Golden Weeks
VACATION time does not begin with the Fourth of July., But on or about the birthday of the nation the exodus from city to country acquires a tempo that forces it on the attention of the most...
...Loafing has a bad name among us...
...The strenuousness of the typical American vacation does not date, though many would have it so, from the discovery of the internal combustion engine...
...Compared with what they might be made even in the exiguous space accorded them, they are too empty...
...For others, a great deal, depends on individual taste and relish...
...Naturally, tyranny has produced its rebels...
...VACATION time does not begin with the Fourth of July., But on or about the birthday of the nation the exodus from city to country acquires a tempo that forces it on the attention of the most inattentive...
...From pointing out flaws In the summer vacation as conceived and exploited, to trying to formulate some ideal of what a summer vacation might be made...
...Two things may confidently be asserted about them...
...Monotony Is, of all things,, the most dreaded by our people upon pleasure bent...
...Robust heretics are even to be found who scent a paradox in the habit of taking time off in the solstice...
...He is apt to register a vague feeling that a great deal of waste and distraction attended the settling of the new country...
...A queer sort of conscience seemed to be about, fostered by habits of work, and suddenly applied to habits of play, and anyone who preferred specifics for recreation, not tested and approved by public opinion, wrote him or herself down as either "high-brow" or morose...
...So may the class of which Mr...
...It presents to allow thoughts and considerations which have knocked In vain at the preoccupied mind to enter and perform their healing office...
...The essence of any holiday Is its leisure, and the happiest property of leisure Is the opportunity...
...At the cost of a little seeking, some happy means Is sure to be found within reach of the most modest holiday maker which will render the golden days all the more memorable by linking them up happily with the leaden days of work and worry...
...They need no more to be taken into account when considering the common lot of the vacation 'seeker, than the wealthy commuter twixt Europe and America who uses the Atlantic as his ferry...
...Vacations for the mass of our people must be taken when business and schools permit...
...But there is a kind of loafing more fruitful than the most intensively scheduled activity...
...At one end of the scale there will always be those to whom the break-off presents itself as an opportunity to give vent to physical energy pent up for months and to indulge In an orgy of physical activity to which city doctors occasionally write a second chapter later on in the year...
...Sinclair Lewis made such abundant fun in Mantrap, who are rich enough or enterprising enough to turn their holiday Into an attempt to realize the lifq of the screen...
...There are, first of all, the happy mortals who can arrange work and leisure upon a schedule that takes no note of public holidays or "dead seasons...
...Foresight and hard work on the part of traffic managers and traffic controllers manage to accommodate it to a quite wonderful extent...
...In contrast to the solitudes that border them, either In a long silhouette as continuous as the moving targets that used to travel across the far end of an old-fashioned shooting gallery, or held up in a checked and chafing torrent at the gates as the train clangs Its way through a level crossing, are cars, and cars, and cars—from the lordly Hispano Suiza or Rolls-Royce to the creaking and swaying Ford packed with shirt-sleeved and pinafored families, all alike on the move, and able to conceive of no happier stat^ and condition than to be on the move...
...There is also the growing group of those who believe or affect to believe that the statutory fortnight of complete separation from business is a delusive affair, and who space their own holiday over a period of weeks, generally contriving, by skilful management, to add a few unnoticed days to the tale of extended week-ends...
...Is a long step...
...In paragraphs and columns these privileged ones, a large proportion of whom seem to be writers, love to feature the peace that descends upon the unsocial being who can watch his harassed fellows converging upon packed railroad stations with an impersonal interest, and return to a quiet city apartment to dream' or do his work with the heartening prospect before his mind's eye of a vacation taken out of season...
...Compared with even humble standards in Europe they are too short...
...Trains running in sections and with crowded aisles, battalions of boy scouts assembled by bugle call in the concourses of our great stations, packed highways and speedways where the margin of safety, always slim, grows appreciably slimmer, and their resultant in a mounting toll of mishaps, continue to be the heralds of the holiday season year in and year out, and all that special writers who make it the subject of articles in the press are able to register is an intensification of the process as time goes on...
...Building experts tell us that rhythmical movements put the maximum strain upon the soundness of any structure...
...Tarred and concrete roads whose excellence Is a revelation to the overseas visitor, invite to speed and change of scene...
...At the other end are those who secretly resent the interruption to daily habits implied in even a brief term of unsettlement, and who believe they pay rather too dearly by the dead-lift that comes when these habits have to be resumed...
...The prelude to a period devised for relaxation is forced to be nerve-racking concentration...
...But there is a way of flying from monotony which only succeeds in sowing it broadcast...
...Every traveler from abroad has taken note of the contrast between multitude and solitude to be observed in the course of a train journey...
...Those who are oldl enough to remember the days when June, July and August brought a golden harvest to the thrifty agriculturist and the thrifty agriculturist's wife In New England, when "city folks" filled the big cottages and farm-houses that may now be seen shuttered and rotting away all over Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire with their flirtations and banjo concerts, and when the "summer girl" added one type the more tq our national portrait gallery, will remember a difference in degree rather than in essence...
...In no other civilized land does the wilderness persist so close to the house-door as in the United States...
...This emptiness derives largely from their standardization, and this standardization is almost forced upon the American holiday-maker in America by the topography of his country...
...And, everywhere these arteries come In sight...
...In the ragged woods of second growth that stretch away inimitably to the horizons, the lonely lakes that lie amid a tangle of undergrowth and rotting trees, the litter and rubbish lying round humble dwelling-houses and the neglect to fence and wall and level even round quite imposing ones, he sees no sign of the affection for site and prospect that makes a journey through the old countries a succession of memorable perspectives...
...These, however, are the happy few—the privileged minority...
...But no system that man has ever thought out can take the initial strain out of the situation that arises when common impulse and common opportunity send thousands of human beings swarming through outlets designed for hundreds...
...What he is watching is something that, under the comprehensive title of "the great out-of-doors" becomes the playground of the nation as summer comes round...
...Except in a very few sections of the country it is everybody's property, and the signboards that warn the trespasser off are, happily, as rare as four-leaved clovers...
...The abiding principle of these summer colonies lingers In the memory as restlessness, a flight from boredom, and a difficulty in filling In the long hours between rising time and bedtime with sufficient canoeing, swimming, picnicking and dancing to Induce a sense that the precious fortnight was not being wasted by pursuits that could be conducted just as well in the other fifty weeks of the year...
...Whatever is valued, he cannot help thinking, is tended and improved...
...It is rather a rough and ready playground, studded with summer-camps and roadhouses and, in the maritime states, with beaches, that repeat one another's leading features with a regularity often to be observed in Its perfection rather as the result of accident than design...
...They will discourse of the whip to mental energies that city heat, philosophically endured, affords them, and defer making fresh acquaintance with the open spaces at least until the first frosts have allayed such minor rural discomforts as poison ivy and mosquitoes...
...The very large number to whom vacations mean family reunion may be left out of account...
...The American vacation is essentially a rhythmical affair...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 11
