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Cinematographer Buddy Squires filming at Glacier Bay National Park in southeastern Alaska. Tourists warming their feet in the waters of Great Fountain Geyser in Yellowstone, the first national park in the United States. Grand Teton mountain, within the Grand Teton National Park, in Wyoming, created in 1929. Arches National Park, in Utah, was created in 1929 as a national monument. It preserves thousands of natural sandstone arches, like the ones shown here. Cinematographer Buddy Squires, director Ken Burns, and writer/producer Dayton Duncan at Grand Teton National Park. |
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This fall, Ken Burns, the award-winning director who has documented in rich narrative and exhaustive detail such wholly American phenomena as baseball, the Civil War, and jazz music, turns his attention to what might just be his most indigenous subject yet: the country’s national parks.
From Crater Lake, in Oregon, with water so clear you can see an 8-inch disc 142 feet down; to the marshy Everglades, which support thousands of species of flora and fauna; to the remarkable plumes of hot water that spew from the geysers at Yellowstone, Burns and his crew roved the country in search of footage to justify Wallace Stegner’s statement that federal stewardship of the parks, codified under the 1916 creation of the National Park Service, was “the best idea we ever had.” It was certainly one of the most radical: the United States was the first nation in the world to preserve its most extraordinary natural features as public trusts, in the name of every citizen.
Because a park such as the Grand Canyon offers a literal cross-section of several million years of history, it can be tempting to think of the parks as foregone conclusions, pre-existing and forevermore. But that would be a mistake, says Burns. He spoke to RL Magazine about the 391 parks’ extraordinary backstories, the tug-of-war between conservation and commerce, and the powerful effect of nature on our national psyche.
RL: You’ve been working on this suite of films for more than five years now. Who had the idea to do national parks, and how did the ball get rolling?
KB: My longtime producing partner, Dayton Duncan, came to me ten years ago and thought that he would have to spend ten years convincing me, as he had on the previous films, to do this. And I, within ten seconds, agreed. Dayton and I had been working together on a history of the West—we’d done Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, we were working on Mark Twain—and when Dayton said “national parks,” it was, of course, the ultimate thing we could do, to tell not a travelogue, not just a nature film, but the story of the ideas and the individuals that made this uniquely American idea possible.
RL: I was interested to see how that actually played out in the films, because although the cinematography is gorgeous, one might wonder how much there is to say about a national park.
KB: Exactly! You raise a really good question, which is that beauty is often a distraction or condemns us to live at a superficial level. What we’re hoping to do is use that beauty in a much more complicated way. So we use it to tell the story of fifty people, some of whom you’ve heard of—the John Muirs and the Teddy Roosevelts and the John D. Rockefeller Jrs. The rest are not famous white guys; in fact, they’re black and brown and red and yellow and female and unknown as well. The added bonus is that their stories just happen to be set against the backdrop of some of the most spectacular scenery on Earth.
RL: The first episode talks about the parks as being a gift for generations. So I was wondering, What was the first park that you visited as a child, and what was your impression of it when you returned for this project?
KB: The first national park we filmed at for this project, six-plus years ago, was Yosemite. I had told everyone that this was the first national park I’d been to [as a child]. We worked our butts off, and the last night there I should have fallen into an exhausted sleep, but I couldn’t. My mind was churning. And I suddenly, I was given a memory, of 1959, when I was six years old. My mother was dying of cancer. Our household, as you can imagine, was a grim and demoralized place. But one day, after school on a Friday, my father took me to Baltimore, where he had grown up, put me to bed in his old room, and it seemed like just a second later that he woke me up at four in the morning. I’d never gotten up so early in my life. We left my grandmother’s house and we drove to Front Royal, Virginia, which is the northern entrance of Shenandoah National Park. It’s a relatively small park, but it has this beautiful skyline drive that runs down the spine of it. And he and I climbed into this park, scattering deer with his car horn, and drove through tunnels and clouds, and checked into a little cabin. I can still remember what his hand in mine felt like. It was the first and last road trip I spent with my dad. For some reason, all the trauma and tragedy, I had forgotten it. It wasn’t repressed, it was forgotten. And Yosemite opened up my heart and permitted back into my consciousness this memory of the first national park I ever went to, Shenandoah in 1959. If you’re doing the math, that’s fifty years ago.
RL: That story reminds me of what one of your interviewees, the writer Gretel Ehrlich, said about the parks being places we go to in order to come back in.
KB: She’s quoting John Muir: “In order to go in, we have to go out.” Which is to say, in order to know ourselves—in a rational way, in an emotional way, in a psychological way, in a spiritual way—we have to go out. Nature reminds you of your place in things. Today we live in a virtual world, which is not existence, you know? Cell phones and laptops and PDAs and video games—it’s not real. What nature provides are real experiences, and therefore identity.
RL: What do you think will be most surprising to people about the parks or about these films?
