Natural Beauty

One part of our trip that I haven’t touched on much thus far has been my experiences in some of the National Parks that we’ve visited. The truth is that I can’t. Many of the National Parks were so different from what I’m used to saying that I can’t elaborate on them much because, I’m still processing them. Suffice it to say that for me the National Parks on this trip were like oases along this forty day journey.

With this trip the national parks have been some very refreshing for me, but also for my group as a whole. Cities and towns are great, but there is something very special about spending time in nature. It’s interesting because I think that sometimes I felt more American and more patriotic in the National Parks than I did in some cities, but it’s a different type of “Americanism.” What I loved about the parks was seeing the beauty that is America. I think that geographically our country is very unique. Because it’s so big we have such a wide variety of landscape; a wider variety than most countries. Yellowstone, Glacier Park, the Redwoods, the Badlands, and even the Mt. Rushmore are all very different areas. And yet they’re all here in the United States.

While in all of these areas I couldn’t help but think about the fact that at one point, our entire country looked like these areas, and it’s bittersweet for me. On one hand it shows how much we as Americans have destroyed our country in hopes of becoming more sophisticated. New York City and Detroit look a lot different than Glacier Park. But on the other side of that I think that the parks also show what early American Settlers had to deal with. Looking at areas like Yellowstone and even the Redwoods shows how hard the settlers from the past must have worked in order to create towns for their families. And over the years these towns became more and more exaggerated as we grew more accustomed to the land, and while this exaggeration isn’t that great, it also ingenuity. Comparing Yellowstone and New York City shows how far our country has come in the last two hundred years both negatively and positively.

But I also think that comparing the two shows how big and diverse this country is and how diverse it is supposed to be. Sometimes this diversity isn’t as clear in some places, and in others it’s even there, and yet still in other places it’s not even important. But I think that if you look at the different areas within this country from metropolitan cities, to to small towns, to rural areas, and finally the wild areas such as National Parks (which aren’t all that wild anymore) you get a clear picture that America is special because of all of it’s different areas. And I wonder if more Americans got a chance to see how wide the spectrum of America’s landscape truly is, how much more accepting of different people we would become. Just a thought.