Outdoor Recreation

It's okay, folks, to wander up thisaway and do nothing. Nothing.

Not necessary to leap over mountains in a single bound. Or hike the Highline Trail faster than a speeding bullet. Or bag a legal limit of everything, every time.

For some years now, I've been nagging Smokey Bear and Woodsy Owl to revise their visitation charts. As it is, they count the campers along the Tonto Rim and the backpackers up Aravaipa Canyon, estimate the skiers on San Francisco Peaks, and tally the swimmers in Oak Creek, the bowhunters north of Grand Canyon, the Boy Scouts up Mount Baldy, the four-wheelers circumnavigating the Chiricahua Mountains.

Unfairly, we stumpsitters go unrecognized as a separate category. I think the Forest Service should add another column to ascertain our numbers. Although without official status in Arizona's seven national forests, we stumpsitters may be on the increase. In fact, likely we are the wave of the future.

Stumpsitting? It is the art of doing constructively as little as possible for the benefit of humankind with the least effort for the longest period of time. If that seems like loafing, so be it.

Some rough old remnant of a ponderosa pine is ideal for stumpsitting. But a rock beside a creek will serve, or a lip of a rim overlooking a thousand-foot drop to a rolling panorama of timber and grass. The object is to observe, ruminate, and seek an eternal truth.

That truth might arrive on the march of thunderheads across the Huachuca Mountains in the Coronado National Forest, or appear in a hatch of mayflies at Sheep Crossing on the Sitgreaves forest. Fawns with does symbolize resurrection along the meadow of Potato Patch on the Prescott forest.

Fresh insight may accompany a breath of piney fragrance wafting through the air. Or it may be revealed in the inexorable way that life swaps carbon atoms deep in a boggy meadow. Or it may manifest itself in the ageless cycle of frost and fracture, cruelty and beauty, death and rejuvenation that courses through the mountains, season by season.

utdoor Recreation STUMPSITTING: SEARCHING FOR ETERNAL TRUTHS

One noble day, my favorite child and I perched on a great-granddaddy of a pine stump and counted growth rings back through Lindbergh, Villa, Lincoln, the Gadsden Purchase, the War of 1812, and the Articles of Confederation. We concluded (conveniently) that our tree germinated in 1776, maybe July 4, if the summer thundershowers that year arrived on schedule.

My girl acquired more meaningful perspective of the distant past in an hour of stumpsitting than she gained from a whole course in American history. But that day we did not make a blip on the screen of the forest-service computer that sorts out visitors. We weren't camping, hiking, hunting, boating, mineral collecting, fishing, woodcutting, or picnicking. We were unpersons. Just sitting there. Dreaming. Learning.

My quarrel with traditional classification is the emphasis on action. The recreation establishment equates hustle with happy. Is the good life just one big TV beer ad? A dollop of frontier vinegar in our veins, Americans often approach Nature like a cavalry charge. It's almost unpatriotic not to fill your creel or bring home a big buck or put the first tire track on Saddleback Mountain.

Time was, the forests were able to absorb all that human energy. What were a few hikers in 190 million acres of 156 national forests and grasslands?

The first year after World War II, 18 million Americans visited their forests. Now the visitation (expressed as one visitor for one day, or as one visitor/day) exceeds 250 million.

I know that the forests will ever be where great numbers of energetic cityweary people will go to do something. At times, I'll be among them.

But now I'm of a mood to recognize and further the stumpsitter's philosophy. The forest is a finite resource. It cannot survive limitless use, let alone abuse.

Only when a visitor to a forest remains motionless for a time, does Nature burst into action. Artificial noise, in this serene realm, may be among the worst pollu-tion a visitor can inflict upon a wildness.

So while not altogether eliminating the strenuous physical enjoyment of our national woodlands, let's reflect upon the passive forest enrichments of mind and soul.

Cloud-contemplating. Squirrel-charming. Nature-harmonizing.

Stumpsitters of Arizona, sit down and be counted!