Well, here we are in Arizona, the land where no one need apologize for being old and overweight since nearly everyone is. As we approached Apache Junction, site of the RV resort we left the trailer at last June, we made sheepish jokes about whether we would find a puddle of melted plastic where the trailer was since it was 114F when we left. How hot was it? I unwisely left some unopened wine in the car. The wine blew the corks out of the bottles (yes, plural) and emptied on the back floor. All I could say, stupidly, is that I didn’t know (until then) wine could do that.
In fact, the trailer was fine except that all the things attached to the walls with adhesive had fallen off. Think tie backs for the curtains, hooks for hotpads at the stove, and the inside thermometer. The resort was another matter since there had been a major rain storm (unheard of here) that flooded the grounds. Apparently the low spots went under several feet of water. All we experienced was some mud under the unit, which turned our folding chairs a romantic tan (they were white), and served us right for storing anything under there in the first place. Now we know.
It’s amazing how much learning curve there is when you move from using an RV just for camping to using it for living, as we plan to do over the next few months. Minor irritations with one another over trying to occupy the same space at the same time required major negotiations regarding priority, life style, and precedence. We had to relearn how to stake our space amicably and set up a timetable. We now take a walk around the one-mile perimeter of the park first thing in the morning, have breakfast, workout on the treadmill and bicycle in the fitness room, then take a dip in the pool. Of course, all this will be subject to yet more adjustment once all the other RVs return and things are much more crowded. But right now afternoons leave me free to write and Sid to read, although he’s already meeting contemporaries and I fully expect him to start playing bridge with them and joining them for coffee poolside.
I’ve written two chapters on the new book despite working on the trailer to get it comfortable—didn’t know that there’s a big industry here making blinds that fit over the outside of the trailer windows. It makes a huge difference for the inside temperature but I’d never seen it before. Of course, I’d never been in 114F before—well, maybe once at Palm Springs and I thought it was the closest thing possible to being in ring 5 of Dante’s inferno.
You gotta admire the human spirit, though. It’s amazing how creative one can be when necessity demands. We have made multiple runs on Walmart buying space-extending gadgetry. Sid’s idea of storing plates vertically suddenly made the cupboard over the stove seem capacious. We celebrated that achievement, as well as his suggestion that we store all the pots in the oven. Even a few extra inches makes a huge difference, something I would never think about much in the Denver house. We have been like kids at Christmas congratulating ourselves over organizing ourselves. He’s even used the fold-down television shelf in the bedroom to house his shirts. Not a single cranny is safe from being appropriated to other uses.
I have to admit it’s a huge adjustment from a 3,000 square foot house to a 30 foot trailer with one slide out. But I just looked at the national weather and it was 34 degrees in Denver with snow flurries. Today it was 86 degrees here and the pool was warm. I think I’ll take it although I suspect that learning to live small is likely to either be character-building or a quick trip to the loony bin. Time will tell.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Covered in Yellowstone Mud
The recent PBS special on the National Parks has left me feeling profoundly depressed. Given the fact that I love these parks, as do most other Americans, it strikes me as strange that I should not feel the uplift and “super” humanity that the six specials have argued I should. I’ve felt my share of wonder at the beauty of these parks--most recently Denali and ten or so others through the years--but not from this series of presentations.
Some of my discouragement may be my own misguided expectation of the series. For me, the National Parks are, as the series claims super frequently, a source of inspiration and beauty, an uplift to the human soul and part of what makes us human. If it’s part of a national park, I expect—I know—that certain things will be so. There will be rangers who love their work, there will be wise advice on where to hike, and there will be standards of care to preserve what I see for those who follow. I also know that what I will see will fit the standards of what I have come to expect from a park belonging to the nation.
Yet having now seen the series, I feel grubby and very small. I’ve never done anything to damage our parks and yet I feel coated with dirt and besplattered by the bubbling mud of the Yellowstone geysers.
Perhaps I deserve to feel this as the series earnestly seeks to raise our awareness of the tenuous way the parks came into being—we could so easily have lost them and still can for that matter. I guess my reaction is partly my surprise at the attack that came out of the television screen. I was expecting a celebration rather than a rather tawdry expose particularly when it was clear that I was part of what was being condemned. I am a human being and by definition I am as guilty of the desecration as anyone else.
