DO WE NEED A NEW FRONTIER?
What surrounded you when you were growing up? Were you raised in an apartment in the city, high up, your window looking out on TV antennas or another building? Or a farm, where your view was a field, vegetable patch, fences and the barn beyond. From my window I saw the houses across the street, the sidewalk and a row of elm trees. But whatever our view, wherever we were raised and in what decade, there is always the search for something different.
THE URGE FOR THE NEW
Living in Chicago, I had Lake Michigan, but wanted to see the ocean. I had what were once called skyscrapers, but wanted mountains. On a train coming back from a trip to California, I lied to a girl my age when she asked where I lived. Damn, I had just been swimming in the ocean, standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Now I pictured the severe blocks of my neighborhood and said: “Where I live there’s the hills and the flats. I live on the hills.” Liar.
We all know why American toy makers, writers of fiction for children can do very well—imagination. And when I was young it was still about THE WEST. You opened the back door, grabbed a bike or a scooter and roamed in your imagination.
THE FRONTIERS WE SAW ON TV
Every kid had a book or watched a TV show about cowboys, horses, guns and the enemies they pursued, Native Americans. (Sad but true). Later it was GI Joe and army green. Even I with my childhood fears created a game of death. (From my Memoir) We climb the gnarled cherry tree that oozes sap. We stumble over stones and rocks in the weedy rock garden that her mother will never have time to weed. We pretend it’s a pit of burning oil and we push the imaginary “bad girls” into the pit.
GO WEST… When people got tired of tornadoes, snowstorms, were eager to work in the airplane industry, become songwriters, playwrights or movie “stars”—they went west. For decades, the settled green lands of the east gave way to the rocky openness of the west. In my lifetime, I’ve been able to visit many of our national parks: Glacier, Grand Canyon, Four Corners, Zion, Brice Canyon, Everglades, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Mount Rainier, Mesa Verde, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore! And though people still love mountains, canyons and glaciers, still seek out places where the river runs through it—now they hunger for earth’s highest peaks, photograph the North and South poles, fly to Africa for safaris, and desire to create a permanent village on Mars. It’s in our DNA.
A CRY FOR THE AMERICAN WEST
But here’s the thing, if we still yearn for something new why not work to preserve what we already have! In his recently published nonfiction work, THIS LAND, Christopher Ketcham reveals how our eagerness to tramp through forests, seek out wildlife, do whatever we damn please with our resources is destroying them.
(In California this spring, the thousands of people who drove to see the California poppy fields, disregarded posted signs, went off pathways, not eager to really SEE the poppies, but to take with their phones, photos of friends. Whole fields were destroyed because of their egos. (THEY AREN’T INTERESTED IN THE FLORA & FAUNA, they want the Likes on Facebook.)
WHAT ARE WE DOING TO SAVE OUR FRONTIERS?
Though the environmental laws of the ‘60s and ‘70s protected public lands and endangered species, now both political parties have allowed loggers, drillers, ranchers to degrade millions of acres of forest, grassland and mountains at the expense of future generations.
A NEW FRONTIER IS NEEDED
Reading Ketchum’s book might be a good way to start, to think about what each of us can do to protect our lands, prevent global warming, move away from coal and advance solar etc. Another thought: in each stage of life, we often find ourselves standing on some hill or in our backyard and staring at the sky, or the ocean, or an open field. Our minds and souls go to what is clean and untouched. And in today’s society, each and everyone of us needs to pledge that in some small way we will be keepers of our frontiers.
Another idea: make the new FRONTIER, one of HELPING ONE ANOTHER.
For Family Photos of our National Parks go here.
PHOTO: The Photographers Guide to the Grand Canyon
