John Steinbeck's view of the national parks

[John Hunter]

Over the past few days, I've had the great pleasure of reading John Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY: IN SEARCH OF AMERICA, his 1962 account of a couple of months spent traveling the back roads of America with his poodle Charley.  At one point in the book, as he is about to visit Yellowstone, he says the following.  What he says has stuck with me and may do so with you, for it in some ways contradicts what the NPS is all about while at the same time making sense.  Let's hear what you think.

I must confess to a laxness in the matter of National Parks.  I haven't visited many of them.  Perhaps this is because they enclose the unique, the spectacular, the astounding--the greatest waterfall, the deepest canyon, the highest cliff, the most stupendous works of man or nature.  And I would rather see a good Brady photograph than Mount Rushmore.  For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and of our civilization.  Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.

John Hunter

[jimmy]

 

I am a big fan of Steinbeck, especially In Dubious Battle,  and of course The Grapes of Wrath. All his books were about the essence of American experience, weren't they?  

 

As he says here, he hasn't visited many national parks.

 

Of course, there IS something to the issue he states, his critique, the idea that one-of-a-kind or uniqueness means parks are freaks.  All of us have seen the uniqueness carried to extremes, particularly when some people try to describe some feature in some national park.  And there have certainly been some overstated distinctions in park planning in a quest to describe the unit as one of a kind.

 

The National Park System as a whole describes the scope of America, and as such they are absolutely representative of America.  Yes, it can appear freaky when a circle of built in seats are laid out around a geyser for people shuttling in for periodic eruptions.  But when you experience a park for what it is, it feels nothing like a freak, but yes it does feel extraordinary.  Each park IS excellent.   Sites are excluded no matter how excellent from consideration in the Special Resource Study process for new parks if the System is already well represented in that theme. 

 

The NPS did move to address the idea that the "real" -- rather than the unique -- America may not be represented enough in a System designed to avoid managing everything thrust at it, while maintaining excellence. This insight into the need to develop preservation strategies for the "real America" is why the National Heritage Area concept of a system of "living landscapes" was developed by Linda Neal and refined by Deny Galvin and DSC planners.  Because, it is entirely possible 200 years from now people will want to know how 'normal' people lived, what they did, what the common experience of creating the America we know was.  I would like to see more of that represented in the System, while at the same time seeking excellence and distinctiveness in such units.

 

There is a parallel critique to Steinbeck's that you can see expressed by another fiction writer, in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  As I recall, they characters are in Rocky Mountain, and the author observes that the park looks too manicured and so managed as to appear removed from Nature, or reality.  As with Steinbeck, there is some truth there as well, but for the most part the NPS in recent years has worked hard to focus on the Meaning of the resource.

 

PS:  twice last week getting ready for the Senate hearings of the National Parks Subcommittee I heard people say "we must make sure there are no Pizza Parlors inside  park boundaries."  They were talking about the large landscape units proposed for the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park.  In truth, there are no Pizza Parlors inside those boundaries, that was just a superior sort of way to try to rip down the SRS for the proposed landscape-scale park.  National Historic Landmark districts are as much outstanding examples as are parks, and when a District contains a concentration of cultural resources of quality they are not eliminated because a non-contributing non-historic structure sits there too.  But they are not considered part of the landmark.

 

It seems to me there was a time when we were in danger in cultural resources of being overrepresented by homes of "great men" or of "great architecture" ripped out of the fabric of life and community, in danger of favoring icons rather than the most meaningful center of human experience.  I think that danger is over.

[Jerry Rogers]

John,

 

Thanks for opening the question.  Steinbeck indeed makes sense, but in this passage he only contradicts what the National Park Service used to be all about, and today is partially about.

 

Many NPS units, especially the early ones, were set aside precisely because they were extraordinary and certainly not because they were representative.  Those extraordinary places have become icons to America, and to you and me, but a very long time ago—as the Service began to realize that in addition to thrilling visitors its job included preserving places that were representative of ecosystems, geology, history, archaeology, etc.—the System began to become more representative of America.

 

We had not gone very far down this road when Steinbeck wrote this last (and in my opinion least) book in 1962.  Route 66 was still a highway that he had made famous and no one then would have imagined it as the present National Historic Trail under NPS leadership.  The biggest leap toward what he seems to long for came four years later in the National Historic Preservation Act, with its emphasis on recognizing the value of that broader and more representative America—and I believe it does that very well. 

 

Steinbeck probably did not know that the real Cannery Row was for a time a National Historic Landmark, due directly to the values he planted in our minds about it in his 1945 book.  He would have appreciated the irony in the fact that we had to de-list it because the people making money from the setting of his story about people with no money enterprisingly destroyed the actual historic resources of the place.

 

Chances are Steinbeck never knew—or let is slip his mind—that the Brady photographs he liked may have been taken in National Park System units that had been set aside because of their extraordinary historical significance.

 

Nowadays the National Park Service is about all of these things, the representative as well as the unique and the splendid.  I am really glad the Service does all of these things, including preserving the icons.  The icons will probably always dominate our image, as evidenced by your own word choice in your third sentence.

 

As much as I revere Steinbeck, in the “Travels With Charlie” genre William Least Heat Moon beats with Blue Highways and Prairy Earth. 

 

Jerry

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[Jerry Rogers]

Jim’s post reminds me of the time when I lived in a haunted house.  The ghosts were not happy with my ways of doing things, and one Halloween they left on the mantel a very long list of their specific complaints.  I spent the whole night reading The Gripes of Wraiths.

 

JLR

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[park...@comcast.net]

I got started reading books by  authors traveling around America, with Blue Highways (William Least-Heat Moon), and now my personal library has a whole section of those.  I think it would be easy for me to get over my head, trying to unravel the philosophical objectives of the authors, but most of them seem to focus on exploring the common man, the interesting  'characters' to be found by just roaming around. (Charles Kuralt style), not, necessarily looking for the biggest, most rare, natural or historically significant features.   Two of my favorites, which  take a funny look at some of our NPS foibles, is "Out West" (Dayton Duncan-, Ken Burns' buddy).  Another  is Bill Bryson's Lost Continent.  In addition to the more famous Steinbeck works, I really like the one about specimen collecting down in Baja, with his naturalist mentor.  Then there's Charles Darwin, Alexis deToqueville and William Bartram, pre-dating the National Parks.  Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance was followed by "lila', where Persig discusses the same concepts, except, this time, by boat.  There are many more. I didn't read Steinbeck's comment as a negative. Just food for thought.  Don

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From: "jimmy" <James_...@msn.com>
To: "com, parklandsupdate@googlegroups." <parklan...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 4:50:27 PM

Subject: [PLW Update] Re: John Steinbeck's view of the national parks

 

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[park...@comcast.net]

Jerry's mention of Heat-Moon's  Prairie Earth reminds me of the time I was driving across Kansas, with Mike Haydon, then Asst. Secretary of Interior.  After laboring through this tome, (more than anyone could want to know about one County), I asked the former Governor, if he'd read it.  He said," well I started, but just couldn't get through it".
Another thing (no offense to any Kansans on here),  but some of the most mean-spirited, negative people I ever was required to try to deal with, were those who opposed our efforts to get a Tallgrass Prairie Park. Believe it or not, Rick, they were worse than those at Upper Delaware.  Heat-Moon talks about them in that book, including the fact that he couldn't even drink in local bars, being an 'outsider'.  Don

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From: "Jerry Rogers" <jro...@cnsp.net>
To: "com, parklandsupdate@googlegroups." <parklan...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 5:05:51 PM
Subject: RE: [PLW Update] John Steinbeck's view of the national parks