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