Another tiny little site, out in the middle of nowhere. A small slice of land, barely four square miles, preserving a few reconstructed mud huts and a view of a minor Missouri River tributary. Fit for the occasional grammar school field trip and not much else.
Through all the denialism around environmental degradation and global warming, I’ve become convinced the human soul is incapable of understanding the concept of absence. We are quite capable of observing the world around us. We can see the moon and the stars and the distant mountains and the dandelions at our feet. We can see what we have, are enthralled by what the other guy has, and are intrigued by what might be hiding behind that mountain over yonder. What we can’t contemplate is what isn’t there. We can’t lament the old-growth forests of New England, because we’ve never seen one. They’ve been gone for decades, or even centuries. They’re not here, so we don’t miss them. Nobody cares that they’re gone.
A couple decades ago, there were a series of logging protests in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. The locals were furious that a bunch of East Coast types flew out there to chain themselves to old-growth trees and interrupt logging. I can understand why they’d be pissed off. I would be pretty angry if some guy flew 1000 miles to get in my grill because I drove a foreign car or was an avowed atheist. But the folks of Idaho should understand something as well: we don’t have old growth forests on the East Coast any more. They’re gone. They’ve been gone for at least a hundred years if not two. The eastern United States is a scarred landscape, the result of clearcutting, mountaintop-removal mining, abandoned industrial complexes, sleazy strip malls, and horrid public housing projects. Most of the natural beauty in the east is gone, and gone forever. All we wanted was for the western states to preserve theirs before it, too, is gone.
This same idea applies to the native cultures of the Americas. They’re mostly gone, and those that remain have been scarred by decades and decades of suppression, poverty, extermination, and broken promises. They’re barely recognizable today. But we don’t understand what that really means. Indian reservations have been the way they are our entire lifetime, and for so many generations before us, that we can’t even fathom what native tribal life must have been like in the long, long ago. It’s unfathomable because it’s gone. Gone forever, there’s no bringing it back.
Imagine what life in America would have been if, instead of driving the native populations back and out, our forefathers decided to share the land with them. Would our country have developed any differently? Would we never have connected east-and-west with the Golden Spike? Would there still be American bison on the flatlands of Ohio? Would there be states in the Union with all-Native legislatures and Congressional representatives? What would the U.S. flag look like? What would our architecture look like? What would that great cultural tradition — rock & roll — sound like, infused not just with the minstrel songs of sharecroppers, the folk tunes of Dust Bowl migrants, and the swing of urban jazz, but also with the steady rhythms and chants of the Sioux? Wouldn’t that be kinda cool?
We’ll never know what the impact of Native American culture would have been on this country, on our government, on our society, or on our lives. And we can’t … because it’s gone.
[All pictures on this page are mine and thusly copyrighted.]
Poor Kings Canyon. At one point, it had a real patriotic name: General Grant National Park, named not after the Civil War victor, but after the General Grant, the second largest sequoia tree on earth (which is named after the Civil War victor). Back then, in 1890, the park only protected the Grant Grove itself. Decades later, after long battles, the rest of the canyon was protected with National Park status, under the boring moniker Kings Canyon National Park.
Kings Canyon gets no respect. It’s in the heart of California’s Sierra Nevada range, a truly beautiful part of the country, but, unfortunately, it’s sandwiched between two behemoths: Yosemite, with its magnificent valley and El Capitan, to the north, and Sequoia, with its groves of massive trees, to the south. Eventually, the NPS merged Kings Canyon with its southern neighbor, and, like Gracie to George Burns, it got second billing: Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park. But I think that sucks. Kings Canyon deserves to stand alone, as its own National Park.
As usual, I visited Kings Canyon on a big road trip through a slew of National Park Service sites. Yosemite and Sequoia are grand places, to be sure, but they’re also grandly crowded. Yosemite, especially the valley area, were insufferable to drive through. People stopped for every spot of wildlife or beautiful vista, and the light dusting of snow on Day 1, although wonderfully esthetic, only made the drive more miserable. And Sequoia, well, the groves were not only crowded by noisy. All those tourists, yammering on an on. The mansplainers were completely insufferable.
