Ken Burns’s Best Work Ever
His documentary of America’s national parks far surpasses Burns’s earlier, famous film work.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 08/25/2009
All these people, every single park, has somebody unique: Native American, Hispanic, Asian. Horace Kephart, a guy who had lost his family—his wife and six kids—due to alcoholism, decided to hide out in the Smoky Mountains, and he began to write. He wrote the established guides on camping in the wilderness in America. He and Japanese immigrant George Masa—who worked his way up from the laundry room at one of the tonier hotels there in Asheville, North Carolina—started taking photographs. His photographs and Kephart’s words became the essential basis for the creation of what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
It’s just an amazing, amazing collection of stories. Ever been to Alaska?
No, I have not.
There are rivers that are called braided rivers. They have huge, almost alluvial, wide banks, filled with rocks, not big boulders, but rocks. The water at any given time, except in floods, flows in these little channels, so it’s easy to walk over; but it may be 100 or 200 yards wide, so they’re called braided rivers. I’d like to think that we took these four or five dozen people and inter-braided their stories as the idea of the parks evolved, set against the backdrop of some pretty great, spectacular scenery.
What I find remarkable is how people who didn’t necessarily have the ear of anyone of great wealth or high office were able to make the difference.
That’s why it’s democracy applied to the landscape, because it actually worked. Wallace Stegner, the writer and historian, said the national parks are our best idea, which gave us the subtitle of our film. Now you could make an argument, as we do instantly in our introduction, that the best idea is Thomas Jefferson’s. But once you start the country, once you establish this thing, you could do no better than the national parks.
In point of fact it does represent a kind of participatory thing, and it’s all the way through. Have you been to Dinosaur [National Monument] up in Utah, where the Green and the Yampa Rivers are? Just an amazing, amazing place. And in the 1950’s they were going to put a dam, and there hadn’t been a dam in a national park—there’s only been one, and that’s Hetch Hetchy, which John Muir fought all his life to stop—and it didn’t happen.
In the case of Hetch Hetchy, San Francisco wanted the water; they took it. But Hetch Hetchy became a rallying cry, and a whole conservation movement was born in response to it. There hasn’t been a single dam since. And here was one being proposed in the ’50’s. So what we consider the modern conservation movement coalesced around that dam, in what was called Echo Park, a part of Dinosaur National Monument, and [the movement] stopped it. It’s because the Speaker of the House could not believe the amount of mail that he got, running 99-1 against it.
So now we have dams outside of the national parks, and Glen Canyon [Utah] certainly alters the rage of the Colorado within the Grand Canyon, making it a hell of a lot cooler, because the water that’s let down out of the dam is from the bottom. But it’s outside the park; it’s not in the park.
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