"Your" National Parks

This is both a review of a very old book and a contemporary debate on a sizeable persistent issue. Let’s start with the author, who has a great name. Enos Abijah Mills (1870 – 1922) was an American naturalist, author and homesteader. His Wikipedia entry states, “Mills authored several articles and books on nature, beginning in the first decade of the 20th century. His speeches generally focused on the lives of trees, forestry issues, preservation of natural lands, and the lives of wild animals. Often in his speeches and written articles he encouraged people of all ages to get outside and into nature.”

After reading, Your National Parks, I believe he may have been divided on man’s access to nature. He starts by describing how progress has marched on with the penetration of the wilderness. He credits and blames trappers then prospectors, cowboys and finally farmers who, “hastened its final development.” Strangely, he leaves out the logger.

His introduction is clearly a lament, a nearly tortured one. Which is amazingly ironic for a book that painstakingly describes and equips your average citizen to visit a national park. At once, he is saying, “Come see the majesty, revel in the beauty” but then switches to, “Maybe you should just stay where you are because you are undeserving.” The title of the book becomes humorous as a result.

Mills praises the pioneer and, in so doing, condemns weaker and shallower city people. Pioneers were sincere, authentic and happy. Theirs was “really a life of selection. They were away from the crowd - from the enemies of sincerity and individuality. Of all the people they were most nearly free. But the pioneers are gone.”

He speaks too, of the wilderness vanishing. Remember, this was published in 1919. Mills would be shaken today by, what he called, “the levelling forces development.” John Dickinson Sherman called the parks, “the playgrounds of the people.” Yet, that is the problem. People are the levelling forces. Once invited in, the beauty of the asset is in peril.

Mills contradicts himself time and again. There is a strange vacillation between promoting the heck out of the parks but then embracing dread as he imagines roads, hotels and camps for children on the lands.

He outlines the conflict that exists today and is magnified in Covid as urban dwellers buy country property and visit rural areas. “Congested population, the necessity for outdoor life, the destruction of most of the wild...”. 

His writing hits on a great irony, imbalance and hypocrisy. Travel and adventure writers have been tortured souls for 150 years. Playing a game of, “it is awesome, amazing. Let ME tell you about it, just don’t act on my words. Stay away, keep it pristine.” Most of these writers fail internally while succeeding externally. They do a great job convincing people to explore then clearly are upset by the action.

Mills’ prose on the land is beautifully expressed. It is absolutely inviting. Consider this bit on one parks’ waterfalls, “Many of these high falls are accompanied by a fluttering of a number of rainbows. These flaunt, shift and dart like great hummingbirds.” His reverence for The General Sherman tree is overwhelming. Mills regales with visits to Phantom Ship, Crater Lake and Wizard Island. That is part of the problem, these names are alluring. To keep visitors down, we should rename places Boring Woods, Sad Sight Lake, HoHum Trail, and Netflix is Better Mountain.

The book is an incredible accomplishment. It is an exhaustive history and a geological homage. I was drawn into the latter like never before. At the book’s end is a painstaking, incredibly detailed how-to. Mills arms novices with step-by-step instructions on each park (that existed at that time, thankfully more have been added). His efforts include what to bring, itemized costs down to the penny, sights to see, directions. I cannot help but think he actually kept out real gems from the book as a kind of trick or as an attempt to keep them pure.

I believe that because these were his last words. They are clearly a prayer. A hope that preservation itself is neither unspoiled or bastardized, “The trail compels you to know yourself and to be yourself, and puts you in harmony with the universe. It makes you glad to be living. It gives health, hope, and courage, and it extends the touch of nature which tends to make you kind. This heroic way conducted our ancestors across the ages. It should be preserved. It has for us the inspiration of the ages.”