Icefia Ids Parkway. Photograph bt Douglas Cwtart. i. The View from the Road Recreation and Tourism Modern tourism was bom owt of the application of social policies which hi So industrial work-I ers obtaining annualpaid holidays, and at the same time found its expression through the recognition of the busk human right to rest and leisure. — United Nations declaration on tourism, 19 So In the mid-1980s I took a railway trip from Toronto to Vancouver. The train, called Trie Canadian, was old and tatty and filled with grumpy American travellers who were in the country by default — Canada was a tourist destination without terrorists. But no tourist experience comes without its own logic, its own way of organizing the landscape and our sense of it. The train carried us to Vancouver, all right, but on the way it stirred us to pay belated though still sincere homage to the Canadian landscape. The dining car was the most intact remnant of this vestigial nationalism, Called the Queen Alexandra, it was a roya! blue ode to prairie songbirds and prairie hospitality, with wonderful etched glass dividers and stars on the ceiling. Here was a colonial nostalgia whose restraint and innocence spoke of the early 1950s, yet it was overlaid with the ruthless corporate reality of our own day: mass-produced meals and packaged travellers who probably wanted to go to Greece but ended up in Saskatchewan. Out the window, as always, the vast land itself flitted by, so familiar from postcards but silent and untouchable from inside our glass cases. I remember wanting to get off the train at every point and lie in the sweet summer fields. While it's nice to think that my image of those fields came from within, from the memory of authentic, animated, red space, I know that it is also part of the repertoire of images of nature that tourist culture produces in great number and variety, and that in some ways are indistinguishable from nature itself cultures and landscapes. In the past fifty years or so it has become a global } THE CU LTUFtE OF NATURE phenomenon involving millions of people. It is also a big and growing industry — Mid the principal one for the economies of many countries and regions ih the Third World. It may also be the largest industry in North America by the turn of the twenty-first century. The history of tourism is a confusing one, because no one knows quite what it is or when it started. What we can say is that its history parallels that of modern industrial society. While people travelled for pleasure before that time, and the wealthy classes of imperial Rome or China had holiday villas in the country, modem mass tourism represents a vastly different way of moving through the world. It has created a whole range of new landscapes: motel strips and campgrounds, airports, beach compounds, amusement parks, and convention centres, It has promoted the growth of a managerial class whose job it is to organise human desires and leisure time. It has extended the commodity form both out into the natural world and back into our imaginations. The Caribbean holiday, after all, is a ma«-marfatedjgoduct —j as well as a place. Like a tin of fruit cocktail, the promise of a holiday experience has been manufactured out of the material and ideological resources available to contemporary culture. The "destination" as they say in the business, is an integral part of the identity of the Caribbean holiday product at the same time . as it's strangely irrelevant: basically, anything with sun and palm trees will do. Lastly, modern tourism is a phenomenon that is both urban and rural, and at the same time it breaks down the distinction between the two. It has vastly reorganized not only the geography of North America but also our perceptions of nature and our place in it as humans, f Tourism has metre than a coincidental relationship with modern indus- [ trial society. As the 1980 United Nations declaration on tourism points out, the 1 phenomenon is one of the byproducts of that society. Certainly one outcome of the long history of industrial capitalism has been the creation ofleisure time. But leisure isn't time like any other. It's supposed to be a discretionary kind of time, different from the productive time spent at work. Leisure is a nineteenth-century idea, introduced by a culture that defined work itself as a separate sphere of life, an activity that had its own politics and increasingly its own place no the landscape. In the nineteenth century, work was still a redemptive activ-\u 'ity. But work has changed, and so has the politics of labour. Because new tech-■ nolo_gies have-eliminated certain kinds_of work and made much of whatMeft \ f rfleaiuijgJesSjJgBure time is increasingly the time, and creates thejypace^where we look for meaning in our lives" A lot ofsociirmsHtuSons are now orgsni2ed around buying, eating",' oFsightseeing rather than around the social bonds built through labour, It isn't always this way, of course. People also use leisure time to engage in other kinds of activities altogether: to build local cultures