SUMMER VACATIONS

With summer only a dream away, the season approaches when vacationers will be spreading picnics beside rivers and streams while breezes carry the refreshing mists of waterfalls into canyons and valleys and across mountains grown over with cedar and pine. Giant elms will spread their shade along the back roads of New England, campers will pitch tents in the Sierra, and the sun will shine warmly along our seashores, from Maine to Mendocino.

Summer. The season is ripe with promise and adventure, a time when vacationers will jet to faraway places, or else reach out across this land of ours, exploring sheltered coves and moss-covered forests where rivers rampage through canyons and the miracle of life is sensed in a thousand different ways: by the voice of a mockingbird, the buzzing of a bee, the chatter of a squirrel, the darting of a deer in a forest so still that creation seems only to have begun.

Summer recalls memories of swimming holes and tide pools and sandpipers and sunsets along a sandy shore. It is a time when the weary exchange crowded cities for hiking trails and country roads and meadows with windblown grass. Tents will appear beside rivers running headlong into the Pacific and the Atlantic; other travelers will turn to farms for their vacations, relaxing on the stoops of country porches, listening to crickets and studying the stars--or a harvest moon.

On these retreats from the daily routine, vacationers will fish off country bridges and settle in meadows to inhale the fragrance of new-mown hay. Summer brings to mind America’s campgrounds and parks in a wilderness where the rush of icy waters serves as a symphony for the weary.

All this is the season we celebrate today inside the special issue.