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

Introduction: Nature as We See It

INTRODUCTION Nature as We See It W hen we visit national parks, we drive. And with few exceptions, national parks welcome us with open gates and splendid scenery. At a park like Washington’s Mount Rainier, we leave behind urban sprawl, the roadside blight of strip malls, and the patchwork of fields, clear-cuts, and other signatures of people at work in nature. We pass beneath a massive log portal and enter a landscape for the car in nature. It is a landscape that seems pristine. The road travels through a dark forest, passesthroughmeadows,andgraduallyascendsthemountaininalongseries of turns that, like stanzas in a poem, reveal an unfolding panorama of glaciers , rock, and sky. Conforming to the topography and edged with guard walls of stone, the road seems to belong to the landscape. It frames our view. It is how we see the park. It is how we know nature in this place. This vision of national parks and automobiles reflects how many millions of Americans encounter their national parks. Although a park road may look “natural,” a great deal of thought and eªort has gone into making it appear this way, particularly through landscape architecture. Still, we are willing to suspend disbelief that a park road intrudes on, or is harmful to, the environment because it appears to fit the scene so well and presents the scenery to us. I find national parks attractive for these reasons. They intrigue me with their natural beauty. Yet I am left wondering why autos seem so familiar in an otherwise primitive landscape. And what does this say about the meaning of national parks? We can make sense of automobiles in national parks by thinking of their presence as a story about space and time. Automobiles and the highways 3 Introduction they travel have shortened the distance and time it takes to reach national parks. They have brought the cities in which we live and the parks we visit closer together. In our minds as well as on our journeys out of town, the places we live and the natural places we visit merge. They have become part of the same mental as well as physical geography. Autos and highways have made it possible to think of national parks—to understand their meaning— not as wild places reserved from progress but known because of it. Although this notion began early in the twentieth century and has changed over time, it is still with us. It is a legacy of knowing nature through machines. When the automobile first appeared in national parks one hundred years ago, it changed the way most Americans would encounter these protected areas. Throughout the twentieth century, people would interpret parks from a road and through a windshield. A twentieth-century phenomenon, the automobile helped reinvent the nineteenth-century idea of national parks as products of America’s cultural achievements and vestiges of the nation’s disappearing wilderness for a modern, mobile audience. For Americans of the Progressive Era, this new way of knowing national parks did not necessarily signal the destruction of nature, but the beginning of something promising. The presence, and acceptance, of autos in a national park embodied the hope that nature and technology could be blended into a new kind of aesthetic, one that would solve the social dilemma brought forth by our ambiguous relationship with the natural world. Thus, coming to terms with the automobile, like coming to terms with technological progress itself, redefined the meaning of national parks as places of windshield wilderness, where it was possible for machines and nature to coexist without the same industrial transformation that was aªecting other parts of the nation. One made it possible to appreciate the other. We can think of parks in this way because each generation responds to parkswithinthecontextof itstime.Thenationalparkideaisaflexiblenotion; we “dispossess” parks of native peoples to protect them as wilderness and we allow native peoples to “inhabit” parks to protect them as wilderness. Notions about the ways we know nature through work and leisure are also flexible.1 Perhaps the greatest example of this conceptual flexibility is the way automobiles have shaped our perceptions of parks as wilderness reserves (open to cars). Early in the twentieth century (and perhaps still today), automobiles provided Americans with the authentic experience they desired from the natural world. Automobiles supplied not only the vehicle by which middle-class Americans got back to nature but also the vehicle by 4 [3.145.175.243] Project...