and communities — or simply to work in the garden. These shifts in the nature of work and leisure are also part of the history of tourism. By the mid-twentieth century, technological change in North American Industry had created considerable wealth. The response of most Canadian and U.S. workers, however, was not to gain more control over the labour process — to demand shorter working hours and more time of their own, for example — but to settle for higher wages and easy credit as an entrée into the growing culture of affluence, what was usually talked about as the American way of life, The cycle of ever increasing growth and consumption became a near universal creed. Tjiu&^during the 1950s andjcjóos, the modern utepjiar^yisions, of a beneficent technolog)' ushering in a sqciety. pjfease and plenitude easily translated into mass desire for leisure commodities. Cars, trailers, motoiboats, camping equipment, home appliances, vacatlorTčottages, televisions — in other words, people sought out shopping centres, superstores, and everything inside them. These were the forms that leisure and tourism had taken on this continent by the middle of the present century. The links between tourism and contemporary society are not only eco-1 nomic. Tourism has all along had a particular role to play in our experience of 1 modernity. By circulating through the material and natural world, we juxtapose the many contradictions of our everyday lives and try to make them whole. When I recall my experience of the train that summer, I begin with images of dead queens and terrorists and grain elevators; then I remember the micro-waved Pacific Salmon Almandine in the Rockies, the gleaming bank towers in An Bip/essimiy undet construction an ihe outskirts ol Toronto in the 1950s. Sightseeing helps as mike sense of a landscape continually demolished and rebniit. V Opposite: Tourism redefioes the Isndin terms of leisure. This fffft? art promotes Canada as a roomy, hand'/ place with a "foreign atmosphere." 22 THE CULTURE OF NATURE Calgary, and a man fishing from a boat in the Precambrian Shield ac sunset (the Korean monk In the next seat took a snapshot of him). Sometimes I read while all this was going on, and sometimes I listened to music I'd brought along. That train trip, and its many small pleasures and disruptions, somehow coalesce for me into orderly but still ambivalent images of life in Canada in the late twentieth century. This ambivalence characterizes much of what's called modern life, and as modernity gets updated we must keep sightseeing just so we can understand our place in it. pur cultures, our landscapes, our social institutions are continually demolished and rebuilt. Each new moment of modernity promises to heal the wounds it continues to inflict, while at the same time encouraging us to imagine an open future. We tour the disparate surfaces of even-day life as a way of involving ourselves in them, as a way of reintegrating a fragmented world. Tourism is thus a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Its institutions — package cruises, museums and amusement parks, self-guided nature trails and visits to a shrine to the Virgin Mary, the grave of Wild Bill Hickok, or the site where a president was assassinated — continually differentiate and reorganize our experience of the world. One way they do this is by naming the modern and separating it off from the premodern — or the merely old-fashioned, which in contemporary culture often amounts to the same thing. Thus the tattered via Rail cars that hurtled us across the continent chat summer were "outdated," as our U.S. visitors pointed out more than once, while Calgary was somehow "new," or in any case, different from that. The outdated is sometimes demolished (as much of it has been in Calgary) and sometimes preserved as a reference point for us, an "authentic" curiosity that reminds us of the victory of the modem over the ever receding past. Tourism locates us in space as well as time. It has redefined the land in terms of leisure. It began to do this at a moment when most North Americans were being wrenched from traditional relations with the land. It's no accident that industrial agriculture, the spread of suburbs, and the growth of mass tourism all coincided in the mid-twentieth century. The Roots of Nature Tourism Nature has figured large in leisure activities since the mid-nineteenth century and the history of nature tourism provides a good sense of the history of relations between humans and the natural world over the past 150 years. It also reveals how tourism organizes those relations. Nature tourism is simply the temporary migration of people to what they understand to be a different and usually more "pure" environment. It's going out to nature for its own sake, and it's all of the ways we talk about that 34 THE CUtTURE OF NATURE experience. The modern history of nature tourism is a history of altered land-forms and changed ideas and experience* of the non-human. Broadly speaking, it involves a shift from ajsastg^approach to nature to