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Posts Tagged ‘National Parks’

Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, Pennsylvania-New Jersey Border

Posted in Pennsylvania, tagged , , , , , , on January 17, 2009| 2 Comments »

Somewhere Down That Lazy River

The Delaware Water Gap is a protected stretch of river and shoreline between Port Jarvis and East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Like Catoctin, Chickasaw, and Cuyahoga, it’s mundane and uninteresting. But that’s OK, because like those other national park sites, it serves a purpose: protecting our natural resources, providing habitat for wildlife, and simply giving city folks a place to see what a tree looks like. I go on and on about this point so often in this blog, I don’t really feel like retreading that all over again here.

What I do want to talk about is good, old-fashioned laziness.

Public domain photo courtesy National Park ServiceI had no grandiose plans for my Water Gap visit. I had an exciting, inspiring trip the prior autumn when I visited Alaska for the first time (a subject for my next post), but for my trip through Pennsylvania the following spring, I wanted to tone it down (although some might say you have no alternative but to ‘tone it down’ when you visit Pennsylvania, but, well, moving on …).

For my visit to the Delaware Water Gap, I went uber-simple. I just rented a kayak from the fine, Bohemian folks at Chamberlain Canoes, and paddled (well, floated really) downstream for a couple of hours. Yes, it was lame and unexciting. A couple of deer playing on an island, a few ducks paddling around, a couple of Class 1 (actually Class 0.5) rapids, that’s about it. There wasn’t a drop of adrenaline for miles around (unless you count the headbanging hillbilly houseparty happening on the eastern shore).  I didn’t even take my camera, didn’t feel like fussing with it. I just wanted to enjoy a calm, early summer afternoon, futzing around on the Delaware River.

As I live my life and travel around the country, observing the society around me (and often looking inward, as I am wont to do), I feel that one ability sadly missing in most Americans is an ability I am calling “soulful laziness”. Our society is high-strung, jittery, overly busy, and tremendously uptight. Everywhere you turn, you see it: the chronic impatience,  the busy little rush-rush for even the most mundane of tasks, that hum of self-created stress for decidely unimportant minutiae, that decidedly un-subtle “me first and right now” attitude that sends psychic ripples of anxiety up and down the corridors of business and the tiled expanses of mall food courts nationwide. I feel this constant buzz-buzz of motion and thought and stress is so damaging to folks that our society would be so much better if we could simply learn to be soulfully lazy.

Public domain photo courtesy National Park ServiceNow I have to be careful here: I am calling it “soulful laziness” for a very specific reason. It’s the ability to just stop, for a few minutes or a few hours or a few days, and relax. Find a quiet spot, at the beach or in a field or on your own back patio, and take a breather. Get away from the noise. Stop and smell the roses.  Free your mind and the rest will follow. Let not only your body and your mind but the very fiber of your being, your soul (in both the theological and non-theological meanings of the word) take a rest.

Let me also be clear, lest there be no confusion. Laziness (or sloth if you will), is the Fourth Deadly Sin, and for good reason.  Physical laziness is clearly bad, and is a chronic problem in America. Our obesity epidemic is one part bad nutrition and one part physical laziness. Our environmental problems are partly attributable to physical laziness. How many folks are simply too lazy to walk up one flight of stairs and burn unknown amounts of kilo-watt hours using the elevator instead? I even think our economic collapse has elements of physical laziness. So many folks are too lazy to earn an honest living or provide real value to customers or society or business, instead they try to take the short road through lying on home mortgage applications, cheating people via pyramid schemes, or making horribly risky get-rich-quick investments. That’s laziness right there.

Public domain photo courtesy National Park ServicePart and parcel with physical laziness is intellectual laziness, as  evidenced by excessive TV watching, vapid internet surfing, pointless shopping sprees or chronic videogaming. Many people are too intellectually lazy to even ask questions of our leaders or their bosses or even their spouses. Fewer and fewer people read or write effectively, or even try to think their way out of problems, instead depending on others to bail them out or praying to God for salvation while having another box of Ring-Dings and watching Monday Night Football. How many people can’t even count change? Lots and lots.

