“Just sit back and let
Mother Nature carry us toward her own.”
Yogi Bear
“When
you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Yogi Berra
In 1935 a family travelled from Canada to
Yellowstone National Park, taking in Niagara Falls and New York along the way.
They stopped at other sites, and may have gone further than Yellowstone (a
photo not included is from Colorado), but these are the places in the photos
that we have. Because these were bought in Montreal and because the
inscriptions on the back are in French, we can reasonably assume the family
came from Montreal or thereabouts. A pedant may clear his throat and beg to
speak here but actually, we don’t care where they came from, only where they
went.
The unifying idea behind all the photos in
the collection is that they are about bigness. Niagara Falls is massive, New
York is huge and Yellowstone is vast, but that’s not surprising. In 1935
America was still a big country, metaphorically if not so physically. Niagara
Falls is only the ninth largest cataract in the world – waterfalls being
measured by the volume of water that pours over per time frame, not the height
nor the width.
The Empire State from ground level. How
many of us have visited New York, stood at the bottom of the Empire State and
jiggled around, finding that perfect position from where the sides of the
building angle in as they move up to a vanishing point? If you haven’t tried it
you haven’t been a tourist in New York.
New York was big; no one would argue with
that, and whether it was the biggest city in the world was a matter of
population or square miles, which again wasn’t so important. When this photo
was taken from the Empire State Building, that , and the Chrysler, seen in the
middle ground here, were only four years old and both were the tallest
skyscrapers in the world. Interesting: whoever wrote the inscription on the
back says this is Chicago, which it obviously isn’t. But what that tells us is
that by the end our photographer was so overwhelmed by the experience he or she
could no longer remember where the photos were taken. A common experience;
usually indicating a good time.
We have skipped large parts of America and
find ourselves with the family at the top of a summit in Wyoming. Which
mountain our photographer doesn’t say but obviously one that was accessible to
children. If the children were exceptionally well educated they could read the
detritus around them for evidence of the last ice age that affected this
particular mountain.
And now we are in Yellowstone. You may have
seen footage of what happened to Yellowstone within a few years of the
reintroduction of wolves in the 1990s. This photo gives you an idea of why they
needed to be brought back. Before Yellowstone became a national park the
vegetation had covered the slopes much more thickly. This prevented erosion,
which in itself allowed more biodiversity. By 1935 there were no wolves in
Yellowstone, the last being killed nine years earlier.
The paradox of America’s internationally
progressive national parks programme was that it wreaked destruction on
wilderness areas, usually under the directorship of men who aspired to protect
the landscape. The question of how to balance conservation of the environment
against the commercial demand to make it available to visitors was impossible
to answer given the knowledge and general ethos of 1930s. It wouldn’t get a
proper response until Aldo Leopard wrote his report on wildlife management in
1963. In 1935 these falls would have been viewed from a specially constructed
platform, with the photographer crowded by others trying to take the same
photo. Experiencing Yellowstone wasn’t much different to viewing a patient in
an incubator.
Her hat isn’t fashion. It is part of a
uniform. She is unlikely to be a tour guide because the rest of her outfit
isn’t suitable. By 1935 the New Deal was in full swing and the Civilian
Conservation Corps employed thousands of workers to maintain the national
parks, but the CCC only employed men. She isn’t part of that. She could have a
trolley off camera and be selling ice creams or sodas from it. In any case,
this is exactly the type of platform tourists would have observed the park
from.
Old Faithful blows its stack every 35 or
120 minutes. There is a theory, part paranoid conspiracy, part science based
paranoia, that the volcanic caldera, the same force that drives Old Faithful
will collapse any day and being of such a size it will drag most of the U.S
with it. Maybe President Trump’s last thought will be that all his billions of
dollars are now worth nothing. Fortunately Canada and Mexico don’t appear to be
affected so we can relax.
Imagine travelling all the way to
Yellowstone and not seeing a bear. Well, if you were Canadian you might have
thought that was no big deal. Even so, Yellowstone didn’t have any wolves left
but the bears had become emblematic, not just of the park but of wilderness.
They were an apex predator and in the 1930s they were the animals that stood up
to represent all others. Anyway, here is a photo of Wild America 1935; a black
bear so inured to people that it knows how to perform for the camera.
We leave our holidaymakers here. They’ve
shown us a fragment of America, from back when it was brash and self-confident
and too obsessed with grand visions and great projects to be aware there was a
concept called hubris. Still, there are glimmers in the darkness. Yellowstone
is one.
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| YELLOWSTONE |
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