our best idea

As I was preparing for this trip, one of the things I looked forward to was time for reading.  Trouble is, books are heavy.  But data weighs a good deal less than paper, so I packed along just a couple of real books, and loaded several audiobooks on my computer for transfer to my phone/mp3 player.  No cel service here, but I've been listening intently to an absolutely inspiring book on the national parks.

It's a companion book to the Ken Burns documentary series, "The National Parks:  America's best idea."  True to form, Burns tells the stories of grand historical events from a deeply human, even spiritual perspective, focusing on the lives of individuals and their personal experiences with the parks.  Listening to the most eloquent, impassioned quotations from the most eloquent and passionate supporters of the park idea, I often feel just a little inadequate for my lack of personal experience in national parks.  For though I regard myself as a deep lover of wildness and nature, I have not made the effort in my own life to see these most wondrous places.  For this, I feel a little ashamed, as if I have not made good on my own ideals.  How can I presume to be a supporter of the park idea, the idea of untamed wildness as valuable and worthwhile in its own right, when I only occasionally make the effort to take a camping trip, and have never traveled to the most scenic and magnificent places in my own country?

I have found an answer, and a kindred spirit, in a brief and unattributed quote from this wonderful book.  In an interview, naturalist Terry Tempest Williams mentions a young man who once attended a hearing on the proposed expansion of the national park system in Alaska in the late seventies.  He was blind, a piano tuner by profession, and had taken a bus from Austin to Denver to be at this hearing.  Standing, he said:
"I will never see wild Alaska.  I will never see these parks.  But when I'm in Texas, tuning those pianos, it will touch my heart, knowing they are there."

This book has inspired me to try to see more national parks in the future than I have in the past, but this simple quote from a blind Texan piano tuner has reassured me that I don't have to try to see them all--an impossible task.  To love these places, these refuges of wildness, even without knowing them; to take comfort in the simple knowledge that they exist; that is also good, also worthwhile.

If the book is any indication, the PBS series must be magnificent.  I intend to see it as soon as possible when I get home, and I encourage anyone and everyone to seek it out.