PHOTOGRAPHER'S WEEKLY

PAGE 113

SARCAS
ACHE

I

Local Manipulation"!

T is a significant commentary on our complex modern life that people so commonly refer to rural districts as insupportably lonely. "Away off there in the country? I should think that you would die." How often we hear such expressions of commiserating pity from the happy dwellers of townland. The other day my wife received a letter from a girlhood friend of hers whose home is now a farm in northern Vermont, many miles from the railroad, accessible only by stage, and hardly at all in the depths of winter. The recipient of the missive suggested that I make her some prints of pictures around our home, to send this lady far away-because, forsooth, she must be "frightfully lonely." This "because" was not based on any intimations in the letter, which I read myself, at least enough to surmise that the gentle creature was apparently in the best of spirits. It was rather one of those "assumptions from circumstances" to which we all are prone. I would be lonely in the wilds of Vermont; ergo, she is.

I have been thinking quite a bit about this living in the country, the real country, as a sort of penal servitude, and the more I think of it the less the idea appeals to me. If living in the country is such bad business, what the dickens are we coming to? Somebody has got to live in the country, just to raise the crops, and unless enough people can keep from being lonely in the country there won't be enough to eat. That would be bad, very bad. Next to photography, eating is my favorite hobby, and I can't endure the thought that I must eventually give it up just because the country has become so lonely.

And, after all, why should anyone be lonely in the country? Lonelier, I mean, than in a town or city. Why, I had a next-door neighbor who was so lonely that he committed suicide a few short weeks ago. He had a niece and a brother-in-law in the same house with him, too, and I was talking to him out in the yard the morning of the day he did it. There were people enough around, in all conscience, to keep him from being lonely.

It's all poppycock, this idea of being lonely in the country because it is the country. Being lonely is simply being out of tune, and you can be that anywhere.

The real reason why so many people feel sorry for those who live in the country, think

ing how lonely they must be, is that they themselves are very much out of tune with the harmonies of the out-of-doors and of the healthy normal life of rural sections. And that is a pity in itself. For the harmonies of the country are the real harmonies, nature's harmonies, and the person not attuned to them is too onesided, more artificial than he should be.

Now I think that one reason why I don't think of the wilds of Vermont as quite so lonely as my wife does, is that I have tramped around so much in the country with my camera. I have climbed hills and mountains; have hiked innumerable miles over fields and meadows; have drifted into farmyards near and far and been an interested spectator of the business of the husbandman; have clambered up gullies and picked my way along the bank of many a mountain stream; have studied, in a superficial manner, the habits of pigs and sheep and cattle; and have had an increasingly observing eye for shrubs and trees and flowers:--and all, in large measure, through the leading of the camera I have carried.

And what I have seen, and what I have learned (it is not really much), suggests that for the dweller in the country there must be open surely as rich a world for interested enjoyment as any that the city can supply.

More than this, for the amateur who lives in the country there must be no end of pleasurable excitement. Where I have wandered hither and yon, catching a sudden and superficial look at this and that, for him there is the opportunity to observe his rural scenes from every angle and under every changing aspect of the seasons.

So the dweller in the country, and especially the dweller in the country who is an amateur photographer as well, shall get from me no glance of pity. With his camera, a good darkroom, the friendly friends of the family circle and its neighbors, and his photographic magazines, he has a pleasant world in which to spend his leisure time.

And the rest of us will be lucky, very lucky, if we can match his freedom and elbow room to do with our cameras what the "innards" of our nature call for.

The Intensifier.