How to use this Page

Today: Awakened at 1:35 AM, I come downstairs and do not sleep. A few lines make their way to a blank page; I do not know if the lines are good.

Morning, then, and at the gym, I find Ann, an old friend, long lost; I'd once thought forever. In the large group room Theresa, leading the Body Pump class, has chosen the music of men. She turns her barbell into a guitar and sings her Aerosmith loud; the rest of us abide her antics, need her antics, love them. We don't scream the pain we feel. Many times a week Theresa leads this class and yet on Saturday it is as if we are her only students, her passion just for us.

Mid-morning and in my in-box I find the first official review of The Heart is Not a Size. I am overcome. The reader has found within my work just precisely what I hoped a reader would. A faster plot. The smell of dust. The have-everythings who learn from those who possess little.

Noon, and while shopping for the small dinner party that I'm throwing Sunday, I find my father at the Farmer's Market, sit with him while he eats his lunch. Then there is the frenzy of deciding and shopping. Yes, the serrano ham and the lavash, the strange apples from the Lancaster trees, the fatter berries and the insanely rotund scallions, and why not those tomatoes, which cannot decide what size they wish to be.

Mid afternoon, and I sit with the work of my fantastic Penn students, who move me to tears with the way that they think; I sit with Patricia Hampl. And then time alone with the Horace Kephart segments of the Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea" (go to episode four, plays segments five and eleven). I don't care what you want to say about my great-grandfather. He did this country good. He saved what remained of the Great Smoky Mountains from the avaricious loggers, all the while knowing that once the park was made, it would not be his homeland anymore.

Later, a conversation with Andra. An email exchange with my friend Buzz. A note from Alyson Hagy, perhaps the grandest writing teacher of all.

Later, dinner.

Later, now.

Myself.

The image above is drawn from the new Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea," and introduces the words and images of my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart, who (as I've said previously, forgive me) played a pivotal role in the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Those of you who might interested in reviewing a brief segment from the film can go here, to the WHYY web site. I never heard my great-grandfather's voice, obviously. It is fascinating to hear it rendered by this voice actor and to see photographs that I have long had in my own personal trove revealed to the wider world.

Thanks to Libby, for sending along the link.

Ken Burns has been at work on a six-part documentary called America's Best Idea—a series that will tell of the making of our national parks. Since my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart, played a pivotal role in the creation of the Greak Smoky Mountains National Park, he, along with his good friend, photographer George Masa, will be featured in the stories told.

(I've written about my great-grandfather from time to time, both for literary journals and here, on the blog.)

The photograph here is of Horace Kephart's son, George Kephart, my father's late father. Though Horace was absent during the majority of his childrens' youth—ensconced among the Appalachians, recording their ways, advocating on behalf of earth and stream, living a life that to many remains a mystery—few people were as proud of Horace Kephart as this son. I think of him looking down right now, and smiling.

The series begins this Sunday night. A viewers' guide is featured here. Concurrent with this event is the release of a long-hidden Horace Kephart novel, Smoky Mountain Magic, that features an interesting foreword by my cousin, Libby Hargrave, and a beautiful introduction by long-time Kephart scholar, George Ellison.

In honor of the new Ken Burns series starting on PBS next Sunday we asked Donald Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, University of Kansas and the author of A Passion For Nature: The Life of John Muir, to take a look at the series and let us know what he thought. His response is below. Tune in on Sunday and let us know what you think in the comments.

I have been watching the new Ken Burns series for PBS, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” and it is a gorgeous and inspiring achievement. The hero of the series, and of our long history of creating national parks, is John Muir, the subject of my recent biography. Muir had nothing to do with setting aside Yellowstone park in 1872, but he was the main force behind the preservation of Yosemite, and he was the founder of a movement that would go on to add the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Big Bend, Cape Cod, Haleakala, Glacier Bay, and many others. Altogether, Americans would set aside more than two hundred million acres in a vast, diverse system of terrestrial parks and marine preserves spanning the continent and the Pacific Ocean. Muir would have endorsed the claim that those parks are this nation’s best idea ever. But what is the idea behind the parks?

“Recreation” is a commonly expressed purpose of the parks, which usually means outdoor exercise in the form of hiking, camping, fishing, or boating. But one can find mere physical exercise in a gymnasium. Muir understood that recreation should be a “re-creating” of our inner selves through immersion in nature. In his 1901 book Our National Parks he wrote that the parks should offer “wildness” (another word for “nature”) and that “wildness is a necessity.” A nation of “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” seek in the parks an escape from “the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” They go there to reawaken something deep within their souls—a sense of being part of the natural world. Modern society has repressed that feeling of connectedness, of kinship with other forms of life, and has buried people under the burdens of too much work, too much economic insecurity, too much noise and machinery.

Muir thought the parks should be preserved for poor people as well as rich. Americans of all sorts shared the same need for getting back in touch with nature. The rich could buy a private summer retreat in the Adirondacks or a ranch high up in the Santa Barbara mountains, but the poor could not. They could, however, claim a right of access to the “people’s parks,” although it was not clear in 1901 how an impoverished sharecropper or a low-wage factory worker could afford traveling to a park. Muir seems to have assumed that eventually the railroad and the automobile would be cheap enough for almost everybody to use—and in fact that has come true. As well, he supported the creation of urban “natural” areas, like Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Central Park in New York City. It took art to design them, but they could bring the green world within reach of city dwellers.

Besides restoring Americans’ psychological and physical health, the great parks were supposed to serve a religious purpose. Muir was one of this country’s greatest spiritual prophets, and he envisioned the parks as a kind of church or temple. They should become sacred places, rigorously protected in their pristine beauty from too much profane intrusion. He would never draw a rigid line between what is sacred and what is profane; after all he wanted people to come to those new churches and they would need food, lodging, and transportation while there. It was an old dilemma that has plagued all religions. “Thus long ago,” he noted, “a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves.” He was under no illusion that the temple of Yosemite or Mount Rainier would be safe from the ancient struggle between what is appropriate and what is not.

For people who do not share Muir’s religious stance toward nature, the whole idea of setting aside and carefully preserving national parks may seem loony. Conservative Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims may find the idea of national parks a dangerous slide toward paganism or pantheism, a threat to their traditions. On the other hand, there are a lot of “nature atheists” who find Muir’s religion misguided, anti-human, or too restrictive. They don’t find nature at all inspiring or holy—it’s just a set of economic resources to be used for the benefit of humankind. Why shouldn’t we let snowmobiles into Yellowstone? Or why shouldn’t we give the parks back to their “rightful owners,” the Indian tribes that once hunted and gathered there and let them use the lands for economic development? That the parks should have a predominately religious purpose is not a universal point of view, and thus they are constantly embroiled in America’s cultural wars.

Yet I am impressed by the extent to which Muir’s way of thinking has spread through American society and the parks have become part of the nation’s religious life. The Ken Burns series promotes this success. It suggests again and again that we should come to these places in a spirit of awe and respect for something grander, more transcendent, more beautiful than we could ever create. Here are places to make us proud but also make us humble. They are the result of immense forces working over immense periods of time, and the outcome is goodness and beauty beyond our capacity to improve. This is a view that has gathered power in our culture. I am convinced that democratic societies are especially open to the religion of nature, for it takes faith out of the hands of priests and gives it back to the people. As long as Americans hunger for religion and as long as they pursue democracy, the national parks will likely be treasured as places where the people can go to worship as they see fit.