Then I went to poor, disrespected Kings Canyon … and I loved it. Yes, it doesn’t have the grandeur of Yosemite. It doesn’t have the massive sequoia groves. But what it does have are great hikes, hikes where you can be alone if you want to be. I took a valley hike, and I think I only saw one other couple on the trail at all. While everyone else was scrambling for a spot in some scenic pullout, I was doing what I really love: walking in the woods, away from everything.
When you’re on your own tour of the western Sierras, don’t ignore Kings Canyon. It deserves your attention, your respect, and your feet, walking on its trails.
[Pictures on this post are mine and thusly copyrighted]
[I hesitated writing this essay. When I finally did write it, I sat on it for months. Then I edited it, and I still hated it, so I sat on it for more months. I’ve then edited it again, sat on it again, and now that it’s horribly dated, I’m finally publishing it. I still hate it. I still hate what it says about me. But I have to say it, nonetheless.]
From Kennesaw …
Kennesaw Mountain was a major engagement in the American Civil War. It was a tactical defeat but a strategic win for the Union army, for it opened up the preeminent Confederate city, Atlanta, to occupation by Union forces. This had the side effect of rallying the North to the side of Abraham Lincoln, thereby guaranteeing his second term as President of the United States. After Kennesaw, General William T. Sherman conducted his infamous March to the Sea, wrecking industries, farms, roads and the lives of thousands of civilians, as he made his way to Savannah on the coast. It was, as some historians have noted, the dawn of “total war”. Sherman wanted to break the back of the confederacy, and he felt the only way to do that was by destroying all its institutions, and putting the people in direct harm’s way, thereby forcing the surrender of the Confederate leaders and its armies.
Brutal, brutal stuff. To this day, Civil War buffs don’t like to talk about the March to the Sea. People love talking about Gettysburg and Antietam and Bull Run and Vicksburg, but not the topic of Atlanta and the March too often. It inevitably leads to accusations of Northern atrocities, few of which can be refuted. It typically ends in argument, and is a topic best left avoided.
As they say: war is hell.
… To Iraq and Afghanistan
Let’s advance the clock 125 years. America has become an industrial juggernaut, a major player in global politics, and (seeing as how we delightfully ignored Eisenhower’s warning), the strongest military power the world has ever seen. We are masters of destruction, harnessing the Sig P320, the power of the atom, and everything in between. It’s what we do, it’s who we are. We blow shit up and kill people.
In August of 1990, the Iraqi Republic invaded the State of Kuwait in a clear case of overt aggression. The Iraqi president, the tyrant Saddam Hussein, in quite possibly the biggest blunder in the second half of the 20th Century, invaded an oil-rich country, and expected an oil-hungry world to simply let it happen. Of course, the world, and the United States, had other ideas. President George H. W. Bush and his team brilliantly assembled a coalition of nations, and after a buildup of some months, proceeded with a superbly executed “100 day offensive”, shattering the Iraqi military, freeing the nation of Kuwait, and securing significant oil fields in the region. Gen. “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf’s “Hail Mary” play was a rousing success, and the briefings and maps filled CNN’s schedule for days, weeks and months. The Gulf War met its objectives, and the Western World was pleased.
Full of Grace
And that was it. We were done. Well, we did enforce no-fly zones for years afterward, but other than that, we withdrew from Iraq. Entirely. All our troops, and the troops of the coalition. Bush famously asked the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam, and then we went home. That was it, we were done. And the first, and wisest, President Bush took an endless load of crap for that. “We should have marched to Baghdad”, the war hawks cried. Certainly, they fabricated their own chance to do so twelve years later, but in the moment, the President gave the order, and the military obeyed. We had an objective, we met the objective, and went home. “You break it, you buy it” was the lesson of the day, and for that moment in time, we decided not to break it.
