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?