a_consumer approach. This in itself is a huge and significant transition. h^tej^o^andiSdos the parks movement got underway in the large cities of theJJnjte^Statt^and Canada-Itjrew out of a widespread dissatisfaction with industrial culture and its momentous effects on the landscape...This dissatisfac-!i tion was not a new sentiment in its time. The myth of nature as a lost gaidenper-'' * meates both the Greek and Hebraic iQQts of Western culture. In the nineteenth-l' j century version of that myth, in the age of what would be called thelndustrial Rev^ution ,_popular aostalguTor'nature overlapped in key ways with the cul-tUffijafJ^jJu^a^XwjfS grew quickly,'becoming crowded, and polluted. ^-J Many people began to see nature as the toni c foe an unhealthy urban life. In the i 8 5 os in the United S"ia"te?rand'scTmewKatlater in' Canada," amateur horticultural S and urban reform organizations built small parks to "improve" urban life. These parks were to have a moral as weljju jjhysicali &rictjoij^eaJthy open spaces, reformers_thought, would alleviate the cities' many social and physical ills. The parks movement was followed by the playgrounds movement in the last years of the century, and like the parks movement the playgrounds movement was originally a citizens' initiative, in this case largely organized by women's groups. Typically, a neighbourhood improvement association organized itself to save a vacant lot from development; the undeveloped urban land was versatile and could be devoted to play of all kinds. In the long term the social goal of the playgrounds movement was to convince the public of the beneficial aspects of play and games and see that "supervised" recreation of all types was provided for in schools and neighbourhoods. By the last years of the nineteenth century, parks in both Boston and Montreal had sand gardens for infants, ball fields and instruction in games, folk dancing, first aid, and story -telling. Outdoor organizations like the Camp Fire Girls and the ymca date from this period. These movements had two effects that interest us here. One was the new possibility of thinking about recreation as an activity apart from our other everyday tasks, Recreation assumed its own schedule and its own locations in the landscape. It had become a form of leisure. In the contemporary literature of the tourist industry, this is talked about as an increase in demand for outdoor experiences. At first these new activities were organised around the dominant social institutions of their day, like schools and churches, and in fact the collectivization of recreation was closely related to the collectivization of work and the formation of unions, The other effect of these movements was a general reawakening of interest in the natural world. To be sure, it was at first a natural world shaped by the THE VIEW FROM THE ROAD 2S shears and spades of urban culture, for nature appreciation directly coincided j with urbanization and industrialization. By the late nineteenth century, almost j half of North Americans lived in cities. It was not until then — the moment chat ': in the United States is called "the closing of the frontier" and in Canada "the . opening of the "West" — that wilderness itself assumed value in popular culture. In the United States, progress was measured by how far nature — and the abo-l riginal peoples who were often understood to be jart ofit —Jiad been pushed bacE7~and the feeling at the close of the nineteenth century, at least in the ; United States, was that the job was nearly done. It became possible to argue then j that the wilderness had to be preserved. In Canada, where nature was not so eas-f ily pushed back, the wilderness ethic did not gain currency as quickly as in the ( United States. j: The love of nature flourishes best in cultures with highly developed tech- nologies, for nature is the one place we can both indulge our dreams of mastery over the earth and seek some kind of contact with the origins of life — an experience we don't usually allow urban settings to provide. Since at least the ! witch burnings of the sixteenth century, people of European origin have : regarded nature as separate fromhumac civilization, which makes it possible to ; argue for its protection. The Native peoples .. n, lie, rJH Lf^tr iujlj's; tu M-i ^ l> ta^sarW:, art- :hraF* <£.-;.- in foö er« -*? rfcs. *«"(rn Wink r*-.^r>usji ftK »id-rv^äiwn: Itf JfVr "Vis *>£-frJfAxrf.' ■h rstjsi IspJajL i^Eivaya-iTniirJertie m ordering of space, Before the car, most roads took care of all manner of traffic. But once the ear was in general use, traffic had to be functionally separated: trucks and cars from pedestrians and bicycles, local and feeder traffic from intercity travel. Expressways, for example, are usually set off on a differeticgrade from surrounding bjid, and access to them is strictly controUed.