive of Manhattan Island.

When the urge to wander far comes, and one has only a week's vacation or perhaps two weeks, it seems almost useless to try to crowd into so short a space of time the experience, travel, adventure for which one longs. But it should not be forgotten that the strange and unusual is within a day's run of any city, any community, in the United States. Out from Chicago lie the Lake Michigan marshes, the shell rivers, the sand dunes, the back countries of many river bottoms. Maine, New Hampshire, western Massachusetts, lie within a day of Boston. New York has from the Adirondacks to the wilds of eastern Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh has the feudlands, the dying struggles of the old Whisky Rebellion in the Alleghanies, Lake Erie, the Ohio shantyboaters, the big woods along the New York border. No city has a greater variety of back country than Pittsburgh.

St. Louis, with the Missouri, Mississippi, the Ozarks, has even fewer varieties than, for example Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We are accustomed to think of the great West as a land of varied interests. Life in Nevada is simpler, has fewer variations, than can be found within a day's run of Albany, New York.

Those who study their opportunities never lack for expediences!