Flash forward another ten years, and we have the horrors of 9/11, which I won’t recount here. Afghanistan harbored Osama bin Laden and his militant band for years prior, giving them sanctuary so they could plot terrorist attacks around the world. The lesser President Bush demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden and dismantle al Qaeda, and Mullah Omar declined. It was clear the Taliban government was an enemy of the U.S. and other Western democracies, and a direct supporter of international terrorism. NATO invoked Article 5, and again, war was on. The U.S. and her allies officially invaded on October 7, 2001, and … we were there nearly 20 years.
Whoops.
War Is Hell
This is where this essay gets ugly. This is where I begrudgingly put to page the thoughts I’ve begrudgingly held for a couple of decades now.
It has been said that war is a failure of diplomacy. I would go one further and say that war is a failure of everything. It’s the failure of respect, the failure of decency, the failure of civility. It is the failure of economics, of reason, of leadership, of sanity.
Unfortunately, it is also, occasionally, necessary.
Sherman wasn’t a man to fsck around. He knew what he was dealing with. He also knew what his job was, and that job was to win, and end, a war. He didn’t start it, he might not have wanted it, but once he was in it, he was going to fight. And win. But fighting, and winning, comes at a price. A terrible, terrible price. The Atlanta campaigns and the subsequent March to the Sea caused about 70,000 casualties and over $1B in damages in today’s dollars. It was brutal and miserable, and real people suffered.
And the war ended within 6 months. Sherman went home. Grant went home. War was over (I won’t go over Reconstruction here, that’s a topic for another day).
So what does this teach us? It teaches us that war only has one purpose, and that purpose is achieving a specific political goal through acts of violence when no other approach will work. But what did we set out to do in Afghanistan? In the words of George W. Bush, we set out on a “daring and ambitious mission” to “rebuild Afghanistan” with the “transformational power of liberty”. What does that even mean? Those were nebulous, fanciful objectives, none of which should ever be the goal of warfare. Yet the liberals in Congress ate it up. One representative dressed up in a burqa and pleaded with the House to support the invasion of Afghanistan, and praised Bush for dropping “both food and bombs.” [link] We waged war against an enemy state and justified it with touchy-feely platitudes, with supermajority Congressional OK and highest-ever presidential approval ratings.
That was totally, and completely, the wrong approach. War isn’t a touchy-feely exercise. It is destructive and deadly. Take any other approach, and you’re lying to yourself, and setting yourself up for failure.
I’ll tell you how we *should* have responded. We should have gone in and decimated the Taliban, Mullah Omar, and al Qaeda. And then gotten the hell out, leaving a power vacuum if need be. The world would have been left with a message: “if you support domestic terrorism, we will end you, and leave your country a rudderless mess”.
The level of cruelty in the last paragraph astounds me, and I’m the guy who wrote it. But look what happened: we sat there, spending billions of dollars and risking thousands of lives, trying to rebuild a country. We left ourselves open to terrorist attacks, IEDs, and suicide bombers. And then we had enough and left, in the sloppiest exit since Saigon. We gave the Taliban a victory, a victory over the deadliest military force the world has ever seen. They’ve since used that victory to seize power for themselves. That country is now in a state as sorry as it’s ever been.
... To the Future (and maybe Ukraine)
So now where do we stand? Yes, we’re out of Afghanistan, but what about us as a military power? Well, we’ve shown that we’re a military power that can be defeated by our own goody-two-shoes mentality, a military power whose tactical, strategic, and political thinking can be skewed by sympathy and Twitter polls. We are not a military power who wages war, we’re a military power that wants to build orphanages. Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not what military power is for, and not what it should do. That is the activity of other institutions. At best, the military can keep the peace so other actions can occur, but even that is dubious and should be short lived. It’s best to get in, kick the everloving shit out of the belligerents, and get out, leaving a clear and stern message that actions have consequences.
It’s hard to create direct corollaries between historical events. It would be unfair of me to wholly trace our failures in Afghanistan (and in the second war with Iraq, a debacle way beyond the pale) to today’s situation in Ukraine. You do have to wonder if Putin would be in a different mindset if he knew America was a true, not-fscking-around military power, instead of a bunch of orphanage builders.
