Lines on the Land: Writers, Art, and the National Parks by Scott Herring, and: Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks by Richard Grusin (review)

2 2 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 5 remains a real presence despite his death in the novel’s prologue. And Meyers nails many facets of the young South Dakotan rancher-type with Carson, par­ ticularly the speech. Arguably less successful is the main nemesis, Yarborough, whose disturbing actions are for the most part without motive. While Meyers may intend that these acts remain mysterious and reflect the overall illusive nature of evil, most readers may come away feeling Yarborough is a stock villain. His young wife, Rebecca or “Reb” as Carson calls her, is also less successfully developed, though she has moments of appeal and believability. Yet when romantic feelings stir between her and Carson, Meyers avoids cliched plot elements regarding their relationship, as he does numerous other times in the novel. While I primarily highlight the novel’s characters here, Meyers’s gifts of style, description, and plot, among other considerations, round out this New Western. In addition, Wolves seemingly leaves itself wide open to a sequel, one that could move in any number of directions. In the interest of full disclosure, I must note that Meyers is a colleague of mine, and I am mentioned in his acknowledgments for reading and responding to an early draft of Wolves. That aside, I consider the book a worthy rival to Pete Dexter’s Deadwood (1986) and David Seals’s Powwow Highway (1990) as the finest South Dakota novel to date. Lines on the Land: Writers, Art, and the National Parks. By Scott Herring. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. 216 pages, $49.50/$ 16.50. Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks. By Richard Grusin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 232 pages, $65.00. Reviewed by Brooke Ann Smith Utah State University, Logan Fewer people visit national parks these days. According to the National Park Service Public Use Statistics Office, visitation has been steadily decreas­ ing since 1999 (http://www2.nature.nps.gov/stats/). Fear induced by the ter­ rorist attacks of September 11 seems to have contributed to the downward spiral—Americans have taken to nesting in their homes, avoiding even their friendly neighborhood national parks. An examination of the visitation num­ bers for individual parks, however, presents a different story. While visitation to such sites as the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and Pennsylvania Avenue is markedly down since 9/11, numbers at parks like Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite have rebounded from their 2001 lows and have even surpassed pre-9/11 levels. These numbers reveal not a duck-andcover obsessed America but an America seeking reconnection to its bedrock B o o k R e v ie w s 2 2 5 national identity. In his introduction to Culture, Technology, and the Creation of Americas National Parks, Richard Grusin notes that “it is something of a historical truism that the construction of American national identity has always been inseparable from nature” (1). After experiencing 9/11, Americans altered their itineraries, replacing visits to monuments of stone and pavement with visits to monuments of earth and sky, reflecting a desire to reconnect with their homeland. Grusin’s Culture and Scott Herring’s Lines on the Land: Writers, Art, and the National Parks, both published in 2004, are indicative of this recent renewed interest in America’s national parks. Each author speaks to readers eager to find their identity in cherished public lands. A traveler entering Yellowstone National Park after reading Herring’s insightful dissection of national park-related literature and art will view the landscape with much more awareness than other less-read travelers. In Lines on the Land, Herring examines the works of major authors and artists whose subjects are national parks, and he delineates the way in which these works shape our expectations of nature before we ever enter it. For nineteenth-century Americans, understanding the wonders of Yellowstone or the gaping gash of the Grand Canyon began with the digestion of reproductions in word and image. Thomas Moran’s...