oh god someone asked about the fucking national monument

OK, so. That's not just in my neck of the woods, in a lot of ways it is my neck of the woods, and I tell you what, it's been a hot-button issue here since at least 2002, when I moved back to the state and went to work at what was then my local newspaper. It touches on a lot of ingrained cultural forces in this region that go back to the year dot. Around here, Roxanne Quimby (the Burt's Bees lady, who bought up the land that she then presented to the feds to make up what, at the time, she intended to be a national park) is roundly hated as the quintessential Person From Away who wishes to protect the Maine woods from the people who live in it. There are a lot of those, and many of them become noisy and troublesome activists of a particularly unpleasant, patronizing, paternalistic stripe.

They are closely associated (and often explicitly aligned) with another group of people who are held in low regard by many of the people of the Katahdin region, environmentalists, who are widely (if in large part, I would argue, inaccurately) seen as the primary reason why the pulp and paper industry in these parts (which, I should stress, was the only industry of any note in these parts) died. I think I've talked about this before: a lot of people around here are out of work with no discernible skills and nowhere to put them to use if they had them, and as a consequence are desperate and angry. Most of them are angry at environmentalists, recreational carpetbaggers, and Foreign Competition, and Roxanne Quimby is two out of three. (Some folks around here wouldn't be too surprised to learn that she owned a stake in a Russian paper mill or some such, too.)

Adding to that, this region has a rich tradition of disdaining outdoorsy tourists (the only kind likely to come here, as there is nothing else here but The Woods). When we had a thriving industry in town, we didn't need them and they just got in the way. Now that we don't, we kind of do need them and resent them the way dependent people tend to resent the people they're dependent on. Contra to that prevailing popular opinion, you have the locals who actually work (often as struggling entrepreneur types) in the hospitality industry, who, in pushing back against that tide, tend to become not a lot less strident and talk-downy than the environmental crowd (with whom they are often in sympathy, since their business model depends on the Unspoiled Wilderness-ness of it all, and that makes them borderline to the skeptical local mind as it is).

There are deep divisions and a lot of anger 'round these parts, is what I'm getting at, and for going on 15 years now, the "national park" issue has been big jagged chunks of rock salt rubbed vigorously into the bloodiest parts. Hell, there are straight-up conspiracy theories in circulation that old Great Northern Paper was put down specifically to make way for it. Until very recently, over in Medway (the neighboring town closest to the Interstate), a local business run by a second-generation immigrant with an imperfect but oddly eloquent grasp of English displayed a large sign reading

WHY MILL
TEAR DOWN?
N. PARK??

(Which always struck me as slightly futile, since the way it's worded you wouldn't have a blind clue what it was about unless you already knew, but anyway.)

As for me, I don't really have a dog in the primary fight. I was close enough to the hypocenter when the bomb dropped on Great Northern to know that the environmental movement didn't really have a hell of a lot to do with it, nor did the outdoorsy tourists. GNP fell because it would have taken a genius management team to make a paper company work in northern Maine in the early 21st century, and what it had instead was a series of clownshoes and fraudsters, the best of which can charitably be described as "well-meaning". The cracks in the pulp-and-paper industry were showing as early as the 1980s, now that hindsight provides the clarity to recognize them, and while some of that was environmentally driven, most of it is down to what the right wing likes to misquote Adam Smith and call the Invisible Hand of the Market.

So I don't blame the Sierra Club or snowmobilers for the end of the industrial glory days, but on the other hand, I don't much care for them, either, because I believe the entire purpose of the last 10,000 years of human civilization has been making it so we don't have to be outdoors like a bunch of goddamn animals. :)

My own concern with the idea of a national park (or national monument, as they're now calling it, I'm fuzzy on what the distinction is but I'm sure there is one) on my doorstep is not connected to conspiracy theories about federal land grabs or Agenda Whateveritis at the UN (the one some people around here think calls for a systematic depopulation of the state to make way for the displaced population of Somalia or Syria or whatever the fuck it is, seriously, people think this). My concern is that I've been to other towns that are the "gateways" to national parks and they're horrible.

Take, for example, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the last town before the entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I've been there, and it is the most godawfully tacky place you can even imagine. It's all "see the death car"-grade wax museums and places selling "Indian" trinkets and Ripley's Believe It or Not. It's every Walmart-parking-lot stereotype you can think of. The kind of place where you're glad to catch sight of a Hardee's for its reassuringly upscale atmosphere. Millinocket is a bit of a hole, I grant you, but it's not that and I really would prefer it not to become that. I'll take "crumbling post-industrial nowhere" over that shit any day of the year.

So yeah. I believe I'm not on that train, although not for quite the same reasons that a lot of my neighbors are not on it. Unlike many of them (for example, my sainted right-wing-loony mother, who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972 and would do so again tomorrow even though he's a criminal and dead), I do at least believe that the National Park Service provides a useful function to society and should not be dismantled as Liberal Nonsense.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.