Now, I am not saying that the expose was undeserved. Far from it. I was sickened by the Arizona senator who used his position to set up toll booths for people wanting to see the Grand Canyon even though it was national park land. I was likewise sickened by the lumber companies who clear-cut virgin forests in the Smokeys (with the blessing of the forest service), even after the land was not theirs—and nothing was done to them. I was sickened by the Wyoming ranchers who were prepared to shoot anyone who tried to stop them grazing their cattle on public land in the Tetons and then years later claimed the protected park as a Wyoming treasure and even put the mountain profile on the state automobile license plate.
These were the jackals, the carcass-strippers, the ones who looked at a landscape and saw only profit. Yet they weren’t alone. There were also the others—the ones who were photographed mugging for the cameras at scenic points, the ones who were taken back to the places where they had scratched their names and were required to removed the defacement, the ones who visited Mesa Verde and yodeled like the plains Indians even though they were visiting the ancestral homes of settled agrarian farmers, and the ones who took the forbidden lava rocks from Volcanoes National Park only to mail them back in guilty packages when the promised curse appeared to coming true.
Yes, the series appears to be saying—the national parks have had to endure despite our careless indifference to the harm we inflict. And lest we forget we are capable of the worst—the series even reminds us of the infamous internment of Americans of Japanese descent during WWII, even though a number of these people had worked hard to preserve our parks.
I’m not going to buy the DVDs of this series. I don’t need to as the message is clear: just by visiting the parks and riding over roads cut into the wilderness, I am part of the process of loving them to death. The parks are not our manifest destiny to destroy—any more than our planet is. I’m going to have to rethink my relation to the parks (maybe that was the idea), particularly since Congress has recently voted to allow people to carry guns into the national parks. I can see little benefit to this except to the poachers and pot growers and I fear that yet again our parks may be in danger.
When will we ever learn?
Some of my discouragement may be my own misguided expectation of the series. For me, the National Parks are, as the series claims super frequently, a source of inspiration and beauty, an uplift to the human soul and part of what makes us human. If it’s part of a national park, I expect—I know—that certain things will be so. There will be rangers who love their work, there will be wise advice on where to hike, and there will be standards of care to preserve what I see for those who follow. I also know that what I will see will fit the standards of what I have come to expect from a park belonging to the nation.
Yet having now seen the series, I feel grubby and very small. I’ve never done anything to damage our parks and yet I feel coated with dirt and besplattered by the bubbling mud of the Yellowstone geysers.
Perhaps I deserve to feel this as the series earnestly seeks to raise our awareness of the tenuous way the parks came into being—we could so easily have lost them and still can for that matter. I guess my reaction is partly my surprise at the attack that came out of the television screen. I was expecting a celebration rather than a rather tawdry expose particularly when it was clear that I was part of what was being condemned. I am a human being and by definition I am as guilty of the desecration as anyone else.
Now, I am not saying that the expose was undeserved. Far from it. I was sickened by the Arizona senator who used his position to set up toll booths for people wanting to see the Grand Canyon even though it was national park land. I was likewise sickened by the lumber companies who clear-cut virgin forests in the Smokeys (with the blessing of the forest service), even after the land was not theirs—and nothing was done to them. I was sickened by the Wyoming ranchers who were prepared to shoot anyone who tried to stop them grazing their cattle on public land in the Tetons and then years later claimed the protected park as a Wyoming treasure and even put the mountain profile on the state automobile license plate.
These were the jackals, the carcass-strippers, the ones who looked at a landscape and saw only profit. Yet they weren’t alone. There were also the others—the ones who were photographed mugging for the cameras at scenic points, the ones who were taken back to the places where they had scratched their names and were required to removed the defacement, the ones who visited Mesa Verde and yodeled like the plains Indians even though they were visiting the ancestral homes of settled agrarian farmers, and the ones who took the forbidden lava rocks from Volcanoes National Park only to mail them back in guilty packages when the promised curse appeared to coming true.
Yes, the series appears to be saying—the national parks have had to endure despite our careless indifference to the harm we inflict. And lest we forget we are capable of the worst—the series even reminds us of the infamous internment of Americans of Japanese descent during WWII, even though a number of these people had worked hard to preserve our parks.
I’m not going to buy the DVDs of this series. I don’t need to as the message is clear: just by visiting the parks and riding over roads cut into the wilderness, I am part of the process of loving them to death. The parks are not our manifest destiny to destroy—any more than our planet is. I’m going to have to rethink my relation to the parks (maybe that was the idea), particularly since Congress has recently voted to allow people to carry guns into the national parks. I can see little benefit to this except to the poachers and pot growers and I fear that yet again our parks may be in danger.
When will we ever learn?
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