From The Seattle Star, December 10, 1913. By Berton Braley.
I’m sick of your mobs and machinery,
I’m weary of second-hand thrills;
I’m tired of your two-by-four scenery,
Your nice little valleys and hills;
I want to see peaks that are bare again
And ragged and rugged and high;
To know the old tang in the air again,
And the blue of the clear Western sky!
Once more in each fiber and fold of me
I feel the old wonderment brew;
And again has the spell taken hold of me,
The spell of the mountains I knew;
So the city means nothing but slavery,
And my heart is a load in my breast,
And life will be stale and unsavory
Till I stand on the hills of the West.
Let the homebodies “hobo” and “rover” me;
Poor plodders, they never can know
How the fret for the hills has come over me
And the fever that bids me to go
Away from traditions gone moldering,
Away from the paths overtired,
To the place where the mountains are shouldering
Right up to the Archways of God!
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