Don’t Tell Me That ‘Government Doesn’t Work.’ Not Until You’ve Been to the National Parks and Witnessed America’s Best Public Agency at Work
Don’t let anyone tell you that government agencies can’t be trusted to do their jobs well or that, in the words of a former President, government is “the problem and not the solution.” Anti-government propagandists and corporate hacks have been making this claim for years, arguing that only the profit motive can provide excellent products and services. As if the corporate profiteers that sell you the latest techie toys and then hide behind recorded messages and foreign call centers when their toys don’t work truly have their customers’ needs at heart.
Don’t tell me that our national government is unable to provide first-rate services, solve problems, offer efficient service delivery, contain costs, plan ahead, and protect the value of the American people’s most valuable asset — this wonderful piece of Planet Earth entrusted to our keeping.
And don’t try out any of the uber-capitalist cant on the beauty of the profit motive to me until you’ve been to the National Parks and observed the Park Service at work. I have been to the National Parks — a few of them at least, and very recently — and they work better, and feel better, and make more people happy than any experience you or I could hope to have at any privately owned ‘amusement park’ or entertainment center, or obtain through any product or service generated by the hallowed private sector.
And these treasures are ‘national’ parks. They would not exist without the federal government’s insistence on maintaining ownership of public land, going back to the time of Theodore Roosevelt a century ago. Many of us may know the story of their beginning, if only from the Ken Burns public TV documentary.
But have you been to a National Park recently?
There you experience the truth of what TR and Gifford Pinchot and scores and hundreds of public servants who followed in their footsteps accomplished. The parks may well be “America’s best idea,” as the PBS documentary kept telling us — although personally I believe that popular sovereignty is our country’s best idea, given the need to abolish several millennia of rule by kings and emperors and conquerors and tyrants of all descriptions — but in any event our National Parks would not be “the best idea since the Declaration of Independence” without a dedicated and effective public agency to make that idea a physical reality.
Let’s look at the facts: Here’s how you get to see Grand Canyon National Park. You pay a for-profit airline a ton of money for a cramped travel experience to some place like Phoenix. A second flight in a tiny plane bumps over the clouds to Flagstaff, still in Arizona, a piece of Earth that proves unexpectedly glorious and various and well worth seeing. Then you pay another profit-maker a lot more money to rent a car and drive to Grand Canyon National Park.
You drive hard for an hour and a half on high-speed Western highways to get to the park (though you’re dead tired from the day’s early start to make your plane), and when you finally get to the park’s official entrance to the park, those little toll booths that somehow don’t have a long line of cars in front of you…
You hand the park ranger your laminated National Parks “Senior Pass” membership card AND YOU GET IN FOR FREE.
What a deal! It has been days, or maybe weeks, since anyone has said the word ‘free’ to me. The entrance to a National Park is the only place I can think of where someone wearing an employer’s uniform says ‘free’ to anyone.
And what do we get for this free admission?
From the Visitor Center — free parking sufficient for what appears to be thousands of vehicles; free advice from a park ranger on how best to enjoy the Grand Canyon in the amount of time your visit allows — my wife and I take a short walk to what’s called the rim trail. The canyon side of the trail is safety fenced, for which I am wholeheartedly grateful, without marring the view. Otherwise I might not have dared getting to close to that rim since the first-look at the whole wondrous Big Bang! canyon façade might have caused my head to spin sufficiently to result in a fatal step in the wrong direction before I had the opportunity to make my gracious and light-headed salute to a universe that produced such an elemental wonder by eloquently carving the bones of the earth for nearly two billion years.
In other words, my ‘wow moment.’ You look around and see others having theirs.
I am grateful yet again that this ‘view’ is free, since there is absolutely no way to put a price on it.
“Would you call it a million dollar view, sir?”
“Yes, I would. Without a shadow of a doubt.”
“Excellent, sir. Cash or Card?”