—changes jhat imply ^rationalization of space. Certain roads come to have certain purposes: some are for whisKng'travellers and goods past places (whether urban or rural) as quickly as possible. In this case, the landscape you move through is subordinate to your destination. Other roads, such as the nature parkways begun in the 1930s, bar commercial traffic and in the design of their curves and rest areas instruct drivers about how best to appreciate the scenery out the window. In both cases, the car further divides the landscape^.and^mr experience of itf into discrete zones. iTpiomotes some !an3scapes and discourages others. In the 1930s new road-building technologies carried more people than ever before out of the cities to play in the country. In 1044 the U.S. Congress passed the Defense Highway Act, which authorized the construction of a An ad for the Asphalt Institute, ISSOs. Rom building is an sssentiat component 0/ modern mass tourism. THE CULTURE OP NATURE THE VIEW FJJOM THE ROAD 31 massive national network of road;, that would supposedly allow for movement h of troops and materiel in case of foreign attack. In Canada, the Alaska Highway, j authorized in 194.8, had similar military beginnings. In 1356, U.S. workers j began construction on the Interstate Highway System, aided by revenues from ':> a gasoline tax. The tax, in fact, could only be spent on highway construction for the first sixteen years. The highways encouraged car acquisition and use, the cars in turn consumed more gas, and the tax on the gas ensured the construe- : tion of more highways. The interstate highways, completed in the mid-1980s, 3 amounted to a massive government subsidy to the auto industry and its many J dependents, including tourism. 3; Tourism grew by about 10 per cent annually during the iojjos and lofjos, ! ' and it was largely a tourism organized around the car and the highway. Pleasure * driving had become the most popular form of outdoor recreation and for many :. people older forms of outdoor activities — camping, far example — became an ; adjunct of car travel. Car and camping technologies merged, The new highways \ j were thus no: only a measure of the culture's technological prowess but they 5 i were also fully integrated into the cultural economy. They were talked about j j as though they hid an important democratizing role: the idea was that modern' A \ highways allowed more people to appreciate the wonders of nature. i i The car also made possible the establishment of a vacation-home indus- \ \ try during the 1950s and 1960s. This changed the physiography of resorts in * \ interesting ways. It used to be — and here we might recall the great nineteenth- \ j century spas — that resorts were typed according to the natural features of the j I landscape they were part of So there were mountain resorts like Banff, there i j were spas, ski resorts, seaside resorts, and so on. Once mass second-home build- . j : ing got under way in the late 1950s, resorts lost many of their ties to locale. The \ i most obvious effect of the car on nature tourism was a large-scale diffusion of S \ recreation across the landscape. Holiday-goers no longer took rest cures at one I \ place, but sought out ever more distant and "unspoiled" recesses in their cars. f: When A-frame and other pre-fab homes replaced resorts in many people's ;; itineraries, there was a proliferation of tourist sites, and consequently the expe- •! '■- rience of nature became more private for many people. By the mid- 1960s, the \ resorts themselves had changed in character: either they went out of business j or they adapted to the demands of a new and different clientele. Today, travelling families have been replaced by convention-goers and corporate head officers attending marketing seminars. These clients expect familiar surroundings — \ . amenities, they're called — that are not specific 60 locale. As the growth of rural tourism proceeded, the geographical focus shifted from natural features of the landscape to artificial ones such as golf courses or i1 African animal-safari parks, The reasons for this are complex, but they'had ]' mostly to do with the need for the industry to differentiate its products to serve a rapidly expanding market. Marine parks and Santa's Villages, whether in California or Kansas, were like so many interchangeable brands of cigarettes or pain relievers, each with its target audience. Thus scenic legitimacy came to rest partly on the marketing strategies of the tourist industry as well as the_vagaries of land speculation. All of these changes led to new fields of study including tourist motivational assessment and scenery evaluation, which by the 1960s had become the subject of intense scrutiny within the industry. Where the landscape itself was adaptable to this new industrial situation, so much the better. For example; in the forest-lake complex of much of the north-central area of die North American continent, the aesthetic values already in place coalesced with the demands of a growth industry. The two most desirable features of a woodland cottage-site are the illusion of solitude and the view out over water. In the sinuous lake and river country of the Great Lakes-St.Lawrence watershed, the land is relatively flit