Chasing The Fading Language Of Place
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Chasing The Fading Language Of Place
Just outside Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, a whitewater rafting mecca near the borders of Maryland and Virginia, a creek named Meadow Run narrows into a stone groove known as the “Natural Water Slides.” I watched a few videos of this swimming area before booking a vacation with my kids, and it looked like our vibe: wet and wild, with just enough risk to make it fun. I should say that this is my vibe and that I’ve been hoping, with varying success, to convince my kids to adopt my idea of fun.
It had rained heavily before we arrived, and the channel looked a little frothier than it had in the promo videos, so I told everyone to let me try it first. After watching me pinball between the rock walls to the bottom, scraping my elbows on boulders that weren’t quite as smooth as advertised, they wisely reasoned that we’d have a better time swimming further down, where the creek pooled beneath a rock ledge. And so we passed a few happy hours there, exploring caves, rating our underwater handstands, and working up the courage to leap from the ledge into the pool.
It’s important to me to share my love of wild places with my kids, even if it’s not always the vacation they would choose. I think of the American outdoors as akin to the Great Books: too vast to ever master completely, but worth a deep dive now and then for personal touchstones and for knowledge of the commonwealths we all inhabit, mindfully or not. Indeed, parks and forests, even roadside attractions like the Natural Water Slides, are part of the wealth we share as Americans — part of our belief that feudal lords cannot wall green spaces off from the rest of us.1
Yet the more I visit remote places with my kids, the more I’m troubled by what those experiences reveal about inequality in America, how much sharper the class divide is growing with each passing year. Some of these signs are subtle, but I’ve been watching them for most of my life, ever since I left my rural hometown. The kind of sorting that we see between elite colleges and less selective universities, the hardening of caste, is manifesting more and more in recreation spaces. This has created a tension that I was unaware of in my youth between natural beauty and poverty in the human communities that inhabit wild places, which raises questions about just what associations my children might have drawn while watching me bounce between the limestone ledges outside Ohiopyle.