The Everlasting Imprint of Wild Places

A couple of weeks of battling the flu, or something, that passed from one boy to the next brought a nice find:  in our downtime the boys and I started watching “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”, Ken Burns’ latest documentary.  It’s……….I have nothing to write about do I.  Here I am trying to squeeze something out, to tell you how moved I was watching the stories of these parks. How proud it made me that they were set aside for generation after generation to enjoy, how deeply I felt the speakers’ love of the majesty and beauty, and how romantic I find the whole thing.  But I don’t know what to say.  What do I tell you about the West and why I feel drawn to it?  Is it my dad?  Who cares?  The old man couldn’t stay in one place long enough to like it, and that lucked into a period of  spending time all over the state of Wyoming, trout fishing, half-assed camping, and driving, a lot.  Am I attracted to these places because they remind me of one of the gifts from my father: the days spent on trout streams and the unbridled joy we both expressed when one of us hooked a fish?  Could be.  Those were personal times – I felt like not just his son, but his friend, his fishing partner, and that carried with it an intimacy.  If he went fishing with someone else, a friend (drinking buddy) from the Moose Lodge, I felt betrayed, and couldn’t imagine he was enjoying himself as much as he would with me along.  And in some fundamental way I think I was right.  Because I knew how he cheered and beamed when I caught a fish and how I returned the sentiment when he did the same.  I knew he wasn’t feeling that sense of shared victory when Larry Hewitt caught a fish, or visa versa.  Hell, Larry Hewitt didn’t even let out a grunt when he got a bite.  His demeanor was the same whether he was reeling in an empty hook or a six pound trout.  He seemed to me empty, joyless – everything our trips weren’t.
So, trout fishing in Wyoming was formative and special.  It served as an inadvertent lesson on the value of wild spaces.  We kept fishing, even after our move to Florida, but it was never quite the same.  Still fun.  But fishing for bass on a lake surrounded by development, or even in a vast place like Lake Okeechobee, didn’t carry with it the same level of romance.  It is that romanticism that partly lead to our move west from New York in ’07, and it was that romanticism that was touched this past week watching “The National Parks”.  I can’t recommend it enough, especially the first episode.
This is a young country.  We don’t have 1,000 year old cathedrals and castles.  But the Yellowstones and Yosemites are our cathedrals, settings that touch the spirit, can heal the soul, and speak to a history far deeper than the thin chapter we populate.  I love these places.  I love that they were fought for and set aside by men of vision at a time when such things were not done, anywhere, and that because of that vision my father could share them with me and I now share them with my boys.  I love that the visitor from an hour away and the tourist from half a world away come to these places and might just understand each other in their mutual silence and awe.
Every child of this country, whether from rural America, sleepy suburb, slick metropolis, or inner city, should know of these places, know that they are part of their legacy, and visit them. Somehow, some way, visit them.   You will commune with something bigger than yourself, and touch a link to the beginning of time. You will not leave the same person and you will understand value that cannot be quantified.

It was a pleasant surprise to learn Yellowstone was named the country’s first National Park on March 1, Sebastian’s birth date.  Yellowstone (and by extension most of these parks) is symbolic to me – symbolic of my childhood in Wyoming, and of the best of my father, which softens the memories of the worst, and solidifies what peace I have in my heart for the man, his shortcomings, his gifts, and the ever unfolding lessons he inadvertently taught me.  I love them as I loved him.