Anyway, to pick up from where my earlier post left off, after a few days in Portland, Oregon, last September, we headed up to "the other Washington," to spend ten days in the Olympic National Park and the San Juan Islands.
One of the things that struck me throughout our trip was the ever-present hand of the Civilian Conservation Corps; they built the park lodges, headquarters, observation towers, roads, and even the trails our footsteps traced through the mountains. The history of the CCC and the establishment of the national park system is too fascinating and too long to be even outlined here; Ken Burns took six years and six episodes to do it. However, as i think about the state of our economy, and the stress fractures showing in those structures, i wonder why it is that, as a nation, we now scorn Roosevelt's economic and environmental policies. The CCC created public works and brought back from the brink of permanent destruction our most beautiful lands that not only now belong to each of us (and to the world), but also gave starving men (and some women) jobs working to improve the infrastructure of our country. Their profit was the nation's profit (not that of any particular individual, company, or hedge fund), and these investments seem to have been some of our most valuable; if you look at how well things were built and how long they have lasted, it seems like the work of the CCC is one of the greatest returns on investment our government has ever received.
I have to digress or expound a bit further here by quoting an amazing piece by Susan Eisenhower in last week's Washington Post, who was in turn citing her grandfather - a man the Republican Party loves to like, but whose sound economic and social policies have since been totally jettisoned in favor of throwing what little is left of our civil society under the bus of the military-industrial complex (we can no longer afford to pay a cent for public media, but have plenty of money for two wars). To wit, Ms. Eisenhower, writing about the current debate going on regarding how to balance our budget with limited resources - a major issue in Ike's time as well - says the following:
The pressures Eisenhower faced during his presidency were enormous. Over the years, as the Soviet Union appeared to reach military parity with the United States, political forces in Washington cried out for greater defense spending and a more aggressive approach to Moscow. In response, the administration publicly asserted that there was no such thing as absolute security. "The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without," Eisenhower said. And he followed through, balancing the budget three times during his tenure, a record unmatched during the Cold War.
...[Eisenhower also outlined] the cost of continued tensions with the U.S.S.R. In addition to the military dangers such a rivalry imposed, he said, the confrontation would exact an enormous domestic price on both societies: "This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. . . . We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
To bring the tangent back full circle, as i look at all the benefits we still enjoy from Roosevelt's massive stimulus plan and compare it to the vilification of all things "government" by the right leaning sectors of our society (and even by our supposedly socialist President), i want to cry in frustration. Many people out west still have near-reverence for Roosevelt and what he did to rebuild their failed economies. And i wonder, as our politicians propose shredding everything except the sacrosanct defense budget how much an F-35 costs in terms of the kinds of economic benefits and long-term security our society would gain from investments in high speed rail, our public schools, more research in the sciences, fixing our decrepit roads and bridges, or restoring our overtaxed parklands.
My Hero, Harold Ickes
Harold Ickes (le père) is the kind of person i would aspire to be if anyone actually let me run the Department of the Interior. A self-described curmudgeon, Ickes, originally a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, became the longest-serving Secretary of the Interior from 1933-1946 under FDR, and also ran the Public Works Administration. He is essentially the man who established most of our great national parks, including Olympic National Park. His tenure at Interior earned him the nickname "Honest Harold," for his opposition to corruption and meticulous management of the budget. He was a staunch defender of civil rights who arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when the fine Daughters of the American Revolution banned her from singing at Constitution Hall because she was African-American, and ordered desegregation of facilities in the national parks. He opposed internment of the Japanese during WWII and as a founding member of the UN, argued for de-colonization. He was a fabulous orator with an ascerbic wit and while Horace Albright called him "the meanest man who ever sat in a Cabinet office in Washington and the best Secretary of the Interior we ever had," i think Horace just misinterpreted a man who didn't suffer fools gladly (or at all) and exposed the nudity of emperors - see, e.g., the fabulousness of such gems as his response when Dewey announced that if elected, he would force Ickes to resign, whereby Ickes drafted a letter to Dewey and circulated it in the press, retorting: Hence, I hereby resign as Secretary of the Interior effective, if, as and when the incredible comes to pass and you become the President of the United States. However, as a candidate for that office you should have known the primary school fact that the Cabinet of an outgoing President automatically retires with its chief. Another truth-to-power-no-matter-which-side-of-the-aisle-it's-on gem is his actual resignation letter to President Truman, which came about when Ickes was brought before Congress to testify regarding the nomination of Edwin Pauley, a former treasurer of the Democratic Party, to be Secretary of the Navy. Ickes testified that Pauley had once pressured him to allow the private sector to gain title to oil-rich offshore lands in exchange for $300,000 in campaign donations, which led to a confrontation with Truman, who asked Ickes whether his memory on this incident was faulty. Ickes' 2,000 word resignation letter said, in part: I don't care to stay in an Administration where I am expected to commit perjury for the sake of the party.... I do not have a reputation for dealing recklessly with the truth. I think this might be the very definition of integrity.
