Of all the national park sites I will ever visit, this is the one to which I am most inclined, and ironically it is the one in which I will spend the least amount of time.

When I was a boy, my mom told me stories about George Washington Carver. Like me, he grew up in the Missouri woods, though he made rather more of the experience than I did. He became a world-reknowned botanist; I became – well, a guy who doesn’t even have houseplants in his apartment.

But my mom must’ve seen in me something of the natural curiosity that drove Carver into the woods. Better yet, I like to think that I have in me something of the love that drove him not underground, but under leaf and bough. There is a kind of isolation in nature that better connects us to the whole of life than being in a crowd of people does; it’s a place where we can believe that being alone is not loneliness but home.

So right off you can see that this essay is going to be a lot more about me than my boyhood hero and his national park site. In part that’s because when my family visited this place in Southwest Missouri back in 2006, we arrived late. We were expected back at my father’s cabin at the Lake of the Ozarks in a few hours, and we had precious little time to do what I normally would have done, which is hike all over the place.

On the other hand, I didn’t have to. Like I said, I was home, and I knew these woods as soon as I started down the paved, zigzag path that leads from the Visitors Center to the world that Carver knew. That the national park system is preserving not only all those majestic mountains and stunning coral reefs, but a little piece of the world I know is an amazingly democratic gratification.

Frankly, the Visitors Center isn’t much, though I understand they are building a better one. Mostly it serves to remind you of why Carver was important, and why anyone would want to preserve his memory. From the middle of what most people consider nowhere – the Middle West – he grew up to develop agricultural products that changed the world. He is especially connected to peanuts, and why every visitor doesn’t get a free handful of goobers when he walks in the door is beyond me.

But it isn’t gimmickry and museum doodads that make this place worth visiting in the first place: It is the world itself, and Carver’s experience of it. He was a deeply religious man and expressed his love of nature in religious language completely appropriate to his time and place. I don’t want to go to the Florissant Fossil Beds in Colorado and hear a lecture on creationism, but reading Carver’s words about God and life here is a different kind of truth, and prepares you for the walk in the woods that follows.

Missouri woods are not breathtaking. The forests are neither broad nor deep, and the trees are not generally massive, though occasionally the hiker happens upon some old oak or cottonwood that seems to be hiding out (rather conspicuously) in the brush. Missouri’s thin and quiet woodlands edge along its equally thin and quiet streams, and a good many of the tree trunks can be encircled by your hands. But the sparsity of upper foliage gives a peculiar green glow to the world below, and the forest floor is thick with lesser plants.

Not very far into the woods at the Carver site is a statue of him as a boy, plant in hand, looking up and out. It’s not a difficult leap to see that it was these lowly plants, from the forest floor to the peanuts he would eventually pick up in the rural South, that inspired him to create.

I stand by the statue and tell my kids that this is the guy I grew up with, the only boyhood hero I remember. Because they’re modern kids, highly politicized, they ask me about the racial element and I have to admit that it never entered into the picture. Then they tell me it’s time to go and I struggle back up the path to the parking lot. In part it’s because the path is steep, but also it’s because I want them to go on ahead of me: I’d be happy to spend some time here alone.