and yet densely vegetated. There are no sweeping vistas, so the aesthetics of this landscape in its more or less wild state is built on experiencing nature in its details. The activities that make sense here are intimate, even private, like canoeing or mushrooming, Yet the geography allows for great numbers of people to have this experience of the immanent frontier all at the same time. When you add the automobile and the express highway to this equation you end up with a well-populated region of the continent colonizing large portions of the remaining bush with millions of second homes, each with its private road and intimate view. The car is not the only vehicle that roamed the new highways of the 1930s. A related technology, the trailer, has had a profound effect on the way we move across and inhabit this continent. Originally — in the early T930S — trailers were a kind of house on wheels, like a covered wagon for vacationers or itinerant workers. Now they're called mobile homes and they've become the predominant form of prefabricated housing. They are permanent features of the landscape, as the evolution of their town names indicates: from trailer camps to trailer parks to mobile-home estates. In the U.S. Southwest, these communities are simply called parks, and the trailers themselves are called park models. Temporary dwellings — which are an ancient phenomenon — imply a kind of freedom and have thus found a special place in the North American ideological landscape. This phenomenon is usually expressed as freedom from ties to place, to family, and to job; freedom to move across this land as we want and to make new connections with it. For people who work at migratory or temporary jobs — and to day this includes work in sales or mid-management as well on farms — moving from one place to another is often a necessity. It's as if physical mobility is standing in for the dream of social mobility that North 12 T H £ CULTURE Of NATURE : i j American society has been unable to deliver. Camping is one form of this refusal i of station; so is desert retirement in a mobile home. ' ] I In any case ihe trailer ii now something people use to tour nature (among 3 other places) and dwell there temporarily. In fact, technologieslikejhe,trailer, j and the cultures that surround them, construct i^^«JJsjy>Jaceof feedornand ■ repose."*As our technical mastery over nature has progressed,, theidea.oJfjjature 2 atifreedomlw^ouridied — anl^ijKat would be meaningless in a time orcul- s tuKTothef tEain thisjaiie- j """""" Other transportation technologies have been developed since the Second i'■ World War, and all of them have helped to transform the landscape and our per- j cepfions of it in some way. Most fall under the name of recreational vehicle (av), ? and they include the snowmobile, the off-road vehicle [onv), the van, the ■ camper, and so on. Many of these technologies have insinuated themselves into ; ; everyday North American iife, and the social activities of dubs and vacation car- ; i avans are now often planned around them. Indeed, a new kind of campground J j has been designed for people who travel with recreational vehicles. I j The trucking industry was also born in the postwar years — often as a result of the car companies' marketing strategies — and it too has had a curious z i effect on how our culture perceives nature. Before continuous streams of trucks j plied highways of every size, trains catried most freight, including foodstuffs. i' Refrigerated train cars were first put to use in the late 1920s. As John Steinbeck's ' novel East of Eden documents with some bitterness, refrigeration allowed produce from warmer parts of the continent, such as Florida and California, to be shipped to large markets in the cooler regions. Like the car, however, the trans- 1 ■ port truck is a more versatile, if less efficient, technology than the train. It was j; able to get right into the fields and collect the avocados and grapefruit soon after they were picked. This development coincided with two others of equal import. Postwar agricultural research bred fruits and vegetables to be part of an industrial process — they could be mechanically picked, were resistant to biocides, j and took well to shipping. This led to great increases in farm productivity dur- j ing the 1950s. At the same time the transportation industry was consolidating ' itself: trucking firms began to be vertically integrated with food growers, pro- 5 cessors, and retailers. ] This is a complex tangle of changes, and there were a number of cons e- ■ quences. One was the replacement of local and regional market gardeners by large, often corporate growers in the new agricultural zones of the sunbelt, They in turn introduced vast amounts of biocides, with ecological effects that in many cases remain unknown today. The industrialization of agriculture — which included the development of supermarkets — also led to a homogeniza-tion of the seasons as summer produce (or some semblance of it) began to THE VIEW FROM THE ROAD 3} appear in winter as well. This in turn led to a very different relation between the culture and the geography and climate of North America. The land began to look and feel different. As models of domination began to ilounsh in North American cultures in the 1950s — and the industrialization of agriculture was mirrored by the U.S. military policy of the time — it became possible to think of nature as a servant, or a weU-loyed pet.Jt__also became^possible to think of I^iE£iiLyi£l'SJZ * sentimentthat underlay much.of the thinking of the environmentalist movement in its earliest years. £3.