With regard to the establishment of the Olympic National Park, Ickes and Roosevelt had to take on the Forest Service, who were in cahoots with the powerful logging companies. From the Burns summary of the fight:
In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt and Harold Ickes entered into a park controversy that had been raging for 30 years. On the Olympic peninsula west of Seattle, verdant rain forests contained the largest specimens of Douglas fir, red cedar, western hemlock and Sitka spruce in the world. For centuries, the area was the homeland of native tribes like the Makah and the Quinault, the Hoh and Skokomish.
In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt had used the Antiquities Act to set aside 615,000 acres as Mount Olympus National Monument. Since then, every bill introduced in Congress to make it into a national park had been defeated, caught in a seemingly endless battle between the Forest Service and the Park Service.
Meanwhile, loggers were approaching the last virgin stands of rain forest. The president decided to assess the situation for himself – but his visit was arranged by the Forest Service and its allies in the lumber industry, who were intent on convincing Roosevelt that a national park would ruin an already suffering local economy.
The Forest Service ensured that Park Service officials were excluded from the invitation list. They scheduled a logging train to rumble past the president's lodge during his breakfast, a reminder of the jobs at stake. And they moved a sign marking the national forest boundary, giving the impression that a heavily logged area was not on federal land. "I hope the son-of-a-bitch who is responsible for this is roasting in hell," Roosevelt said when he saw the devastation, not realizing that he was looking at a national forest and his guide was the forest supervisor.
When Roosevelt learned about the deception, it only spurred his desire to protect the forest. On June 29, 1938, Congress converted the national monument to Olympic National Park and gave Roosevelt the authority to expand its boundaries. The president saved two of the most threatened valleys by stripping an additional 187,000 acres away from the Forest Service.
I can't say that this dynamic continues exactly the same way today, but I do find it curious that the Park Service is still part of an Agency that also sells off public lands. Anyway, we should all be grateful for what Ickes and Roosevelt fought for, or we wouldn't have seen any of this...The High Divide Loop
Over the river and through the woods...the High Divide Loop is one of those amazing circuit hikes that takes you through four seasons and several ecosystems in 1 to 3 days, depending on your hiking style. I was amazed to encounter a couple of people doing the entire 17.6 mile loop in a single day. Most people spend at least one night, usually two, enjoying the old-growth forest, subalpine meadows and lakes, montane forest, and spectacular views of the glaciated peaks of the Olympic Mountains - including Mt. Olympus (the other, somewhat less bankrupt one). We really lucked out with the weather, which had been unseasonably wet until we arrived for 3 perfectly clear, non-humid days of 70-degree temps.
