National “Park”

24 Aug National “Park”

in Idaho

I used my annual motorcycle vacation budget this year to take in the wonders of Glacier National Park.  Its a beautiful place and a remarkable achievement of a forward thinking that set aside the area as a public resource in a time when minerals extraction was regarded as a means to an end.  I mean, theres no chance we’d deforest whole swathes of  land to get at some oily sand to refine into gasoline, or disassemble whole mountaintops to get at  5 foot thick veins of coal anymore, right?  Well, if your sarcasm detector set off a red alert, your irony meter should have at least pegged a minor bleep.  I think its possible that we use the excuse of having these National Parks to continue to abuse our natural habitat.  Setting aside great tracts of land as a kind of museum to nature is great, but  the geography defined by a fancy title is the same land that sustains us outside the intentional boundaries of the “Park”.   We certainly do need to extract minerals and resources from our lands, we don’t need to use the land as means to an end.

along Going to the Sun road

I was drawn to the park this year because I wanted to ride my motorcycle on one of the nation’s most elevation-gaining, twisty, narrow, sheer cliff sided, no shoulder roads.  I’ll write more about  riding the Going To The Sun Road later.  Riding my motorbike is my hobby.  My career is involved with manipulating privately owned parcels of land to achieve an aesthetic, and in doing so I dig a lot.  Every project produces some artifact that gets dug up.  Often we find “garbage”- stuff that people discard or just want gone, and so common is the perception that a final way to get rid of something is to burry it.  Earlier eras are better representations of this ethic.   When we begin work on a 20’s era house we expect to find glass snake oil bottles in the ground, when it’s the lawn of a 70’s house we find batteries and motor oil jugs.  Isn’t this why we bury our pets in our lawns?  They “find eternal rest” in a context where eternity itself can be defined by a desire to install a patio in that same area some time later.  We find lots of cat skeletons.  RIP, kitties.

We’re better about unintentionally poisoning the ground with our detritus- we know lots more about causation as it relates to pollution, but were still hazy about correlation.  Some interesting artifacts are beginning to wash up on the Northwest beaches, but since  its debris from the tsunami-ravaged japanese coast where a power generation facility melted down, lots of the flotsam is radioactive.  Too bad, its fun to collect stuff from the beach.  It’s going to be hard to make a national park out of a portion of the ocean so events that will continue to occur like that one won’t  spoil the reserved area we define as Park.

2013 trip to glacier

I had a nice get-away to Glacier last week.  At the same time, so did a few tens of thousands of other people who went to the Park, almost all of them drove there.  When I was considering a topic to write about for this entry, I was driven to the pithy-yet corny metaphor of the National Park as Parking lot.  Its not all that clever, but see- I went there to transit the roads on my motorbike, so it was kind of frustrating having to pass all those RV’s just to tuck in behind another RV at another variable-radius, off-camber sweeping turn while slowing down to not-so -fun.  Going To The Sun Road is scenic.  Its also probably a lot of fun to ride a motorcycle on with no traffic.  I wouldn’t know.

Want to point out to me that there’s already an Oceanic National Park?   Want to dispute the importance of the role the National Parks play in our continuing ecological efforts?

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