KB: The variety of them, for one. You say “parks,” and people have just one sense. But I think they’ll be blown away by the incredible variety. And part of that variety is their beauty, something we just talked about, but I don’t think we can diminish it. Beauty has a powerful effect on our psyches. And when we see something like Yosemite Valley or stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or behold the majesty of Denali or the incredible habitat that is the Everglades, the beauty is the overwhelming thing. It’s the voice that speaks to your soul, first and foremost. And then they’ll notice the diversity of the story. Each park tells a story that involves a so-called ordinary person who worked their whole life to set it aside for people they would never meet, meaning you and me.
RL: Was there a favorite historical tidbit associated with the parks that you discovered while working on these films?
KB: I think about Teddy Roosevelt when he visited Yellowstone as president of the United States, going off on a thirty-four-mile hike—alone! It’s flabbergasting. His predecessor was assassinated. And here’s the president of the United States in the wilderness, alone.
RL: Probably wouldn’t get away with that these days.
KB: Definitely not. And Teddy Roosevelt was the last president to sleep outside, under the stars, as president. Which is sort of sad.
RL: You mentioned some of the archival photos you came across during the research, those sweeping views of mountains reflected in lakes, and of basins and forests. A lot of those early image makers—photographers like Ansel Adams as well as painters like Albert Bierstadt—are credited with spurring conservation movements during their times, and I was wondering whether you were consciously or unconsciously working toward that while shooting.
KB: It’s a yes-and-no answer. Obviously, when you’re in the heat of production, you’re not thinking, Oh boy, this is the same vantage that Bierstadt had; you’re just trying to get the shot. I wasn’t the principal cinematographer, but I had enough time to do some, and it was thrilling. You are both mindful and completely in the moment. You’re just there, and what works, works. And then you go, Boy, that was not too far from what Ansel Adams took! Or, Boy, he’s so much better than I am!
RL: Speaking of shooting, let’s talk about some of the practicalities of that. What were the challenges you encountered trying to shoot in this incredibly varied terrain?
KB: We pinched ourselves almost every day, thinking, I can’t believe I am here and I am being paid, so that kind of transcended the fact that it took, for us, great generalship to pull this off. Part of that generalship was the stamina to keep the troops out there in extremes of weather. We were in Death Valley with over 100 degrees. We were in Yellowstone where it was twenty below zero. We had to climb mountains, we went down into the desert, we fought the bugs in the Everglades. And we jumped back into our van in Denali because a mother grizzly and her cub—who owned the park, by the way!—wanted to walk very close to us. But I don’t think there’s a person in the crew who would trade what they’re doing for a cushy studio gig.
RL: And they’re mostly your long-term collaborators, right?
KB: I have been working with [cinematographer] Buddy Squires for thirty-five-plus years. We barely even talk to each other anymore—we just use looks and hand signals and head tilts. And with [writer and coproducer] Dayton [Duncan], it’s been twenty years. And what happens is that you develop an enormous trust. I feel so privileged in my working life.
RL: Can you tell me about the equipment you were using?
KB: We are still clinging obstinately to film, and we shoot on 16 millimeter, what’s called Super 16, which has an aspect ratio that’s like wide screen. We believe we can get HD-quality imagery. And this series is being released in HD. These images are pretty spectacular.
RL: You’ve said before that you think this is the most spectacular footage that your production company, Florentine Films, has done to date.
KB: I think easily, in that regard. This project is big, it’s long, and it’s complicated, and we took the time to go to all these places. You will see at least one image of all of those parks in the series. And as we are borrowing or stealing from Wallace Stegner, who said that this was the best idea we ever had as a country, we are then honor bound to at least prove that aspect of the argument.
RL: Taking the long view, what, in your estimation, are the greatest threats facing our parks today?
KB: The greatest threats to the parks today are apathy and encroachment. Encroachment is obvious: adding more snowmobiles, putting in the power plant, changing the borders. There are always people who look at a river and think, Dam; who look at a stand of beautiful trees and think, Good board feet. And the parks are the antithesis of that. They say no, there are some places that should be free of development. Extractive and acquisitive interests are always present, even within ourselves. And we have to be vigilant and on guard.
And that leads to the second threat, which is apathy. If we think that the parks have always been there, and they haven’t, they are threatened. If we think the National Park Service has always been there to protect them—and it hasn’t—they are threatened. The essential message of this film is, you are the co-owner of some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet. The highest free-falling waterfall in North America. The greatest collection of geysers in the world. The grandest canyon on Earth. And all you have to do is visit your property now and then, make sure it’s being taken care of, and put it in your will for your kids. And as Dayton says in the film, that’s one hell of a bargain.
After the Civil War series aired in 1990, about three years later I visited the Gettysburg National Military Park, which is a unit of the National Park Service. I was walking across the lawn of the visitor’s center with the superintendent, and he bent down and scooped up a Popsicle wrapper that was on the grass. He waved it in my face and said, “It’s all your fault!” And he laughed, he was happy. His attendance had gone up 200, 300 percent, and they were straining to figure out what to do about all the people. And I would hope that every one of the national parks’ superintendents will be angry with us. Those are real, good problems to have in a democracy. The worst thing is if no one shows up here anymore.
—Interview by Sarah P. Hanson.
Photography credits:
- Courtesy QT Luong/terragalleria.com
- Yellowstone National Park
- Craig Mellish
- Craig Mellish
- Craig Mellish
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