Indoor Nation

On the afternoon of our first day in Yellowstone last year--a dusty, too-hot Montana afternoon--I had to search out a payphone in Gardiner, the park's northern gateway community. I had not dropped coins into a telephone since I had been here the previous year, and the phone I used then had for some reason been removed, and with no finesse whatsoever; all that remained was the wall bracket, looking stripped and skeletal, like the scene of a crime. Cell phones work fine here sometimes. Sometimes they work as well as two tin cans and a piece of string.

Which is fine with me (I don't own a cell phone any more). On the payphone, I called various places, looking for Bill Berg, the founder of this website. I talked to some Cool Works people, and discovered that Bill was going to the potluck and literary reading that he had told me about some weeks earlier, which was to be held in the "community center" in Gardiner. I had not known they possessed such a thing, and did not know what to expect from such an event, although it was surely a troubling wrinkle; given the hour, we would have to eat dinner at the potluck, to which we had not properly been invited and for which we had nothing to bring. I was uncertain about this whole affair.

The community center, it turned out, was in the local Fraternal Order of Eagles lodge. A pair of bronze eagles stood at attention next to the door, looking out of place in front of the unpretentious lodge building, like Marines in their dress uniforms standing watch as honor guard over a donut shop. We entered and saw that, at the moment, we knew no one here--but were made to feel immediately welcome, in part because they needed our help setting up. Bill arrived, looking somehow harried and unflappable at the same instant. He had been at a meeting of the county planning commission, trying to make the local trophy-home developers remain within the bounds of the law, and the meeting was apparently just like the gunfight at OK Corral, only less friendly. Changing the subject, I asked him what he needed from me for Cool Works. He answered me immediately, without thinking: he needed people--to work in national parks and such places, that is. At that time, there was a shortage of employees through the entire industry, even though it was only the beginning of the summer season. I have been reflecting on that comment ever since.

Plenty of you will probably be thinking that they could solve the problem easily enough by paying more. That's surely true--but the summer tourist business has been in existence for well over a hundred years, and the pay has been low for that whole time. (When I worked in national parks, I always thought it was more the lack of privacy in the housing that was the greatest problem; give people a little space of their own, I thought, and any retention problems would ease). While the pay has been what it is for a long time, the shortage has gotten worse recently. I think it is a problem with society itself.

"Many members of my generation grew to adulthood taking nature's gifts for granted," author Richard Louv writes in his book Last Child in the Woods; "we assumed (when we thought of it at all) that generations to come would also receive these gifts. But something has changed. Now we see the emergence of what I have come to call nature-deficit disorder." Just over the last thirty years or so, Louv argues, parents (in the developed world, at least) have become protective of their children to a degree that resembles clinical paranoia. The natural world has become, for children today, a distant and difficult place that holds no appeal compared to all the glowing screens in their lives. Louv interviewed kids all over the country about this phenomenon: "I think often," he explains, "of a wonderfully honest comment made by Paul, a fourth-grader in San Diego: 'I like to play indoors better, 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are.' In many classrooms I heard variations on that answer. True, for many children, nature still offers wonder. But for many others, playing in nature seemed so...Unproductive. Off-limits. Alien. Cute. Dangerous."

It's that last that's the real problem, and the children are not necessarily to blame. The parents I know are often scared of everything; in the city, children are chauffeured everywhere, in car seats that resemble the ejection seats in an F/A-18. They don't go to the country at all because it's full of coyotes and snakes and West Nile Virus, and the sun is hard to get away from in the country. The sun can be a real source of terror for the modern parent. This trend has been going on for long enough to produce what amounts to an indoor nation. There are exceptions (the people reading this blog are mostly exceptions), but if you doubt me, look at the indicators. To give just one example, look at the obesity problems swelling forth everywhere, among children especially; look at the degree to which diabetes has become common in all age groups.

This trend is part of much larger historical changes. The urban revolution--the movement of people from farm to city--is not over; I have watched it happening in my own life. A generation ago, it was still common to have parents or grandparents who grew up on farms. Mine did. That meant that I was exposed to countrified pursuits at an early age even though I grew up in the most urban of places--and one must be exposed at an early age, or else those pursuits look odd or inexplicable. While I had grandparents and relatives in the country, my children do not.

But what Louv calls "nature-deficit disorder" is not the whole explanation. I think also of how different the cultural climate of the 1970s was from more recent years. In the mid-'70s, there was a hiking fad; John Denver's hit song "Rocky Mountain High" was its anthem. Backcountry visitation in national parks reached numbers not approached before or since. Big brown Vasque waffle-stomper hiking boots, though shaped like the boots Apollo astronauts wore on the moon, were fashionable on high school and college campuses, a badge of authenticity. Compare that to the situation today, when to be "urban" is what the average college kid wants, desperately. Among my students at UC Davis, a major preoccupation is trying to convince the world that you grew up in an inner-city ghetto (most of them are from wealthy San Francisco Bay Area suburbs, and have only visited ghettos as brief and nervous tourists). Acoustic guitars and the all-natural life are not their major focus.

And it's bigger still than that. When, after the Second World War, industrialized countries grew wealthy--a process that happened in the United States first, later elsewhere--people were offered a choice: they could either have more money or more time off. Europeans took the time off, while Americans took the money (so did the Japanese, who have a word, karoshi, for death from overwork; the phenomenon is common enough that they need a word to describe it). People work hard in this country from a very early age. Although they are fatter--that is undeniable--they are not lazier. The goal is the comfortable life of the upper-middle-class urban or suburban professional. Since becoming a successful doctor or attorney is a hard slog, people caught up in this process will hardly think of taking the time off to work in Alaska. Pure snobbery can also play a part; such people may also think it beneath their dignity to take a job bussing or cleaning rooms.

In such a cultural environment as this, going off to live in a national park, or something like it, requires a willingness to flout social convention, and adventurousness of an Indiana Jones intensity.

But people really have no idea what they're missing. Half the town showed up at the Gardiner community center, but there was still plenty of food. We were made to feel altogether welcome, and went away happy. We spent almost two weeks in the park; having worked here, of course, it's a second home for me. We let the kids get as dirty as possible every day, and they were sad when it was time to go back to the city.