Music Welcome to snoozecast, the podcast designed 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 Woolen Drawer's. Tonight, we'll read the opening to Woodcraft, published by George Washington Nessmuck Sears. Sears was a sports writer for Forest and Stream Magazine in the 1880s and an early conservationist. His stories popularized self-guided canoe camping and what is today called ultra light camping or ultra light backpacking. Growing up in Massachusetts he took his pen name from a native American who had befriended him in early childhood. A period of factory labor while still a child left him with a fondness for the writing of Charles Dickens. At 19, he signed on for for a three-year voyage on a whaler headed for the South Pacific.

It was the same year that Herman Millville shipped out of the same port bound for the same whaling grounds. Let's get cozy.

Close your eyes. Let's get cozy.

Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. We are an overworked nation, in an age of hurry and worry. Anything slower than steam is apt to get left. Forchoons are quickly made and freely spent. Nearly all busy, hard-worked Americans have an intuitive sense of the need that exists for at least one period of rest and relaxation during each year. And all, or nearly all, are willing to pay liberally to liberally in fact for anything that conduces to rest, recreation, and sport. I am sorry to say that we mostly get swindled.

As an average, the summer outer who goes to forest, lake or stream for health in sport gets about 10 cents worth for a dollar of outlay. A majority will admit to themselves at least that after a month's vacation, they return to work with an inward consciousness of being somewhat disappointed and beaten. We are free with our money when we have it. We are known throughout the civilized world for our lavishness in paying for our pleasures. But it humiliates us to know we have been beaten. And this is what the most of us know at the end of a summer vacation. To the man of millions, it makes little difference. He is able to pay liberally for boats, buckboards, and body service if he chooses to spend a summer in the north woods. He has no need to study the questions of lightness and economy in a forest and stream outing. Let his guides take care of him, and unto them and the landlords he will give freely of his substance. I do not write for him and can do him little good, but there are hundreds of thousands of practical, useful men, many of them far from being rich. Mechanics, artists, writers, merchants, clerks, businessmen, workers, so to speak, who sorely need and well deserve a season of rest and relaxation at least once a year, to these and for these I write. Perhaps more than 50 years of devotion to woodcraft may enable me to give a few useful hints and suggestions to those whose dreams during the close season of work are of camp life by flood, field, and forest. I have found that nearly all who have a real love of nature and out of door camp life spend

a good deal of time and talk in planning future trips or discussing the trips and pleasures

gone by.