Yellowstone: Viewing and Moving

This past week I visited Yellowstone during my relocation from the east to the west coast of the US with my wife and our two dogs. I had some concerns about going to Yellowstone because, like all National Parks, it is not especially dog friendly.

1. Pets are prohibited in the backcountry and on trails and boardwalks [for a variety of reasons].

2. Pets may accompany you in the front country areas of the park.
This includes any areas within 100 feet of roads, parking areas, and campgrounds. Pets must be kept under physical control at all times - caged, crated, or on a leash not to exceed six feet in length.

3. It is prohibited to leave a pet unattended and tied to an object.
If necessary, pets may remain in your vehicle while you are viewing attractions near roads and parking areas. However, we care about your pet's well being. Be sure to provide sufficient ventilation for its comfort and survival.

Their point is well taken: dogs (or other pets) should not run loose in Yellowstone and, for any number of reasons, they should not be "unattended and tied to an object." It is the second point that marks the real area of contention and establishes the practical meaning of dogs in Yellowstone. Dogs are allowed in certain areas: the areas where there is nothing to see. One does not go to Yellowstone to see roads, parking areas, and campgrounds. Those are ubiquitous, not spectacular.

In the parking areas there were regularly people with dogs out (ourselves included). It is by no means exceptional to take dogs into Yellowstone, so this confinement should not be read as a marginal case: it is part of the steady functioning of the park, as continual as the accumulation of pressure and spectators at Old Faithful. I did take our dogs down to a lesser geothermal site because there was no one around to see me. Again, I was able to do this because it was something deemed not worth seeing.

The irony is that the legal confinement of pets is matched by a de facto confinement of human visitors. Yellowstone has a far-reaching system of near-highway quality roads with speeds of up to 50 mph. We came in at the north entrance and made it 50-odd miles south to Old Faithful, with stops and roadwork, in a couple hours. Yellowstone is not so much a continuous flow of Nature or sublimity/beauty as a map of speed punctuated by spectacles. Vehicles race between things to see. Sometimes these things are the wildlife, and so at the fields where animals might appear there is plenty of room for cars to pull off and watch without disrupting traffic. I would say that I spent nearly as much time in the car as the dogs.

[Of course this implicates myself in the perversity of it all: I could have left my dogs elsewhere, got a pack and went on foot. More authentic. I could have been less enamored with the aura of Old Faithful and sought out unmarked geothermal sites. But I didn't, and I don't even feel bad about it.]

What I see in the history of Yellowstone, the first National Park, is a primer on how the modern subject is to relate to nature as an aesthetic object. Except for that "modern," I am talking about the subject of Romanticism. By "modern" I here mean the world of the automobile, the world of transportational acceleration (prior to total speed of a digitalized world) which dissolves the problem Wordsworth wanted to solve. Nature is out there; aesthetic mediation, poetry, brings it here; but if we have a car we can just go there. If the object an sich is readily available, we don't need mediated transcendence. We can get it uncut from the source.

The pre-post-modern job was to establish those pathways which would bring the subject into contact with the transcendent spectacles: to build the roads, clear the outlooks, erect gateways physical and legal (even if, as Kafka points out, we can't enter them). In the process, the subject was also taught how to be a looker. The relation to nature or to intra-societal spectacles was ritualized through a social architecture enabling a mass experience of what "The Wanderer" is seeing.



The Wanderer is watching a movie before film. But movie theaters are not a social experience, and so cannot take on their real purpose, without roadways feeding groups in to share the screen.

Yellowstone has a number of these Romantic nature-films and a highly efficient transportation network to move vehicles to and from them. In acculturing persons to the subject-work of viewing it also teaches them about transit between spectacles, events, images, zones determinable by the codes of optics and relevance.

Yellowstone has all the roads it is going to get. The positions of viewership have reached the appropriate density so that enough is visible but not completely interpellated with other viewer positions (you don't want to look out at nature and see someone looking back). While I was there the roads were undergoing pretty heavy duty maintenance. That seems like the postmodern job in relation to the subject of the road: keeping it up against the erosions of culture and technology.