She Likes to Watch

Former Grand Canyon worker looks forward to “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”

Note: Today’s post comes to us courtesy of former Tribune employee Jay Thompson, marketing coordinator at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo.

Ken Burns is back.

And I’m looking forward to “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” his 12-hour, six-night epic documentary, that begins Sunday on PBS.

While many people visit the parks each year — an estimated 300 million — few experience them for more than a few days.

Most visitors take a few fleeting minutes to experience the parks during their travels — like Clark Griswold’s classic visit to the Grand Canyon in “Vacation.”

Wallace Stegner called the national parks “the best idea we ever had.”

No activity of the federal government engenders such universal support and public loyalty. Yet the story of how these special places became preserved remains relatively unknown.

It’s a shame, really. The experiences in and around those parks can last a lifetime.

I’ve visited maybe a dozen national parks, but I had an opportunity to live and work at the Grand Canyon in Arizona and in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons during summer breaks in college. (Ken Burns, by contrast, spent six years on his documentary.)

“The National Parks” starts with the birth of “America’s Best Idea” in the mid-1800s and follows the national parks’ evolution for nearly 150 years.

The documentary takes its lead from President Theodore Roosevelt, following in the footsteps of Teddy’s 66-day trek across the nation in 1903 that included stops at Yosemite, Yellowstone — the nation’s first national park — and the Grand Canyon.

That trip changed everything as Roosevelt returned to Washington resolving to protect these American jewels by placing them under the cloak of federal protection.

Ken Burns uses archival photographs, first-person accounts, personal memories and analysis from more than 40 interviews to chronicle the steady addition of new parks, as well as the people who helped create them and save them from destruction. Paired with stunning cinematography, the series is simultaneously a biography of compelling characters and a biography of the American landscape.

Among the lengthy cast of characters profiled are magazine publisher James Mason Hutchings, one of the first people to promote Yosemite; naturalist John Muir, a deeply religious mountain prophet; and George Masa, a Japanese immigrant whose photographs of the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee helped protect the region as a national park.

We also meet environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, park ranger George Melendez Wright, biologist Adolph Murie and businessman Stephen Mather.

I met my own cast of characters during my national park experience. Who would figure that stints at Moqui Lodge, located a stone’s throw from the Grand Canyon, as a gardener and waiter would become a turning point in my life?

Moqui Lodge, which was torn down in 2005, was unique to the Canyon for reasons other than architectural pedigree or the clientele who spent time there.

Although a part of the Fred Harvey Co., whose Harvey Girls helped to civilize the West, Moqui had little relation to its venerable rim-side counterparts, the El Tovar Hotel and Bright Angel Lodge.

It was, in the words of Al White, a former general manager and the current vice mayor of Flagstaff, Ariz., the company’s “bastard stepchild.” But it was beloved by the employees who knew it as a tight-knit and tolerant place.

Located in the Coconino National Forest, Moqui Camp passed through a handful of owners between the 1930s and early ’60s. The 20-cabin property was transformed by contractors/owners Don Potter and Arlen Wisseman.

By 1966, their rechristened Moqui Lodge included 135 rooms, one of the area’s first swimming pools and an impressive A-frame that used nearly 60-foot Ponderosa pine logs as supports, a Navajo-crafted petrified wood fireplace that stretched five stories to the roof, and a mural in the bar depicting “every dance that Navajos do, every ritual that they had,” Wisseman told me.

The 1970s brought more changes and a corporate owner.

Guests in that era came for the cheap rates or when the park rooms were sold out. What they found was a funky-chic ambience — from the Plains-style “Chief Moqui” statue in the lobby to the Magic Fingers and dated decor in the rooms. The Mexican food, free chips and salsa, tasty margaritas and live music made it a hit with Canyon locals seeking affordable diversions.

But to its workers, Moqui offered more than room and board.

We were a motley crew of college students, young couples and longtime resort workers — loners, losers and hustlers who were willing to endure testy tourists, low pay and crummy housing for life by the Grand Canyon.

For years, Arizona road maps depicted Moqui as a town between Tusayan and the South Rim. Town may not be quite accurate, but the mix of people who lived and worked there helped foster a spirit of community.

“It was a place, not just a building,” said Marcus Fuhrman, who lived within sight of Moqui’s A-frame with his wife and two kids for five years and whose ashes were scattered in the Canyon in 2008. “It was a campground for crazy people who didn’t fit traditional careers, odd people who could survive there and have some sense of a normal life.”

It was distinctive — not quite Grand Canyon Village and not a part of Tusayan, the gateway community a mile down the road. Yet Moqui provided a sense of calm and kinship for workers amid the crush of tourists who crowded the rim daily.

There were lots of tours and frequent lodge sellouts during the summers of 1978 and 1981 when I lived there, but by 1999 visitation had dropped to less than half.

New hotels in Tusayan offered more amenities than Moqui could provide or its corporate owners would pay for.

Before it closed, in December 2001, it was renting only 10 to 20 rooms a night. The tragedy of Sept. 11, and the precipitous drop-off in foreign visitation that followed, was just the final blow to what had been a long, slow and sad decline.

I still miss the faint vanilla aroma of Ponderosa pines in the morning, the scent of pine needles steaming in the sun after a summer rain and a morning sky so blue it made my eyes tear up on jogs south to Tusayan and back.

I still carry the tunes in my head of the saloon singers, our local celebrities who provided the soundtrack that turned nights at Moqui’s cantina into our own private parties.

The Moqui crew I remember was like the cast of a TV sitcom, a ragtag collection of characters, individualists and dreamers who were intermittently cranky and profane, smart and funny, cynical and sad. One blew up his trailer looking for a gas leak with a match. Another played Russian roulette — and lived.

We lived together, drank together, fought occasionally, played softball, football and basketball together, hit on each other. And we rallied against the never-ending crush of tourists, many oblivious to the beauty around them and more concerned by the lack of TVs in the rooms.

There was no shortage of self-centered guests and obnoxious or lazy co-workers. But I learned a lesson that has outlived Moqui and continues to guide me: The world is full of inspiration if you take a moment to look around. Moqui gave me that time –  time to explore the Grand Canyon and, in turn, find my way in the world.

“Moqui was the beginning of my ability to be able to do new things, take risks and feel good about myself,” says alum Jo Ann Ferris of Lafayette, Ind. “That detour has made all the difference.”

I have to agree. And I have Moqui and the Grand Canyon to thank.

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“The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” airs Sunday at on PBS, Channel . The mini-series will air nightly through Friday, Oct. 2.

If you’d like to share your own story about the national parks, click here.

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Images courtesy of Jay Thompson.