America's Best Idea, Darkened

As I wrote earlier this week, last Sunday’s ride to Glacier Point made for a spectacular day — dazzling beauty and light throughout.

But for one brief shadow that fell upon our day, that is.

I’ll now describe the darkness that fell over me and Karen — just as you head into a long Memorial Day weekend. Cruel, I know — but better to get this over with.

When I wrote that “We drove through the entrance and around the first few bends, where granite outcroppings, the kind of feature that themselves would attract crowds were they anywhere else, serve as hints of the grandeur to come,” I omitted characterizing a fleeting ugliness that invaded the day between driving through the entrance and proceeding to those initial bends and granite views.

As we rolled towards the entrance, Karen and I debated whether we should purchase the day pass — $35 — or plunk down for the annual pass, at $80. Surely we’d visit a National Park sometime this calendar year —? Crater Lake while in Oregon, a maiden trip to Pinnacles — or back to Yosemite; any of these seemed possible, so plunk down we did. I collected the receipt and the pass from the smiling ranger-hatted woman sitting in the kiosk and proceeded into the park.

As I did so, though, I shifted the pass and receipt from one hand to the other and then to the console — I’m an avid knee-driver — and glanced down at the pass. And then I gasped, “OH MY GOD!”

(Mind you, I’m not an Oh-my-God! person, or a Jesus Christ! shouter; consider it a holdover from my Catholic upbringing, and my modicum of protest against the coarsening of our civil discourse.)

Karen, startled, responded, “WHAT?”

Slightly calmer now, I gestured towards the pass and suggested, “Look,” and she took in the sight that had so troubled me.

Thank God for Canva’s Magic Erase tool

I think a warning might have been appropriate? Before looking at it — or purchasing it? Our day-vs.-annual debate now seemed moot.

Karen turned it face down and we drove into the park, towards the glories of Yosemite. We stopped to use the bathroom on the way in: It was filthy, with toilet paper strewn everywhere and graffiti on the walls. Karen remarked that when she would visit Yosemite growing up, she could always count on the bathrooms being clean.

Fretting and a sarcasm aside, we did manage to enjoy the day; in fact, after about 30 seconds of pedaling in the Redwood-scented air beneath a canopy of trees, I was oblivious to the disturbance. While the shock of the pass had jolted me into remembering the absurdity of the age we live in, the Glacier Point vista jolted me into a state of awe.

---

Whereas Barack Obama visited national parks several times, and narrated a documentary about the glories of “America’s best idea,” as Wallace Stegner called them, today our parks are a pawn in funding-and-shutdown battles. If our current president has even visited a national park during either of his terms, I’m not aware of it; my assumption is that he would sell them off if he could get away with it (and if he could make a buck doing so).

Love for our national parks strikes me as one of our final few shared convictions, rippling across party lines and through classes; when I visit Crater Lake or Joshua Tree I see pickup trucks with NRA stickers, and I see Teslas — with Elon-disavowing window stickers. Yosemite and Yellowstone, Hot Springs, Acadia and Everglades should be the shared pride of the country, our one resource that isn’t subject to political vagaries.

---

On our way out, driving slowly in the procession of cars leaving the park, Karen rolled down the window and called to a ranger. “Do we have to take this pass?” she asked. “Do we have an alternative?”

The ranger told us that every annual pass looked like ours, as did the lifetime version. But then she added, “Check out Etsy. People are creative.”

Sure enough. I’d imagined defacing the pass, mustering my own crude little act of civil disobedience. Fortunately, though, people are indeed creative — far more than me. Here’s what we’ll show the next time we drive into a national park

.