The South Rim trail proves quite impressively lengthy, and remains fenced for a generous segment. By the time the fence disappears, I am sufficiently accustomed to walking astride this miracle of time and the elements to maintain my footing without fear of drifting off in the wrong direction. I have stood at the bottom of the more common miracles of Earth, called ‘mountains’ — there are some big ones in the Eastern Appalachian range — and maintained my senses without fear of loss of equanimity, but I have never before looked down at these upside-down projections dug so deep, and darkly colorful, and abundant, and penetratingly strange.
All right. So the parks, we may agree, are a bargain at any price.
But what about their administration? This aptly titled National Park Service?
If there is a better administration — or agency, or public service, or paid private service — anywhere in our absurdly vast and varied country, I have never encountered it. Because the Grand Canyon National Park is extensive (the canyon itself being over 200 miles long), the Park Service faces a fundamental challenge in how to help people see as much of it as possible, and provides the answer of a public transportation service — by bus.
Americans, on the whole, do not like riding buses. We prefer to drive around in our own vehicles. This is, I suspect, because buses do not come often enough or reliably on schedule, are sometimes costly, and then forced to fight their way through urban traffic. We’d rather take our chances in our own private vehicles, where at least we can pick what sort of noise we wish to distract us, and (regrettably) play with our phones.
Because of the vast numbers of visitors, however, and the degree of pollution so many private vehicles would add to the local ecology, the Park Service wisely chose to limit vehicular access and create a system to move people effectively to the park’s many attractions by smaller numbers of public carriers. Somebody must have studied how to do this, devised a comprehensive plan, and got it adequately funded, because Park Service’s buses are the best public transportation system I have ever been on.
The buses will take you anywhere you wish in the areas open to the public, and are absolutely reliable. Maps and schedules are posted at every stop, and at other park buildings, and run so frequently that they are able to boast that you will never have to wait more than 15 minutes. We rode them for a week (in three different parks) and never waited that long. Frequently, the bus is waiting when you approach the boarding area. All bus stops had lightweight roof coverings to protect from rain too much strong sun.
Equally important, bus drivers were paragons of courteous and knowledgeable service: telling hundreds of passengers each day precisely where they were going, and providing individualized advice on how to take some bus to get someplace where they weren’t going; answering all other possible questions about the park, its many areas, and the services available at the close-to-hand or remote areas (is there food there? restrooms? water? camping? lodging? latrines? mules? guides?)… and doing this no matter how many times they have answered those same questions before.
What characteristics would a paragon of public service embody? Would he or she be good-humored, communicative, capable of performing his task? Personable? (Is that asking too much?)
The National Park bus drivers were all these things. Taking the bus to the known and popularly favored outlooks or starting points for walks, or for those more strenuous outings that involved hiking down into the canyon’s walls (which we eschewed except for a single dip of about a mile down Bright Angel Trail) proved to my experience far superior to driving unknown roadways while somebody stared at a map or an app.
This is how my wife and I accessed the natural playland of three of America’s world-famous canyon parks. Leave the car in the big public lot. Take the bus somewhere interesting, follow the clearly marked trail signs when you’re there, and consult your paper map as needed or when you conspire together to choose your next activity.
In the late afternoon of our second day on the South Rim of the canyon, we bus back to the Visitor Center and make the short walk to the part of the rim called Manters Point. We are now in the ‘golden hour’ before sunset when, as were told by the knowledgeable ranger the day before, the slanted sunlight dazzles the array of color tones in Nature’s great portrait of Earth, Rock, and Time that is this vast canyon wall. Clouds, some of them dark, cover the western sky, so we’re not expecting much sunset effect. But then we see that gaps in the clouds permit arrows of radiance to pick out and illuminate segments of canyon wall.
I snap images of some of these radiant moments and illuminated segments. The images you see on this page come from this magic hour. Thank you, Park Service.
