June 6, 2025 • 19 mins
Tracy talks about her experiences with the Blue Ridge Parkway growing up, including her mixed feelings about it. Holly talks about the theft of the Mona Lisa.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
This week we.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Talked about Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park and the.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Blue Ridge Parkway.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, all of those things.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
So I grew up in northwest North Carolina. I consequently
have spent a lot of time on the Parkway in
my life. I would say I have probably driven the
whole of the North Carolina section some of the Virginia section.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I lived in an.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Area where you could drive approximately north by a couple
of different routes and get to the Parkway in Virginia,
even though I grew up in North Carolina, and so
that was kind of a thing to do. And then
at various points I have lived in western North Carolina
spent a lot of time on the Parkway. I think
I have owned been on Skyline Drive once on a
(01:05):
trip to Virginia some years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I think I have.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Only been on a tiny part of the parkway when
we were driving to your wedding. Oh really, yeah, I
haven't been on either of these.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
I'm imagining which way you would have gone that would
have taken you onto the parkway, but that's just like
my mental mess.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Well, I will say, I don't know if you remember,
and I don't even remember if we told you oh no,
well it wasn't important, but I didn't want to fret
you in any way. As we were driving, I can't
remember who it was. As we were driving there or back,
we took a weird detour because we were following a
dog okay, and we like would lose track of it
(01:47):
and try to find it again, and eventually we just
lost track of the dog completely. It must have been
on the way home, because I can't imagine I would
have been like, especially because we were driving your wedding
dress to you, have been like, let's keep following this
dog wherever it may lead. Does we got to I mean,
I would want to rescue the dog. So I don't remember,
but I do remember being in a weird place and
(02:09):
being like, uh, oh, we went a long way trying
to Oh wow, So I think that was what happened
with that.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, yeah, I think, But.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
I remember having a moment of oh, we're on the thing.
Not for very long, I mean like for a very
short period of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't remember
much of it. I haven't driven to that area very much.
When I was living in the Atlanta area. There was
one time that I had gone on a little like vacation,
(02:38):
long weekend kind of thing to Ashville, and I just
didn't want to go home yet when it was time
to go home, and so I made the drive home
be just a very long out of their way route
where I was on the parkway for a really long
time and then dropped off of it and like went
(02:59):
through the back roads through northern like North Georgia to
get back home, stopped it everywhere that was selling local honey,
got a collection of unusual honeys by the time I
got home. I have a great fondness for the Blue
Ridge Parkway, and I have also had mixed feelings about
(03:19):
it since my childhood, like from going up there with
my mom kind of being like, this is a beautiful drive,
this is really pretty.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Why is there a road here? Did we build a
road here just to drive on? Basically yes, yeah, And
I would say that my various layers of mixed feelings
about all of these things just got more complex, more
layers of mixed feelings because it is beautiful the whole
area around the Parkway is beautiful. A lot of it
(03:51):
is currently hurricane devastated, but still beautiful. Something that I've
sort of come to appreciate more recently is that I
like the idea of everyone having access to nature, and
I think that like beautiful mountain views should not be
reserved only for people that have the ability to hike
(04:11):
long distances, right, that kind of stuff. So I read
a lot of stuff for these episodes. One of the
things that I read was the proceedings of a conference
that had been held for the fiftieth anniversary of the Parkway.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
To be clear, the parkway was.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Not done yet when they had this fiftieth anniversary conference,
because it was starting with like when it was authorized,
and it took more than fifty years to get done.
So there was a paper that was by James F.
Shephard called Land Use Attitudes of Rural Residents And here's
(04:51):
a quote quote. To obtain the attitudes of rural residents
regarding land use, I have conducted ethnographic interviews. All the
interviews were tape recorded. Five basic groups of residents were
found in Grayson County. First, the residents were divided into
Native or non native categories. I will take a moment
to say, I think native or non native in this
(05:13):
context is the people who were born and grew up
grew up there versus people who moved into the area.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
I got youa not suggesting indigenous.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yeah, I don't think this means indigenous or non indigenous.