*.; The B!je Ridge Parkway ' The car also had a more instrumental effect on the landscape. Most obviously, it brought massive environmental change in the form of roads, traffic, and deteriorating air quality. These all have had their own secondary and tertiary effects, most of them bad if not catastrophic. But much less discussed are the aesthetic arid psychological changes the car has brought to land forms and our perception of them. Once the roads were full of cars, there had to be a physical infrastructure to service them. Thus we get the creation of the strip: gas stations, roadside motels and drive-ins, coffee shops, muffler franchises. These came with their own logic. Highway businesses had to design their buildings and advertising to attract motorists. Recognition from the road became paramount, and this led to the spread ofthe franchise business and use of standardized images and eventually logos in advertising, both on and off-site. Consider the repetitive architectures of chains like Howard Johnson's or the Holiday Inn, or indeed of national parks. Tourist services had to be built on a scale compatible with, the automobile. Large signs andTacades and small cheaply constructed buildings were the lessons learned from Las Vegas. Motorized access and parking lots became necessary adjuncts £0 every new building, whether souvenir shop or campground office. These in turn were often "naturalised1' by planting gardens around them; and work like this became the bread and butter ofthe newly prosperous profession of landscape architecture. A roadside coffee shop or gas station was transformed into an oasis in the midst ofthe created deserts of parking lot and highway. Similarly, driveways and garages — and the reappropriated ranch architectures they complemented — contributed to the sprawling character of postwar urban design. More recent architectures like shopping malls turn inward from their parking lots, towards the retreats of indoor gardens. The roadside environments of just thirty years ago are now largely in decay. The car imposed a horizontal quality on the landscape as well as architecture. The faster we drive, the flatter the earth looks: overpasses and clover-leaf interchanges are almost two-dimensional when seen from the car window. 34 THE CULTURE OF NATURE They are events in automotive time, As highway and tourist space has become more homogenized — like the universal space of modem communications — distance is experienced as an abstraction: suburbs lie "minutes from downtown," and the miles pet gallon we achieve getting to them quantify field and stream. Compare this experience of the landscape with that suggested by aerial photography, which wasn't really accessible to people outside the military until the 1960s. Seen from a plme window the landscape flattens out to something like a map: it is a landscape of fact (or to the military, of secrets). With more advanced satellite photography, the landscape has been inscribed with representations of resources — healthy crops, or deposits of subsurface minerals, or Cuban missile bases. The image of the Earth from space, and its Whole Earth counterpart, are extensions of this impulse to picture the planet as a resource. But in the 1950s, travellers weren't yet able to perceive this factual landscape. What we saw out the window of the speeding car — the Futurists were right after all, it is one of the great experiences of modern life — was the future itself, Consider the thrill of entering New York along the Henry Hudson Parkway or Vancouver crossing the Lion's Gate Bridge. Thejpeeding car is a metaphor for progress. It is always rr^ving ahej»d — although the effect is die opposite, as iflthelandscape \v^re_mpvingjpast_us Jnto the inconsequentkljhadows^of history. In this very hmitedrespect, timeJisxeE.ljced space as: the.predojmtiantjMy^jn-ex^ o£ the world is organized. These effects are somewhat more attenuated in the design of nature roads. The best examples of these are in the national parks, although parkways, as they are often called, are prominent features of the working landscapes of eastern North America, The Hutchison River, Merritt, and Taconic parkways in Westchester County and the lower Hudson River watershed are good examples of the long-distance and commuter type; the shorter Gatineau, Niagara, and Thousand Islands parkways in Ontario or the Seventeen-Mile Drive in California function more strictly as nature appreciation roads for tourists. These parkways are designed