TIDINESS AND IMMENSITY
The Dutch seem to have parks everywhere. When Henny took us to Bergen, a very elegant town with boutique shops with beautiful clothing and objects in every one, there in the center of the town was a park bordered by a canal with all kinds of animals just over the fence: an emu and ducks and deer and swans. The dunes at the edge of the North Sea are protected as a national park. I mentioned the parking lots out of sight under the dunes. Between Henny’s house and the North Sea there are miles of parks with bicycle lanes.
But yesterday as I was driving to South Asheville to do errands I drove most of the way on the Blue Ridge Parkway right through the center of Asheville, forest on both sides of the road with only an occasional house in the distance.
If the dunes national park outside of Haarlem is thousands of acres, the Blue Ridge Parkway, also a national park must be millions of acres, 500 miles of park stretching from the Smoky Mountain National Park, a huge park itself and the most visited of all American National Parks almost all the way along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains without a gas station or a strip mall or a convenience store or hardly even a house in sight during the leafy summer to Washington, DC, a full day’s drive. Somehow I am so used to the protected spaces here in the United States that I hardly notice them. But there I was with the yellow green leaves budding and forest everywhere, not a carefully managed crop that is clear cut when fully grown, as in Germany, but wild with trees rotting where they fall, returning to being an old growth forest. If I had continued South for 30 miles I would have gotten to Mount Pisgah with views past mountain valleys far across the plains of North Carolina and if I had turned around and driven north for 30 miles I would have climbed to the top of Mount Mitchell, the highest point in the Eastern United States. In either direction the trees and flowers would have changed until I was among the woods of Canada with the present Canadian plant and animal life left on these mountain tops after the glaciers of the ice age that had pushed south retreated to the far north.
And when last summer I made a huge circle 7000 miles around the United States I was able to feel the immensity of the United States and the variety of landscapes including the endless western desert, bone dry, day after day as the train passed through emptiness with small towns dotted here and there.
Haarlem impressed us but the advantage of travel is that you know your ordinary home in a new way and are astonished by things you never noticed before. Travel opens your eyes. Not traveling and being critical of places where you have never been because home is all you know, means that you hardly know home at all, that in a certain sense you are blind both to the rest of the world and to the place you call home.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 