On day 29, I wrote a post on national parks arguing that discounting our participation, particularly historic Native American participation, in natural systems harms and deludes us. I wrote another post making a related argument through the lens of Leave No Trace principles instead of national parks. I tinkered with this article for a long time, rearranging and deleting arguments for days, which became weeks. I’m happy with how the article turned out but also happy to be finished with it now.
It might be helpful to read the national parks article first since this one in my mind follows from it ideologically, but I will offer a summary of the parks article here (perhaps more useful than the parks article itself because this outlines what I attempted to communicate, not what actually was communicated). The article on national parks and Native American removal made three related claims. First, Native Americans lived in what became the national parks, including Yellowstone and Yosemite, but were removed by the government and settlers. Second, national parks further a mythos of human separation from nature, partially because we see no one living in national parks and seldom consider the Native American presence prior to removal. Third, though the national park system contributed little to the large-scale erasure of people and cultures, the myth of being undisturbed by humans apart from the modern tourist both continues this erasure of people and deepens a Western notion of separation from land. We see ourselves as visitors, not participants in a national park landscape, unlike the native people who lived directly off the land.
As a trail update, I hiked through the heat and dryness yesterday then heat and light rain/humidity today. The trail now overlaps periodically with the Blue Ridge parkway. Continuing a long trend, after leaving town, I have again hiked with new folks: a guy named Bath who can imitate many accents (Australian yesterday, Tennesse radio guy today), a guy with excellent social awareness and botanical facts named Blink, and a hype guy named 109. Today, we pushed each other to camp as night fell, walking blindly in dusk. I spent much of this steep day with Blink, our conversation distracting both of us from the effort of climbing. I lay now in my tent as lightning illuminates the rain fly, thunder pounds clumsily around the low cloud deck, and rain steadily patters.
It was a sad day because I lost my spork, a trusty companion of some 15 years that I would use to eat every meal, not just on trail but in regular life. Once, it was stolen by a chipmunk and buried in a hole, and my brother Jake found it for me. This time, I hoped for a similar miraculous recovery, but I cannot find it. Tragic indeed. Still, yesterday featured a swim in a cool stream, and there are many nice views of green, not brown, forest. Some redeeming qualities.