The odd thing is, even lazy folks injure themselves through pointless, self-inflicted stress.  The chronic TV watcher bombards himself with cacophonies of action-packed movies, bitch-slap reality TV bickerfests, or pointless arguments on Fox News. The shop-a-holic exposes herself to a crush of traffic, a swarm of humanity in the checkout line, and that ludicrous self-inflicted drama of “does this look good on me” that serves no purpose. The chronic internet surfer or videogamer literally absorbs himself into a narrow, two-dimensional world where one must constantly point-and-click-and-point-and-click all for the next split-second fix of Flash-animated inanity in order to remain interested. So even the physically and intellectually lazy segments of society clutter themselves up with so much stress and noise, they too can benefit from a self-inflicted heavy dose of soulful laziness.

Public domain photo courtesy National Park ServiceWhat we need to do as individuals is occasionally enter that state that allows one to set aside all the petty, self-created stresses, and just sit there in a quiet, low-key space and watch the world go by for a few hours on the weekend, or a few days while on vacation. This type of laziness is a wonder and a marvel. It shuts off all the noise and all the crap that we either willingly enter or (far worse) create for ourselves. Now this brand of laziness must be earned and can’t be abused (you can’t live your life staring out into space or gazing into your own navel, that’s what puts you into “the home”), but, in moderation, this is what we need, what we all need, the entire country, for our own sanity and our own survival.

I think if there’s one hope, one bright & shining potential outcome from our current economic crisis, it’s the notion that maybe people will start to shut out the noise and self-propagated stress in our lives and learn to be soulfully lazy once in a while. I spent $40 for that kayak rental down the Delaware River, and I loved it, but soulful laziness can have the best price tag possible in tough economic times: it’s free.

Courtesy of Chamberlain Canoes

[The above picture is from Chamberlain Canoes’ website. I hope they don’t begrudge me using it here, they’re nice folks & deserve some props. All the other pics on this post are public domain from the National Park Service website. I also took a hike up to Dingman’s Falls, a few pics from that hike are here.]

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Links:

Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area

Chamberlain Canoes

Google map to Delaware Water Gap

I normally have four links per post but I was just too durn lazy

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De Soto National Memorial, Bradenton, Florida

Posted in Florida, tagged , , , , , , , on January 1, 2009| 2 Comments »

Florida, As It Used to Be

I don’t think there are many places in America where people have had a greater impact on the overall environment than in the state of Florida. The Everglades, that swampy “river of grass” that once extended from Lake Okeechobee to the Florida Bay, has been interrupted by highways and sugar plantations. The big lake itself has been modified and contained by numerous dikes and canals. Shorelines have been overdeveloped, beaches have been artificially expanded, natural waterways have been dredged and deepened, invasive plant species run rampant all over, and great tracts of open land has been clear-cut, raised, and built upon. I won’t even go into the paved monstrosity known as Greater Orlando ….

Gulf Coast As It WasNot to be forgotten are the changes to Florida’s gulf coast. When Hernando De Soto explored Florida in the mid-1500’s, the gulf coast was lined with subtropical estuaries, tangled masses of native plants rarely seen any more. Palmettos, saltmarsh pines, and mangroves formed a natural wall dividing narrow beaches from the interior. Manatees plied the waters and great flocks of migratory birds filled the skies. In the time before European exploration, I suspect Florida was an immense botanical and biological wonderland, filled with thousands of species of plants and hundreds of species of animals, the Amazon Basin of North America. It must have been wonderful.

After the colonization of America, the peninsula of Florida was ignored by all settlers, Spanish, French, English, or whomever, for the longest time. It was deemed wholly inhospitable, and, to an extent, I’ll agree.  I stated earlier it must have been wonderful, but not for humans. For settlers, it must have been ghastly. All that slow-moving water plus all that humidity plus all that biological diversity meant insects and disease. To make matters worse, the best arable land is in the interior, away from the cooling ocean breezes and ease of nautical transportation. So, if you wanted to actually eek out a living in the Sunshine State back then, you needed to tolerate an awful lot of misery and hardship. So the peninsula was mostly ignored by most settlers for a couple hundred years

Then, along the way, something changed. Something drastically changed.