From these two categories, residents could fall into one of
three subcategories one retirees or summer home resident, two counter culturalist,
three movers and shakers. And I was like, wow, I
(05:45):
had never really thought about what three categories? Could I
sort people into? Four areas like the Blue Ridge Mountains
around the Parkway, But boy, does that really make.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Sense to me, these three broad categories.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
I also read a couple of very deeply frustrating articles
about the process of removing people from their land for
Shenandoah National Park's establishment, because they made it sound like
this was an unprecedented thing in the region, and I'm like, Okay,
(06:26):
we're talking about a place that is named Shenandoah, which
is generally agreed as coming from an indigenous language, but
we're not actually sure which language or which specific word
it's a reference to. Because of all the forced removal
and displacement in genocide that had already happened in earlier
eras before people were again forcibly removed from Shenandoah for
(06:50):
the park.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I found that very frustrating.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Yeah, I fixated on something very silly.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
And in this second episode, I'm going to let you
tell everybody because he told me, and I was like,
I thought it was funny. Oh, it's the same thing
that we talked about. I don't know what the se
tell me, No, tell me what you fixated on the
guy talking about taking a knife to the Mona Lisa. Okay,
here's why that was funny to me. Okay, this conversation
was happening in the nineteen thirties. If it had happened
(07:18):
forty years earlier, no one would have referenced the Mona Lisa.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Oh yeah, because no one knew anything about it until
it got stolen in nineteen eleven. That's seat and it
just made me laugh so hard. Yeah, because you know,
even if you look at old news reports about the theft,
some of them feature the wrong piece of art, like
nobody wow what the Mona Lisa was? And so, because
(07:45):
I really like art history and that theft in particular,
is fascinating to me because of how it shaped global
views of art history. It's like, you see, in a
very short less than three decades, it had become such
an obvious touchstone to people that it was. It had
(08:06):
been elevated from completely unknown work to the apex of
art that you would never deface. And I'm fascinated by
that anyway, mentioned in Themisa, what was the thing that
you thought? So?
Speaker 3 (08:20):
I thought you were going to say something. So normally
when we do these behind the scenes episodes, we recorded
the episode and then we recorded the behind the scenes.
And since the Skyline Drive episode and the Blue Ridge
Parkway episode were sort of researched and written in tandem, we.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Record were We recorded the.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Skyline Drive one, which was finished, and then I finished
the Blue Ridge Parkway one and we recorded that the
next week, and now here we are recording the behind
the scenes for both of them together. But you and
I had a conversation after recording the Skyline Drive one
about statements that people were making about a proposed skyline
(09:00):
through Shenandoah that would be like an unparalleled scenic.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Oh yeah, and you found that hilarious, not that it's
not beautiful, but anytime people get real superlative about something
like that. I think I said something like, brother, have
you not been to Italy? Like when you when you
drive along Italy and you could see, you know, the
(09:28):
mountains where the Careerra Marble comes from. It's a pretty
astonishing view, right, And lots of places have views equally
astonishing and beautiful. So it's like when they're like unparalleled,
I'm like, I mean, yes, but like, are you sure
you want to go out on a limb like that?
Speaker 3 (09:46):
I think some of the people who made statements like that,
like there was a context of specifically building a road
in order for it to be a scenic drive without
a lot of other purpose, And I was trying to
figure out if there were other Like, there are definitely
other There are plenty of other parkways in the world.
(10:07):
There are a ton of other parkways in the United States.
The Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive were built during
an era of road building through and to connect to
the National Parks, and a lot of it had this
like very similar quote naturalistic design for the road and
like the road was supposed to be beautiful and the
(10:28):
landscape the road was traveling through was supposed to be
beautiful and managed. Yeah, So some of the people at
the time who were riding about this kind of thing
made it sound like this was a completely new idea
for the entire world, that nowhere in the world had
anyone decided to just make a road in order to
(10:51):
be a scenic road, not just to have a road
that's a highway for travel that happens to be scenic.
And I don't actually know the answer to that whether
this really I would say probably not a completely unprecedented thing,
but some of the people who were writing about these
(11:13):
roads in the nineteen thirties made it sound like it was.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Totally new idea.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
No one had ever thought to just build a scenic
road for its scenicness as the primary purpose before.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
I also get in that like heady overthinking space of
building a scenic road for it to be scenic, but
also having to do maintenance on it. I'm like, is
that really scenic or is it curated? It's definitely curated, right, So,
like I don't know, Like I said, it gets way
too in my head and in the weeds about like
(11:57):
what is that?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Then?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
What's a real scenic road? Is it very paved? Is it?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Because you'll never see the truly untouched version of it. Yeah,
unless you are a person this this goes back to
your discussion about how important it is that you know,
nature access be available to everyone, And clearly everyone could
not see those places if we did not put some
sort of roadway through there.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, just I end up in the I'm the snake
that bites its own tail. I can't kick it out
of the spiral.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
All of these things are true, they are all interconnected together.
