Over the past three decades and a sprinkling of years I have been fortunate to know a now-retired professor of mathematics at a small university here in Michigan. Someone once said, “Math is just numbers,” but the subject is a foreign language to me. Nor do we have an especially close relationship since we only met a few times and correspond infrequently.
We were introduced to each by a mutual friend in northern Wisconsin. Like a dwindling number of people, we were still avid readers of Sam Campbell’s nature books. Walt had been a longtime friend of Sam and his wife, and was a writer a old-fashioned newspaper man who hammered out his pieces on a manual Remington typewriter, augmented by carbon paper and White-out. One day he wrote and gave me the professor’s name and address and said we should get in touch because she was writing a biography of Sam Campbell.
Like many newly minted retirees, she is exploring what might become the next chapter in her life. Soon after she hung up her academic cap and gown, she became a lay chaplain at a nearby retirement community. Being a devout Christian who has been slowly migrating toward the Anglicans, she has been thinking (‘discerning,’ as it is called in many churches, the possibility of ordained ministry.
There is nothing easy about ordination in most mainline denominations. It is expensive, very time-consuming, and to be honest, sometimes the future looks rather bleak. Many churches are steadily declining, and it is almost impossible for the smaller ones to be self-sustaining, much less afford a full-time minister. There is a lot more, and when it is all combined together, it is discouraging.
We have corresponded on those topics and then make a warp-drive leap back to Sam Campbell’s books and essays to find a lot of encouragement.
Maybe you have watched Rich Steves, the perpetually enthusiastic and cheerful host of international travel television programs. He also leads trips to various places around the world. Suffice it to note Sam was an early version of him.
He began his work as a promoter and travel writer for the old Chicago and Northwestern Railroads. He wrote some of their advertising, took tours to the national parks, and during the off-season traveled around the country with his travelogues of the wilderness. Sam Campbell was highly successful and used some of his money to buy a small island in northern Wisconsin. There, beginning in the early 1940s until his death in 1961, he wrote a series of books devoured by young readers.
When we put him in the historical context, he was working and promoting rail travel to resorts and national parks in the midst of the Great Depression. He took his films on tour during that same era, charging a quarter or fifty cents for admission. When war broke out in December 1941, leisure travel came to an end. He retreated to his cabin and began writing his stories in the middle of the war and got them published when paper was rationed. A few years later, in the midst of the Red Scare and Korean War, he wrote Nature’s Messages, about the wisdom people can find in the wilderness.
More than anything else, he was able to step away from financial, social, political problems, ands the two wars to put his emphasis on joy and hope. The problems and uncertainties of the world are never mentioned in his writings, even though they were on everyone’s mind. For example, in one of his books, a teenage boy, Hi-Bub, was very discouraged by the world around him. He was morose, listless, and had lost the joy in life. All things considered, but never mentioned, was his fear of a very bleak looking world. Gradually, through spending time learning the lessons of nature the young man, comes out of his depression.
Another lesson turns up in Beloved Rascals where the Campbells go to the Canadian Rockies to film movies for a future program. There, they encounter a bus driver who is wonderfully cheerful. Sam points out that the driver has been on the same route for years, answers the same questions, helps people in and out of the bus, and is perpetually enthusiastic. “How do you do it?” he asked the fellow. The driver explains that he reminds himself every morning that some of his passengers have saved their money for years for this trip of a lifetime, so he wants to do everything he can to make it a wonderful experience. Meanwhile, other passengers are probably taking their last holiday, and wants to create some wonderful memories for them and their family.
Sam wrote about canoe trips to the north country and the fun the group had, even in the drenching rain. He told fun tales about raccoons that had a battle with their own reflection in a mirror, a crow that had been hurt in a forest fire, and more. In short, he told tales of people finding and making their own fun, even when the rest of the world was going to You-Know-Where.
That is the lesson for today. Pick any era in American history, or even the history of the entire world starting with the cave-dwellers, and without much effort we can find plenty to grip about. No time was ever perfect, and there were big dump truck loads of hurt and pain all around.
I don’t think much, other than technology, has changed because human nature seems to remain consistent. If we are angry with the world, we can move from one topic to the next. If we are going to lie, cheat, and steal our way to the top, if one way doesn’t work, we’ll find another. We can always find a new subject to blame for our misery.
The other way is to look around and find the goodness in life. We learned that from a canoe trip where the weather turned filthy, and they spent a day sitting underneath up-turned canoes to keep dry, and invested their hours by singing together.
My favorite story comes from Nature’s Message, where he wrote about his favorite visitor. A guest came to his island cottage. He was singing as he paddled his canoe across the lake. Over the course of the next days they ran into one challenge after another – a boat motor that would not start, mosquitoes, and a host of other challenges. The guest continued to sing and have a good time. And when he had to return to the city, Sam’s guest began to sing as he paddled to the other shore.
That is the sort of guest we all like; when the occasion we are a guest, that’s how our host and hostess would like to find us.
It seems to me that we need more writers like Sam Campbell who can find goodness in so many places, and a lot more people to put those ideas into practice.
