California, Oklahoma
And all of the places I ain’t ever been to
But down in the valley
With whiskey rivers
These are the places you will find me hidin’
These are the places I will always go
I am on my way
I am on my way back to where I started
— The Head and the Heart, “Down in the Valley”
In a twist of irony, Grand Teton National Park was created by a series of shady land deals orchestrated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr, son of the famous oil tycoon. Nowadays, underhanded land grabs and Big Oil are the archenemies of conservationists and environmentalists, but Terry Tempest Williams paints Rockefeller and his plan in golden, glowing colors. The land became a national park, piecemeal, between 1943 and 1950, leaving only the JY Ranch in the hands of the Rockefeller family as a beloved summer retreat. In 2001 this, too, passed into the hands of the National Park Service, at the request of Rockefeller Jr.’s son, Laurance. The ranch itself was dismantled and reconstructed outside the park, and the land on which it had once stood was rewilded, returned to it’s pre-ranch state. Williams explains the motivation for the land transfer:
This gift marked a continuation of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s philanthropic legacy to national parks. The ranch, purchased in 1932 for $90,000, roughly $45 an acre, is valued today at more than $160 million. But as Laurance Rockefeller said, “Father’s greatest gift to the national park was not his generous donation of land, but rather his vision that people can live in harmony with nature.”
But the vision realized by the gift and the rewilding is not one of harmony, but segregation. The deconstruction of the ranch is a clear message that humans can live in harmony with nature, and nature with humans, but they cannot do so while living in the same place. That kind of thinking is not only sad, it’s dangerous—but it’s also unfortunately common in conservation.
Humility in born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage in a world beyond ourselves.
—Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land
I would like to go to Canada
I have never been there before
All of the travel that I have done
I don’t know what I am looking for
—Nadia Reid, “Oh, Canada”
I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing—not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer the get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it not but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? […] I know that some of my friends see my keeping a hawk as morally suspect, but I couldn’t love or understand hawks as much as I do if I’d only ever seen them on screens. I’ve made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me. […] She can resist the meaning humans give her. But the condor? The condor has no resistance to us at all.
— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
Last weekend I took a break from practicing spontaneity to spontaneously stop at a park off a highway in Burnaby. Spontaneity is something I’m bad at, so I was deliberately practicing it by blowing off my work and going for a drive. I kept catching these tantalizing glimpses of the strait through the trees and I told myself if I saw a sign for a park or a pulloff or something I would take it. Which is how I found myself not ten minutes later crossing a narrow footbridge over a set of railroad tracks.
It turns out the tracks were important, because the park is one of the last places to bear the name of the town that grew up around them. The railroad, the water, and the plentiful trees created the perfect habitat for a sawmill, called Barnet after the owner’s wife’s family. The community took it’s name from the mill and grew into a sizable company town, with economic ups and downs, fires and rebuildings, and even a dramatic labor strike. But today nothing remains except the park and Highway 7A, still signed in some places as the Barnet Highway.
The experience helped me put things in perspective, though I wasn’t quite sure what that perspective was. Striking for fair pay must have seemed all-important to those long-ago mill workers, yet now it was barely a footnote in history. How would my looming, all-important, panic-inducing deadlines look in five years, yet alone a hundred and fifty? That kind of thinking certainly made all my fears and dreams seem fleeting and insignificant. But perhaps history is not an appropriate scale by which to measure a single person’s life. Humanity may experience centuries, but humans experience moments. And the moment I was experiencing was of a mild winter morning by the water with the snowy hills heaped up like clouds and someone’s dog running by on the path. It was altogether a much nicer moment than any I might have been experiencing at home behind my desk. So I decided my deadlines weren’t, in the grand scheme of things, all that important, and I should go on practicing spontaneity a little while longer.
Open road in central California [x]
Another long day (Day Eight) of driving lay ahead of us, but it was, oddly, the day I’d been looking forward to most. More than Arches, more than the Grand Canyon, what I really wanted to do was drive a particular stretch of back highway and forest road in California.
The jagged rock formations of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley.
Country road, take me home…
John Denver shuffled to the top of the playlist before we’d even left the national park. Ashley and I laughed at the happy coincidence: we were indeed on the road home, though it would take us several days and three states to reach it.
View of the Grand Canyon from the top of North Kaibab Trail.
The Grand Canyon.
The sight of it inspires different emotions for different people, most of them very strong emotions. For me, it inspires a kind of disbelief and despair. Disbelief because it is so big, so grand, so… so much that my mind cannot grasp it. Walking along the rim of canyon, I start to wonder if it is even real. If the park staff printed a really, really long poster and suspended it from a scaffold… would I really be able to tell the difference? It is unreal the way the solar system is unreal, the way those vast distances and massive objects just cannot exist in the same reality as coffee mugs and car keys and you and me.
Looking down to the continuation of the Kaibab Trail and the inner canyon.
And despair, because of course it is real, the way both car keys and Jupiter are real, but there is no way to ever convey its reality to someone else. I could write pages of description, and you would still not understand what it is like to stand on the edge of canyon. I could take thousands of photos, and not a single one of them could capture it immensity. The Grand Canyon makes me put down my camera because… what’s the point.
The Kaibab Trail switchbacks down, down, down.
And so I will say very little about the Grand Canyon except that we hiked part of the North Kaibab Trail, and part of the Rim Trail, and that it was more than I can ever, ever convey to you.
A team of mules takes a break while heading up the Kaibab Trail.
Bird, Wandering 