Eugenious

Before tonight, I never knew how to answer the question that comes up in some games and quizzes: “With which historical figure would you most like to have a conversation?” But, after a phone call with my Dad and an e-mail from my Mom, in which they independently extolled the wonders of Ken Burns’s National Parks series on PBS (which you can watch online until October 9), I was sufficiently intrigued to make the show my companion as I cooked some potato-leek soup and prepped tomorrow morning’s breakfast, a puffed sliced apple dish (sounds good, doesn’t it? We’ll see how it goes.).

Not surprisingly, the National Parks footage is beautiful. How could it not be, with the “crown jewel” nature of the places that we Americans own together? Old photographs fill in some historical information in the 12-hour documentary, and a number of eloquent historians, authors, and park rangers share their thoughts and experiences.

I’ve only watched half of the first episode, The Scripture of Nature. I found myself near tears on a number of occasions. While I was, actually, chopping onions, it was, instead, the film’s declaration of ideas that stirred me–of public ownership of this country’s most jaw-dropping places, places that more than one urban easterner in the 1880s just stood before, speechless, before writing of his religious experience there; of the contentious decision, later, to include in our National Park system those battlegrounds where blood was shed as this nation struggled.

John Muir, when he started working in the Yosemite Valley, built a cabin near the foot of Yosemite Falls with the floor’s flagstones just far enough apart that ferns could still grow. The moment I heard that, I knew how to answer that niggling question about with which historical person I’d like to chat. While I wouldn’t know what to ask John Muir, how to open a conversation, I would like to listen to his ideas, just hear him speak about the Sierra.

Of course, as we drank tea from the thermos, Mr. Muir would eat only crusts of bread as I lavished clotted cream on my scones. And he would still hike 50 miles in two days. That man was truly fueled by sequoias and granite.