“Last night, I suddenly couldn’t sleep and lay awake and realized that I had forgotten — hadn’t repressed — I had forgotten this moment in 1959 when I was six years old and my mother was dying of cancer and our household was an unbelievably demoralized place. My father was absent in every sense of that word. No catches in the backyard, no attendance at ball games. Very hard, hard situation. My mother would die in 1965 after many, many agonizing years. That destabilized our family in every way imaginable. But one day, and I had forgotten this, after school my father had taken me from our home in Delaware to his home in Baltimore and put me to bed in his old bedroom in his old bed and woke me up in the middle of night and took me to Front Royal, Virginia and the top of the Skyline Drive that runs down the spine of Shenandoah National Park. And we spent the first and only road trip I ever spent with my dad, who passed away a year and a half before this — way too young — at this time that we were filming in Yosemite.
…I found that the whole experience had performed a kind of open-heart surgery that permitted me to remember something that had been lost in all of the other stuff. And I can remember the songs my dad sang. I can remember the hikes we took. I remember, most importantly, what his hand felt like in mine. The songs that I had sung to my three daughters that are permanently part of my hard drive now, I had forgotten where I had learned them. But it was on this trip. The bottom line is this: being out in the wild is important because it awakens us–and it allows us all to reclaim something. And I think that we can find that again and again and again.”
~Ken Burns, American Film Maker
The sun rises on a mountain lake in southwestern Utah
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