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Book Review
| A Woman in the Great Outdoors: Adventures in the National Park Service. By Melody Webb. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. 272 pages. $39.95.
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| The fifth chapter of this memoir reminded me of something Thoreau once wrote about the Great Pyramids. Each Pyramid, he observed, was an expensive tomb "for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs." |
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In this case the pyramid, so to speak, was Lyndon B. Johnson Historical National Park, where Melody Webb was site superintendent from 1989 to 1992. LBJ is buried there, which improves the pyramid metaphor, and the place is indeed an expensive monument to a terribly ambitious man. (Whether he was a booby who deserved to end up as dog food I feel unqualified to say.) |
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The cost of Johnson's monument may not be of pyramidal proportions, but it does get absurd. As Webb recalls, in just one example, there was the time purists clamored for more historically authentic ranch cattle—more like the ones Johnson actually ran there. Webb had to go out and find a bull with the proper bloodlines. She found one, named Mr. Rust. But Mr. Rust's key body part for the mission would not work because it had somehow become corkscrew-shaped in his later age. Webb eventually found a bull that worked, but the whole process wasn't cheap. |
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Despite such absurdities (or maybe because of them), the LBJ assignment was Webb's favorite in a twenty-two-year Park Service career that included jobs as NPS historian in Alaska, southwest regional historian based in Santa Fe, and assistant superintendent at Grand Teton National Park. That career, she says, was influenced greatly by her natural inclination toward bluntness. Once, in Alaska, her supervisor got drunk, called her a "witch," and then told her to stay out of his park because "you will alienate everyone there." |
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But she persevered, or else, of course, you would not be reading this now. Her book does have historical value. It touches on a large range of important National Park issues, though often, of necessity I suppose, briefly. These include, among others, sexism, whether historical artifacts should be reconstructed (Webb thinks not), fire management, animal population control, wolf reintroduction, grizzly management, brucellosis in elk and bison, snowmobiles in the parks, airports in the parks, private concessionaires, and recreational user conflicts. |
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Throughout all, Webb describes the frustrations of working in a large agency that is constantly pressured by interests of all kinds. She still has opinions after all these years, especially of the NPS directors. James Ridenour, she says, "was a do-nothing director" who once "gave a speech [in Venezuela] that lectured other countries and insulted the Third World." Director Roger Kennedy turned the park superintendents into "a politically correct and sycophantic brotherhood." On the other hand, Russell Dickensen, the "last career director," was "articulate, smooth, politically pragmatic, but dedicated to the inviolate mission of the National Park Service." |
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So it's an interesting read, but also informative. For a college course, it would make a good supplement to something more interpretive. |
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James M. Glover has been teaching and writing about wilderness topics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale for so long that they gave him a free parking sticker. |
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