Mike Bezemek in Canyonlands
When I think of national parks, I think of craggy iced mountains, hot geysers, and drippy, haunting everglade swamps in a slow canoe. Mike Bezemek, writer and outdoorsman, thinks of mysteries. Some natural—how did an Indiana sand dune swallow a little boy? Some historic, or mythic. And quite a few tinged with sinister exploits, eccentricity, and conspiracy.
Bezemek majored in geology and worked as a wilderness guide before earning an MFA in writing here at WashU. In Mysteries of the National Parks, he moves across the country, digging into the secrets buried in 133,000 square miles of public land and water. He tells us of stagecoach robberies—and the thief who consented to have his photograph taken by one of those newfangled cameras, posing nonchalantly, gun at his hip. He also “walked into the woods on horsehoof shoes” to lay a trail of a horseback escape for his pursuers—before leaving on foot in the other direction.
There is the requisite UFO sighting—he grew up watching X Files with his mom, so he had great fun researching the story that may have spawned all the tales that followed. “I don’t think that Kevin Arnold did see flying saucers, honestly,” he tells me. “I think that he was probably deemed credible by so many people because he seems to have believed he saw what he said. But he also shows signs of paranoia at the time throughout the research, which I hint at through subtext in the story. I didn’t want to spoil the mysteries for readers, so I touch on my conclusions in the Case Files appendix.”
There, I have spoiled it, because I find Bezemek’s take more interesting. He points out that after the angst of World War II and the arrival of the atomic weapons age, Americans had been thrust into a worldwide Cold War. They were on edge. “My guess is that, due to some type of optical illusion, Arnold probably did see a formation of white pelicans, perhaps visually obscured or amplified by glare from the nearby DC-4 or an inversion layer or rising heat distortion,” he says. But the real point is “how a mass panic can start from a minor incident and spiral, leading to the Roswell Incident and decades of conspiracy theories. The mystery in this one, for me, is the great mystery of human nature, and how we can interpret and twist events and perceptions in the wildest of ways.” He pauses. “That said, there are UFO sightings that can’t be explained away. Whether these objects are incursions by foreign drones, spy balloons, ball lightning or whatever, further investigation is needed.”
Even the historic tales we all know merit further investigation. Bezemek finds a fabulous description of Pocahontas at a party in England in 1617, decked out in a delicately embroidered dress, petticoat, and lace collar, watching a masque. “Most Americans probably think about her story as happening in the Virginia colony,” he says, “but overseas is where this mystery really begins. That’s when John Smith reveals the alleged backstory of her saving his life. Sadly, she dies shortly after that, so no one can ask her if it is true.”
Also lost to us is “a mysterious confederate spy named Kate Thompson,” who went by several other names and allegedly knew, before Lincoln’s assassination, about another group’s plans to bomb the Executive Mansion. One speck of colorful detail in a story too complex and too long past to ever yield whole truth. Researching such mysteries, Bezemek says his office “began to look like a detective’s bulletin board, with documents, maps, old photos, notes, and arrows.” He even combed through acknowledgements in academic papers.
As relief from human craziness, nature’s beauty is woven through the book. He describes the “fairy rings” formed when redwoods grow in a circle, leaving the center empty. “Strangest of all were the albinos,” he adds, meaning the hard to spot, pure white branches of the “ghost redwoods.”
In Dinosaur, New Mexico
The big parks are here—he spent months at the Grand Canyon, Canyonland, and his beloved Yosemite, where he first fell in love with granite. But he also takes us to NPS “units” I had never heard of, including Hovenweep National Monument. (Bezemek always includes travel tips, and here they are crucial: the roads are rough, cell service is intermittent, and GPS flounders, but the National Park Service has downloadable directions on the website.) Howenweep is a Ute word for “deserted valley.” When you arrive, look up, and you will see what remains of an ancient village of cliff dwellings: “multiroomed buildings with jagged walls, resembling castles atop the bluffs.” There are and towers several stories high, some round, some square, built atop boulders. Photos taken of this magical place in the 1870s helped persuade the U.S. government to protect Southwestern ruins.
Science turns fun as Bezemek describes the flat oval basin in Death Valley nicknamed the Racetrack. Supposedly Indians once raced horses across its smooth surface, using an outcropping at one end as a grandstand. But the mystery was the sliding stones: heavy rocks that moved across this playa of their own accord, often on parallel tracks, as though they were racing. First the stones were a legend, then a puzzle. Geologists documented their zigzags through dried mud, wondering if wind could be blowing even the rocks that weighed several hundred pounds. Locals said the lakebed tipped back and forth. Tourists and college classes made pilgrimages. Finally, in 2013, the sensors that had been placed in the rocks two years earlier woke up. The stones were sliding! The temperature had dropped overnight, and a thin sheet of ice had formed on the shallow rainwater pond that covered the playa. When the next day’s sun began to break up that sheet, the wind blew the large pieces into the rocks, which slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to move.
Sorry for another spoiler, but there is plenty more suspense. I will refrain from explaining the “zone of death” in Yellowstone, except to say that if you are contemplating a crime, site it there. Calamity Jane would. Was she an orphan from Missouri or an heiress from Virginia? She could shoot and ride, that much is sure, and she drank hard and died young—still in love with Wild Bill Hickok? So many secrets. While researching the Upheaval Dome chapter, Bezemek delved into the relatively new field of impact science and discovered how many impact craters are hidden across the U.S. We pass over them without even realizing it.
Nor did I know the urban legend that the Gateway Arch, already the result of a rigged election, was a., stolen from Italian fascists and b., secretly designed with their supernatural technology to control the weather, redirecting violent storms and tornados away from the city. (Clearly, the Arch needs a tuneup.) St. Louis sits at the edge of Tornado Alley, Bezemek explains, “where cold, dry air from the northwest slams into warm, humid air from the Gulf.” Thunderstorms and twisters form easily here, and some St. Louisans noted that “approaching storms seemed to split around the city before reforming downwind.” Which became known as the Arch Effect.
You cannot read this book without loving our nation’s parks more (and worrying even harder about their now slashed budgets). The need for conservation comes through the stupidity of the past. You learn about the hunter who discovered a sequoia 280 feet tall and made such a noise of it that “laborious vandals,” John Muir’s term, cut down the 1,200-year-old sequoia for “a dancing floor.” Those were the Gold Rush years, and greed and conquest were all that mattered. But the present danger is more fierce.
“The United States invented the concept of public national parks,” Bezemek notes, “starting with the Yosemite Grant and Yellowstone Park in the mid-1800s. We have some of the best national parks in the world. But despite widespread support across party lines, they are facing mass layoffs and budget reductions that will harm management and conservation. Other misguided proposals seek to de-list NPS units, shrink or sell off public lands, or open them to destructive mineral extraction. If we don’t protect the parks now, the biggest mystery may come years from now, when we look back and wonder, Why didn’t we save the parks when we had the chance?”
In the Great Smoky Mountains (photo by Ina Seethaler)
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
