We were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania this weekend. It’s not at all like Brooklyn. The biggest lifestyle difference was driving everywhere. There were things that reminded me of Montana where I grew up and Nebraska where my parents grew up, historic places and times where and when we could go around on our bikes by ourselves as kids. My friend lives in a beautiful neighborhood of cul-de-sacs that has much in common with the home of my relatives in Orange County, California, beautiful houses on a hill but nowhere for a kid to ride a bike.
Sometimes I fantasize about living in a house in a neighborhood where my kid can go outside by herself and have some autonomy. But, that’s not possible in many suburbs, built in my lifetime, without sidewalks or street lights. I wouldn’t let my kid ride her bike along the side of the two lane highway anymore than I would let her ride up Fulton and cross Flatbush on the way to school or a friend’s house in Brooklyn. Whatever happened to riding your bike and playing with the neighborhood kids and “Come home for dinner when the street lights come on.”?
Pennsylvania was insurance company calendar rural instead of what I think of as farmland which is mile after mile of mathematically straight rows of wheat and corn with giant tractors and combines.
Subtext being the presidential campaign, it was gratifying to have the woman selling pumpkins by the side of the road and the biker chick waitress at a restaurant both complement me on my Obama t-shirt.
Our friends took us to Lake Tobias Animal Park, a family farm that has been turned into a zoo. I wore my bright orange Obama Mama t-shirt, but nobody commented at all. I’l bet the people there saw it with disdain and disapproval. The tour driver told us they called the longhaired breed of Scottish highland cattle on display, “hippie cows”.
The kids loved Lake Tobias, a popular local school field trip destination. It was disturbing (although not deeply disturbing if I thought of it as a farming operation) to ride in a topless bus and watch people give crackers to small children who held them out to the bison that loped up to the side of the vehicle. This, goes against everything I know about wild animals. But, I suppose technically these were not wild because they live with a steady parade of topless busses full of outstretched arms and crackers. Who knew such eclectic private zoos existed? It was bizarre to see elk and yaks and water buffalo together in the same pasture
I grew up with regular visits to the National Bison Range in Moiese, Montana. (The Snake Pit tourist trap on I-90, notwithstanding, it was the closest thing we had to a zoo.) When comparing notes on our childhoods with a college roommate who grew up in Annapolis, Maryland we discovered that the big 3rd grade field trip where she was from was a day at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. At Lewis and Clark Elementary in Missoula, Montana, the big 3rd grade trip was to the bison range maintained by the US Department of Fish and Wildlife Services. The bison range is deeply educational, you can go there and experience the animals as brown spots miles away because the 18,500 acre preserve is experienced via a one-way 2-hour car drive. (There is oh so much for a disaffected teen to ignore and it’s the kind of place where parents feel compelled to go to battle with their children to put away the novels and video games in order to look for the distant wildlife that only adults paying attention can see.) There is ample time to read the brochure cover to cover learning more than anyone outside of the Department of Interior needs to know about native prairie grasses, birds, rodents and the breeding habits of the elk, deer, bighorn sheep, antelope and black bears that share the range with the bison.
Because of our visit to the Lake Tobias wildlife park in Pennsylvania, I now understand how it is that the tourists in Yellowstone National Park come to make the kind of stupid mistakes that get them killed. In Montana we never cease to marvel at the tourists whose deaths and injuries we read about every summer in the local paper. They are gored while walking toward a moose or a bison in order to pose for a picture, or got between a mother bear and her cubs on a trail or most mind-blowing of all to a kid raised in the Rockies, attract bears by cooking in their tent.