Jack Burns Lives!

Should I Stay Or Should I Go

The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders-Edward Abbey.

With spring approaching, I find myself once again yearning to head west. To cross the mighty Mississippi and flee to the land of mountains, mesas, deserts, cowboys and Indians. In the interest of balanced reporting, I should also say the land of hydrofracturing, Mormons and water shortages. No place is perfect.

But there are other problems, of course, not the least of which is turning myself into a willing and hypocritical participant in the metastasis known as industrial tourism. Hoards of humans with cameras ’round their necks, Visa’s smoking in their pockets and screaming children in tow. All of us filling the friendly skies and highways of a country on life support. Millions of people looking for a “getaway,” so many in fact, parks like Arches and Yosemite are beginning to resemble the places we’re attemping to escape.

The airport experience alone is enough to keep me at home. It’s a house of horrors where the terror begins the moment you reach the overpriced parking lot. That’s just the foreplay, however. From there comes the full scale rape. There’s your non-refundable ticket, a contract between you and the airlines where the airlines is held harmless from everything. They don’t even have to get you where you want to go within a reasonable amount of time. And if there’s a problem, they can hold you hostage for hours on the runway. Try to leave, and goon-like Federal agents will be waiting for you at the gate, ready to haul you off to a dingy room for several more hours of torture.

Once your ticket is purchased, you’re herded like cattle in a slaughter line through an inefficient, bizarre security apparatus and treated like a common criminal.

But wait. There’s more.

There’s the flight itself where we’re jam packed into a giant metal, mechanically deficient suppository frequently managed by underpaid, undertrained operators. If there’s a big mistake, it’s adios. C’est fini, monsieur.

And if you survive all of that, you have also endure the terror of wondering if your luggage made it followed by the bus ride to the rental car terminal where you’re once again raped. There’s no lube in any part of the journey. The whole thing is abject misery, and I haven’t even touched the most important deterrent of all: burning prodigious amounts of fuel. Then again, maybe we just need to burn it up fast and be done with it. Let the healing process started posthaste.

I’m told by some that people visiting the parks is what’s needed to raise environmental awareness. Really? Why is this? Why do they have to see something “magnificent” in order to love the natural world and feel a responsibility toward it? Are the bees in the backyard insufficient to inspire our awe? Bats circling above the patio on a summer night? The symphony created by our amphibian friends after a spring rain?

Seems most people hardly notice such things, sufficient evidence to suggest the average bloke is nearly completely disconnected from the natural world. They know little about their own home, of the native flora and fauna and weather patterns. They’re disconnected from place, ignorant buffoons whose knowledge doesn’t extend far beyond what’s provided by their GPS or ESPN.

Which brings me back to myself and my own apparent inability to remain satisfied with place. I take some comfort in Ed Abbey’s own inability to remain in place. He was a rambler, and like me, a fellow Easterner that realized the desert and the West was his real “home.” Ed selfishly made the West his home, but he more than paid for his admission by becoming its greatest defender. Ed did as much for the West as he took from it.

So, unless I’m willing to become a foot soldier and give back in some measurable and meaningful way to its defense, therefore paying for my admission to this already overcrowded, much abused place, I probably need to stay home.

The West has enough people already, with nary a spot for one more. What it needs is more defenders.