The Gentle Art of Tramping

IT is a gentle art; know how to tramp and you know how to live. Manners makyth man, and tramping makyth manners. Know how to meet your fellow wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of Nature and how to be active to its wildness and its rigor. Tramping brings one to reality.

If you would have a portrait of Man you must not depict him in high hat and carrying in one hand a small shiny bag, nor would one draw him in gnarled corduroys and with red handkerchief about his neck, nor with lined brow on a high bench watching a hand that is pushing a pen, nor with pick and shovel on the road. You cannot show him carrying a rifle, you dare not put him in priest’s garb with conventional cross on breast. You will not point to King or Bishop with crown or miter. But most fittingly you will show a man with staff in hand and burden on his shoulders, striving onward from light to darkness upon an upward road, shading his eyes with his hand as he seeks his way. You will show a figure something like that posthumous picture of Tolstoy, called “Tolstoy pilgrimaging toward eternity.”

So when you put on your old clothes and take to the road, you make at least a right gesture. You get into your right place in the world in the right way. Even if your tramping expedition is a mere jest, a jaunt, a spree, you are apt to feel the benefits of getting into a right relation toward God, Nature, and your fellow man. You get into an air that is refreshing and free. You liberate yourself from the tacit assumption of your everyday life.

What a relief to escape from being voter, taxpayer, authority on old brass, brother of man who is an authority on old brass, author of best seller, uncle of author of best seller.

What a relief to cease being for a while a grade-three clerk, or grade-two clerk who has reached his limit, to cease to be identified by one’s salary or by one’s golf handicap. It is undoubtedly a delicious moment when Miles the gardener seeing you coming along in tramping rig omits to touch his hat as you pass. Of course it is part of the gentle art not to be offended. It is no small part of the gentle art of tramping to learn to accept the simple and humble rôle and not to crave respect, honor, obeisance. It is a mistake to take to the wilderness clad in new plus-fours, sports jacket, West-End tie, jeweled tie pin, or in gaiters, or carrying a silver-topped cane. One should not carry visiting cards, but try to forget the three-storied house remembering Diogenes and his tub.

I suppose one should draw a distinction between professional tramping and just tramping, especially as this whole book is to be called The Gentle Art of Tramping. I am not writing of the American hobo, nor of the British casual, nor of railroaders and beach combers or other enemies of society—“won’t works” and parasites of the charitable. While among these there are many very strange and interesting exceptions, yet in general they are not highly estimable people, nor is their way of life beautiful or worth imitation. They learn little on their wanderings beyond how to cadge, how to steal, how to avoid dogs and the police. They are not pilgrims but outlaws, and many would be highway robbers had they the vitality and the pluck necessary to hold up wayfarers. Most of them are but poor walkers, so that the word tramp is often misapplied to them.