Chapter XI: National Wildernesses

GLACIER in 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_; or _He 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 Wordsworth drew 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.

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