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| A view of the Yosemite Valley. |
In my busy life, I can hardly commit to 12 hours of anything. Last week’s five hours of Wagner’s “Siegfried” opera just about did me in.
But I accidentally started watching Ken Burns’ six-part documentary “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” and it is dredging up memories from a childhood spent traversing the American West by station wagon.
Burns thesis is in the title, and he believes as John Muir did, that getting people out in the outdoors makes them better people and gives them a more spiritual view of our great country.
My father believed that too, and watching Burns’ movie is like the home movie I never had: post-World War II families in tiny Airstreams or tent trailers pulled by station wagons. We had a Nimrod trailer and a Rambler American wagon. Later we had a Dodge Aspen wagon my mother dubbed “the lemon.”
In the backseat, my little brother and I fought our way across state after state. My sister would have been a combatant too, but she was too young. She entertained herself grabbing fistfuls of dirt and pine needles through the bars of her playpen until my mom started putting a drop cloth down first.
I can remember the mysterious cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, Colorado, and Gila, Arizona. I was fortunate enough to see the Firefall at Yosemite, depicted in all its blazing glory in the Burns’ film. A huge bonfire was lit on summer nights at the top of a dry waterfall, and the embers shoved over the side, which looked like a stream of lava.
I swam at Big Bend in Texas, hiked in Utah at Bryce and Zion. I ice-skated at an outdoor rink in the winter at Sequoia and waded, shivering, in snowpack run-off in a fork of the Kaweah that ran next to our campsite in summer.
I marveled at the Grand Canyon with my grandparents, and felt dwarfed by Carlsbad Caverns, the giant Sequoias, and mammoth presidential heads at Mount Rushmore with my parents.
I counted bears in Yellowstone and gave them names like hurricanes in a notebook, beginning with “A,” and took their photos as well. I left my Brownie camera on a tree stump and it was gone when we returned for it, so my ursine portraits are lost.
My dad and I slept out in the back of the Rambler in Yosemite, hoping to see the marauding bear that had been terrorizing campgrounds.
I tried to express my sense of wonder and awe of nature by writing bad, childish poetry. The only poem extant is titled: “The Painted Desert.” Believe me, you’re better off not hearing it.
All I know is that everything I believe to be good, true and right about this country I learned from visiting national parks and monuments. The fact that we managed to preserve some of the breathtaking scenery on earth makes me proud to be an American.
Of course, I am a partisan of the West. I know there are national parks all over the United States, but we have Yosemite, Yellowstone, Muir Woods, Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, Devil’s Postpile, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, Mount Rushmore, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Tetons, and more.
I think that list trumps the Great Smokey Mountains and the Everglades.