I said at the I think, I think I said
in the Shenandoah episode that a lot of people that
I talked to in and around the Nashville area were
incredibly anxious for tourism to come back to pre Helene levels.
(12:57):
I don't want to like minimize the fact that the
like this storm was horrifically destructive. There were a lot
of whole towns and villages that were basically wiped off
the map, Like the entire the entire village just basically
swept off of its foundations by floodwaters and the debris
(13:19):
and the floodwaters. There are a lot of roads in
the area that are closed to everything but local traffic,
and in some cases, like you actually have to have
a permit saying yes, this is like I live here
to be able to go down that road. So I
intentionally did not try to get into any of those areas.
(13:40):
I intentionally stayed like in the areas that have said
we are open for business, please come.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
And I don't know, I.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Have nothing else to say about that, really except that, like,
if you've been wondering, is it okay to go to
vacations on these places, the answer seems to be from
the local people, Yes, it's okay to go on vacation
to these places, but like, don't go try to bully
yourself into the areas that are still like lacking basic services,
(14:12):
like where the roads are still destroyed, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, and I'm very glad you did these episodes, because
all of this does speak to the fact that the
news cycle is so bananas that we can lose track
of the things that take a long time to recover from. Yeah, Like,
there's no coverage of Helene recovery going on right in
any major news outlets that I've seen in quite some time.
And it's easy, I think, for people that are not
(14:37):
immediately affected by it to forget that there are still
people really really struggling to try to get their feet
back unto them. I don't know how we fix this
problem because there is so much to take in constantly.
But also if you think I did not run to
the Xerxes Society for Invertebrate Conservation, you're wrong.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
So excited, I.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Have already been working a lot on my selection of
plants for the yard this year to make sure that
you know we're friendly to pollinators and other creatures. But
they're full of good information there. If anybody doesn't hasn't
been there yet and hadn't heard of it until our
listener mail this week that mentioned it specifically because it's cool. Yeah, yeah,
(15:28):
I got a flashback as you were reading that Listener
letter to the time I had a very sad breakdown
on a plane over a bee. It's just not that
long ago. There was a bee in a plane during boarding.
This is probably a year a year and a half ago,
and the people sitting near me lost their minds and
(15:49):
freaked out and had were like kill it, and I
was trying to like I wanted to collect it and
put it outside again. During boarding boarding door not closed
and going, and there was one woman that was just
like people are allergic. You could die, and I'm like,
are you allergic, and like it's a bee, it's fine,
(16:10):
and I just I literally ended up in tears because
I was the only person that cared about the bee.
Oh and it did not make it off of that plane.
I'm sad to say, because some dude had to show
what a protector he was. Anyway, Sorry, be it did
not do enough for you that day, anyway, What you
(16:30):
can't for your pollinators? We need them. Yeah, without them,
we're not gonna eat. Huh.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah, yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
If I have anything else to say about any of
these things, I will reiterate that I do love our
national parks. I do not love the fact that, especially
in the West, like.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
The national parks.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Exist because of displacement and genocide. And then in the
East also true, but like separated by more time that
had passed in the interim. Under the Biden administration, we
had an Indigenous Secretary of the Interior for the first time,
an Indigenous Director of the National Park Service for the
(17:17):
first time, and a lot of work was being done
to try to work out co management agreements with different
indigenous nations to co manage land that is their ancestral
homeland in some cases, to return land from the parks.
That didn't start with the Biden administration, but like that
(17:37):
had been like specific intentional thing that had been undertaken
under that administration. And I don't know what the status
of any of that is at this point, in part
because the fire hose of things about the national parks
in particular has been focused on other stuff like reductions
(18:02):
in force for the park workers and like opening up
national forests two more logging and that kind of stuff.
So my efforts to figure out, like what the Trump
administration's views are on that part, I did not go
read Project twenty twenty five or whatever to find out
(18:22):
if that said anything. But yeah, I hope, hope even
the right word that we don't make a bunch of
big step backwards and all of that.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Me too, fingers toes a little bee feet crossed, Yeah,
little bfeet.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
If you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcasts or history podcasts that I
heart radio dot com, we will be back tomorrow with
a Saturday classic something brand new on Monday. Whatever's happening
on your weekends. I hope it is as lovely as possible.
If you're able to get out into some nature, if
(19:04):
that's accessible to you, I hope you're able to do that.
