OUR CROWDED PARKS

When we visited Canyonlands National Park in southern Utah recently, we failed to make a campground reservation. After all, it was May, surely too early for the hordes of tourists that drive into the parks in summer. We forgot to note that we were arriving just a few days before Memorial Day, a very popular time. (Indeed, on Saturday the entrance to nearby Arches National Park was closed by the state police, for the first time ever, because backed-up traffic onto the highway was so hazardous.) So, we spent two nights out on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands before scoring a campsite inside the park. Even then, only my partner’s disabled placard made it possible. We spent three wonderful days in Canyonlands.

For such a huge park (527 square miles), Canyonlands has surprisingly few campsites, possiby as the result of an attempt to protect the park’s fragile desert environment. The two campgrounds have a total of thirty-seven sites. Early every morning, RVers and tent campers circle every loop, watching like vultures for people who are vacating their sites. (No reservations are possible; it is a first come–first served situation. For the elderly, getting up at dawn to drive into a park and then compete for a site can be very difficult.) Fortunately, other campgrounds can be found near by in Dead Horse Point State Park, the BLM’s Horsethief campground, and other spots.

One effective way to avoid disappointment is to travel before May 15 or after September 10, when children are in school, and families are less likely to be on the road. Even then, though, it is becoming harder and harder to travel and find stopping places for the night.

In just the past few years, national parks have become much more popular for a variety of reasons, including Ken Burns’s TV series. As a parks enthusiast, of course I am happy to see this trend, even if it makes my life more difficult. To be sure of having a campsite, reservations for the most crowded places are essential. Barbara Parker, who with her husband has been a host at one of the Yellowstone campgrounds for several years, has written in an online RV forum about her pity for and astonishment at people who arrive in mid-summer with no reservations and expect to camp. They cannot stay, and it is a far, far drive out of the park! When we went to Yellowstone (after Labor Day) a few years ago we found a riverside spot just outside the park that had nice pit toilets, but finding it was just dumb luck.

As we refuse to lock ourselves into a schedule when traveling, the need for reservations is a pain. In the West, where the BLM has vast public land areas, we can simply pull off the road and stay overnight. There is always Wal-Mart, too. As a last resort, private RV campgrounds are common nearly everywhere. So many of them are either too expensive or slumlike that we scarcely ever use them.

This country’s state and national parks still have the features that make them so appealing, and they are the last habitats for some threatened or endangered species. What is the solution to the crowding? Some legislators (including mine, unfortunately) in the House of Representatives feel that more campgrounds and other facilities (such as skating rinks) should be opened up “for the people,” as if conservation is elitist, but I feel that would be a serious mistake. We must preserve our parks, where much of the natural environment remains, and where visitors can learn about archeology, paleontology, ecology, and history in unmatched fashion. If we lose these priceless places, or convert them to theme parks, we can never get them back. Yes, I will be irritated when it is hard for us to find a campsite. In the long run, though, preserving the parks trumps anyone’s personal wishes.

 

WHO ARE THE KARDASHIANS, ANYWAY?

Waiting in the checkout lane at a supermarket, I glance at the magazines with their photos of glamorous celebrities. Or worse, photos of celebrities the paparazzi have caught drunk or obese. Who are all these people, and why should anyone care about them?

Long ago, I cared. Back in the 1950s I knew all the movie stars who were in Photoplay and other magazines. The term au courant was not yet in my vocabulary, but the idea was already entrenched. Most teenagers knew that June Allyson had a dusty pink bedroom and was married to Dick Powell, had a crush on Stewart Granger after seeing King Solomon’s Mines, and looked enviously at Jeanne Crain’s pencil sketches. No detail about the stars was unimportant to us high school girls.

For an impressionable young girl living far from city lights, fascination with celebrities is understandable. But, that was long ago, and in college I was exposed to live theater, classical music, and philosophy. The world suddenly seemed much larger and better than it had looked in glossy magazines.

Old people are often urged to “think young,” to “keep up with the times,” and so on. Isn’t it better for us to provide a link to the past? We have a perspective that is impossible for the young. My mother, who was born in 1908, forecast the current recession years ago, because she saw the similarities to the Roaring Twenties and to the Depression. I remember World War II and the postwar years, and can contrast that time with the present.

From our own aging viewpoint, we may be happier and more fulfilled if we spend time with the important books and music of the past than if we try to understand current ones. I would rather read a novel by Austen or Dickens than by most modern writers, rather listen to Tchaikovsky or Gershwin than to Philip Glass. Some modem writers and composers are excellent, of course; I enjoy reading anything by Simon Winchester, and am captivated by Animusic. In the end, however, I go back to old favorites.

Most of all, though, I want to catch up with important things that have been postponed too long, especially regarding our natural environment. Just in the past few years, for instance, I have begun truly experiencing the national parks and realizing their importance. About 100 years ago the poet A.E. Housman wrote that “And since to look at things in bloom, Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go, To see the cherry hung with snow.” I have far fewer than 50 springs remaining, but will make the most of them. 

PARADISE ON EARTH

Regrettably, we were able to spend only a couple of days at Arches National Park on our return from New Mexico in 2010. Driving into the park at sunset, we gazed at balanced rocks, towering hoodoos, and natural arches glowing in the russet and orange light.

The next morning we took the wrong hiking trail by a lucky mistake, so we avoided the hordes of tourists near Landscape Arch and Delicate Arch, and walked to Broken Arch  by ourselves. Being alone in windswept canyon country is important for fully appreciating its stark beauty. Edward Abbey was happy when he spent two seasons here by himself as a park ranger, but dreaded the inevitable time when broad, paved roads would be constructed, allowing many tourists—like us—to invade the park in their RVs and SUVs. In fact, he felt no new roads should be built in the national parks, and visitors should walk most of the time.

Though Arches and other national parks in the Southwest are spectacularly beautiful, they strike me too much as being Earth’s skeleton, providing structure without nourishment. The parks I love most are rich in water, the blood of Gaia. Yosemite, Crater Lake, and Yellowstone glisten with waterfalls, cataracts, and lakes or rivers that bring water and nutrients to surrounding plants and animals.

Even Abbey needed to leave the desert at times and spend time in forests and near water. Before Glen Canyon was dammed to create Lake Powell, he and a friend rafted down the Colorado River, exploring it as few since John Wesley Powell had done. Abbey’s elegiac description of now-gone Glen Canyon makes it sound like paradise—in fact, he said in Desert Solitaire that wilderness is “all the paradise we need.”

We still have that earthly paradise, in spite of the crowded campgrounds and gift shops that spoil parts of the national parks. It is still possible to pull on a pair of hiking boots, walk for half an hour or so, and find ourselves in wilderness. As Jefferson and others said in another context, though, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. We need not only to support the national parks, but also to defend their wildness.