Music Welcome to snoozecast. The podcast is on to help you fall asleep. Find us at snoozecast.com and if you enjoy our show, please share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by Camp Life. Tonight we'll read another excerpt from Woodcraft, published by George Washington Nessemook Sears. Sears was a sports writer and an early conservationist. His stories popularized self-guided canoe camping, and what is today called ultra light camping, or ultra light backpacking. Canoeing had been popularized by a Scottish lawyer in the 1860s, but the typical canoe trip of the day employed expert guides and heavy canoes.

Sears had a lightweight solo canoe built. He named it after a Charles Dickens character and used it to travel alone for months at a time through the Adderoland Axe. I'm going to have to get closer. Close your eyes. Relax your body. Into the darkness. Love your mind. Now, take a few deep breaths. With a large majority of prospective tourists and outers camping out is a leading factor in the summer vacation. And during the long winter months, they are prone to collect in little knots and talk much of camps, fishing, hunting, and roughing it. The last phrase is very popular and always cropping out in the talks on matters pertaining

to a vacation in the woods. I dislike the phrase, we do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it. We go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home, in towns, in cities, in shops, offices, stores, banks, anywhere that we may be placed, with the necessity always present of being on time and up to our work, of providing for the dependent ones, of keeping up, catching up, or getting left. Alas, for the lifelong battle whose bravest slogan is bread. As for the few fortunate ones who have no call to take a hand in any strife or struggle, who not only have all the time there is, but a great deal that they cannot dispose of with any satisfaction to themselves or anybody else, I am not writing for them. But only to those of the world's workers who go, or would like to go every summer to the woods. and to these I would say, don't rough it, make it as smooth, as restful, and pleasurable as you can. To this end, you need pleasant days and peaceful nights. You cannot afford to be tormented by insects nor kept awake at night by cold and damp, nor to exhaust your strength by hard trips and heavy loads. Take it easy and always keep cool. 9 out of 10 on finding themselves lost in the woods quarrel with the compass. Never do that. The compass is always right or nearly so. Carry the compass in your hand and look at it every few minutes. For the tendency to swore from a straight course when a man is once lost and nearly always to the right is a thing passed understanding. Insect pests As regards insects, it may be said that, to the man with clean, bleached tender skin, they are at the start an unindurable torment. No one can enjoy life with a smarting swollen face. More than 40 years experience in the woods has taught me that the following recipe is infallible. It was published in Forest and Stream in the summer of 1880, and again in 1883. It has been pretty widely quoted and adopted, and I have never known it to fail. Three ounces pine tar, two ounces caster oil,

one ounce penny royal oil,

simmer all together over a slow fire and bottle for use.

You will hardly need more than a two ounce file full in a season.

One ounce has lasted me six weeks now.