At the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, the Park Service also provided our lodging. The cabin-style single-room with bathroom lodgings located within the park are in such demand that you have to reserve them months in advance. They are clean and comfortable and close to other park services — a restaurant, a supermarket — so there’s no compelling need to leave the park and drive those lengthy Western distances for necessities.
And when a credit card problem stalled the cashier at my supermarket checkout line on my first day at the park and I was too brain dead after my long day’s journey to endure a wait of any duration, the service desk manager magically appeared like a messenger from the gods to lead us to an oasis of service where she processed our purchases herself. I mumbled my thanks. Looked about for somewhere to make an offering; none was required.
Typical of her service, the store manager was considerate, courteous, competent, smiling. The thing is, these Park Services employees must see hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. And, to our witness, they do the right thing, in the right way, every time. That’s a good definition of customer service.
The Park Service restaurant also functioned efficiently and courteously to serves meals, without table servers and without delays. You order through a cashier or through a computer, hand a piece of paper to the food-procurers, and pick up you food when they call your number. I’ve waited longer at ‘fast-food’ counters. The system is fast, friendly, and keeps down costs. It works because everybody talks to everybody.
Is that perhaps also an essential piece of the definition of serving the public? Always willing, and able, to talk. The motto of the Park Service might be “No one here but human beings.”
The National Park Service knows when it has a good a idea. The same style of comprehensive, well-run, fully supported, and timely shuttle bus system that got us where we wanted to go in the Grand Canyon did the same job in Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park as well. The buses were timely, the drivers were patient, and everybody answered your questions.
And one of the carryover benefits of good public service is a good public. People stood in line, followed directions, packed buses to the brim when needed so that others could get on, the young and hale offering seats to the old. People mixed. Easterners talked to Westerners. Southern accents were heard. Japanese tourists, European travelers, Indians with impeccable English, Latinos and locals all rode together. I heard more French and German in the national parks than I do in Boston.
The Park Service rose to the challenge when, though the calendar told us we were in the middle of May in southern Utah, Bryce Canyon greeted us with nearly a foot of snow on the night of our arrival to a lodging just beyond its gates. The park opened in the morning, the roads were plowed, the buses were running, and the Visiting Center was filled with weather-stunned visitors asking employees where it would be safe to hike in their sneakers. Park rangers gave of their time to all comers.
When my turn came, I spent some of it complaining about the weather anomaly of a big snowfall when the projected temperature range for May in this canyon was fifties and sixties. The ranger listened to me with a tolerant smile, then observed philosophically that “the formations so many people come to the canyon to see were caused by weather and climate conditions like these.”
Maybe that’s what it takes to be Park Service ranger: the long view.
The snow melted, much of it, by day’s end. And by the late afternoon, the snowy mist cleared sufficiently to give us a good look at those peculiar formations called “hoodoos” from the aptly named Inspiration Point.
In Zion a line of sporadic showers cut through the middle of the day. The Park Service store sold inexpensive plastic “ponchos” to wear over your clothes.
It is true that the National Parks Service is not asked to insure human beings against the ravages of time and ill health, protect the lands and air and water of a continental-sized country from the ravages of human society, collect taxes from the greedy, make one law for both the righteous and those who seek to prey upon their neighbors, or protect our borders from the real or imagined hostility of those who don’t look like us or dare to speak languages other than English, among government’s many other functions. Many other agencies and administrations are required to perform those tasks.
And it is true that when we deal with the IRS or the lines at the voting booths or the complications of one or another benefit system you thought we believe we have earned entitlement to simply by being an American of good standing, we do not always come away singing the praises of this or any government.
But keep in mind that when we have dealings with profit-minded corporations dedicated to feathering the over-stuffed nests of a tiny minority of our nation already filthy rich, we often have outcomes that are equally unpleasant and considerably more expensive.
And remember also that if we wish to find a model of how our public experience can be managed efficiently and equably in the land of e pluribus unum, we do find one example of excellence. A model. A paradigm. It’s the National Park Service, where they do things right.
