My family vacation would have been better without all the foreigners.
My husband and I recently completed a family trip to Colorado, specifically, Rocky Mountain National Park. We’re avid outdoorsmen, and after a multi-year hiatus taken to have and raise babies, our children were finally old enough to partake in the great American tradition of road-tripping. All told, we had a wonderful time, but on our drive back home I caught myself wondering, would there be a National Park worth coming back to?
This Land is My Land
Lichen is a pioneer species. It lives where few other things can and it has the extraordinarily important job of making uninhabitable land habitable. This is a process that takes hundreds of years due to the fact that lichen’s function is to break down stone and turn it into dirt. After enough dirt has accumulated, more pioneer species, like grasses and shrubs, can come in and speed the erosion process along, creating more dirt and nutrients, but lichen is the first step.
Because of this, because of how delicate lichen is, and because of how long it takes to literally eat stone, there are signs everywhere throughout the park instructing visitors to “Keep off the tundra” and “do not enter”.
Conservation efforts such as this rely on a remarkably simple social contract: help preserve what you enjoy today, so that it will still be here tomorrow for others to enjoy.
The foreigners’ reply to this is an overwhelming and resounding “no.”
Everywhere I turned, there were Indian men perched atop stone safety barriers erected between parking lots and 100 foot drops, Indian families hiking off-trail and trampling the lichen, Indians feeding the wildlife, Indians in freshly waxed, rented Escalades, parking them across multiple parking spots in front of scenic overlooks, and standing up out of the sunroofs to take selfies.
At Yellowstone National Park I see a similar pattern among foreign visitors in viral online videos.
The incursions are so reliably frequent among Chinese nationals that Yellowstone has had to write out their park rules and signage in Mandarin due to the fact that they simply refuse to stay on path. They trample the geothermal features that took thousands of years to form, and they regularly approach wildlife only to be gored or trampled or chased, transforming their date with death into an accidental ménage à trois with an innocent tourist.
When asked why they do this, the consistent defense given by the Chinese has been to feign ignorance. However, due to the fact that American tourists yell angrily at any park-goer disobeying park rules, this is difficult to believe.
Another infamous case that diversity demands I discuss involves Shamash Kassam, as he and his father, during a driving tour, pulled over, took a baby bison, and put it in their SUV. The baby later had to be euthanized after reintroduction efforts failed.
As I personally bore witness to this again, and again, and again, daily, for a week straight, I found myself asking the same question over and over: “When will we as a country be ready to admit that it’s time to ban foreign nationals from our parks? Not only to protect American land, but to protect them from themselves.”
The American Tradition of Conservation
Theodore Roosaveldt, one of the most consequential conservation presidents in American history, had an answer to this: “America is for Americans.” Though it was a speech devoted to immigration, I believe his stated principles can be applied to tourism as well.
He described certain immigrants as “undesirable” due to their observed unwillingness to assimilate and inability to contribute to the good of the Nation in a meaningful way. As such, he believed none of them should be allowed to set foot on American soil.
To Americans, the National Parks are not just random parcels of federally administered land. They are the truest expression of the American spirit. They are America in its most raw and primal form.
They are some of the few places left on earth that heritage Americans can visit in order to gain a deeper appreciation for what their ancestors conquered in order to deliver them into this present age. Not to be subjected and enslaved by it, but to rule it as any beneficent ruler would, that is, to respect, defend, and preserve it.
Bad Company Corrupts Good Character
On one of the last days of our trip, I finally had to pull my children aside. I had found them climbing up the side of the stone church we were touring. After fending off questions all week as to why we couldn’t climb on top of the safety barriers, carve up the aspen trees, or hike off trail, I knew it was only a matter of time.
“Listen.” I said, squatting in front of them. “We don’t climb on buildings. You know better.”
They looked back at the church and pointed to a family, every member of which were clad in Mexico soccer jerseys and spoke only Spanish, “but they did it.”
I was incensed. I had watched the perpetrators on our way in and gave them my best stern face as we walked past. It was one thing to witness someone disrespect a place of worship, it was another to watch my children see it happen and naturally wonder why they couldn’t do the same.
Typically, when I discuss sensitive subjects with my kids, I choose my words carefully because you never know what they’ll repeat, to whom, or at what possible moment, but right then, I no longer cared.
“Our culture is better than theirs.” I said bluntly. “That’s why they climbed the church and I’m telling you not to.”
I pointed back to the church and mountains behind, “If everyone that came here climbed this, eventually it wouldn’t look like that anymore. We preserve beautiful things so that we can share them. We want your children to be able to come here one day and see this place if they want to.”
I lowered my voice.
“Unfortunately, other people take advantage of that.
That’s what that other family did. They did something wrong and they got away with it. But that doesn’t change how we act or what we believe.
We take care of the beautiful things we are given and we don’t ruin them just because somebody else did it first.”
They nodded solemnly and then we all had hugs to break the tension.
Later, as I sat and watched a little creek meander around the base of the church, my oldest sat next to me and asked “Why did they do that, mommy?”
It was a question I had been picking at myself. I had watched the family use the kneelers within the chapel and kneel before entering the pew. They were Catholics. The church was a Catholic Church. What they did was blatantly disrespectful. But they hadn’t seen it that way.
I chose to be honest with my answer, “I don’t know, sweetheart, I just don’t know.”
To me, it only makes sense that Americans are so protective of something so seemingly inconsequential as lichen.
I believe something in our collective soul recognizes a familiar spirit. We see something of ourselves in something so lowly. Both pioneers. Both forging the way for people we’ve never met, generations we will never see. Both dreaming of the sun. Both faithful to the end, not to our own self-interests, but to a better, more bountiful future.