Closing Thoughts
I said in the beginning of this essay that I’m not proud of my thoughts in this area. This whole topic makes me angry, and angry people don’t think with reason. I’m also not a trained solder, I haven’t served in the Armed Forces, haven’t attended basic training, much less a military academy. I’m definitely not a historian either, I’m just a hobbyist who reads books and thinks about this stuff when he has a bout of insomnia. I strongly welcome any and all criticism on this post. Perhaps someone can put some sanity into the conversation and talk me off the ledge. Or perhaps convince me to jump. So chime in, leave a comment, and feel free to tell me exactly how wrong I am.
There are three categories of National Park tourists.
The first is the worst: the tourist. The tourist blunders in with their fancy RV, stumbles off some cruise ship, or barrels in on a pair of Harleys. They make a bunch of noise in the visitor’s center, take a high-speed trip through the scenic drive, perhaps (at best) reading 2-3 roadside signs before giving up and barreling off to some picnic area to uncork a bottle of wine, unscrew a bottle of cheap whiskey, or unpack a fistful of juice pops before nearly burning down a campground via an over-butaned charcoal grill.
The second is the polar opposite: the wildlander. These are the folks who truly revel in the hard-core activities: spending days backpacking or river rafting across varied terrains; performing a multi-hour rock traversals up the cliff face; or otherwise reveling in the true wonders of the park: the wilderness. I have full respect for these intrepid travelers, but because I like traveling alone, it would be incredibly dangerous for me. Plus I’m an immense coward.
So I nestle inside the middle group.
Mountains A La Mode
Parks are to be experienced. If you’re in Acadia, you bike the carriage trails. If you go to Key Biscayne, you snorkel the reefs. And if you go to Kenai Fjord, you hike the glaciers* and you kayak the fjords. That’s the Middle Group: find activities that let you experience the park in the few days you have to spend, and enjoy the sh*t out of them.
*Well, you don’t hike *on* the glaciers, that’s dangerous AF. You hike *to* the glaciers. Play safe, everyone.
The kayaking I did at Kenai was one of the best times I ever spent in a park, and I’ve been to well over 200 of them. First, it was a gorgeous day. The sky was so blue, the wind was light, the air was the perfect temperature. Second, the people were fantastic. I typically avoid commercialized park tours, they tend to be too expensive and too lame, but these tour operators were awesome. They were friendly, and helpful, and gave good information, but also knew how to shut up so folks could just enjoy sitting on the water and watch the puffins dive.
Beautiful Day
My fellow kayakers were really cool, too. There were seven of us in all, three couples and myself, and we didn’t know each other (well, hopefully the people in the couples knew each other, but hey, who am I to judge). But everyone was so chill and so interesting and so much fun to be around. It was just us and the puffins and the eagles and the sea lions: the perfect trip.
After the kayaking, we went back to Fox Island. There was supposed to just be some standard lunch, but instead there was some special end-of-season event going on, so we got the full grilled salmon treatment. I rarely remember what I ate on my trips, but that was so memorable. It was all fresh and cooked to perfection and there was no spoiling that day. I was even on-point with my photography that day (a super-rarity).
Photogenic Jay
After lunch, we hopped on a cruise boat for the standard, tourist trip through the fjords. That was … lame, but also hysterical. It’s kinda hard to get excited about tufted puffins or sea lions from 20′ up the side of a boat, when a couple of hours ago you were paddling right alongside them. So the group of us sat in the middle of the deck and chatted for the duration.
My trip to Alaska was, by far, the highlight of all my park trips. I need to go back, visit the panhandle, Aniakchak, and more. It’s a big state with a lot of parks, and I only hit the few with the most … tourists.
Tourists Marvel at the Wonders of Bird Shit Rock
[The photos on this post are mine and copyrighted thusly].
Many years ago, I started on a personal quest to visit every site in the U.S. National Park System. This is not an easy task, there are almost 400 of them!! The journey has been a fascinating one. I have learned more about the natural world, American history, and the breadth and depth of our culture, than I ever thought I could have. On this blog, I’ll share experiences, observations, and insights from my trips. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay here, and I appreciate your comments and feedback!
America In Context 