Now an Oregon winter has no inducements for those who wish to return to Nature, so Darling started out in search of a climate.He mounted a bicycle and headed south for the sunlands.Stanford University claimed him for a year.Here he studied and worked his way, attending lectures in as scant garb as the authorities would allow and applying as much as possible the principles of living that he had learned in squirrel-town.His favourite method of study was to go off in the hills back of the University, and there to strip off his clothes and lie on the grass, soaking in sunshine and health at the same time that he soaked in knowledge.
But Central California has her winters, and the quest for a Nature Man's climate drew him on.He tried Los Angeles and Southern California, being arrested a few times and brought before the insanity commissions because, forsooth, his mode of life was not modelled after the mode of life of his fellow-men.He tried Hawaii, where, unable to prove him insane, the authorities deported him.It was not exactly a deportation.He could have remained by serving a year in prison.They gave him his choice.Now prison is death to the Nature Man, who thrives only in the open air and in God's sunshine.The authorities of Hawaii are not to be blamed.Darling was an undesirable citizen.Any man is undesirable who disagrees with one.And that any man should disagree to the extent Darling did in his philosophy of the simple life is ample vindication of the Hawaiian authorities verdict of his undesirableness.
So Darling went thence in search of a climate which would not only be desirable, but wherein he would not be undesirable.And he found it in Tahiti, the garden-spot of garden-spots.And so it was, according to the narrative as given, that he wrote the pages of his book.He wears only a loin-cloth and a sleeveless fish-net shirt.
His stripped weight is one hundred and sixty-five pounds.His health is perfect.His eyesight, that at one time was considered ruined, is excellent.The lungs that were practically destroyed by three attacks of pneumonia have not only recovered, but are stronger than ever before.
I shall never forget the first time, while talking to me, that he squashed a mosquito.The stinging pest had settled in the middle of his back between his shoulders.Without interrupting the flow of conversation, without dropping even a syllable, his clenched fist shot up in the air, curved backward, and smote his back between the shoulders, killing the mosquito and making his frame resound like a bass drum.It reminded me of nothing so much as of horses kicking the woodwork in their stalls.
"The gorilla in the African jungle pounds his chest until the noise of it can be heard half a mile away," he will announce suddenly, and thereat beat a hair-raising, devil's tattoo on his own chest.
One day he noticed a set of boxing-gloves hanging on the wall, and promptly his eyes brightened.
"Do you box?" I asked.
"I used to give lessons in boxing when I was at Stanford," was the reply.
And there and then we stripped and put on the gloves.Bang! a long, gorilla arm flashed out, landing the gloved end on my nose.Biff!
he caught me, in a duck, on the side of the head nearly knocking me over sidewise.I carried the lump raised by that blow for a week.
I ducked under a straight left, and landed a straight right on his stomach.It was a fearful blow.The whole weight of my body was behind it, and his body had been met as it lunged forward.I looked for him to crumple up and go down.Instead of which his face beamed approval, and he said, "That was beautiful." The next instant I was covering up and striving to protect myself from a hurricane of hooks, jolts, and uppercuts.Then I watched my chance and drove in for the solar plexus.I hit the mark.The Nature Man dropped his arms, gasped, and sat down suddenly.
"I'll be all right," he said."Just wait a moment."And inside thirty seconds he was on his feet--ay, and returning the compliment, for he hooked me in the solar plexus, and I gasped, dropped my hands, and sat down just a trifle more suddenly than he had.
All of which I submit as evidence that the man I boxed with was a totally different man from the poor, ninety-pound weight of eight years before, who, given up by physicians and alienists, lay gasping his life away in a closed room in Portland, Oregon.The book that Ernest Darling has written is a good book, and the binding is good, too.
Hawaii has wailed for years her need for desirable immigrants.She has spent much time, and thought, and money, in importing desirable citizens, and she has, as yet, nothing much to show for it.Yet Hawaii deported the Nature Man.She refused to give him a chance.
So it is, to chasten Hawaii's proud spirit, that I take this opportunity to show her what she has lost in the Nature Man.When he arrived in Tahiti, he proceeded to seek out a piece of land on which to grow the food he ate.But land was difficult to find--that is, inexpensive land.The Nature Man was not rolling in wealth.He spent weeks in wandering over the steep hills, until, high up the mountain, where clustered several tiny canyons, he found eighty acres of brush-jungle which were apparently unrecorded as the property of any one.The government officials told him that if he would clear the land and till it for thirty years he would be given a title for it.
Immediately he set to work.And never was there such work.Nobody farmed that high up.The land was covered with matted jungle and overrun by wild pigs and countless rats.The view of Papeete and the sea was magnificent, but the outlook was not encouraging.He spent weeks in building a road in order to make the plantation accessible.The pigs and the rats ate up whatever he planted as fast as it sprouted.He shot the pigs and trapped the rats.Of the latter, in two weeks he caught fifteen hundred.Everything had to be carried up on his back.He usually did his packhorse work at night.
