317. The resort parts of the United States equal New England in the variety of vacations that a short journey may furnish. The shores of Cape Cod, on the tip of the Coastal Plain, furnish a flat coast with the charm of the sandy beach. From Boston northward to the Gulf of St. Lawrence the Maritime District has a very rugged, rocky coast. Inland throughout the whole maritime region are cozy farmhouses by stream and pond. The highland district offers wilder scenes. It invites those who wish to go where mail and newspapers can not follow them, and where leaping trout make the sportsman rise before dawn to creep stealthily up to clear pools.
Each summer thousands of people may be found canoeing, tenting, and tramping along the streams, lakes, and hills in the solitude of the north woods. There they can know for a few days or weeks how it feels to be in a wild place far from town. Here also, in locations of great beauty, are many large summer hotels, and in scores of permanent camps, thousands of schoolboys and school girls have a few delightful weeks of swimming, boating, and outdoor life.
318. this a place where many people will live all the year? In much of it there are now not more than two or three people to the square mile. Will this change? Three words describe the future of this region: forests, water power, recreation. Tell how an increase of population in New York City and in the New England Mari time District will influence each of these three things in the highlands.
Most of the forests have been cut over once or twice, and some of them have been ruined by fire. Some of the wooded land now belongs to paper companies that take excellent care of their forests, because they must have wood to keep their mills going. The United States Government has begun to buy some of the forest land that private owners will not protect from fire, and much of it will doubtless become a great national forest. The state of New York has taken a large part of the Adirondacks as a park for its people. Lovers of the great outdoors may paddle their canoes over the chains of lakes, may fish in the clear, rapid streams, or may climb the steep mountainsides; but as a condition of their life in the open they must beware of setting fire to the woods.
Into the spongy ground shaded by the forests of the Northeastern Highlands, the rain and the melted snow sink and are held. So gradually does water drain from this forest-earth that the streams which it sup plies are clear, strong and constant. Many stream-valleys have been blocked by the material brought by the Great Glacier; in this way ponds and lakes are formed.
By damrriing their outlets, lakes, which are natural reservoirs, can be made to hold more water than they do now. How may this be useful? When New York City needed a greater water supply, it created a great lake in the Catskill Highland. In like man ner many large cities of the future will draw clear cold water from these highlands. Some of the water may generate electricity in its descending course, to move the wheels of mills in distant places.
This land will invite many kinds of men. For a few months in summer and autumn the canoeist, the camper, the tramper, the fisherman, the hunter, the motorist, and the hotel guest will throng the land where for months at a time and for miles at a stretch, in the long, cold winter, the sound of a human voice is not heard—save that of the fur hunter, creeping stealthily after pelts, or that of the forester, protecting and studying his trees. Then at intervals many years apart will come the lumbermen with noisy winter camp, loud halloo, and ringing ax. The winter stillness will be broken by the sound of falling trees. Thus men will harvest the crop of logs that has taken a half century or more to grow.
If we should have to use all of our land as closely as the Swiss do, what parts of this region might have a dairy industry? Animals in this cold region have very good fur and fur farming, which has already begun, may become important. The Prince Edward Islanders (Sec. 247) have shown the way by raising black foxes with skins selling sometimes for $1000. One mother fox has been known to sell for $15,000, and to raise a litter of young that were worth $10.000. Many millions of dollars are now invested in fox farms. Muskrats and other fur bearers may also be domesticated.