Day one of the hike started off in the old-growth forest, and by old, we're talking trees that are centuries old and the scale of which is impossible to adequately capture, no matter how hard you try:
But one's eye is not only drawn heavenward, but the ground beneath is also full of the most minute details:
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -
Heavenly Hurt, it give us -
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are -
None may teach it - Any-
'Tis the Seal Despair -
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -
When it comes, the Landscape listens -
Shadows - hold their breath -
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -
ca. 1861 (From Thomas H. Johnson's Poems of Emily Dickenson (1955)).
All of this beauty caused a bit of a rift between my spouse's desire to get to the next campsite before dark, and my desire to capture every slant of light, delicate flower, honeybee, and panorama. And this is where the fun of a digital camera becomes and even greater time suck. I only recently traded my trusty and battered Canon 35mm for an EOS 30D. Granted, i raise eyebrows for carrying this rather hefty piece of equipment and a telephoto lens in an already overstuffed pack, but my retort is that compared to the number of filters and equipment i used to need, i've shaved off probably 10 pounds. For example, while i do think that not much has changed from Ansel Adams' day in that the real artwork of photography is still most often achieved in the processing (usually via the labyrinthian Photoshop), one no longer needs the various colored filters in shooting black and white, and one can switch between B&W and color with the press of a button instead of having to shoot a whole roll (or worse, have two cameras). Also, since you can see a shot, you can increase or decrease exposure, aperture, film speed, etc. right there until you get the shot right (this is where the impatient foot tapping usually starts), or you can even shoot with filters or effects that where only achievable in the darkroom before (this is where I am abandoned on the trail). But it's such a thrill to shoot these images back to back:
Day two of the hike brought us up into the subalpine meadows and lakes, through fields ripe with huckleberries, traversing waterfall after waterfall (except for the one with the "log bridge" - which is a bridge only if one considers a log wedged between the banks 40 feet up from the rocks below to constitute a bridge - necessitating that i find the mule trail a mile back downstream), past herds of Roosevelt Elk (named after their patron saint), up onto the spine of the ridge across from Mt. Olympus, and finally to our campsite at Lunch Lake (we were the lunch - for the mosquitoes):
Day three took us through tumbling fields of wildflowers back down into the forest primeval, past the famous Sol Duc Falls, and back to the beginning.
The Olympic Peninsula
The next few days were spent on the coast of the Park, which also has a long and fascinating history, that i will leave to you to investigate yourselves. One of the main base towns for seeing the various sights (in our case, La Push, Second Beach, Ruby Beach, Cape Flattery) is the tiny town of Forks, Washington, just up the road from the Quileute Nation, and made famous by the random choice (and subsequent hijacking of their original history) Stephanie Meyers made when writing the Twilight series. We were in Forks the week before - no lie - Stephanie Meyers Day, and most of the inns were already booked up with little goth tweens. The entire town was Twilight themed (seriously - every store has a Twilight something - the Bella Burger at the local diner, the dueling Edward vs. Jacob Twilight gift shops across the street from each other, etc.) I can only imagine how much life in this 5 stoplight town has changed in the past few years. The Quileute have both benefitted and suffered quite a bit from the attention; all of the clothes one sees in the stores that are covered with Quileute designs provide no profit to the tribe, since apparently none of their symbols can be trademarked. Our country's hypocrisy on indigenous rights elsewhere in the world never ceases to amaze and appall me.
But fear not, i'll stick to the script here, and just put up the pictures and shut up. They're worth more than my words, anyway:
Well, it seems that i have once again gone beyond what is acceptable for the length of a single post, and so will save the Orcas Island and Seattle pictures for another entry. Believe it or not, i was extremely restrained in the pictures posted here. If you'd like to see a slightly less restrained set of photos - including some fun before-and-after-Photoshop-special-effects, you can see them here.
But i'd like to close with a return to Dickenson. A certain slant of light is too wintry for this scene, taken in the still-warm days and slightly-cool evenings of early September. I look back on them now, and think that this one is more appropriate (and not just because of the Twilight reference):
As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away -
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy -
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon -
The Dusk drew earlier in -
The Morning foreign shone -
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone -
And thus, without a Wing
Or Service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.
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