Driving from Maine to Vermont we decided to make a little detour up Mount Washington, the East Coast’s tallest peak at 6,288 feet. The road is windy and narrow and on a Saturday afternoon there is no shortage of traffic threatening to force you off the pavement and careening down the mountainside.
At the top the parking lots are overflowing, teeming with man. A plastic latte cup rolls back and forth on the ground as I step out of the car. We file up the wooden stairs with the others to the lookout areas. At the peak there is a line a hundred people long to take a picture in front of the sign declaring that you have achieved the summit.
Cronies and confidantes of mine often hear me decry overpopulation. These particular jeremiads are usually not even in response to environmental or humanitarian crises, but complaints inspired by simple Western selfishness put forth under the chintzy guise of a quasi-noble conviction to see new places in all their purity, undisturbed and undefiled. An inexplicably deep-rooted belief that when I first step into a streambed or onto a beach or atop a rise there should be little other sign of human life. That when I come to a new town it should not be overrun with people seeking cheap and fast services. That the world should exist for me as I wish it did, some fairytale ideal with all the modern amenities I benefit from with none of the attending crowds. For that is the heart of the issue. Crowds.
I like to believe that these ideal conditions exist somewhere, and try to seek them out in even the vaguest incarnation. Before an extended stay in Spain I scoured the map for a place along the southern coast that might meet my impossible demands. The criteria simply became a town on the Mediterranean with no golf course and no Burger King. It was difficult but in the end I found one, and I do believe it may have been the only such locale. In my more extreme bouts of longing for the uninhabited I research sojourns in the Mongolian steppe, Banks Island above the Arctic Circle. Ah, bliss.
Enochlophobia is the fear of crowds. Some say “ochlo” is a derivative of the Greek word for “crowd” or “mob” (it is), easily explaining the etymology of this particular phobia, but I have a different theory. In the Book of Genesis, Enoch is the seventh of ten antediluvian patriarchs descendent from Adam and Eve (the first humans ever). Most biblical scholars agree that a whopping 1656 years elapsed in those ten generations, from the creation of Adam to the time of Noah and the Great Flood. Ten generations these days would span about 300 years, but in Genesis people lived to the age of 900 or so, giving the offspring of Adam and Eve a fair amount of time to go forth and populate the earth. Many since have attempted to calculate what this population might have grown to in that time, and estimates range wildly from 2.5 million to 17 billion.
Whatever that number may be, it gets too high, so much so that God feels the need “to eliminate everywhere all flesh in which there is the breath of life.” Noah and his crew, of course, are spared. Noah is the great-grandson of Enoch, born 69 years after Enoch mysteriously disappears into heaven at the early age of 365. Thus we can conclude the world of Genesis is getting pretty out of hand even in Enoch’s day. Perhaps not yet quite bad enough to incur the great deluge of the Almighty, but overcrowded enough that your everyday citizen might become tired of the riff-raff, might develop a little Enoch-lophobia and check out 500 years early into heaven.
Crowds. A conundrum and a riddle. We all hate them, we all create them. Hunters, anglers, surfers, hikers, climbers, tourists, motorists, and everyone else that participates in activities requiring a lot of space for one person has felt that particular ire towards the other people trying to do what they themselves are doing. And this frustration, annoyance, and even anger we experience when we are seeking places faraway, peaceful, or remote and find them to be discovered already is a strange paradox. These are people who in theory we should feel a kinship towards. People who want to see new things, acting on one of humankind’s most important and defining characteristics — curiosity. They are after the beauty and depth and texture of the real world, just as we are. Furthermore, we ourselves are part of the problem. We are in their way just as they are in ours. We can’t extract ourselves from the masses hoping to experience the magic of the earth even as we all inevitably choke it out of every corner of the globe.
I drove a car to the top of Mt. Washington. If I was a through hiker on the Appalachian Trail and had just walked 1800 miles to the highest point on the East Coast and saw someone like me stepping out of his vehicle after driving up the mountain on a paved road in twenty minutes I would be totally disgusted. The swarms of Me’s in the parking lot, “summiting” up the wooden steps would be horribly depressing and I might call for the immediate destruction of the road. No more vehicles allowed. Only hikers, only people who truly want to know these places. None of the hoi polloi, the bucket listers, the god damn selfie takers.
I do think there are too many people in the world. I’m one of them. I don’t deserve to be here anymore than anyone else. Certainly a lot less than some people. I don’t think there should be another Great Flood. I don’t have an answer. I do get a little giddy when I read headlines about declining birthrates, despite the economics. Here in North America we are spoiled with space and it often still doesn’t feel like enough. But it absolutely is out there. And when you don’t happen to find it, you can’t let the crowds get you down too much.
The White Mountains of New Hampshire are a beautiful spectacle. Hurricane force winds occurring 110 days a year on Mount Washington keep the treeline at around 4400 feet and above that you are in the barren tundra. Tundra! You’d have to drive another thousand miles to the north to find such a biome again. Then it’s just windswept stone with only stunted grasses and flowers and moss clinging to the mountainside in one of the most inhospitable climates on earth. On a clear day up there you can see for 130 miles, into Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Quebec, and off to the Atlantic Ocean. And if you position yourself right, with the crowds behind you, there won’t be a soul in sight.
Nice reflection. Like you, I have often felt jealous in public spaces and struggled to enjoy places that can’t offer some solitude. How nice it would be to have my own private wilderness. Build a thousand mile barbed wire fence around my favorite river basin. I think accessibility, however, is a net positive for most places. Especially those that are lucky enough to get some tender care from a federal management agency. I think if instead of or in addition to a monetary contribution, people were required to make sacrifices/offerings on mountain tops, then the sanctity of those places might be better preserved.