to present nature to the motorist in a. way that sanctifies the experience of driving through it. Nature can't really be said to be sacred in this culture, but nature appreciation comes close to being a sacred activity. The entrances to parks are important in establishing the terms of this activity and in defining the relationship between "natural" and "artificial" space. My favourite nature road is the Blue Ridge Parkway in the southern Appalachians, one of the supreme public landscapes of the New Deal period. It was begun during the Depression as a job-creation project and link between the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. Managed by the National Park Service, it is 4.70 miles long and built along the crest of five mountain ranges in Virginia and North Carolina. The road was designed as a TtHE VIEW FROM THE EtOAO 35 I rural national parkway restricted to leisure traffic; local residents call it The Scenic, because it bypasses towns and other commercial landscapes. f: The Blue Ridge Parkway pioneered many of the techniques of landscape management taken up by the tourist industry in the 1950s and after. One of these techniques is signage: like railroads, the Parkway is periodically marked by mileposts, their purpose being to orient mocorists vis-a-vis their itineraries and to aid road maintenance and administration. Talked about in the original plans as a way of relieving monotony, the mileposts also introduce the notion of progress to the motorist's experience of the landscape; the miles tick off as nature unfolds magntiicendy before us. The Parkway has a logo — a circle enclosing a roadway, a mountain peak, and a wind-swept white pine — and like all logos it is repeated. Other road signage, especially at the entrances, is standardized to underline die special quality of this created environment. Gouged wood signs point out road elevations, local history, and die names of distant features of the landscape, Other diversions organize the motor tour: parking overlooks, short hiking trails, local museums, campgrounds, and parks spaced every thirty miles. In this way, the planners designed tourist movement into the land itself. All of these management strategies are today a very common part of the tourist economy. The Parkway is a prototypical environment of instruction, and this has become as typical of modern tourism as it was of New Deal public works projects, The Parkway's landscape architect, Stan Abbott, had worked on the Westchester parkways. In the southern Appalachians he wanted to create "a museum of managed American countryside." One objective was to reclaim and preserve marginal mountain lands. Another was to create a landscape pleasing to the motorist, which involved using the land in a way that would "make an attractive picture from the Parkway." To the planners, some land adjoining the Parkway was decidedly not a pretty picture, especially the shacks and worn-out farms of hillbillies — an outsider's term for the impoverished whites of the southern Appalachians, In some cases, these people were moved elsewhere, out of sight, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Resettlement Act, Abandoned homesteads were planted over with native succession species and made into parks. In other areas the Parkway administration bought "scenic easement rights" from local landowners or allowed farmers to work Parkway lands. In both cases, land use was restricted to activities compatible with a Parkway aesthetic, The planners encouraged split-rail fences, grazing cows, or sheep but not abandoned cars or, for that matter, weeds. This policy encouraged soil and watershed conservation; the ecological education of local residents was a high priority with Parkway administrators, who liberally dispensed the The logo of th* Blue Rx/ge Parkway in Virginia and North Carotin*. THE CULTURE OF NATUHt THE VIEW FROM THE ROAD 37 fertilizers and agricultural advice of the day. The policy also allowed the road's designers control over the verges — the place the car driver's eye first conies to rest after scanning the pavement. These were planted in a pastoral style — the meadows and groves that have been equated with naturalism ever since the great landscape parks of eighteenth-century England. Today almost the only communities visible from the road are the native plant communities established by Stan Abbott's staff and crews, who were early restorarionists: rich and perfumed copses of red maple, rhododendron, flowering dogwood, Carolina hemlock, and white pine flourish as they probably haven't since the arrival of European civilization. That civilization locally, meanwhile, has been removed from view, apparently incompatible with nature. . Control over the verges also aDowedthe landscar^ejjesi^neis.to^orgaruje the vistas. They screened_ inappropriate: views.. They designed curves that restricted" speeds to thirty-five or forty miles an hourjind placed those curves in a v^/tffitorg^^'ft'e&ng'loots. Since the toad follow; mountain crews _ for most of its length', distant views tend to