Still Thinking a Lot About the National Parks
"One of the things I think we witness when we go to the parks is the immensity and the intimacy of time. On the one hand we experience the immensity of time which is the creation itself; it is the universe unfolding before us. And yet it is also time shared with the people that we visit these places with. So it's the experience we remember when our parents took us for the first time to these, and then we as parents passing them on to our children. A kind of intimate transmission from generation to generation to generation of the love of place, a love of nation that the national parks are meant to stand for." - William Cronon
I've been lucky enough to see some of the most beautiful places in the United States, and seeing them laid out on my tv fills me with the same joy of old acquaintance I get when I see places I saw abroad. But there is something even more deeply intimate with the national parks, because they are places I shared with my family. And this is a joy that cuts like a knife, because although my father's words to me standing on Acadia's rocky coastline - that we were all not likely to walk these places together again - were meant to denote my starting a new page in life (college), they have in time become oddly prophetic. Even if my family and I want to, the times we spent in the parks together are times that are even more inaccessible than they would be through the simple passage of time. To know that the times when the five of us walked together there have become as elusive as my mother's fabled petroglyphs. I know that if I were to stand on the precipice of Bryce Canyon or gaze through a rock formation at Arches at some date in the future, that Alex would be there in spirit. But sometimes that just isn't enough.
I've been lucky enough to see some of the most beautiful places in the United States, and seeing them laid out on my tv fills me with the same joy of old acquaintance I get when I see places I saw abroad. But there is something even more deeply intimate with the national parks, because they are places I shared with my family. And this is a joy that cuts like a knife, because although my father's words to me standing on Acadia's rocky coastline - that we were all not likely to walk these places together again - were meant to denote my starting a new page in life (college), they have in time become oddly prophetic. Even if my family and I want to, the times we spent in the parks together are times that are even more inaccessible than they would be through the simple passage of time. To know that the times when the five of us walked together there have become as elusive as my mother's fabled petroglyphs. I know that if I were to stand on the precipice of Bryce Canyon or gaze through a rock formation at Arches at some date in the future, that Alex would be there in spirit. But sometimes that just isn't enough.