The gold standard

There were no other campers in sight, which partly explains why I could not figure out how the campground was arranged. It was also dark, which added to the mystery. I was just a young man strapped for cash, arriving very late and intending to leave very, very early. A soft, sandy patch of dry ground near a small stream made a perfect mattress. A soothing trickle of water played like streaming music. I listened to it until I fell asleep.

It must have been near daybreak. I’d been counting on a few rays of sunrise to rouse me, not the sound of a nickering horse 3 feet from my ear. A stern male voice like old-time television’s Mr. Ed commanded me to climb out of my sleeping bag, as if I was still dreaming. I peeked out of my bag and saw a mounted ranger staring down from his saddle at the bundle that was me. Once I finally sat up he said, “You have failed at picking a campsite.”

Failed? How could I have failed? I had slept very well. He pointed with his outstretched arm toward a graveled area at least a hundred yards away, not anywhere near my sweet little stream. I promised to move at once. He told me he’d be back to see that I did. That’s when I rolled and packed my gear, grabbed my backpack, and executed my one and only great escape from a national park.  

Of America’s 59 national parks, over the span of nearly 62 years I’ve visited only 25, though some more than once. Since that one time, I have dutifully stopped at every entrance station and paid my required user fee. The park was located in California, but I won’t get more specific for fear I may be disqualified from receiving my Golden Age Passport next month. It’s a watershed moment in my life, one that I’ve anticipated for decades: to have survived long enough to be offered approximately 84.4 million acres of America’s most treasured heritage for my birthday. Best gift ever.

Any U.S. citizen who reaches age 62 is permitted, for a one-time fee of $10, permanent free access to every American national park, plus national monuments and national forest lands where user fees are typically required. I have worried for years that politicians would do away with the program before I reached my golden age. In 2007, for example, administrators at the National Park Service decided on a change, ridding itself of the elegant name for its popular Golden Age Passport and adopting the generic term, Senior Pass, by which the program is known today.

No big deal you might think, but in 2007 when I was only 54, I was sure the next step would be to simply reduce the fees for seniors each time they entered a park. I can, after all, go to a thrift store and get a 10 percent senior discount on Tuesdays, eat at Denny’s off the senior menu, or qualify for a reduction as a senior on my property taxes. Perks for the elderly are nice, but they pale in comparison with the privilege of receiving unobstructed access to our public lands.

The 1906 Antiquities Act granted presidents the power to set land aside in the public’s interest, to designate unique acreage for protection as, say, a national monument or park. President Theodore Roosevelt championed the cause by convincing Republicans to support a bill that turned Yellowstone into America’s first national park. Since then, 16 presidents from both parties have exercised their authority to protect America’s heritage from a developer’s ravenous appetite, one that will unabashedly consume its own roots.

Partisan politics has pushed the current House controlled by Republicans to approve and pass legislation on to the Senate limiting the president’s authority to deposit exceptional cultural and natural beauty into the land bank for posterity. H.R.1459, if you haven’t heard about it, is a cheap, politically charged measure where anti-Obama forces have fabricated the notion that our current president is abusing his authority by designating culturally significant sites as national monuments, none of them especially large when compared to the acreage some of our former presidents have set aside.

It seems to me gratifying that many of our presidents, upon leaving office, have seen fit to endow the public with a sense of history too easily forgotten. Left up to business, the public would be gifted with acres of coal and oil fields, gravel pits and shopping strips, plus more than a few housing tracts. Wall Street’s insistence on unrestricted profit has already created an economic preserve for the wealthy, one that turns America’s purple mountain majesties into strips of industrial and commercial parks.

I always look forward to the completion of a presidential term, hoping we’ll all be gifted with more public land, so please, Democrats and Republicans alike, remember as our nation ages we need to save more places for our expanding population to see how America was and still is beautiful.

– David Feela