FROM THE WILDS

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 December 1934, Page 12

FROM THE WILDS

AFRAID OF THE CROWD. s It has just been reported that a man ’ who had gone to New York to settle down after spending a lifetime in the 1 Arctic stayed only two days and then 1 fled back to the cold wastes of the E north. The utter strangeness of the ’ civilised life had been too much for ■ him (writes Jack McLaren in the - “Daily Mail”). 1 know how that man felt. I. too, came back to civilisation r after a-long stretch in the wilds —six--3 teen years in the more remote parts ' of the* South Seas. For eight of those ' years I had lived in a solitude almost ' as complete as Crusoe’s. ' Never in any of the jungles I had left behind had I been as lonely as I ■ was in civilisation. There was the matter of money. I was not accustomed to carrying money with me. Back in the wilds I had obtained my food and other requirements by means of barter from natives. And goods I had had sent to me from a store at one of the small 1 settlements were merely charged, to my account, to be settled later with copra or other produce that I might send along. * For months and months at a time I would never have a coin in my pocket or have any use for one. So it was that, here in civilisation, I freely walked out of shops without paying for things I bought. More than once I had a rather painful interview with managers. It was only with difficulty that I was at last able to convince them that I had not really meant to steal the things. A man unaccustomed to money was something too strange to be easily believed. There was the loneliness. I fitted lin nowhere. In the wilds I was. well used to being alone, but here I was , really lonely—which is not the. same ■ thing, by any means. In places like i Hyde Park I was often near to tears !as I saw that most people went in i couples—-while I was a solitary. | I had lost the ordinary man’s point l of view. If I went to the theatre the ! play meant little to me. I was acutely ; aware -that the room on the stage had ■ only three walls, and that the drama had been performed the previous ■ night, and would be repeated again the foilowing night. I seemed to have ' lost the sense- of illusion —maybe be- ! cause I had lived so long with the reality of wild Nature. There was the sound of shod feet on the pavements. I was so accustomed to the almost silent steps of nai tives’ bare feet, or to no footsteps at all, that I would lie awake hour after hour listening. . . . For me there was something oddly uncanny about the sound of feet on pavements. Then, too, there were the police. It seemed to me that the civilised life must be terribly dangerous if men had to be employed merely to keep the peace. It was a long time before I became accustomed to the sight of them, and still longer before I ceased to wish that I were back in the safety of the wilds.