That always helps me take a little bit deeper breath
than I can take when I am just in my
house all the time. So we'll be back with a
Saturday classic tomorrow. Is something brand new on Monday. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
(19:26):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
This week we.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Talked about Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park and the.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Blue Ridge Parkway.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, all of those things.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
So I grew up in northwest North Carolina. I consequently
have spent a lot of time on the Parkway in
my life. I would say I have probably driven the
whole of the North Carolina section some of the Virginia section.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I lived in an.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Area where you could drive approximately north by a couple
of different routes and get to the Parkway in Virginia,
even though I grew up in North Carolina, and so
that was kind of a thing to do. And then
at various points I have lived in western North Carolina
spent a lot of time on the Parkway. I think
I have owned been on Skyline Drive once on a
(01:05):
trip to Virginia some years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I think I have.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Only been on a tiny part of the parkway when
we were driving to your wedding. Oh really, yeah, I
haven't been on either of these.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
I'm imagining which way you would have gone that would
have taken you onto the parkway, but that's just like
my mental mess.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Well, I will say, I don't know if you remember,
and I don't even remember if we told you oh no,
well it wasn't important, but I didn't want to fret
you in any way. As we were driving, I can't
remember who it was. As we were driving there or back,
we took a weird detour because we were following a
dog okay, and we like would lose track of it
(01:47):
and try to find it again, and eventually we just
lost track of the dog completely. It must have been
on the way home, because I can't imagine I would
have been like, especially because we were driving your wedding
dress to you, have been like, let's keep following this
dog wherever it may lead. Does we got to I mean,
I would want to rescue the dog. So I don't remember,
but I do remember being in a weird place and
(02:09):
being like, uh, oh, we went a long way trying
to Oh wow, So I think that was what happened
with that.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, yeah, I think, But.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
I remember having a moment of oh, we're on the thing.
Not for very long, I mean like for a very
short period of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't remember
much of it. I haven't driven to that area very much.
When I was living in the Atlanta area. There was
one time that I had gone on a little like vacation,
(02:38):
long weekend kind of thing to Ashville, and I just
didn't want to go home yet when it was time
to go home, and so I made the drive home
be just a very long out of their way route
where I was on the parkway for a really long
time and then dropped off of it and like went
(02:59):
through the back roads through northern like North Georgia to
get back home, stopped it everywhere that was selling local honey,
got a collection of unusual honeys by the time I
got home. I have a great fondness for the Blue
Ridge Parkway, and I have also had mixed feelings about
(03:19):
it since my childhood, like from going up there with
my mom kind of being like, this is a beautiful drive,
this is really pretty.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Why is there a road here? Did we build a
road here just to drive on? Basically yes, yeah, And
I would say that my various layers of mixed feelings
about all of these things just got more complex, more
layers of mixed feelings because it is beautiful the whole
area around the Parkway is beautiful. A lot of it
(03:51):
is currently hurricane devastated, but still beautiful. Something that I've
sort of come to appreciate more recently is that I
like the idea of everyone having access to nature, and
I think that like beautiful mountain views should not be
reserved only for people that have the ability to hike
(04:11):
long distances, right, that kind of stuff. So I read
a lot of stuff for these episodes. One of the
things that I read was the proceedings of a conference
that had been held for the fiftieth anniversary of the Parkway.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
To be clear, the parkway was.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Not done yet when they had this fiftieth anniversary conference,
because it was starting with like when it was authorized,
and it took more than fifty years to get done.
So there was a paper that was by James F.
Shephard called Land Use Attitudes of Rural Residents And here's
(04:51):
a quote quote. To obtain the attitudes of rural residents
regarding land use, I have conducted ethnographic interviews. All the
interviews were tape recorded. Five basic groups of residents were
found in Grayson County. First, the residents were divided into
Native or non native categories. I will take a moment
to say, I think native or non native in this
(05:13):
context is the people who were born and grew up
grew up there versus people who moved into the area.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
I got youa not suggesting indigenous.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yeah, I don't think this means indigenous or non indigenous.