Mangroves and the Bay

De Soto National Memorial, situated in Tampa Bay at the mouth of the Manatee River, is a tiny little spot of Old Florida.  The shoreline area is chock full of mangroves and other species of trees, shrubs & plants. Spanish moss clings to live oaks, gumbo trees surround the visitor’s center, and birds nibble on wax myrtle berries. Even the beaches are different, they are rocky and covered in shells, not artificially enhanced with truckloads of fine sand like most Florida beaches. It’s a postage-stamp facsimile of old Florida; a 26-acre oasis in the middle of an overpopulated, overdeveloped, overpaved land; a reminder of how the coastline used to look in the days before Henry Flagler and other 19th century industrialists developed the dual coasts of Florida’s peninsula.

PinkThat’s the sad thing about Florida. I lived in south Florida for a couple of years, and many things bothered me about that state. First is the overdevelopment. The flatness of the land has made development so easy. There are almost no natural boundaries to demarc things like in other parts of the country. Most of the rest of the eastern United States is interrupted with big rivers or mountains, these obstacles prevent most back-to-back development. Not Florida, there folks can build and build and build some more, uninterrupted. From a plane on approach to a southern Florida airport, you can see miles and miles of square grids divided by overwide roadways, each square packed solid with home after home after home. Whenever I fly over the state, I look below and just shake my head at the inanity of it all. The Lorax would weep.

All of this development has led to other problems, like a dropping water table. When I went to De Soto, the Manatee River was basically a dry river bed, something normally seen in west Texas, not Florida. Yes, there was a drought in the state at the time, but overpopulation stresses the water table in such a way as to make droughts more damaging to the environment. I suspect in ages past, before permanent settlement, Florida still had droughts, but the rivers still flowed with water. Now, a few months without rain and everything is dry. That’s one price of progress.

PloverThe sad thing is this, in my opinion (and this is based solely on my own personal observations), Floridians care less about the environment than any state population with the exception of Texas. They just don’t seem to care. They water their lawns constantly, even when hurricanes approach they don’t shut off their sprinklers. They plant grasses and non-native plants that either require lots of fertilization to thrive, or spread out and choke the marshes. They shamelessly drive big honkin’ SUVs everywhere. I swear there are more four-wheel-drive vehicles per capita in warm, flat Florida than in snowy, hilly Massachusetts (and don’t say “it’s for towing boats”, I doubt 1 in 10 are used for that). I know one Floridian who practically burst into tears when high gas prices meant he might have to downsize from his big Ford Expedition. And I’ve never seen a region so disinterested in saving electricity: you’ll see regional baseball fields brightly lit all hours of the night. The whole place is so brightly lit you don’t even need headlights. I’m surprised you can see any stars.

I’m sure I’m going to get slapped for this, but in a way, it’s good that the real estate market has crashed. Finally, after decades of pleading from environmentalists, the crush of development in Florida has ground to a halt, not through ethical concerns over what we are doing, but because it’s no longer profitable. It’s a shame that people have lost their livelihoods in this economic crisis, but the path we are going, the continued over-building of America’s best places is simply not sustainable.

Gumbo-Limbo Tree in Spring

[I don’t want to disparage the folks of Florida with this post. I do want to state that I did meet a lot of great people when I lived in Florida, and made some really good friends. I just think Floridians could take a little more care, that’s all. Pics on this post are mine and copyrighted thusly. See my other photos of De Soto National Memorial here.]

