Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington's National Parks

Epilogue

EPILOGUE C arshavebeeninnationalparksformorethanacentury,anditwould be hard to imagine parks, with the exception of Alaska’s reserves, without cars. But what does this really tell us? For one thing, it tells us what we already seem to know: that cars dominate the national park experience . Automobiles provide access to parks, ensuring that most Americans can visit places like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Mount Rainier. Although fulfillingthedemocraticpromiseof nationalparks,carsappeartooverwhelm them at times with long lines at entrances, congested roads, and overflowing parking lots and campgrounds. Within parks, cars are in constant motion (sometimes slow motion), reminders of the nation’s mobility and consumer culture, as they motor through forests, along rivers, and over mountains. The hum of engine noise and whine of tires on pavement compete with the roar of falling water and wind and most of all with silence. In parks, cars are integral to an ever-changing mosaic of industry and nature. But having automobiles in parks also tells us something more subtle— that national parks have been spaces, both real and imagined, for machines in nature. We cannot understand parks without recognizing that cars have been central to shaping how people experience and interpret the meaning of national parks, especially how they perceive them as wild places. But there are diªerent ways of telling this story of parks as wilderness. As the historian Paul Sutter so powerfully suggests, cars have altered the genuine “wildness ” of national parks, for wilderness, Sutter argues, is intrinsically roadless. With their accommodations for auto tourists and motorized recreation, 164 national parks have lost their original purpose—the preservation of the natural world in its primeval state. The launching of the modern wilderness movement, in fact, traces its origins to the interwar years, when the National Park Service was developing parks for the new motoring masses. Groups such as the Wilderness Society heralded roadlessness as a quality essential to the definition of wilderness and national parks, making parks important alternatives to modern ideas of recreation and leisure, and thus symbols of the significance of wilderness in American life. The history of Washington’s parks, however, suggests another way to tell the story of cars and their influence, one that touches on the experience of many traveling Americans. In this narrative, rather than working to exclude automobiles altogether, park managers and patrons attempted to reconcile cars with nature in these parks. In doing so, they blurred the boundaries between the natural world and modern life, transforming these (and by association all) national parks into windshield wilderness, places where the relationship between automobiles and nature seemed to be mutually beneficial. However hopeful or paradoxical, the notion suggests that national parks are products of this relationship with automobiles and people and that our reactions to cars reveal how ideas of nature, wilderness, and culture are complex and historically contingent. For many motoring Americans, who appreciate wild nature protected in national parks, “wilderness” is something they encounter while driving. To say that cars destroyed the primitive values that national parks were intended to protect, then, overlooks this equally essential meaning of national parks in the twentieth century. Responses to autos in parks, however, like expectations about nature and the importance of wilderness, have changed over time. At the turn of the century, the arrival of automobiles in national parks like Mount Rainier received a positive response, albeit with a few misgivings about the future of the machine in the garden. The introduction of cars signaled a new way of thinking about and appreciating parks not just within the context of modern life but within the context of the motor age. Auto tourism—getting back to nature in a car—became the most common way of encountering national parks. As automobiles grew more reliable and aªordable for middle-class Americans, ownership rose, exposing more people than ever before to these natural wonders. Prior to the advent of the motorcar, touring national parks was primarily an activity for those who had both time and money, mostly Epilogue 165 Epilogue eastern elites, to travel to parks by train, stay in hotels, and tour these nature reserves by horse and wagon. After Henry Ford mass produced his Model T in 1910 and roads leading to and through national parks improved, all of this changed. Cars reordered both time and space and made possible an entirely new set of experiences with, and expectations about, national...