be views down over deepjaUeys and c^J^Sreiie^wce^g.tnto the biue_distance. Motorists feel like they are at the top of the world, and they share this new universe with the car. The design-J ers have organized this national public landscap e around the private car and the j private consumption of nature. The Blue Ridge Parkway is landscape management at its most accomplished. Driving along it is a beautiful and exhilarating experience. I think the pleasure of the experience can be attributed to three strategies that the road's planners adopted. The first strategy was to control virtually everything within the field of vision. The organizing poles of this field are verge and horizon, and the road successfully manages the natural and cultural landscapes that fall within it. Control over the cultural landscape has been a matter of instruction and public relations. The new culture of tourism instructed motorists in how to appreciate nature from the car; farm agents, social workers, doctors, and the Parkway's local newsletter, the Miieposts, coaxed destitute Appalachian peoples into modern national life. Once this education took place, mountain cultures could be reinserted into the Parkway motorist's fteld of vision. In the early ratios, "Hillbilly Shows" were performed for tourists on the edges of the road. Men in crooked hats and women in long, flowered dresses with holes in them played music and demonstrated whisky stills and other putative trappings of a culture in dissolution. By the 1970s, these people had gone — to Beverly Hills perhaps — and in their place state t.and federal governments built craft museums. *~ The second, related strategy of the Parkway was an aesthetic one: sepa-rate productive and non-productive landscapes, In this aesthetic, nature is best appreciated "on its own." The road allows no trace of commercial society, save for the occasional nostalgic glimpse of a farm or mill, the shadow of economies that have given way to the single economy of tourism. The third strategy, and the overriding one, is the production of nature itself. All of the road's design features organize our experience of nature. The result is that nature appears to produce itself with no apparent relation to the cultures that inhabit it, or used to. Magnificent vistas now happily present themselves to us without the clutter of human work and settlement. The seasons begin to be synchronized with the tourist calendar: June is Rhododendron Time, autumn is Fall Foliage Time, winter is a Wonderland. The Blue Ridge Parkway was built as a landscape of leisure, with both an aesthetic and economic component. The road's pictorial composition of Eastern woodland, lake, and stream would remain the symbolic landscape of U.S. leisure society until well into the 1960s. As federal and local governments built parks in nearly every state, driving and camping became part of the modem tourist economy as well. The car itself was increasingly laden with technology in the postwar yean, and some of these devices accentuated the kinds of changes underway. Air conditioning was the most obvious. It began to be sold as a feature of a few luxury cars in the mid-1950s and soon became a sign of status, especially in climates where it was unnecessary. Of course, as more asphalt was laid down and more engines circulated, roadside temperatures rose, and air conditioning often did become a necessity even in temperate climates. High-speed cars also encouraged the use of air conditioning. In a car or a building, air conditioning allowed the illusion of human control over environment. This was made possible by the "magic" of what was understood to be a benign technology. Of more interest to us here is the aestheri-c effect of air conditioning on the natural world. Nature was now even more something to be appreciated by the eyes alone. Never mind the dust and heat or the snow, nature was now accessible year-round and under any circumstances. There were no longer any contingencies — just riie^urejy_jrijual experi---S!a£je-^fei!^IJ^!M£jL%^ The other senses were pushed fur- ther to the margins of human experience as nature came to play a role in human culture that was at once more restricted and infinitely expanded. Although car travel is largely an individual activity, this is not to say that people usually drive alone, although for commuters and truckers that tends to be the case. It's more that driving is a private exercise, whether done alone or with company. It is a technology that fits well with the North American psyche, and Detroit has done its best to manipulate this. The individual hero on A 1955 ad for air conditioning. Protected by the paim of ä businessman, ih/s nucfäär famiSy is enjoying "the invigorating tfimate of freedom.*' ■■ At the touch of a finger— man-made climate that's better than nature's ÍÍLice "d\>" somuttiíng ofcnut ^llfz winder zrmmf hitu. Mis |ir biSliixr .". *Jtrúu'rne BUK diícijŕk. 1 Ťfce aíf 4xuuäi[Ľ0iiÍng írMlúau/ is ŕ jiliyiog u \?í$ pat[ íd An»erLe*,s . jjswvili hjuI a Eh Lc-rem c n t It is ■ anuthoe ďcmo£ui.[aíí