From these two categories, residents could fall into one of
three subcategories one retirees or summer home resident, two counter culturalist,
three movers and shakers. And I was like, wow, I
(05:45):
had never really thought about what three categories? Could I
sort people into? Four areas like the Blue Ridge Mountains
around the Parkway, But boy, does that really make.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Sense to me, these three broad categories.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
I also read a couple of very deeply frustrating articles
about the process of removing people from their land for
Shenandoah National Park's establishment, because they made it sound like
this was an unprecedented thing in the region, and I'm like, Okay,
(06:26):
we're talking about a place that is named Shenandoah, which
is generally agreed as coming from an indigenous language, but
we're not actually sure which language or which specific word
it's a reference to. Because of all the forced removal
and displacement in genocide that had already happened in earlier
eras before people were again forcibly removed from Shenandoah for
(06:50):
the park.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I found that very frustrating.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Yeah, I fixated on something very silly.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
And in this second episode, I'm going to let you
tell everybody because he told me, and I was like,
I thought it was funny. Oh, it's the same thing
that we talked about. I don't know what the se
tell me, No, tell me what you fixated on the
guy talking about taking a knife to the Mona Lisa. Okay,
here's why that was funny to me. Okay, this conversation
was happening in the nineteen thirties. If it had happened
(07:18):
forty years earlier, no one would have referenced the Mona Lisa.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Oh yeah, because no one knew anything about it until
it got stolen in nineteen eleven. That's seat and it
just made me laugh so hard. Yeah, because you know,
even if you look at old news reports about the theft,
some of them feature the wrong piece of art, like
nobody wow what the Mona Lisa was? And so, because
(07:45):
I really like art history and that theft in particular,
is fascinating to me because of how it shaped global
views of art history. It's like, you see, in a
very short less than three decades, it had become such
an obvious touchstone to people that it was. It had
(08:06):
been elevated from completely unknown work to the apex of
art that you would never deface. And I'm fascinated by
that anyway, mentioned in Themisa, what was the thing that
you thought? So?
Speaker 3 (08:20):
I thought you were going to say something. So normally
when we do these behind the scenes episodes, we recorded
the episode and then we recorded the behind the scenes.
And since the Skyline Drive episode and the Blue Ridge
Parkway episode were sort of researched and written in tandem, we.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Record were We recorded the.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Skyline Drive one, which was finished, and then I finished
the Blue Ridge Parkway one and we recorded that the
next week, and now here we are recording the behind
the scenes for both of them together. But you and
I had a conversation after recording the Skyline Drive one
about statements that people were making about a proposed skyline
(09:00):
through Shenandoah that would be like an unparalleled scenic.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Oh yeah, and you found that hilarious, not that it's
not beautiful, but anytime people get real superlative about something
like that. I think I said something like, brother, have
you not been to Italy? Like when you when you
drive along Italy and you could see, you know, the
(09:28):
mountains where the Careerra Marble comes from. It's a pretty
astonishing view, right, And lots of places have views equally
astonishing and beautiful. So it's like when they're like unparalleled,
I'm like, I mean, yes, but like, are you sure
you want to go out on a limb like that?
Speaker 3 (09:46):
I think some of the people who made statements like that,
like there was a context of specifically building a road
in order for it to be a scenic drive without
a lot of other purpose, And I was trying to
figure out if there were other Like, there are definitely
other There are plenty of other parkways in the world.
(10:07):
There are a ton of other parkways in the United States.
The Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive were built during
an era of road building through and to connect to
the National Parks, and a lot of it had this
like very similar quote naturalistic design for the road and
like the road was supposed to be beautiful and the
(10:28):
landscape the road was traveling through was supposed to be
beautiful and managed. Yeah, So some of the people at
the time who were riding about this kind of thing
made it sound like this was a completely new idea
for the entire world, that nowhere in the world had
anyone decided to just make a road in order to
(10:51):
be a scenic road, not just to have a road
that's a highway for travel that happens to be scenic.
And I don't actually know the answer to that whether
this really I would say probably not a completely unprecedented thing,
but some of the people who were writing about these
(11:13):
roads in the nineteen thirties made it sound like it was.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Totally new idea.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
No one had ever thought to just build a scenic
road for its scenicness as the primary purpose before.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
I also get in that like heady overthinking space of
building a scenic road for it to be scenic, but
also having to do maintenance on it. I'm like, is
that really scenic or is it curated? It's definitely curated, right, So,
like I don't know, Like I said, it gets way
too in my head and in the weeds about like
(11:57):
what is that?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Then?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
What's a real scenic road? Is it very paved? Is it?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Because you'll never see the truly untouched version of it. Yeah,
unless you are a person this this goes back to
your discussion about how important it is that you know,
nature access be available to everyone, And clearly everyone could
not see those places if we did not put some
sort of roadway through there.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, just I end up in the I'm the snake
that bites its own tail. I can't kick it out
of the spiral.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
All of these things are true, they are all interconnected together.