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Links:

De Soto National Memorial

Mangrove Action Project

Florida Coastal Strategies

Google map to De Soto

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Cuyahoga National Park, between Akron and Cleveland, Ohio

Posted in Ohio, tagged , , , , , , on December 19, 2008| 2 Comments »

Who Cares National Park

Poor Cuyahoga: the Park of No Love. The great national parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Olympic, Acadia, all the others) have huge amounts of visitors and worldwide acclaim. They have spectacular geologies or magnificent trees or rare wildlife. Everyone knows their names, knows what they are about. But no one cares about a little strip of land on a forgotten river nestled between two Rust Belt cities, a little strip of land known as Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Brandywine FallsCuyahoga is a park that preserves a small valley cut in the Appalachian Plateau. The Cuyahoga itself is a meandering river, most notable for a series of canals used as transport in the late 18th to early 19th century (before railroads took over). It’s nice that preservationists lobbied to protect this patch of river. I believe that we should strive to protect all natural areas (not just those with spectacular flora, fauna, or geology) wherever possible.

The problem lies with putting this spot in the National Park System. If you listen to “park-o-philes”, like those on National Parks Traveler, Cuyahoga NP is the result of pork-barrel spending that most Americans heavily despise. I don’t know how to react to that. Usually pork projects only benefit those who win the contracts to build them. Sometimes these projects end up having no value to the community whatsoever, being proverbial white elephants until some future pork barrel project tears them down or repurposes them in an endless cycle of valueless taxpayer expenditures.

Everett Road Covered BridgeBut does government money spent on natural preservation count as “pork”? Many believe so. I don’t. See, I believe that natural preservation is the gift that keeps on giving. Natural lands help clean the air and water, and provide habitat for wildlife and plants. They also act as carbon sinks, something the world needs a lot more of right now. Parks also provide venues for recreation and a chance for urbanites and suburbanites to experience nature (something heavily needed in the manufacturing-laden cities of the Old Northwest Territories).

ButterflySome, especially those who want to profit off land development, think these “benefits” are a crock of tree-hugging bullshit. It’s just getting in the way of progress and economic development. But think about it: do we really need to carve up more of our fields & woodlands? Do we really need to divert more rivers or fill in more swamps in the name of “economic development”? Take a look around: everywhere you travel, you see abandoned properties, empty factories, vacant strip malls. Do we really need to pave over nature to build more crap, when we have thousands, if not millions, of already-paved land just sitting there, doing nothing? Couldn’t we, shouldn’t we, redevelop these existing stains on the landscape for economic development? Do we really need to make new stains? That’s what I think is bullshit.

Yeah, turning Cuyahoga into a National Park probably wasn’t the best use of taxpayer money, but at least there’s a stretch of green in the middle of Rust Belt America. I think it’s needed.

Beaver Marsh

[I didn’t own a digital camera when I visited Cuyahoga Valley. Pics are courtesy of the National Park Service. Actually, they have some pretty nice photos on their Cuyahoga website.]

[UPDATE: I visited Cuyahoga again since my original post. I now have some pics, located here.]

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Links:

Cuyahoga Valley National Park

Benefits of Open Space Preservation: Land Trust Alliance

Citizens Against Government Waste 2008 Report (Dept. of Interior)

Google map to Cuyahoga Valley

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Cumberland Gap National Historic Park, Middleboro, Kentucky

Posted in Kentucky, tagged , , , , , , , on December 16, 2008| 5 Comments »

Competitive Religion and the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap

Nobody talks about Daniel Boone anymore. Folks my age remember Fess Parker as Daniel Boone on NBC between 1964 and 1970, and there was some interest during the Bicentennial in 1976. But now, no one cares or probably even knows who he was. Unless there’s a Hollywood movie about someone, no one knows or cares. If no one knows about Daniel Boone anymore, it’s doubtful anyone knows about the Cumberland Gap, that pass through Appalachia exploited by Boone, resulting in the nation growing beyond the Original 13. Nowadays, the Gap is both paved over by Hwy 25, and a chain of crappy clothing stores stretching all across Generica.

