When city life is hemming in on me, a trip into wild country outside of the city will work wonders in my life, and I'll go back into the city with a smile on my face, renewed in spirit and ready to start another day.
I know that John Muir, Horace Kephart and many other common folks like myself needed to leave civilization periodically to just keep their sanity.
So why do I cry each night as I watch Ken Burn's The National Parks: America's Best Idea currently being shown on PBS?
Maybe it's because I have lived for so long by the Great Smokies National Park, but yet have visited it...really visited it...so seldom.
Maybe it's because, like those heroes who made the National Parks possible, nature speaks to me and calms my fears and worries while nurturing my hopes, like nothing else I know.
Maybe it's because I see God in nature.
Maybe it's because they became a reality despite dollars that were used to try to prevent them so that a few could profit.
Maybe it's because that dollars, especially the pennies and nickels that my neighbors' grandparents in Tennessee and North Carolina contributed to the cause, that finally made the Great Smokies possible.
Maybe it's because I know they will be there for my children and my grandchildren and their grandchildren.
Maybe it's because I know that wild critters and sweet birds, even salamanders and copperheads, can find safety and their own peace in our National Parks.
Maybe it's because this project of setting aside lands for the public (folks like me) can make me proud to be an American at last.
Maybe it's because I find me there, as Ruth Kirk says, at the beginning of the most recent segment.
Maybe it's because I have actually seen so few of the National Parks.
Maybe it's because I miss having a family which really cherished camping out, taking long hikes on a regular basis.
Maybe it's because, despite this, I have known some terrific people who did do what our family was unable to do.
Maybe it's because I was born and raised in Iowa, one state with no National Parks, unless Herbert Hoover's Birthplace counts.
Maybe, unlike land in Iowa that has to be "doing something productive" like raising corn or soybeans, the land in National Parks can just "be."
Maybe it's because I "own" these parks just as much as any of the Rockefeller or Vanderbilt.
Maybe it's because the "spirit of the woods" continues to call me.
To my soul, there are no maybes. It alone knows that just as the centipede finds solace in the unspoiled virgin of the wild, it is also there who my soul becomes one with the universe.