I said at the I think, I think I said
in the Shenandoah episode that a lot of people that
I talked to in and around the Nashville area were
incredibly anxious for tourism to come back to pre Helene levels.
(12:57):
I don't want to like minimize the fact that the
like this storm was horrifically destructive. There were a lot
of whole towns and villages that were basically wiped off
the map, Like the entire the entire village just basically
swept off of its foundations by floodwaters and the debris
(13:19):
and the floodwaters. There are a lot of roads in
the area that are closed to everything but local traffic,
and in some cases, like you actually have to have
a permit saying yes, this is like I live here
to be able to go down that road. So I
intentionally did not try to get into any of those areas.
(13:40):
I intentionally stayed like in the areas that have said
we are open for business, please come.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
And I don't know, I.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Have nothing else to say about that, really except that, like,
if you've been wondering, is it okay to go to
vacations on these places, the answer seems to be from
the local people, Yes, it's okay to go on vacation
to these places, but like, don't go try to bully
yourself into the areas that are still like lacking basic services,
(14:12):
like where the roads are still destroyed, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, and I'm very glad you did these episodes, because
all of this does speak to the fact that the
news cycle is so bananas that we can lose track
of the things that take a long time to recover from. Yeah, Like,
there's no coverage of Helene recovery going on right in
any major news outlets that I've seen in quite some time.
And it's easy, I think, for people that are not
(14:37):
immediately affected by it to forget that there are still
people really really struggling to try to get their feet
back unto them. I don't know how we fix this
problem because there is so much to take in constantly.
But also if you think I did not run to
the Xerxes Society for Invertebrate Conservation, you're wrong.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
So excited, I.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Have already been working a lot on my selection of
plants for the yard this year to make sure that
you know we're friendly to pollinators and other creatures. But
they're full of good information there. If anybody doesn't hasn't
been there yet and hadn't heard of it until our
listener mail this week that mentioned it specifically because it's cool. Yeah, yeah,
(15:28):
I got a flashback as you were reading that Listener
letter to the time I had a very sad breakdown
on a plane over a bee. It's just not that
long ago. There was a bee in a plane during boarding.
This is probably a year a year and a half ago,
and the people sitting near me lost their minds and
(15:49):
freaked out and had were like kill it, and I
was trying to like I wanted to collect it and
put it outside again. During boarding boarding door not closed
and going, and there was one woman that was just
like people are allergic. You could die, and I'm like,
are you allergic, and like it's a bee, it's fine,
(16:10):
and I just I literally ended up in tears because
I was the only person that cared about the bee.
Oh and it did not make it off of that plane.
I'm sad to say, because some dude had to show
what a protector he was. Anyway, Sorry, be it did
not do enough for you that day, anyway, What you
(16:30):
can't for your pollinators? We need them. Yeah, without them,
we're not gonna eat. Huh.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah, yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
If I have anything else to say about any of
these things, I will reiterate that I do love our
national parks. I do not love the fact that, especially
in the West, like.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
The national parks.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Exist because of displacement and genocide. And then in the
East also true, but like separated by more time that
had passed in the interim. Under the Biden administration, we
had an Indigenous Secretary of the Interior for the first time,
an Indigenous Director of the National Park Service for the
(17:17):
first time, and a lot of work was being done
to try to work out co management agreements with different
indigenous nations to co manage land that is their ancestral
homeland in some cases, to return land from the parks.
That didn't start with the Biden administration, but like that
(17:37):
had been like specific intentional thing that had been undertaken
under that administration. And I don't know what the status
of any of that is at this point, in part
because the fire hose of things about the national parks
in particular has been focused on other stuff like reductions
(18:02):
in force for the park workers and like opening up
national forests two more logging and that kind of stuff.
So my efforts to figure out, like what the Trump
administration's views are on that part, I did not go
read Project twenty twenty five or whatever to find out
(18:22):
if that said anything. But yeah, I hope, hope even
the right word that we don't make a bunch of
big step backwards and all of that.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Me too, fingers toes a little bee feet crossed, Yeah,
little bfeet.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
If you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcasts or history podcasts that I
heart radio dot com, we will be back tomorrow with
a Saturday classic something brand new on Monday. Whatever's happening
on your weekends. I hope it is as lovely as possible.
If you're able to get out into some nature, if
(19:04):
that's accessible to you, I hope you're able to do that.
That always helps me take a little bit deeper breath
than I can take when I am just in my
house all the time. So we'll be back with a
Saturday classic tomorrow. Is something brand new on Monday. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
(19:26):
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