Cumberland Gap is in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. True to stereotype, Appalachia is poor, there’s no doubt about it. Driving around the region, I was unsurprised to see economic distress & ramshackle housing. If you drive by with the windows down, you can practically smell the meth cooking. It’s pretty sad, really, for when I went (late 1990’s), the country was at the height of its economic cycle. Nowadays, with the nation on the precipice of the next Depression, I can’t imagine what’s going on down there. Of course, those nearest to the bottom don’t have as far to fall, but I digress.

Jesus Saves

There is one business in high gear in Appalachia: religion. I’m not a religious man, but I do acknowledge and respect religions. I think if I didn’t collect National Park sites, I’d drive around the country and take photos of churches. Large stone churches or modern glass-and-metal churches or one-room stick buildings, I wouldn’t care. Say what you will about all the controversies: the history, diversity, and evolution of religion in America is fascinating.

In eastern Kentucky, the story of religion is the story of competition. Throughout the region, you’ll see small stick church after small stick church, each having one of those quick-change trailer-towed portable billboards in front, mismatched letters stating “Newcomers Welcome”. It’s not just “Jesus Saves”, it’s “Jesus Saves Quicker Here Than the Church Around the Corner, They’re Really Pagans Disguised as Christians Anyway.” I wonder if there are Save-Offs, where the various hardscrabble churches meet and compete on which church wipes away sin quicker?

These quick-build churches really are competing for parishioners, each one scratching around for followers in a sparsely populated area. There’s a lot of poverty and a lot of want, but there aren’t a lot of folks. Hard conditions foster hard-core fanaticism, and it appears that hard-core fanaticism fosters hard-core soul-saving competition. A smart sociologist could have a field day here, studying religious competition in Appalachia. There’s definitely a cool doctoral thesis in there somewhere.

Golden Corral

There is one topic that has received much study, and that’s of obesity amongst the nation’s poor. Shortly before I took my trip to Kentucky, I heard of the theory that the poor are more likely to be obese than the rich, primarily because of bad food choices in local restaurants and grocery stores. Our twisted application of agricultural policies coupled with the borderline unethical practices of the nation’s fast-food chains makes it cheaper to eat fatty, corn-syrupy garbage that will surely kill you, than to eat fresh vegetables and lean meats.

On my trip to Cumberland Gap, these two factors: bad food choices and competitive religion, threatened to steamroll me into oblivion. Hungry after hiking through the park, I headed to nearby Middletown, KY, for dinner. Choices were, of course, crap. Fast-food outlets and all-you-can-eat buffets as far as the eye can see. I hate buffets almost as much as I do fast-food outlets, they’re usually bland as hell and festooned with pasta, meatballs, over-fried chicken and mashed potatoes, not exactly healthy eating.

I finally sucked it up and headed to one (buffets beat out starvation, that’s for sure). I pulled into the parking lot … right behind a church bus carrying half a dozen 300-lb. Bible Baptists. I had to politely let them go first (I tend to avoid fire-and-brimstone moments as much as possible), and was worried there wouldn’t be much left for me. I headed to the salad bar, figuring it’d be totally avoided by the locals (it was), for a feast of brown iceburg lettuce & rock-hard cherry tomatoes. Mmmm, feast of champions.

Honestly, I managed to get a sizable dinner there, and survived the post-processing. I only had “firsts”, surely I looked like an outcast, one of them there rich folks that don’t likes fatty vittles. I didn’t care what they thought, I was confident I could outrun them all.

[I didn’t own a camera when I visited Cumberland Gap. All photos are,  I believe, in the public domain. If you know any differently, please let me know and I’ll get the owner’s permission or remove them outright.]

[Special note to readers: I was contacted by http://chriscrawfordphoto.com/index.php about my use of one photo that belonged to him. I honestly don’t remember where I found that photo in the first place (this post is five years old), but I was clearly in the wrong and have removed the photo. My apologies to Mr. Crawford.]

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Links:

Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Frontline: Why Poverty Persists in Appalachia

Child Obesity in Poor Neighborhoods

Church Sign Generator

Google map to Cumberland Gap

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