YOU HAVE COME TO BE ALONE WITH YOUR HEARTXI. NATIONAL WILDERNESSES
YOU HAVE COME TO BE ALONE WITH YOUR HEART
Glacierin Montana, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Sequoia and Yosemite in California, Grand Canyon in Arizona, besides Mount McKinley in Alaska and many minor reservations and national forests—they ought truly to be called by some name other than parks. The same also is true for Canada, which possesses its wonderful Dominion Parks such as those of Waterton and Lake Louise. The name “park” has evidently been given to popularise them. Such places in Russia are called “wildernesses,”and are resorted to for meditation. They are called literally “empty places,” the same word that is used in the Bible for wilderness. Tolstoy when he died was on his way to the wilderness—to the “Empty Place of Optin.” In England, in our conventional phrase, we should be likely to call them “retreats,” like the retreat on the Island of Iona. But the idea is that they should provide in our life what is meant when it is written:The Spirit drove Him into the wilderness; orHe went up into the mountain to pray.In the midst of the hurly-burly comes the happy thought—“I will arise now and go to my wilderness, to my retreat, to my empty place.”
The spiritual background of Great Britain is in the mountains of the North, among the Cumberland Lakes and on the wild border. Or it is in the obscure grandeur of the Sussex Downs, or on Dartmoor, or on the Welsh hills. Small though the mountains may be, they are continually in the minds of English people. The way of escape is clear. And many of the bright spirits of England and Scotland have derived their strength direct from the hills. Byron and Scott and Ruskin and Wordsworthdrew their strength from the hills. Carlyle super-imposed Ecclefechan upon Chelsea. Even he who once said “London’s streets are paved with gold” was driven by the spirit from Battersea to Buckingham. I find a belief in the wilderness strong in Vachel Lindsay. He holds that the wild West has been and still must be the spiritual lodestone of American men. Untamed America has remade the race. Andrew Jackson was the voice of the West of his day, Abraham Lincoln of his. And though New England has held the hegemony of letters he divines that the wilderness—the mountains—will be the source of the inspiration of the coming time. Early America derived most of her inspiration from across the Atlantic. Her heart was outside her body. But mature America, conscious of herself as a whole, will know more surely that she has a heart and a soul and a way to God in herself.
I lookto a time when national wildernesses will have an acknowledged significance in our public life, when men and women of all classes of life will naturally retire to them for recreation—as naturally as people used to go tochurch on Sundays and for a similar reason. All praise to the foresight and energy of Franklin Lane, the late American Minister of the Interior, that enterprising Canadian who did so much to bring the people’s heritage before their eyes!
The “See America First” is a poor slogan. It is like “Do Everything Once” and “Buy him a Fountain Pen.” The question should be raised to a higher level. People need not visit Glacier as they visit Switzerland, in a spirit of curiosity. Even in this sophisticated age they can come as pilgrims of Nature as easily as they can come as tourists. “Triangular trips,” “Four-day tours,” are not in the right spirit. Time is immaterial.
But there is virtue in shoe-leather, virtue in the saddle of the horse. Not much virtue in guides, in hotels. You come to these places to be alone with Nature or you do not arrive.
Somuch for the idea and possibilities of the national parks. Lindsay showed me a portfolio of descriptions of them when he was in London, and he did much to persuade young Englishmen interested in America to visit them, gotramp in them. And though of course we had heard in a dim way of Yellowstone Park and of the Indian reservations both in the United States and in Canada it was a novelty for us. But Englishmen are born trampers and lovers of the wilderness, and are ready to reverse the American proverb—Why walk if you can ride?—and put it, Why ride when you can walk? And I shall not be the first Englishman to seek refreshment hiking through the wild places of the West.
We talked of this exuberantly as we clambered through the forests on the side of Little Chief Mountain, and it was still our theme in the evening when we lighted our fires in a vast rock temple and chasm down into which tumbled dark water, glittering and hastening as it flowed downward to the valleys. How to say a word for national wildernesses in this sedentary era of the world’s history, how to say a word for true religion and quiet and the things of the spirit! Vachel Lindsay will no doubt dramatise the subject in one fine Western epic some day, and I make my appeal, as I have done before, in prose, as for the wildernesses of Europe, so also for the wildernesses of America.But whether we write or sing of what we feel or see, one thing is sure when we are done—we shall have lived apart and tramped and meditated upon the mountains and far in the wilderness and it will mean something in our lives.
What wish you to-day, dear tramp?What wish you for brother-man?Why, just this:—The quality of mountain-sides in the colour of his eyes,The deep of stars in the lake of his soul,Feet that have learned to leap,And a spirit that longs to fly.That’s what I wish, dear brother, to-day,Said the tramp.
What wish you to-day, dear tramp?What wish you for brother-man?Why, just this:—The quality of mountain-sides in the colour of his eyes,The deep of stars in the lake of his soul,Feet that have learned to leap,And a spirit that longs to fly.That’s what I wish, dear brother, to-day,Said the tramp.
What wish you to-day, dear tramp?
What wish you for brother-man?
Why, just this:—
The quality of mountain-sides in the colour of his eyes,
The deep of stars in the lake of his soul,
Feet that have learned to leap,
And a spirit that longs to fly.
That’s what I wish, dear brother, to-day,
Said the tramp.